Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Voters Still Think Trump/GOP Are Focused On The Wrong Issues
The chart above is from the Navigator Poll -- done between June 4th and 8th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.
The Vast (And Growing) Wealth Inequality Must Be Fixed Before It Destroys Our Democracy
Economist Paul Krugman warns about the huge wealth gap in the United States and its danger to our democracy:
On Sunday Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday with a cage match on the White House lawn. The match and the events that surrounded it — especially the press conference with UFC fighters, shown above, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — were a desecration of America’s capital, whose monuments and buildings have always endeavored to represent small-r republican virtues. The whole affair was an affront to the values on which this nation was founded and also unspeakably vulgar.
That last criticism may strike some readers as elitist and trivial. Yet the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms. As I argued yesterday, these norms historically played a key role in mitigating abuses of power and privilege during the Gilded Age, the last time America suffered from extreme income and wealth inequality (though not nearly as extreme as what we have now).
Norms matter. In his classic book The Theory of the Leisure Class — published in 1899, at the apogee of the Gilded Age — Thorstein Veblen famously argued that much of the behavior of his era’s elite was driven not by the desire to enjoy life but by the desire to impress others. Partly they did this through conspicuous consumption. Thus they built lavish mansions staffed by legions of servants.
However, members of the Gilded Age elite didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society.
The contrast with the public behavior of Trump’s band of uber-wealthy is startling.
In addition to modeling upstanding behavior, the extremely rich of the Gilded Age were expected to have, or pretend to have, some virtues that were part of the aristocratic ideal, including a sense of noblesse oblige displayed by good works.
Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.
So in a real sense we are living in the midst of a reenactment of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, not a second American Gilded Age. No, I’m not one of those men who thinks about ancient Rome all the time. But there are some obvious parallels.
While the causes of the decline of republican government and Rome’s eventual transition to one-man rule were doubtless complex, there is broad consensus among historians that a key factor was the emergence of extreme inequality. A handful of men became incredibly wealthy from the spoils of Rome’s eastern conquests, and their wealth and power eventually became too great for the rules of constitutional, republican government to contain. Sound uncomfortably familiar?
The death throes of the Republic went on for many years. Politicians declared their rivals enemies of the state, deployed violent gangs to disrupt the rule of law, established temporary dictatorships, and more. The installation of Augustus as emperor in 27 BC was just the final act.
And during this long twilight of constitutional government, one of the ways the extremely wealthy and powerful sought both to demonstrate their wealth and to curry favor with the mob was by sponsoring gladiatorial games.
Why Is Trump Being So Secretive About The Agreement With Iran?
For months now, Donald Trump has been claiming that he's only days away from reaching an agreement with Iran that would end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Finally, it looks like some kind of agreement (or memo of understanding) may have been reached.
Trump says the agreement has been digitally signed, and a formal signing will happen on Friday.
However, we must understand that this is not a final agreement that will end the war. It is only an agreement to extend the ceasefire another 60 days (and hopefully open the Strait of Hormuz) while talks continue to reach a final solution. Still, it is good news if it can accomplish at least that.
But it bothers me that Trump is being so secretive about what is in the agreement. Trump has always been very open about things that he thinks make him look good. That tells me that he is not at all sure that Congress (or the American people) will like what he's agreed to.
Has Trump, in his desperation to get out of this mess, given Iran the super hand? Has he surrendered while claiming victory?
He keeps claiming the contents of the agreement will be released, but so far, they haven't been. Why?
Tuesday, June 16, 2026
78% Say The American Dream Is Harder To Achieve Today Than In The Past
The chart above is from the NBC News Poll -- done between May 29th and June 7th of a nationwide sample of 3,000 adults, with a 1.8 point margin of error.
Today's Oligarchy Is Worse Than The One In The "Gilded Age'
Nobel Prize-winning economist compares today's oligarchy with that of the Gilded Age (which led to the Great Depression):
Many people have compared our current era to the Gilded Age. But that analogy is deeply unfair to the Gilded Age. Like the robber barons of yore, today’s oligarchs are immensely wealthy — even wealthier, relative to the economy as a whole, than their predecessors. And extreme wealth corrupts our democracy. But the corruption is deeper and more destructive now than it was then: The mitigating factors that once put some brakes on the harm done by excessive wealth concentration are now mostly gone.
About wealth concentration: The standard source for information on extreme wealth is the Forbes 400 list. Forbes only began compiling that list in its current form in 1982, but it published its first listing of America’s top fortunes in 1918. The chart above compares the wealth of the richest 5 Americans in 1918 with that of the richest 15 in 2025 — 15, not 5, because the total U.S. population more than tripled over that period. I scale their wealth both as a percentage of total wealth and as a share of GDP.
Either way, the concentration of wealth at the very top is much higher now than it ever was during the Gilded Age. And these are numbers from last year, before the SpaceX IPO. The robber barons were pikers compared with today’s oligarchs.
This level of wealth brings with it immense political influence. A New York Times analysis found that 300 billionaires accounted for 19 percent of political contributions in the 2024 election. And since the election the power of money has grown even stronger.
In part this reflects the way great wealth has been used to corrupt the media. Elon Musk bought Twitter, not as a financial investment, but to turn it into the right-wing fever swamp it has now become. Larry Ellison, America’s second-richest man, purchased CBS basically to destroy it as an independent news source and convert it into Fox News 2.0, a goal he is achieving — and he is now on track to do the same to CNN.
On top of this, the presidency is now more or less openly for sale. “Donald Trump,” writes Forbes, “has presided over the most lucrative presidency in history,” adding $4.2 billion to his personal wealth since regaining the White House.
There were many corruption scandals during the Gilded Age, but none on this scale.
What do today’s uberrich do with their political power? Much of what they push for involves their own self-interest. In 2024 Mark Zuckerberg basically used his financial clout to kill bipartisan legislation that would have tried to protect children from psychological harm due to social media and, of course, put some restrictions on Meta. The Koch family has spent decades doing everything it can to prevent action against climate change and keep America burning fossil fuels.
Beyond this, some megabillionaires use their power to push political extremism.
True, Elon Musk is something of an outlier; you have to go some ways down the list to find someone comparably extreme (Peter Thiel is #40.) And he isn’t the first incredibly wealthy man to be deeply bigoted and an avid consumer of conspiracy theories: Henry Ford was a rabid anti-Semite who published and distributed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery probably concocted by the Russian secret police.
Still, it’s remarkable that the world’s richest man has passionately embraced the “Great Replacement” theory of a sinister conspiracy to replace whites with nonwhite immigrants.
And it’s equally remarkable that our political system accepts it as a fact of life that such a person should command such power, even leaving on one side the dubious roots of his wealth. Where’s the outrage?
Obviously some Americans are outraged, but the backlash against a highly corrupt, rigged system is far weaker than one might have expected. Why?
I’ll return to this question in later posts, but it’s clear that modern America suffers from a combination of cynicism — “everybody does it” — and fatalism — “that’s just how the world works” — far worse than anything we experienced in the robber baron era.
You can see this moral malaise in the shrugs with which all too many politicians, especially but not only Republicans, greet each new revelation of presidential scandal. You can also see it in the behavior of the ultrawealthy themselves.
Make no mistake: the men on that 1918 Forbes list were, without exception, ruthless businessmen. The term “robber barons,” popularized in the 1930s by the historian Mattew Josephson, was apt. The great fortunes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were accumulated by men who functionally played the same role as feudal warlords extorting tolls from travelers passing their castles. In particular, John D. Rockefeller, the world’s richest man, in effect controlled an essential economic choke point, a sort of financial Strait of Hormuz, through his monopolization of oil refining.
Yet many of the robber barons also possessed a sense of noblesse oblige, believing that they should deploy some of their riches on behalf of the public good.
Many of the robber barons gave huge sums to philanthropy. These included large donations to cultural institutions, which continue to enrich our society to this day.
Mention Andrew Carnegie or Henry Clay Frick to a modern New Yorker and the first things they think of will probably be Carnegie Hall and the Frick Collection of fine art.
No doubt this was in large part a public relations exercise, but the fact that the robber barons believed that this PR effort was necessary was itself a symptom of a society less cynical than it is today. And the Gilded Age wealthy left a lasting legacy of good deeds to set against the history of their ruthless business practices.
By contrast, today’s oligarchs spend very little on good works, according to Forbes. Musk and Ellison have both given away less than 1 percent of their fortunes.
And Musk in particular is the opposite of a philanthropist. Not only doesn’t he spend any of his own money to help others, he used his power when running DOGE to cut off aid to poor countries, condemning hundreds of thousands of children to avoidable death. And he was gleeful about it:
Again, where is the outrage?
So, are we living in a second Gilded Age? If only. We surpassed Gilded Age levels of income and wealth inequality decades ago. We’re now in an era of oligarchy in which the power of great wealth and the abuse of that power by a tiny elite eclipse anything we saw in the late 19th and early 20th century. And the super-wealthy themselves are far more lacking in redemptive qualities than their predecessors.
Meet the new bosses, worse than the old bosses.
Trump's "Agreement" With Iran Is Not A Victory - It's A Terrible Failure
Does Trump's agreement with Iran represent a victory? Robert Reich says it's more likely a failure. He writes:
Trump again claims victory in Iran. He’s claimed victory before, but now he has a so-called “agreement” with Iran.
That agreement, which appears to be no more than a memo of understanding — that is, a set of principles to which Iran and the United States have agreed — stops the fighting and reopens the Strait of Hormuz but it does not deal with the issue that caused Trump to initiate the conflict: Iran’s nuclear program.
Keep that in mind as you hear various renditions of what’s been decided. Recall that the Strait of Hormuz was open before Trump began bombing Iran. At best, the agreement Trump is touting restores the status quo to where it was when he commenced hostilities. Remember also that Iran had agreed to limit its development of nuclear-grade materials in its treaty with the Obama administration, which Trump revoked in 2018.
So what has been accomplished? Iran now is under the control of a more extremist regime than when Trump started this war. Oil prices are far higher, and will take some time to return to where they were before it began (if they ever do). Meanwhile, Trump has caused the United States to be more dependent on fossil fuels than we were prior to his inauguration for a second time, and the high oil prices brought on by his war has enriched Vladimir Putin’s regime.
The war with Iran has cost the United States an estimated $90 billion, and that’s a conservative estimate. It has caused widespread suffering throughout the Middle East. It has put Israel in a more precarious situation than it was before — and much of that is due to Benjamin Netanyahu, who is not a party to, and has not approved, the agreement.
This doesn’t look like a victory. Compared to where the United States and the Middle East were on February 28, when Trump began this war, it’s a terrible failure.
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