— from Robert Reich's Substack

Friends,
Happy Tax Day. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”
But who should pay the most for this civilized society? As Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, instructed in his The Wealth of Nations, a tax system should be based on the principle of equal sacrifice. This means the richer should pay a larger share of their incomes in taxes than the poorer.
But today’s wealthy Americans are paying a much smaller share of their incomes in taxes than most Americans.
Which is why the debate that’s already begun over the 2025 expiration of the Trump tax cuts is so illuminating and important.
The major reason some very wealthy people are backing Trump is they want the Trump tax cuts to become permanent and not expire as scheduled in 2025.

The House Republican majority has been steadily eroding since Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) won the speaker's gavel last fall. And if Johnson hopes to remain in his position, the GOP will have to successfully hold onto every seat in November. That could prove difficult, thanks to a number of election deniers running for reelection in competitive districts.
In his latest column, the New Republic's Greg Sargent remarked on how Johnson's recent press conference with former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida highlighted the GOP's biggest liability: Republicans' refusal to let go of the debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rife with fraud.
"Johnson publicly affirmed—with the same Mar-a-Lago shrine as backdrop that McCarthy paid homage to—that the party remains fully committed to the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, here demonstrated by propping up the lie that our elections remain menaced by the same forces (fraudulent voters, many immigrants) that supposedly robbed Trump last time," Sargent wrote.
Sargent named 10 House Republicans running in competitive districts that Democrats are openly aiming to flip in November. He opined that their reelection hopes have been "tainted with election denialism, some of it extremely serious or even deranged."

Since the end of the last century, I have occasionally repeated five or six straightforward exercises in classrooms in different countries with students of different cultures, ages, and social classes―with the same result.
One (inspired in Africa) refers to the classification of geometric figures, where we always see the differences and never what they have in common. In another, in the United States, I draw a cube on the blackboard and, when asked what they see, they unanimously say that it is a cube. It is not a cube, but three rhombuses together. To the question of what colors the sky and the sun are, the answers have also been unanimous, for years. But the repetitive response is a question: “Professor, are you also going to tell us that the sky is not blue and the sun is not yellow?” After all, that’s how they are on flags, in children’s drawings, and in any other representation that is not modern art―that which made Hitler’s blood boil. Something that hasn’t changed much today. The sky is not always blue and the sun is never yellow. Not only is it white, but the dominant colors are blue and violet.

Since the start of the Gaza war, more than 200 hundred aid workers have been killed. As a result, the health situation of the civilian population, still reeling from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)’s attacks, has worsened considerably, since many aid operations have been cancelled. One cannot but wonder what is crossing Netanyahu’s mind who is unable to see the suffering of hundreds of thousands of human beings, a situation that is mainly his responsibility.
It doesn’t escape anybody that, to a large extent, this has to do with Netanyahu’s desire to escape accountability for his actions. What is becoming increasingly evident is that absolute power has transformed him, making him even more ruthless and more impervious to criticism or to the calls for human kindness.
When he took office as prime minister for the second time in 2009, Netanyahu developed a perverse political doctrine that held that increasing the rift between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority would be to Israel’s advantage. That way, the diplomatic paralysis created would eliminate the possibility of negotiations with the Palestinians about the division of Israel into two states.

The situation in the Middle East--not to mention in the Ukraine, Moscow, North Korea, China, here in the U.S.A.--has been creeping ever nearer the red zone of absolute and terminal peril, with everyone paying even the slightest attention sensing that Iran may now do something really aggressive toward Israel, then Netanyahu will do something Netanyahuish to Iran, and we’ll be off to the races, headin’ for Armageddon, with nukes as party favors and shit for brains. Because we know, don't we, that a theocracy like the one in Iran is overseen by the looniest of Loony Tunes, secure in the notion that whatever madness they choose, Allah will have willed it. Ditto the response to Iranian craziness in the form of Zionist craziness rooted in the same soil, but with a different name, a different language, but much the same belligerence. And fear, rage, and hate.
All of which were previewed in the Hamas attack, and the response to that horror with payback multiplying that provoking horror by tens of thousands of deaths that continue to this day all these months since that ball was opened.

Andrew Tate may be facing a mounting number of international charges for alleged sex crimes, but this doesn't mean we've seen the end of "masculinity influencers" who make big bucks by preying upon the the insecurities of young men. On Tuesday, Ben Terris of the Washington Post profiled Nick Adams, a self-described "Alpha Male" who wins over young men with an is-he-kidding shtick focused on the ever-present threat of emasculation supposedly posed by everything from liberals to girlfriends to salmon entrées at restaurants.
Like most similar marketers of so-called masculinity, Adams targets young men's fears of loneliness or failure — which are no doubt both real and prevalent — with the false promise that embracing aggressive misogyny is the key to achieving your dreams. Adams has evidently cashed in because he's good at employing faux-irony in order to push his message. Terris, who has an eye for telling details, zeroes in on excellent examples of the "jokey but serious" rhetoric.

Even though the US Department of Justice declined to pursue criminal charges against Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) last year, the House Ethics Committee is still investigating him. And a new profile suggests that investigation may soon intensify.
Earlier this week, the Atlantic's Elaine Godfrey reported that, according to several of her sources, the Florida Republican sent explicit photos and videos of women to some of his colleagues in Congress. One video was allegedly of a young woman hula hooping while naked.
"Matt sent this to me, and you’re missing out," one unnamed Gaetz aide said, telling Godfrey that he watched the video from the back of a fan along with another member of Congress.
According to Godfrey, Gaetz has a longtime habit of "bragging about his sexual conquests" that supposedly includes showing nude photos of women to his friends. One of Gaetz's longtime friends, Erin Scot, recalled a time when she met up with Gaetz at a wedding in 2009 — prior to him launching his political career — and wanted to show him a photo of her girlfriend (Scot came out as lesbian to Gaetz when they were young, and she noted that she felt comfortable with him when he appeared unfazed at the news).

“When exactly was America great?” is a common question often asked of Donald Trump loyalists sporting MAGA (Make America Great Again) hats. The Republican-dominated Arizona Supreme Court has an answer: 1864. Put aside that the nation was embroiled in a civil war, millions of people were brutally enslaved, native populations were being driven from their lands, and that women were more than a half century from having the right to vote. What apparently made America great in 1864 were extremist anti-abortion laws then in existence.
These old laws are being dusted off in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June, 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v.Wade’s federal guarantee of the right to abortion.
This week, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that an 1864 Arizona abortion ban, including in cases of rape or incest, still stands (with an exception to save the life of the pregnant person). The court stayed its enforcement for two weeks pending final appeals. If those fail, abortions will be criminalized in Arizona, with anyone performing one or even assisting someone in obtaining one facing up to five years in prison.

An enormous flash, a mushroom cloud, multi-thousands of human beings dead. We win!
Nuclear weapons won’t go away, the cynics—the souls in despair—tell us. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t, as Gen. James E. Cartwright, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, once put it, “un-invent nuclear weapons.” So apparently we’re stuck with them until the “big oops” happens and humanity becomes extinct. Until then: Modernize, modernize, modernize. Threaten, threaten, threaten
David Barash and Ward Wilson make the case that this is completely false: We’re not “stuck” with nuclear weapons any more than we’re stuck with obsolete and ineffective technology of any sort, bluntly pointing out: “Crappy ideas don’t have to be forgotten in order to be abandoned.”
“Useless, dangerous, or outmoded technology needn’t be forced out of existence. Once a thing is no longer useful, it unceremoniously and deservedly gets ignored.”

When I was in the U.S. military, I learned a saying (often wrongly attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato) that only the dead have seen the end of war. Its persistence through history to this very moment should indeed be sobering. What would it take for us humans to stop killing each other with such vigor and in such numbers?
Song lyrics tell me to be proud to be an American, yet war and profligate preparations for more of the same are omnipresent here. My government spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies). In this century, our leaders have twice warned of an “axis of evil” intent on harming us, whether the fantasy troika of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea cited by former President George W. Bush early in 2002 or a new one—China, Russia, and North Korea—in the Indo-Pacific today. Predictably given that sort of threat inflation, this country is now closing in on a trillion dollars a year in “defense spending,” or close to two-thirds of federal discretionary spending, in the name of having a military machine capable of defeating “evil” troikas (as well as combatting global terrorism). A significant part of that huge sum is reserved for producing a new generation of nuclear weapons that will be quite capable of destroying this planet with missiles and warheads to spare.

This Monday, April 15 will mark a first in the United States' 248-year history when jury selection begins in former President Donald Trump's first criminal trial.
Trump and his attorneys have been able to delay the trials in all four of the criminal indictments he is facing. But assuming there are no more delays, the trial for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr.'s hush money/business records case is right around the corner.
Bragg alleges that during the 2016 presidential race, Trump falsified business records in order to make hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. According to Michael Cohen — Trump's former personal attorney and fixer and one of Bragg's key witnesses — Trump had extramarital affairs with Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal and paid hush money to cover them up.
In a listicle published on April 12, The Hill's Niall Stanage lays out five "big questions that loom" as Trump's first criminal trial draws closer and closer.

If there's one thing that characterizes this election season so far, it's that the country remains as polarized as it's ever been in recent history, and "both sides" are highly agitated and upset. But nobody seems to be able to figure out exactly why. Is it inflation, the divisive nature of media, the unending pandemic, the fact that we all spend too much time doomscrolling or something else? There are plenty of theories but no consensus.
The most common explanation is that the economy is bringing everyone down. It's hard to explain why people are so negative about it, since the numbers are actually highly robust, with the best job market since the 1960s and rapidly rising wages, especially for people in the middle and working classes. For the first time in decades, economic gains are flowing to them instead of just to the uppermost 1%.
Here's Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, lying about this on Fox News along with a graph showing the reality (which Fox viewers will never see):

Vladimir Putin understands better than Democrats and Democratic donors how to seize control of a nation. And Democrats damn well better learn the lesson, and fast. Forget about the economy and even abortion: it’s the media, stupid!
When Putin wanted the Central African Republic (CAR) to give him multiple gold and mineral mines in that resource-rich country, the first thing his agent, Yevgeny Prigozhin, did was to buy a radio station and start running propaganda about the benefits of the CAR creating closer ties to Russia.
Similarly, when Putin wanted to put Trump into the White House, he had Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency — a massive, well-funded troll farm based in St. Petersburg — use swing-state polling and other internal RNC confidential information to send more than 100 million targeted Facebook impressions to swing state Americans.

Dark Brandon strikes again! President Joe Biden is playing Donald Trump like a fiddle on the Affordable Care Act, and Trump just can’t help himself from responding.
At an event with care providers Tuesday, Biden dangled the bait again for Trump.
“My predecessor and his MAGA friends want to—I love the phrase, the language they use—they want to ‘terminate’ the Affordable Care Act,” he said.
Trump couldn’t stop himself. He just had to post a video in response.
“I’m not running to terminate the ACA, as crooked Joe Biden says all over the place,” he said, giving the media another chance to show Trump saying, for the past five years, that’s exactly what he wants to do. Roll the tape!

That sound you are hearing from the lavish Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Heritage Foundation, is that of staffers polishing their jackboots for a much-anticipated January 20, 2025 return to Donald Trump’s White House. The Heritage Foundation, the Darth Vader of modern-day right-wing think tanks, has been all about gutting government positions, policies and services since its founding in 1973. Not since the early days of the Reagan administration has it been closer to achieving its goal.
To accomplish the final takedown of the administrative state, the Heritage Foundation has brought together more than 100 conservative tax-exempt organizations with an estimated $2 billion dollars in support of the election of Donald Trump and the perpetuation of MAGA agenda.
As Thomas Edsall recently reported in The New York Times, “Most of the work performed by these nonprofit groups is conducted behind closed doors. Unlike traditional political organizations, these groups do not disclose their donors and must reveal only minimal information on expenditures. In many cases, even this minimal information will not be available until after the 2024 election.

A Republican member of the Maine House of Representatives is facing backlash after suggesting that last year's deadly mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine — that left 18 dead and more than a dozen wounded — was vengeance from God.
NBC News reported that Rep. Michael Lemelin took to the floor of the house on Thursday to condemn LD 1619, which was legislation expanding privacy rights for abortion patients that passed the same day as the October 25 shooting. He then went on to suggest that the shooting was retribution from God for the bill's passage.
"Meditate on this, Madam Speaker," Lemelin said to House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross (D). "When (L.D.) 1619 passed and went into law on Oct. 25, you told God life doesn’t matter."
"Keep in mind that the law came into effect on October 25. God heard you and the horrible events on October 25 happened," he added.
— from Robert Reich's Substack

Friends,
Trump’s first criminal trial — the first criminal trial of a former president, ever — is scheduled to begin Monday. The 34-count business falsification case may be the only case against Trump to reach a verdict before the November election.
Many people I speak with are worried that this is the weakest of Trump’s four pending criminal trials because it has to do with an illicit affair.
Wrong. Although this case is commonly called the “hush money” case and referred to as Trump’s “coverup of a sex scandal,” this way of describing it minimizes its importance.
This case is really an election interference case — just as are the criminal cases charging him with seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Together, they establish an ongoing pattern: Trump will do anything to gain and keep power, even if his actions violate the nation’s laws.

As far as symbols of what the GOP intends for American women, the revival of an abortion ban that predates women's suffrage could not be more fitting. The Arizona Supreme Court decided on Tuesday that the state should enforce a law outlawing all abortions, under criminal penalty of two to five years imprisonment, "unless it is necessary to save her life." The law was passed in 1864, which was not just before Arizona was a state, but 55 years before women obtained the right to vote. The symbolism of that, plus the electoral implications going into a presidential election, means this news is explosive even beyond the high levels of outrage that meet every Republican ban on abortion since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
Anger from the majority of voters over the loss of abortion rights isn't dissipating like Republicans thought it would, and now GOP politicians in the Grand Canyon State are scrambling. The most prominent of these, of course, is election denier Kari Lake, who, while still refusing to admit she lost the race for governor in 2022, is running for Senate. She wants everyone to think she's unhappy that Arizona women's medical care will be determined by a law written while many doctors were still rejecting germ theory. Claiming to "oppose today's ruling," Lake called on the actual governor, Democrat Katie Hobbes and "the State Legislature to come up with an immediate common sense solution."
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I’ve been reading Joyce Carole Oates all of my adult life. Not every novel or story, mind you, but lots of things as they came to hand. It would be a significant boast and exaggeration if I claimed to have read her entire body of work. She is a major American writer, and about as prolific as they come. I admire her enormously, and have enjoyed everything I’ve read of hers, so far as I recall, If there was anything I read that I hadn’t liked, it wasn’t bad enough to be memorable to me for that reason. A life’s work such as hers is a staggering achievement. I'm proud to have introduced some students to samplings of her work. (The short story "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" was one. Check it out.

I don’t get it and I’m hoping you can help me figure it out. Why do Republicans oppose President Biden’s efforts to cancel student debt?
This Tuesday, seven states, led by Missouri’s Republican Attorney General, sued the Biden administration to stop his most recent attempt to reduce student debt. In a separate lawsuit, ten other Republican-controlled states filed a separate lawsuit to try to block the same Biden effort.
The week before, somebody slipped this little gem into Maria Cantwell’s must-pass legislation reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) (my inquiry to her press office was never answered):
“The Secretary, the Secretary of the Treasury, or the Attorney General may not take any action to cancel or forgive the outstanding balances, or portion of balances, on any Federal Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loan, or otherwise modify the terms or conditions of a Federal Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loan, made to an eligible student, except as authorized by an Act of Congress.”

By “class system” we mean the basic workplace organizations—the human relationships or “social relations”—that accomplish the production and distribution of goods and services. Some examples include the master/slave, communal village, and lord/serf organizations. Another example, the distinctive capitalist class system, entails the employer/employee organization. In the United States and in much of the world, it is now the dominant class system. Employers—a tiny minority of the population—direct and control the enterprises and employees that produce and distribute goods and services. Employers buy the labor power of employees—the population’s vast majority—and set it to work in their enterprises. Each enterprise’s output belongs to its employer who decides whether to sell it, sets the price, and receives and distributes the resulting revenue.
In the United States, the employee class is badly split ideologically and politically. Most employees have probably stayed connected—with declining enthusiasm or commitment—to the Democratic Party. A sizable and growing minority within the class has some hope in Trump. Many have lost interest and participated less in electoral politics. Perhaps the most splintered are various “progressive” or “left” employees: some in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, some in various socialist, Green, independent, and related small parties, and some even drawn hesitatingly to Trump. Left-leaning employees were perhaps more likely to join and activate social movements (ecological, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-war) rather than electoral campaigns.

As the cost of housing has exploded, so has the number of people experiencing homelessness. And unfortunately, instead of trying to house people, more states and cities are criminalizing people simply for lacking a safe place to sleep.
According to the National Homelessness Law Center, almost every state restricts the conduct of people experiencing homelessness. In Missouri, sleeping on state land is a crime. A new law in Florida bans people from sleeping on public property — and requires local governments without bed space for unhoused people to set up camps far away from public services.
Laura Gutowski, from Grants Pass, Oregon, lives in a tent near the home where she resided for 25 years. Soon after her husband unexpectedly passed away, she became unhoused. “It kind of all piled on at the same time,” she told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “Flipped my world upside down.”
— from the Columbus Free Press

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
Sam Randazzo was once the Chair of the Ohio Public Utilities Commission.
Now, at 74, he’s dead by apparent suicide.
As is the “Nuclear Renaissance.”
Dating back many years, we often encountered Sam at energy hearings in Columbus. He was always personable and friendly as we exchanged handshakes and smiles.
That we were totally on opposite sides of the issues was like an inside joke between us.
Hi folks!
We're just $1,557 away from our goal.
Let's put an end to this fund drive this week. I know we can do this, because we've done it before. All it takes is you.

If you haven't yet chipped in — if you're one of our regular donors who likes to wait until the last minute — this is your cue.
One dollar, five dollars — no amount is too small, and every donation pushes us that much closer to our goal.
Thanks in advance!
— Jeff T.

There's been some talk lately about Donald Trump's light campaign schedule compared to President Joe Biden, who's been visiting swing states constantly even as he's handling some very thorny legislative and foreign policy problems. The contrast has been sharp. Trump is spending much more time on the golf course than holding rallies and even his appearances on friendly right-wing media have been scarce.
Judging by his Truth Social feed, it's fair to say that Trump is stressed and it's not about the campaign. He's obsessed with the criminal trial that's set to start next Monday:




















