In May of 2023, the world watched as Charles III was crowned King of England after his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, passed away at the age of 96. Very few people alive could have remembered her coronation almost 71 years before and most Americans' only familiarity with that medieval ritual comes from viewing Netflix's "The Crown."
The UK Parliament prepared a detailed briefing on the history and protocol of coronations and it's quite fascinating. Much of the ceremony is symbolic these days, but the intent is clear. It is designed to make it clear that the new king is the legitimate monarch, ordained by God. Back in the day, this required that all peers pledge their fealty to the king one by one. It was apparently a long and tedious process. But since they abolished most of the hereditary peerage back in 1999, they shortened the process this time, with the Archbishop of Canterbury pledging to be "faithful and true" and Prince William kneeling before his father and saying, "I pledge my loyalty to you and faith and truth I will bear unto you, as your liege man of life and limb. So help me God."
After President-elect Donald Trump threatened to sue the Des Moines Register over the newspaper's "final election poll showing" the MAGA leader "several points behind Vice President Kamala Harris in Iowa," according to HuffPost, Trump officially filed the suit Monday night.
Puck News' Tara Palmeri reported, "NEW: Trump filed a civil lawsuit tonight against Ann Selzer, her polling company & the Des Moines register claiming consumer fraud and 'brazen election interference" over her Nov 2 poll showing Harris winning."
Palmeri then noted: "What's so unprecedented about this suit is that Trump is suing Selzer's polling company too, which may be a way to send a chill to the industry that will be measuring public opinion and in turn his legacy since he can't run for reelection"
University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers replied: "As Trump files suit against a pollster for a principled (but ultimately incorrect) poll, one wonders how long it'll be until he sues an economist who dares forecast anything other than four years of glory."
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
ABC shouldn’t have agreed to settle the defamation case Trump brought against it — handing him $15 million for his presidential “library” (whatever monument that turns out to be) and another million for his legal fees, along with an apology.
It shouldn’t have, first, because the standard for defamation of a public figure requires that a plaintiff prove that the defendant acted with “actual malice” — that is, knew their statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
But when on March 10, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos asserted that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll, there’s zero evidence that Stephanopoulos knew it to be false or was acting with reckless disregard for the truth.
In dauntless pursuit of my goal of becoming a killjoy and major pain in the ass, this seemed to me to be just the right time to give vent to my feelings about Costco. I’ve been a Costco shopper for quite some time now, putting aside the sense I have every time I go there about just how wasteful it is to shop the way Costco think we should shop. The whole business model is to get people to buy more than they need. Much more. The result, of course, is that lots of food and other consumables get thrown away. Couples without children fill up pallets and carts with more than enough stuff to feed a large and ravenous family for months. The stuff is stored until it becomes time for the ritual of checking expiration dates which reveal things purchased at Costco decades ago, when the world was young.
How did people ever believe they would ever eat this stuff, so much of it processed and really not very good. How did so many products work their way to the rear of our refrigerators or the dim recesses of our cupboards or pantries to lurk there for so long.
The good times—for America’s super wealthy—are now rolling way past good. Our richest have in 2024 enjoyed their best year ever. No other nation’s deepest pockets have watched their fortunes grow as large or as fast.
Elon Musk, of course, perfectly embodies this unprecedented surge in the personal wealth of America’s wealthiest. Musk has entered 2024’s last two weeks with a net worth spilling past $450 billion, nearly half a trillion dollars. Over the last 12 months, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index neatly notes, Musk’s wealth has doubled.
But Musk’s good fortune hardly rates as unique. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is sitting on a quarter-trillion personal fortune, and the Facebook-driven net worth of Mark Zuckerburg has jumped comfortably over $200 billion as well.
Of the world’s 15 largest personal fortunes, 14 currently belong to Americans. All these 14 will be stepping into 2025 with at least $100 billion in personal assets.
In the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, Americans are wondering out loud why we’re getting ripped off by giant insurance companies when every other developed country in the world has healthcare as a right and pays an average of about half of what we do — and gets better outcomes.
As I point out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, and brought up with Joy Reid on her program last week, America is:
— The only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right,
— The only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare and a half-million families facing bankruptcy every year because somebody got sick,
— The only country in the developed world where over 40% of the population carries $220 billion in medical debt,
— And the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, enslaved and then legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race.
We’ve been inundated with reports on Project 2025, but what about Project Esther? Unveiled on October 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ murderous rampage, the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther is a far-right McCarthyist attack on supporters of a Palestinian state, liberal American Jews and progressives. It accuses the Jewish community of being “complacent” in combatting anti-Semitism. “A leader on the Heritage Foundation’s anti-Semitism task force claimed in an interview that if Jewish organizations “were doing their job and they were being effective, we wouldn’t have the problem that we have,’” The Forward’s Dove Kent reported.
What exactly is the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther? How will it impact free speech and the right to protest in the United States? Will it do anything to combat anti-Semitism? It does offer a roadmap for the Trump administration to launch witch-hunts against institutions and protests labeled as progressive or Left while turning a blind eye to the anti-Semitic tenets of Neo-Nazi’s and (more broadly) white supremacy.
by Wenonah Hauter and Alan Minsky
The upcoming Trump presidency poses an existential threat to our already fragile climate. Trump has appointed a cabinet filled with climate deniers, and promised to ramp up oil drilling and gut industry regulations. In response, Governor Gavin Newsom has promised to fight Trump and advance climate progress in California.
Gov. Newsom has a national profile and has aspirations for national office. He has a chance to provide much-needed national climate leadership, but to effectively battle Trump and advance a bold agenda; he’ll need to walk back some of his prior positions and fulfill promises that are at odds with the wishes of some of his biggest corporate backers. His first early test will be to fulfill his commitment to shut down Aliso Canyon, site of the largest gas blowout in U.S. history.
Like many roads that cut through Wyoming, the highway into the town of Rawlins is a long, winding one surrounded by rolling hills, barbed wire fences, and cattle ranches. I’d traveled this stretch of Wyoming many times. Once during a dangerous blizzard, another time during a car-rattling thunderstorm, the rain so heavy my windshield wipers couldn’t keep pace with the deluge. The weather might be wild and unpredictable in Wyoming’s outback, but the people are friendly and welcoming as long as you don’t talk politics or mention that you live in a place like California.
One late summer afternoon on a trip at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, I stopped off in Rawlins for lunch. There wasn’t a mask in sight, never mind any attempt at social distancing. Two men sat in a booth right behind me, one in a dark suit and the other in overalls, who struck me as a bit of an odd couple. Across from them were an older gentleman and his wife, clearly Rawlins locals. They wondered what those two were up to.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has just completed hearings on the climate crisis in a case that could have critical consequences for the survival of future generations. From December 2-13, more than 100 states and organizations argued before the ICJ in landmark litigation that began five years ago when Pacific Islander law students initiated a grassroots movement that persuaded the UN General Assembly to request an advisory opinion from the ICJ.
“In The Hague, most of which lies below sea level, this has been a momentous two weeks,” environmental attorney Richard Harvey, who works for Greenpeace International and attended the historic proceedings, told Truthout. “The Cold War divided the world into East and West but climate change divides it into North and South: corporate petrostates against the Small Island Developing States and the rest.”
“Never before have the U.S., Russia, China, U.K., Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and OPEC [the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] lined up so explicitly against those who suffer the most from their greed,” Harvey said. “Corporate petrostates shamelessly asserted that peoples’ rights to self-determination, to life and to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment are, in essence, trumped by their right to fossil fuel profits.”
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
I’ve shared with you the plans of Trump’s unelected multi-billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to undermine Social Security — the most popular and successful program in the federal government, into which you’ve paid your entire working life.
Today I want to share their plan to gut Medicaid.
Medicaid is less politically popular than Social Security or Medicare, because it mainly supports poor children and families who have little or no political voice.
But Medicaid covers far more Americans.
Medicaid insures nearly half of all children in the United States. It covers 1 in 5 women of childbearing age. It also pays for a large portion of the nation’s nursing home care and mental health treatment. States and the federal government share its costs, which totaled $880 billion last year.
How are the DOGE billionaires planning to gut it?
Dems have bragged for a long time that we are a “big tent” outfit. We’ll take anyone. Reactionaries. Racists. Colluders. Turncoats. Misogynists, Homophobes, Sleaze bags, Union busters, Low-life scumbags. Really conflicted rich guys. Two-faced weasels. Ambitious opportunists. Rogues. Renegades, and good ol’ boys. If you say you're a Democrat, you're a Democrat, and that's good enough for us, even if you don't really mean it. Even if you don't vote that way on crucial issues, and even if your path to office and to riches was underwritten by the Koch brothers, those famous friends of the coal miners of West Virginia.
In the olden days, when I was a kid, the Dems were a really schizo outfit, with hardcore racists, segregationists, and voter suppressionists in the south, lots of Unitarians and “Many of My Best Friends are Black” liberals, and bourgeois people living in mostly all-white neighborhoods throughout the land trying their damndest to do the right things, but who were also conflicted
Just before I was old enough to vote (but not too old to be drafted), we narrowly elected John Fitzgerald Kennedy as POTUS, just barely defeating Richard Nixon. There were lots of suspicions created about voter fraud, but Nixon rather graciously chose not to make a stink about it. He saved the stink for later.
Following the murder of United Healthcare’s CEO, social media has been flooded with outrage, mostly directed against insurance companies that deny care.
On social media, I have seen reports from people I know. They express, as I do, that murder is not the answer, but they go into detail about the pain caused by the denial of their insurance claims, often due to insurance use of AI to evaluate the “need.”
Our capacity for empathy is what makes us human. I see this in my friends as they grapple with the ethical crisis: “It was wrong to shoot him, but…” One friend says it has shed light on a real problem; another says, “They don’t need him for their investors’ meeting—nothing changes.”
I surprise my friends; they know I have complained about healthcare insurance for more than a decade. They know I question whether or not a better system could have saved my brother’s life when he died at 33, but this time I give a different response.
Ruthless tycoons, already privileged and empowered, join today’s weird, vigilante clown show hawked by the cartoon scoffer who laughs at rules, laws and norms.
Call me an optimist with a mixed message. If history is the guide, we’re about to find out how quickly arrogant tycoons good at amassing wealth but daft at governance will incite the next crises, then presumably the next “populist” backlash. That doesn’t mean money-grubbers won’t prosper from chaos but nothing comes without tradeoffs. What matters long-term is the blatant default in running government fromelected professionals and savvy experts, suspect or not, to the carnival of grotesquely unqualified Trump yahoos. Black swans loom even more for the over-reaching inept, and that's a gift for the stodgy, risk-averse Democrats.
Where’s the evidence, delusions aside, that even competent fat cats know how to govern highly complex federalism (and globalism) without direct, massive damage to the majority? When did “austerity politics” suddenly make sense to the complaining impoverished? Name the last time (actually ever) a finance wheeler dealer, especially from the know-it-all, predatory class, successfully ruled the country? That’s even truer today as governance itself verges on the impossible, the world’s most daunting leadership test even for the skilled and less prodigiously self-serving than the president-elect.
Trump has spent the month since the election firing off a rapid torrent of Cabinet picks. His nominees generally fall into two types: obviously whacko (see Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, RFK Jr.) and superficially normal (think Marco Rubio, Doug Burgum, Pam Bondi). While the headline-grabbing scandals and general trumpery of the first group easily draw scorn, it’s important that we not grade the second group on a credulous curve, overlooking the economic interests behind their soothingly conventional manner.
That’s a lesson we should remember from the last Trump administration, when scandal-plagued appointees like Scott Pruitt at EPA and Ryan Zinke at Interior were replaced by more circumspect villains like Andrew Wheeler at EPA and David Bernhardt at Interior. Wheeler and Bernhardt wreaked havoc on environmental, public health, and public lands protection while evading the mockery invited by their predecessors.
Even a wannabe-authoritarian like Trump wants his administration to have a veneer of power and legitimacy, and the scandals of Pruitt and Zinke compromised that illusion. As I recapped for our series of Trump retrospectives, Pruitt “misspent millions in public funds on 24/7 private security, first-class plane tickets, chartered jets, and renovations, while misusing EPA staffers to find his wife a job and do his personal errands,” while Zinke “resigned amid over a dozen ongoing ethics investigations.” Mockery can be politically useful, insofar as it deflates authoritarian egos. But corruption doesn’t have to be sensational to be consequential—and those are the harder stories to tell.
You may not have noticed this. The world “celebrated” International Human Rights Day the other day, even as wars across the planet continued, bombs fell, children died. What if “freedom from war” were a human right?
I don’t ask this to be cynical, but rather to expand the reach of what should be a global day of connection and collective inner reflection. International Human Rights Day is December 10. It’s an annual honoring of the day in 1948 when the newly formed United Nations, in the wake of World War II, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which publicly recognizes “the inherent dignity and... equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”
All members of the human family! Every last one of us must be valued. This is not simply a hidden, personal wish, but a public—legal—document, posted globally in 577 languages (from Abhkaz to Zulu), declaring that all humans are equal at the cores of their being and deserve the chance to live full lives, free from... a whole slew of hellish possibilities, including: slavery, torture, arbitrary arrest, and much, much more. And we deserve, my God, freedom of thought. Hey, book banners! Did you know your cowardly insistence on limiting human awareness is against world law?
Luigi Mangione — who has been charged in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — could be banking on one particular defense strategy in order to prevail in court.
On Friday, Mangione hired attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo — a former New York City prosecutor with decades of experience in criminal law — to represent him in court as he defends himself against five charges, including second-degree murder. While it remains unknown exactly how Mangione will argue his innocence, one attorney recently told the Guardian that he thinks the alleged killer could bank on claiming he was in "extreme emotional disturbance."
"He has one and only one viable defense, and that is extreme emotional disturbance," veteran civil rights attorney Ron Kuby said. "One version of extreme emotional disturbance is he just snapped, but the defense is broader than that and certainly covers the slow, bitter, corrosive wearing away of normal sentiments of right and wrong until it all collapses in pain."
Ya know, fellow plebes, it's not too soon to be thinking about subversion of the systems that have been gouging us with ever greater mercilessness, with way more on the way. We need to be thinking about our real enemies. We need to look at all those corporations that gave so generously to Trump. We need to turn away from Home Depot (if we haven't already) and away from Walmart, Hobby Lobby (of course) Chik-fil-a (as if the name wasn't already enough). We need to not buy the Medicare Advantage rip-off supplement. We need to buy local, unless they're known to be owned and run by MAGA neighbors. In other words, we need an organized nationwide consumer boycott of our oppressors (and that is not an exaggeration).
We also need designated days of rage in which we call in sick. We need labor to act like labor movements once acted. We need to buy less, think more, and do whatever we can to reach out to co-workers, neighbors, friends, and kin who may have had their brains fogged by the smoke so steadily blown up their asses on Fox. We need to act as though we are the brave if we want to hang on to our hopes to be free, not tyrannized, and not doing what autocrats like Elon Musk think we should do in accepting their cuts and their tyranny like the passive sheep a majority of Americans have shown themselves to be. Sheep voting for the fleecing and the slaughter. Rant, rant, rant, but I ain't lyin'.
The U.S. national debt just passed $36 trillion, only four months after it passed $35 trillion and up $2 trillion for the year. Third quarter data is not yet available, but interest payments as a percent of tax receipts rose to 37.8% in the third quarter of 2024, the highest since 1996. That means interest is eating up over one-third of our tax revenues.
Total interest for the fiscal year hit $1.16 trillion, topping $1 trillion for the first time ever. That breaks down to $3 billion per day. For comparative purposes, an estimated $11 billion, or less than four days’ federal interest, would pay the median rent for all the homeless people in America for a year. The damage from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina alone is estimated at $53.6 billion, for which the state is expected to receive only $13.6 billion in federal support. The $40 billion funding gap is a sum we pay in less than two weeks in interest on the federal debt.
The current debt trajectory is clearly unsustainable, but what can be done about it? Raising taxes and trimming the budget can slow future growth of the debt, but they are unable to fix the underlying problem—a debt grown so massive that just the interest on it is crowding out expenditures on the public goods that are the primary purpose of government.
In Richard Connell’s popular short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” hunter Sanger Rainsford goes overboard while sailing to the Amazon, washing up on an island owned by deceivingly charismatic General Zaroff. Rainsford expects Zaroff to help him off the island, but instead, Zaroff invites him to participate in a hunt.
A hunt, to Rainsford’s utter disbelief, in which he is the prey.
Our reckless pursuit of economic growth has become society’s “most dangerous game.” It keeps us trapped on an island of inequality, environmental degradation, and corporate power, all while convincing us there’s still a chance we can win if we continue to play.
But there is no “winning” in a game dependent on the exploitation of people and nature. As long as “growth” is defined by profits and production, people and the planet will always lose.
Anyone remember how old right-wing messaging liked to portray government-provided human service programs as cradle-to-the-grave socialism. They thought that sort of thing was bad for us. It just made so many of us lazy. It robbed many of us of our work ethic. It was un-American. It was anti-business, and the business of America was business. And, of course, if we were going to have such programs at all, they should be administered for profit by people in the private sector. Business people knew how to get things done, with efficiency.
What America was not, according to Republicans (and more than a few Democrats) was a place where voting rights and many other human rights could be denied.
This was a nation founded on the right to pursue happiness, with the unspoken codicil that catching happiness favored the favored, the well-connected, the sons of men who had gained favor in previous generations of exploiters of labor, hustlers, and those who were close enough to the levers of power to ensure that the gravy train made frequent deliveries to them. Those who gained great riches set up ways to extend their powers beyond the grave, to ensure that the gravy train was well-maintained, and ran on time even after they were dead and gone.
One of the most famous episodes in the Watergate saga 50 years ago was when CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr got a hold of Richard Nixon's "enemies list" and read it cold on the air, only to find himself listed at number 17.
The Nixon White House actually committed dozens of abuses that came to light during the investigations spawned by the Watergate break-in and one of them was the use of the FBI to investigate Nixon's enemies list. After discovering the full extent of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's overwhelming misuse of the bureau for decades, including blackmail, harassment and persecution, Congress erected some strong guardrails designed to prevent such things from happening again. The Senate Judiciary Committee report explained:
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
Anyone recall the time in the late summer of 2017 when prominent CEOs resigned from Trump’s business councils in protest at his defense of white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville, after Trump called them “very fine people”?
At the time, I thought America’s CEOs might become a bulwark against Trump’s extremism. But I was wrong. Within months, the CEOs were seeking to get back into Trump’s good graces.
After the insurrection unleashed by Trump against the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, many CEOs announced they wouldn’t be financing the campaigns of election deniers. CEOs of prominent social media banned Trump from appearing.
I hoped their actions would limit Trump’s fanaticism and Trump’s growing MAGA movement. I was wrong again. Within two years, the CEOs were financing the campaigns of election deniers. Within three years, prominent social media were allowing Trump to return to their platforms and retell his lies.
President-elect Donald Trump will have to interrupt his own presidential transition process next week in order to comply with a federal judge's order.
Politico reported Friday that U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisette Reid (of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida) is ordering both Trump and ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos to sit for depositions lasting four hours, as part of Trump's ongoing libel lawsuit against the network. In her order Reid specifically noted that Trump being president-elect of the United States won't let him off the hook in complying with the court's orders.
"The parties are reminded that the Court ‘has already granted a lengthy discovery period... and, with Election Day now behind us, there is no reason for any further delay," Reid wrote, adding that the deposition would be in-person.
The lawsuit stems from a claim Stephanopoulos made on-air that Trump raped writer E. Jean Carroll, even though the actual civil verdict the jury handed down in 2023 was for "sexual abuse." Stephanopoulos made the comment while interviewing Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) in March of 2023.
President Joe Biden should not only pardon Anthony Fauci, Liz Cheney, and the entire January 6th congressional panel, but hundreds more who are potentially in the crosshairs of Trump, Musk, Patel and his other malevolent henchmen.
If you think the chances of Trump’s enemies getting prosecuted are small because, after all, none of them have committed crimes of any consequence, I refer you to Hunter Biden, who was pursued by David C. Weiss, a rightwing inquisitor appointed by the Trump administration under Bill Barr to take Biden down.
Hunter bought a gun and checked the box that said words to the effect of “I am not using illegal drugs” on federal Form 7743. So did millions of other Americans who possess and smoke pot, a federal crime even though it may be legal in their state.
As Jacob Sullum, writes for Reason, the “survey data suggest that millions of American gun owners are illegal drug users, meaning they are guilty of the same felony that Hunter Biden committed by possessing a firearm.”
Follow us
Become a fan
Subscribe