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The Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human

The Biology of Good Fortune: What ‘Lucky’ People Do Differently

When Kōnosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic, was asked what quality he most valued when hiring, his answer baffled the room. It wasn’t intelligence, credentials, drive, or even discipline or experience…

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Neoliberalism comes to America

In America it was inflation that opened the door to Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism.

Inflation is usually caused by one of two things: international devaluation or internal dilution of a country’s currency, or widespread shortages of essential commodities that drive up prices enough to echo through the entire economy.

The early 1970s got both, one deliberately and the other as the result of war.

Between 1971 and 1973, President Nixon pulled the US out of the Bretton Woods economic framework that had been put together after World War II to stabilize the world’s currencies and balance trade. The dollar had been pegged to gold at $35 an ounce, and the world’s other currencies were effectively pegged to the dollar.

But the United States couldn’t buy enough gold to support the number of dollars we needed as our economy grew, so on August 15, 1971 Nixon announced to the nation and the world that he was taking the dollar off the gold standard and putting a ten percent tariff on most imports of finished goods into the US to deal with the changes in the dollar’s value relative to other currencies.

The immediate result was the value of the dollar rose as the world breathed a sigh of relief that the “gold crisis” was coming to an end and the dollar would become more portable. But an increased value in the dollar relative to other currencies meant that products manufactured in the US became more expensive overseas, hurting our exports.

At that at that time there were 60,000 more factories in the US than today and Wal-Mart was advertising that everything in their stores was “Made in the USA”[lxix]: exports were an important part of our economy and imports were mostly raw materials or “exotic” goods not produced here like sandalwood from Thailand or French wines.[lxx]

To deal with the “strong dollar” problem, Nixon announced in December, 1971 that the US was devaluing our currency relative to the Japanese Yen, German Mark and British Pound (among others) by 11 percent. It was the first-ever negotiated realignment of the world’s major currencies, and Nixon crowed it was “the greatest monetary agreement in the history of the world.”

But we were still importing more and more goods from overseas, particularly cars from Japan, increasing our trade deficit and hurting American jobs that manufactured goods like cars that competed with the Japanese and the Germans. So in the second week of February, 1973 Nixon did it again, negotiating a further devaluation of the dollar by 10 percent.[lxxi]

While devaluing the dollar against other currencies didn’t have much immediate impact on products grown or made in the US from US raw materials, it did mean that the prices of imports (including oil, which was the primary energy supply for pretty much everything in America) went up.

Over the next decade, the impact of that devaluation would work its way through the American economy in the form of a mild inflation, which Nixon thought could be easily controlled by Fed monetary policy.

What he hadn’t figured on, though, was the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Because America took Israel’s side in the war, the Arab states cut off their supply of oil to the US in October 1973. As the State Department’s history of the time notes, “The price of oil per barrel first doubled, then quadrupled, imposing skyrocketing costs on consumers and structural challenges to the stability of whole national economies.”[lxxii]

Everything in America depended on oil, from manufacturing fertilizer to powering tractors, from lighting up cities to moving cars and trucks down the highway, from heating homes to powering factories. As a result, the price of everything went up: it was a classic supply-shock-driven inflation.

The war ended on January 19, 1974 and the Arab nations lifted their embargo on US oil in March of that year.[lxxiii] Between two devaluations and the explosion in oil prices, inflation in the US was running red-hot by the mid-1970s and it would take about a decade for it to be wrung out of our economy through Fed actions and normal readjustments in the international and domestic marketplace.

But Americans were furious. The price of pretty much everything was up by 10 percent or more, and wages weren’t keeping pace. Strikes started to roil the economy as Nixon was busted for accepting bribes and authorizing a break-in at the DNC’s headquarters in the Watergate complex. Nixon left office and Jerry Ford became our president, launching his campaign to stabilize the dollar with a nationally televised speech on October 8, 1974.[lxxiv]

Ford’s program included a 5 percent increase in top-end income taxes, cuts to federal spending, and “the creation of a voluntary inflation-fighting organization, named ‘Whip Inflation Now’ (WIN).”[lxxv] The inflation rate in 1974 peaked at 12.3 percent and home mortgage rates were going through the roof.

WIN became a joke, inflation persisted and got worse as we got locked into a wage-price spiral (particularly after Nixon’s wage-price controls ended), and President Ford was replaced by President Jimmy Carter in the election of 1976.

But inflation persisted as the realignment of the US dollar and the price of oil was forcing a market response to the value of the dollar. (An “x” percent annual inflation rate means, practically speaking, that the dollar has lost “x” percent of its value that year.)

The inflation rates for 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980 were, respectively, 6.7%, 9.0%, 13.3% and 12.5%.[lxxvi]

In 1978, Margaret Thatcher came to power in the United Kingdom and, advised by neoliberals at the UK-based private think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), began a massive program of crushing that country’s labor unions while privatizing as much of the country’s infrastructure as she could, up to and including British Airways and British Rail.

She appointed Geoffrey Howe, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and friend of Milton Friedman, as her Chancellor of the Exchequer (like the American Secretary of the Treasury) to run the British economy. Friedman, crowing about his own influence on Howe and the IEA’s founder Sir Antony Fisher wrote, “the U-turn in British policy executed by Margaret Thatcher owes more to him (i.e., Fisher) than any other individual.”[lxxvii]

The ideas of neoliberalism had, by this time, spread across the world and Thatcher was getting international applause for being the world’s first major economy to put them into place. Pressure built on President Carter to do the same, and, hoping it might help whip inflation, he deregulated the US trucking and airline industries, among others, in the last two years of his presidency.

Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and when he came into office he jumped into neoliberal policy with both feet, starting by crushing the air traffic controllers’ union, PATCO, in a single week. Union busting, welfare-cutting, “free trade,” and deregulation were the themes of Reagan’s eight years, then carried on another four years by President George HW Bush, whose administration negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

America was now officially on the neoliberal path, and Friedman and his Mont Pelerin buddies were cheering it on.

By 1982 inflation was down from 1981’s 8.9% to a respectable and tolerable 3.8%; it averaged around that for the rest of the decade. Instead of pointing out that it normally takes a supply-shock inflation and a currency-devaluation inflation a decade or two to work itself out, the American media gave Reagan and neoliberalism all the credit.[lxxviii] Milton Friedman, after all, had made his reputation as the great scholar of inflation and was a relentless self-promoter, appearing in newspapers and news magazines almost every week in one way or another.

Claiming neoliberal policies had crushed over a decade of inflation in a single year, and ignoring that it was just the normal wringing-out of inflation from the economy, Reagan openly embraced neoliberalism with a passion at every level of his administration.

Reagan embarked on a series of massive tax cuts for the morbidly rich, dropping the top tax bracket from 74 percent when he came into office down to 25 percent. He borrowed the money to pay for it, tripling the national debt from roughly $800 billion in 1980 to $2.4 trillion when he left office, and the effect of that $2 trillion he put on the nation’s credit card was a sharp economic stimulus for which Reagan took the credit.

He deregulated financial markets and Savings & Loan (S&L) banks, letting Wall Street raiders walk away with billions while gutting S&Ls so badly that the federal government had to bail out the industry by replacing about $100 billion the bankers had stolen.[lxxix]

“Greed is good!” was the new slogan, junk bonds became a thing, and Mergers and Acquisitions experts or “M&A Artists” who called themselves “Masters of the Universe” became the nation’s heroes, lionized in movies like Michael Douglas’ 1987 Wall Street.

Reagan signed Executive Order 12291 which required all federal agencies to use a cost-benefit estimate when putting together federal rules and regulations. Instead of considering externalities costs (things like the damage pollution does to people or how bank rip-offs hurt the middle class), however, the only “costs” his administration worried about were expenses to industry.

He cut the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and his head of that organization, Anne Gorsuch (mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch) was, as Newsweek noted, “involved in a nasty scandal involving political manipulation, fund mismanagement, perjury and destruction of subpoenaed documents…” leaving office in disgrace.[lxxx]

Meanwhile, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, went on a binge selling off federal lands to drilling and mining interests for pennies on the dollar. When asked if he was concerned about the environmental destruction of sensitive lands, he replied, “[M]y responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.”[lxxxi] According to Watt’s fundamentalist dogma, any damage to the environment would be reversed when Jesus came back to Earth and “makes all things new.”

Reagan cut education funding, putting Bill Bennett in as Secretary of Education. Bennett was a big advocate of the so-called “school choice” movement that emerged in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v Board decision that ordered school desegregation. All-white private, religious, and charter schools started getting federal dollars, public schools had their funds cut, and Bennett later rationalized it all by saying, “If it were your sole purpose to reduce crime, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”[lxxxii]

The Labor Department had been created back in 1913 by progressive Republican President Taft,[lxxxiii] and Reagan installed former construction executive Ray Donovan as its head, the first anti-labor partisan to ever run the Department, a position he had to leave when he was indicted for fraud and grand larceny (the charges didn’t stick) related to Mafia associates he was in tight with. As the Washington Post noted when Donovan died:

“Carrying out Reagan’s conservative agenda, Mr. Donovan eased regulations for business, including Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules disliked by industry. He withdrew a rule requiring the labeling of hazardous chemicals in the workplace and postponed federal employment and training programs, equal opportunity employment measures, and a minimum-wage increase for service workers. His tenure also saw drastic cuts in the department’s budget and staff.”[lxxxiv]

That sort of thing happened in every federal agency throughout the Reagan and Bush presidencies; much of their neoliberal damage has yet to be undone.

Thus, by 1992 Americans were starting to wise up to Reagan’s scam.

Thousands of factories had closed, their production shipped overseas; working-class wages had stagnated since his first year in office while CEO salaries exploded from 29 times the average worker’s salary in 1978 to 129 times average worker wages in 1995 (they’re over 300 times worker wages today);[lxxxv] and union membership had dropped from a third of workers to around 15 percent (it’s around 6% of the private workforce today).[lxxxvi]

The Reagan/Bush administrations negotiated the neoliberal centerpiece NAFTA treaty (although they called it a “trade agreement” rather than a treaty because it couldn’t get past the constitutional requirement for a 2/3rds vote in the senate to approve all treaties) and wanted it signed the following year, in 1993.

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— Russia’s main goal for years has been to cripple NATO by getting US troops out of Germany. Putin called Trump this week (we wouldn’t have known except Russian media bragged about it) and apparently gave him his instructions; yesterday the Pentagon announced we’re pulling 5,000 troops out of Germany and putting massive tariffs on EU goods to further weaken NATO member nations. They’re toasting their success with champagne in the Kremlin and planning their strategy to take the Baltic states once the war against Ukraine is over.

— Thanks to six corrupt bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court, Louisiana Republicans are colluding in broad daylight to rig this fall’s election and silence the voices of Black voters. Jeff Landry is one of the most corrupt governors in America, having been accused of accepting free flights and gifts, illegal use of campaign funds, and giving government jobs to top donors, among other things. Now he’s suspending the upcoming primaries (voting was already underway) so he and his cronies in the legislature can re-gerrymander the state to make sure the state will never again send a Black representative to Washington DC. Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias noted, “What is happening in Louisiana right now is both a redistricting power grab and a dry run for authoritarian election subversion this fall.” And this is just the beginning; with the six Republicans on the Court okaying new maps that shatter majority-Black districts, the Congressional Black Caucus is bracing for a major loss of members this fall and in 2028. John Roberts and his buddies on the Court claim that they’re not “seeing race” and that the problem of minority voters being victimized by Republican policies is long in the past; in fact it’s very, very real now and their and Landry’s actions prove it. Hypocrites and racist liars…

— The Trump regime is the most lawless in America’s history. The War Powers Act of 1973 requires two things: If the United States has come under attack or an attack is imminent, the president may order an immediate commencement of war-making against the attacker; when that happens, he then has 60 days to try to resolve the situation, but after that must seek approval from Congress to continue kinetic action. Trump has already broken that law: Iran represented no immediate threat to the US at all but he bombed them anyway. And now, as Democrats are joining Republicans in pretending he didn’t commit that crime and so are asking for the 60-day request for war authorization from Congress, Whiskey Pete Hegseth told senators yesterday that because our military isn’t currently shooting or bombing, “the clock is paused” and they don’t need to go to Congress. The law requires a cessation of hostilities within 60 days, and if blockading the Strait of Hormuz isn’t a hostile action then apparently the next step is for the Pentagon to declare that gravity is optional and wars only count when someone bothers to keep score. Meanwhile, ICE murders American citizens and ignores the 4th and 5th Amendments, the DOJ ignores court orders, Trump criminally impounds funds Congress had appropriated for Blue states, and the entire regime is in open and blatant violation of the Epstein Transparency Act. Hopefully, Democrats will find their spines and voices and hold these criminals to account once they acquire the power to do so, and begin shadow hearings in the meantime to inform the American people of Trump’s and his people’s lawlessness.

— Americans of all stripes and political affiliations agree: Data Centers are a plague. Big AI have been buying off politicians across the country, often even getting tax deferrals and free land as they burden local electric and water resources, all to increase the profits of a handful of morbidly rich AI oligarchs. Residents in the areas the tech bro oligarchs are eyeing are getting active, although a few well-placed “contributions” and “tips” to politicians often frustrate their efforts. Maine’s legislature, for example, passed a moratorium on the centers last month by a wide margin but then Governor Janet Mills, apparently feathering her nest for her upcoming retirement, vetoed the legislation. In other states it’s less obviously corrupt, but people are genuinely freaked out as AI transforms not just the physical landscape of America but the employment landscape as well. In Michigan, The New York Times reports: “In towns across the state, suspicions are still rife, sometimes far-fetched. Residents in different towns expressed worries about effects on fertility. Others worried the centers could end up as military targets, pointing to Iran’s strikes on data center infrastructure in the Persian Gulf. People in Michigan also pointed to two contracts between a data center project in Saline Township and the state’s main electric utility that were so heavily redacted that the state’s attorney general is challenging them in court. A special fast-track process was used to bypass public hearings. Even the signatures are blacked out.” AI is here and not going away, and Moore’s Law suggests many of these monster data centers will soon be scaled back, perhaps even bursting the AI bubble that keeps driving the stock market regardless of the Iran conflict. Keep an eye on this; it’s going to change the world our kids are inheriting in ways that are still unclear.

— The Trump grift is multigenerational. Uday and Qusay…er…Don Jr and Eric just jumped into the defense contracting business, hooking up with three new drone companies. Suspiciously, the companies all are bidding for or just got massive multi-million-dollar contracts with the Pentagon, with more to come. Remember when Republicans screamed about Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy “cashing in on the presidency” by licensing his name to a brand of beer? Or when Republicans held endless hearings, press conferences, and years of Fox “News” reports about Biden’s son making $5 million for sitting on the board of an energy company? They were pikers. The Trump Crime Family is the most corrupt first family in American history and hopefully their reign will be short-lived when Democrats get the power of impeachment back.

— Democracy around the world is under assault by rightwingers who get themselves elected and then flip their nations into autocracy and oligarchy. An estimated half of all the world’s democracies are under such an assault — including the United States — and Uganda is the most recent to go all in. President Yoweri Museveni says he wants to sign legislation that’s working its way through the Ugandan legislature that would criminalize opposition politicians, most types of reporting and opinion writing, and any group affiliated with foreign organizations. Russia, through diplomatic outreach and via their massive social media influence operations, has been pushing this sort of thing across the free world, and this bill is a virtual clone of Russian legislation that lets Putin imprison or even execute dissidents and reporters. And Trump, trying to help out his mentor and owner, has shut down Voice of America to make Putin’s job even easier.

— Joe Walsh UNLEASHES Tea Party smear machine on a Democrat fighting for us working people. Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh went on his podcast and spewed a vitriolic tirade against Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, calling him “despicable,” a “bullshitter,” even throwing around accusations like “anti-Semitic,” and then said he wouldn’t support him even if it helps keep a Republican in power. This from Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party bomb-thrower who built his career on outrage, division, and some of the ugliest rhetoric of the last decade. And let’s not rewrite history here: this is a guy who helped normalize the very politics that damaged our democracy. Yet when he decided to rebrand himself, Democrats and progressives said fine, come on in, we believe in a big tent. We gave him grace; I’ve even invited him onto my program several times. And now? Now he turns that same scorched-earth, character-assassination playbook on a real progressive who’s actually connecting with voters on the number one issue in this country, affordability. That’s not principle, that’s hypocrisy dripping with arrogance. Walsh doesn’t want a “big tent,” he wants a tent where he gets to decide who’s worthy. And when someone comes along with a message that resonates with working people, he panics and goes for the jugular. It’s the same old Tea Party venom, just dressed up in a different jersey. You don’t strengthen democracy by trashing candidates fighting for economic justice, you weaken it. And if that’s where Joe Walsh is going to stand, then he hasn’t changed nearly as much as he wants people to believe and will not be welcome on my show again until he publicly apologizes to us and Graham Platner.

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Maine just handed Democrats a wake-up call that they’d damn well better actually listen to this time.

Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign yesterday, leaving Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner as the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November.

The message Maine voters are frankly shouting is the same one I’ve been hearing from listeners on my radio/TV show for years and the same one that pollsters across the spectrum keep picking up across the country: people are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow. They want fighters.

Mills was Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate, recruited by Democratic Party insiders because they thought the 78-year-old two-term governor would be the safest, most “electable” option against Susan Collins. What Schumer and the “insider Democrats” got instead — and deserved — was a 30-point shellacking.

Platner, who launched his campaign last August by naming “the oligarchy” and “the billionaires who pay for it” as the enemy, outraised Mills every single quarter, packed wildly enthusiastic town halls all over the state, and even earned Bernie Sanders’s endorsement along the way. He turned Mills’s establishment alignment into a major liability and thus pushed her out of the race a full five weeks before the primary.

That’s what happens when voters finally get a real choice: they want the real thing, not a compromising deal-maker taking money from corporations and billionaires like Republicans do. As then-President Harry Truman said on May 17, 1952:

“If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.”

And it matters that on roughly the same day Mills bowed out, the Congressional Progressive Caucus — just as fed up with moderate Democrats running the same losing playbook as voters are — rolled out its New Affordability Agenda, a ten-point legislative package aimed straight at the cost-of-living crisis that’s now crushing working families.

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It would make:
— Prescription drugs cheaper by establishing a government program to sell generic drugs at a discount, cutting the price of a vial of insulin from $300 to $50;
— Utilities cheaper by cracking down on for-profit utilities overcharging consumers, saving the average family $500 a year;
— Gas cheaper by charging big oil companies a tax on extra profits from the war, then refunding that money to consumers. If oil stays at $100 a barrel, most families would get $324 back;
— Childcare cheaper by guaranteeing no family pays more than 7% of its income – under $10 a day for most families;
— Housing cheaper by building millions of new homes, offering every first-time homeowner $20,000 in downpayment assistance, and expanding rental assistance;
— Groceries cheaper by cracking down on big grocers who fix prices and on companies that abuse seed patents to make farming more expensive;
— Time off cheaper by guaranteeing every worker two weeks of paid vacation time;
— Ban ‘Surveillance Pricing,’ where companies use personal data to raise prices with AI;
— Put money in pockets by requiring companies to pay double wages for overtime, as opposed to the current time-and-a-half standard; and
— Abolish Super PACs so billionaires can’t buy more policies that make stuff more expensive.

New polling from Data for Progress found that every single one of those proposals is supported by close to 60% of Republican voters. Among Democrats it pushes into the 80% range.

That’s not a “leftist” agenda. That’s a genuine populist agenda that works for the actual American electorate, and Greg Casar, Ilhan Omar, AOC, Mark Pocan, Ro Khanna, and the rest of the Progressive Caucus deserve real credit for putting it on the table.

Some of us have been ringing this bell since the 1990s. Back when Bill Clinton was triangulating his way through welfare reform and NAFTA, I was telling readers that we were watching the Democratic Party gut its own coalition for a handful of cocktail-party invitations from Wall Street.

As I laid out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and on the air for over two decades, when Clinton embraced Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1992 and Obama maintained it through his eight years in office, the Democratic Party took a fatal turn to the right.

“End welfare as we know it.” “The era of big government is over.” NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, bailing out the banks and hobnobbing with their CEOs at Davos while throwing the homeowners those banksters had defrauded out on the street, sucking up to Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Defense, defending Netanyahu no matter how many war crimes he commits.

Then nominating Hillary Clinton on a platform that tried to tell working-class voters that things were basically fine, right before Donald Trump ran ads in the Rust Belt about NAFTA and how nobody in Washington gave a damn about them. The post-1992 neoliberal Democratic Party didn’t lose because it was too progressive: it lost because it kept refusing to be progressive at all.

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Meanwhile, look at what the Republicans have actually done with the power voters keep handing them. They’ve:
— Cut taxes on billionaires and corporations so dramatically that the national debt just officially crossed 100% of GDP, the highest peacetime level since the years right after World War II.
— Rigged elections through aggressive voter purges and partisan gerrymandering, with help from a Supreme Court that just this week further gutted the Voting Rights Act.
— Cheered on foreign wars, including the “magnificently stupid” current Iran war Platner himself has denounced, while running interference for the daily war crimes happening in Gaza and now in Lebanon.
— Allowed the Trump family to turn the presidency into a multi-billion-dollar grift machine of meme coins, crypto launches, stablecoins, and foreign payoffs while millions of Americans skip prescription doses to make rent.
— Kept the federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25, where it’s been stuck since 2009, and even went to this corrupt Supreme Court to kill Joe Biden’s student debt relief.
— Taken hundreds of millions from the fossil fuel industry while heat domes, hurricanes, and wildfires are killing thousands of Americans — most recently children in Texas —every single year.
— Taken millions more from the gun industry while terrified schoolkids hide under their desks.
— Hijacked Christianity, pushing a twisted version that Jesus would’ve flipped tables over, while hustling for huckster televangelists, performatively demanding mandatory school prayer, Ten Commandments postings in every classroom, and Whiskey Pete pitching prayer every weekend in every barracks.
— Deployed armed, masked thugs to intimidate and murder American citizens while building a massive series of concentration camps across the country.

That’s the record American voters across the political spectrum need to know about, and Democrats should be shouting from the rafters. A wishy-washy Democrat saying “well, we’ll try, but we really don’t want to piss off the Republicans by impeaching Trump or Clarence Thomas” — like we saw in 2024 — is never again going to work.

Maine’s Democrats saw a guy who’d actually served three tours in Iraq, who runs a small business on the working waterfront, who talks the way they talk, and who isn’t afraid to say out loud that the people robbing them are the billionaire class and the Republican shills they own.

The lesson for the DNC, DCCC, the DSCC, and every damn consultant who’s suggested running on an anodyne “don’t make waves” agenda without naming who’s screwing everyday Americans is clear: the New Affordability Agenda isn’t just good policy, it’s also good politics.

It tells voters exactly who’s stealing from them and offers concrete steps progressive candidates will fight to actually deliver. That’s the formula Bernie Sanders has been pushing for three decades (and did for 11 years weekly on my radio program), the formula AOC and Zohran Mamdani just rode to victory in New York, and the formula Platner just used to blow Janet Mills out of the water.

Help to keep up the fight!

So, reach out to your Democratic member of Congress and senators and tell them to sign onto the New Affordability Agenda. Tell them you want fighters, not neoliberal wusses.

If you’re in Maine, help Graham Platner finish the job and send Susan Collins home in November. And if you’re anywhere else, find the populist progressives in your state’s primary and back them, too, or sign up to run yourself.

Maine just showed the rest of the country what’s possible when Democrats finally stop wimping out and trying to appease Republicans. Voters want candidates like Graham Platner who’ll take names and kick ass.

It’s now on the rest of us to follow their lead.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Change They Can’t Ignore”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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The Wall Street Journal reports in an article titled “Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran” that:

“President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said... In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. …

“For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a ‘State of Collapse.’”

So, Putin — who Trump took orders from for a full 90 minutes yesterday — and America’s billionaires who religiously read the WSJ are officially tipped off to prepare for what may well be a worldwide repeat of the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s. Or at least a revisit to the GOP’s infamous Nixon-era crises of the 1970s, Reagan’s “Black Monday” 22% market crash, Bush’s 2008 “Great Recession,” and Trump’s 2020 massive botched-pandemic-response economic melt-down.

Trump and his people didn’t bother to say one word to average Americans — no press conference or warning — but they sure made certain that their billionaire buddies are informed.

And, of course, they’re not at all worried by this; recessions and depressions are when the morbidly rich like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet make their greatest fortunes. Businesses are failing, stock prices collapsing, and people are losing their homes, all fantastic buying opportunities for wealthy, cash-rich predators investors.

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For example, when a handful of greedy Wall Street CEOs crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.

The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594. No bankers were ever prosecuted.

While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century.

Working-class people were desperately selling their homes and unloading the stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.

But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all of the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

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As the economy recovered, rich people who’d bought stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later!

The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get even richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

As the market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, average Americans, now out of work, were again selling their homes and stocks at a loss just to buy food and medicine. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008!

Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).

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Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.

American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion of that is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt.

Which is why working-class Americans and our media should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of GOP policy choices that get repeated whenever a Republican is in the White House — ten of the last eleven recessions happened when a Republican was president — and this one is being engineered right now in plain sight.

Republican deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. Tax breaks for the rich force cuts to government support for poor and middle class Americans. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich.

And this downturn could easily be the biggest one of our lifetimes, a singular achievement the Trump Crime Family will profit from massively, along with their billionaire cronies. As CNN reports, “About half the stuff Americans buy comes from Asia” and Asia is melting down from a lack of Middle Eastern oil. It’s hitting the rest of the world, too:

“The Middle East ships about 25% of the world’s polypropylene and 20% of polyethylene, two of the most-used plastics. It also accounts for a quarter of the world’s sulphur and 15% of its fertilizer.”

Not to mention a fifth of the world’s oil, most of the world’s helium, necessary to run MRI machines and make precision chips, and other crucial commodities. As Martin Wolf wrote for yesterday’s Financial Times:

“Fifty per cent of the world’s seaborne trade in sulphur passes through the Strait of Hormuz. So does 34 per cent of trade in crude oil, 29 per cent of liquefied petroleum gas, 19 per cent of liquefied natural gas, 19 per cent of refined oil products, 13 per cent of chemicals, including fertilisers, and nearly 10 per cent of aluminium. This is a chokepoint of the world economy.“

The oil shock has become so bad in Asia that, CNN notes, “Several major petrochemical producers, including South Korea’s Yeochun and PCS in Singapore, have declared ‘force majeure,’” meaning they can no longer honor their contracts to supply their customers because of circumstances out of their control.

And now it’s starting to show up here in the US in ways that go far beyond just the price at the pump.

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Some are wondering if Trump’s efforts to bring down the world economy — which are explicitly helping Russia — are because Putin told him to do it.

That’s possible; our joining Netanyahu in illegally bombing Iran has also been a big boon to Putin’s regime, both in justifying his similarly illegal bombing of Ukraine and in jacking up world demand for (and the price of) Russian oil, which Trump has conveniently dropped sanctions on.

But it’s just as likely that this is simply the same type of stupid decision-making that has caused Trump to run every one of his dozens of companies except those subsidized by Russian or Middle Eastern money straight into the ground. Or it’s a two-fer, that benefits both American billionaires and Putin.

However it came about, buckle up. Hegseth’s pathetic performance before Congress yesterday tells us explicitly that the Trump regime has no plan to work out a peace deal with Iran any time soon.

While Putin, the Trump kids, and their fellow billionaires are rubbing their hands in glee, it’s going to be a hell of a year for the other 99% rest of us.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Tip-off!”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Donald Trump isn’t just breaking norms, he’s running a live experiment on the limits of American power. Each move is a test: How far can a president go? What laws and how much of the Constitution can be ignored? And, most importantly, will anyone actually stop him?

It took the King of England to remind Congress that their job is to restrain a president, not cheer him on no matter what. Charles III said:

“The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”

King Charles was essentially begging Congress to restrain Donald Trump’s imperial overreach, the most glaring example of which is his starting a war with Iran without congressional approval and in violation of both the US Constitution, the 1973 War Powers Act, and the Geneva Convention.

It’s a lesson America first lost touch with when President Harry Truman got us into the Korean War without Congressional authorization, was amplified by LBJ and Nixon in Vietnam and Reagan in Granada, and has since led through a series of modern presidential actions straight to Trump joining Netanyahu to bomb Iran without Congress, provocation, or legal basis.

Both parties have been complicit in this, generally in support of their own presidents while questioning the actions of presidents of the other party, but the actions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — and Obama’s failure to respond to them — most directly led to Trump’s excesses.

George W. Bush came into office wanting to start a war with Iraq as a strategy to get himself re-elected in 2004 and “have a successful presidency.” In 1999, when Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz to pen the first draft of Bush’s “autobiography,” A Charge To Keep.

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“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004. He told Baker that Bush said:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Cheney, meanwhile, was in a world of trouble because of a huge asbestos bet he’d made as CEO of Halliburton in 1998. The company was facing possible bankruptcy.

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In July of 2000, Cheney walked away with $30 million from the troubled company and the year after that, as Bush’s now-Vice President, Halliburton subsidiary KBR suddenly received one of the first no-bid no-ceiling (no accountability and no limit on how much they could receive) multi-billion-dollar military contracts that arguably rescued the company.

Bush and Cheney both had good reason to want to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 for their own selfish purposes, the law and public good be damned.

— Bush was unpopular and seen as an illegitimate president at the time because his father’s corrupt appointee on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had cast the deciding vote in the Bush v Gore lawsuit that made him president; he wanted a war that would give him legitimacy and the aura of leadership.

— Cheney’s company was in a crisis, and Afghanistan War no-bid contracts helped turn around Halliburton from the edge of bankruptcy into one of the world’s largest defense contractors today, adding a fortune to Cheney’s family’s holding of Halliburton stock.

Under Bush’s and Cheney’s command, American forces committed numerous war crimes — including torture, murder, slaughter of civilians including children, and kidnapping/rendering to “black sites” — that earned America universal condemnation. Our reputation was damaged, but, even worse, the precedent of an untouchable, unaccountable presidency was established.

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That could have been stopped by Congress, but the body failed; the crime was then compounded when Barack Obama came into office in January, 2009 with a 257-198 Democratic majority in the House and a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. They had real political power, but instead of holding these two liars and war criminals to account, President Obama said, when asked if he was going to prosecute them:

“I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

When he and Democrats in Congress took that position — much like House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying this Sunday on Fox “News” that impeaching Trump is not a priority if they take power in this November’s election — they let Bush and Cheney off the hook and thus pretty much guaranteed that Trump would overreach and commit war crimes, as he has done.

After all, if Obama and congressional Democrats let Bush and Cheney get away with what everybody in America knew was a series of deadly lies that cost us both lives and treasure, why would Trump think that any Democrat would ever try to hold him accountable for the same thing?

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Which is exactly why it’s so important for Democrats to abandon appeasement and hold Trump accountable for his many crimes in office — from taking bribes and selling pardons to tearing down part of the White House to bombing Iran — if they regain the power of the subpoena and impeachment this fall.

Instead of telling Trump in advance that he’ll skate just like Reagan, Bush, and Cheney did, Jeffries and Schumer should be loudly proclaiming that there will be accountability.

This sort of behavior — by presidents of both parties — has to stop. It’s wrong, it’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional, and it destroys the world’s confidence in America as a moral force.

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Taking on Trump is also good politics.

A recent Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll found 55% of all voters support impeaching Trump, with especially strong backing among Democrats. One-in-five of Trump’s own voters want him impeached and at least 85 members of the House are on record for holding him accountable. A Quinnipiac University poll found that fully 95% of Democrats support prosecuting Trump on federal charges.

A hereditary king praising restraints on executive authority before the U.S. Congress was both historically ironic and politically elegant: King Charles III was reminding Congress not to tolerate a man trying to become the kind of ruler our Founders rejected. As he pointed out, free nations only survive as free when executive power is answerable to Congress, the people, and the law.

Democrats damn well better be paying attention.

At some point, this stops being just about Trump. It becomes about whether the United States still believes in accountability at all. Because if the answer to every abuse of power is still “nothing,” then the destruction of American democracy isn’t just continuing, it’s succeeding.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump Ain’t Getting Stopped”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Gallup just found that only 10% of Americans approve of the job Republicans in Congress are doing, with 86% actively disapproving of the GOP’s behavior.

Turns out, there’s a reason.

Yesterday on my nationally syndicated radio/TV/SiriusXM/YouTube program a fellow called to ask how long I’d been running my contest. It started more than 20 years ago, around the time I helped start Air America Radio. Here’s the question:

“Name one piece of major legislation that was created by Republicans since Reagan’s presidency, passed the House and Senate with majority Republican votes, and signed into law by a Republican president, whose major beneficiary is the average working person.”

To this day, nobody’s identified a single piece of major legislation and thus won the autographed book that’s the prize.

Meanwhile, since 1981 Democrats have passed the Family and Medical Leave Act; Earned Income Tax Credit expansions; Children’s Health Insurance Program; Affordable Care Act; Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; Every Student Succeeds Act; American Rescue Plan Act; Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; Inflation Reduction Act; PACT Act, and dozens of others.

Which raises the question: Why have Republicans avoided doing anything at all to help average working people for over 40 years?

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As I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, the genesis of the situation goes back to 1974, when William F. Buckley’s millionaire brother and Senator James Buckley joined a lawsuit with former Senator Eugene McCarthy to challenge the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA, passed in the wake of the Nixon and Agnew bribery scandals) limiting campaign contributions to $1000 from an individual and $50,000 for a candidate self-financing their campaign (as Buckley had done).

Buckley’s suit claimed the money he might want to put into a future campaign was his own and he should be able to use it however he wanted.

Just two years earlier, Nixon had put Lewis Powell (author of the infamous 1971 Powell Memo, which was that era’s Project 2025) on the Supreme Court, and Powell got to working on his colleagues, resulting in the 1976 Buckley v Valeo decision. It echoed Powell’s Memo, saying that money spent on politics was the same thing as “free speech” and thus protected by the First Amendment, blowing up those nasty donation limits.

Two years later, Powell himself authored the 1978 First National Bank v Bellotti decision that doubled-down on the “money is free speech” argument and extended it from humans to corporations as well.

The result was that the 1980 Reagan campaign was suddenly awash in oil industry money, because he’d promised to sabotage Jimmy Carter’s Solar Bank program that would have had America producing 20% of our electricity from solar by the year 2000.

When Clarence Thomas — then himself on the take from rightwing billionaires — became the Court’s deciding vote in Citizens United in 2010, the doors to functionally unlimited campaign and dark money contributions from both billionaires and corporations were blown open.

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Which explains the answers to other questions that often come up on my program:

Q. Why do Republicans fight free college and ending student debt when our experience with the GI Bill after WWII found that for every $1 we invest in educating people our nation got $7 in return, as well as making America the science leader of the late 20th century?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the banking industry, which makes billions in profits from student loans that are almost entirely risk-free because — thanks to legislation signed by George W. Bush — they can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.

Q. Why do Republicans fight every effort to have a national healthcare system like every other democracy in the world has, even though it would save tens of thousands of lives a year, lengthen the average American lifespan, and cost us around half of what we pay for healthcare today?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the health insurance industry, which makes billions in profits from denying coverage to people, even though 78 million Americans have inadequate or no insurance and a national system would save the country an estimated half-billion dollars a year. As Wendell Potter notes, “In 2024, seven big insurers posted $71.3 billion in profits and paid their [seven] CEOs more than $146 million.”

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Q. Why do Republicans sabotage green programs designed to get America off our dependence on fossil fuels, when fossil fuels are destroying our atmosphere, our children’s future, and cause tens of thousands of cancers and millions of cases of asthma and other disease cases every year?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the fossil fuel industry, which makes billions in profits every year and recycles some of that back to the Party. In 2024 the world’s largest, most polluting companies recording an estimated $583 billion in profits, marking a 68% increase since 2019 in part because of their investment in buying American Republican politicians.

Q. Why do Republicans fight breaking up monopolies, even though the average American family pays around $5000 a year more for goods and services than do the citizens of most other democracies that don’t allow monopolies and oligopolies?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from giant, monopolistic companies, as I lay out in horrifying detail in The Hidden History of American Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream (foreword by Ralph Nader). Every time a Democratic president tries to take on the monopolies — as Biden most recently did by hiring Lina Kahn to run the FTC — Republicans support lawsuits that postpone the breakups until a Republican president can fire the FTC head, install a corporate toady, and drop the case.

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Q. Why do Republicans fight letting Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices, even though every other developed nation does it and Americans typically pay two to ten times more for the same medicines?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the pharmaceutical industry, which has poured hundreds of millions into the party for decades. Big Pharma’s obscene profits depend on Americans paying the highest drug prices in the world, so Republicans consistently oppose any reforms that would let Medicare use its buying power to bring costs down.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose expanding Social Security benefits and protecting the program by lifting the payroll tax cap on billionaires, even though millions of seniors rely on it as their primary income and lifting the cap would make the program solvent for the next 75 years?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from Wall Street, which has long dreamed of privatizing Social Security so giant investment firms can skim management fees from the trillions in the Social Security Trust Fund. Every dollar kept in the public Social Security system is a dollar the financial industry can’t turn into profit.

Q. Why do Republicans battle against universal paid family leave and paid sick leave, even though every other advanced democracy guarantees workers time to care for a newborn, a sick spouse, or themselves and paid sick leave helps prevent the spread of disease?

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A. Because the GOP is on the take from low-pay corporate employers who want labor as cheap and disposable as possible. Paid leave shifts a tiny share of corporate wealth back to workers, so the Chamber of Commerce and big business and its political allies pour millions into Republican coffers and campaigns to block it.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose raising the minimum wage, even though productivity has soared for decades while wages have stagnated and the corporate owners are richer than at any time in world history?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from giant retail chains, fast-food corporations, and other low-wage employers whose profits depend on paying people less than a living wage. Keeping wages low forces us taxpayers to subsidize their workers through food stamps, Medicaid, and housing aid while their morbidly rich executives pocket the difference.

Q. Why do Republicans fight food assistance programs like SNAP and universal free school lunches, even though childhood hunger damages learning, health, and lifetime earning potential and research proves these programs are among the most efficient anti-poverty investments any government can make?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from billionaires and low-wage corporations that depend on keeping wages so low workers still need public help to feed their families. SNAP and school lunch programs expose the truth that millions of Americans are working full-time jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. Rather than force employers to raise wages, Republicans would rather let children go hungry and blame the poor for being poor.

Q. Why do Republicans fight stronger gun safety laws supported by large majorities of Americans, even including things as anodyne as universal background checks and red-flag laws?

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A. Because the GOP is on the take from the gun industry and its lobbying arm, the NRA, which make fortunes every time a new round of Republican-pushed fear drives firearm sales. Dead children in classrooms are the tragic collateral damage to this business model built on lies about the Second Amendment and political bribery.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose cracking down on tax havens and making billionaires pay what they owe, even though it would reduce deficits, pay down our national debt, and fund schools, roads, and healthcare?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the billionaires, hedge funds, and multinational corporations that bankroll their campaigns. If you add up the tax cuts for the rich by Reagan, Bush, and Trump they equal more than our entire national debt of $38 trillion, meaning all that money — that we pay a trillion dollars a year in interest on that could instead fund a national healthcare system, free college, and an end to homelessness — was borrowed in our name by the GOP to give to the Zuckerbergs, Musks, and Bezos’ of the world.

Q. Why do Republicans so frequently use hate and fear — from Willy Horton to Trump’s anti-trans ads to hysteria about bathrooms — to win political campaigns, and why do billionaires and corporations fund such advertising?

A. Because such type of campaigning has such a powerful emotional load it causes people to forget how the GOP has been screwing them for the past half-century.

Thus, we discover that the mystery of modern Republican politics isn’t really a mystery at all.

When a party consistently blocks cheaper medicine, better wages, paid leave, affordable college, clean energy, antitrust enforcement, and healthcare that works, it’s not because those ideas are unpopular or unworkable: it’s because they threaten the obscene profits of the industries and the billionaires writing the checks.

Until we overturn these obscene, corrupt SCOTUS rulings, get big money out of politics, and make Congress answerable to citizens instead of donors, the GOP will remain what it has become since the Reagan Revolution: not a political party with ideas to improve America and working people, but a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporations and billionaires while Americans die young and remain uneducated, underfed, and unhoused.

Louise’s Daily Song: “They Don’t Hear You!”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.

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The attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night shouldn’t surprise us. Not only does America have the world’s most active small-arms industry that essentially controls the GOP (the reporters got a taste of what American — and only American — schoolkids experience every few months from their “realistic” active shooter drills), but we also host the world’s largest and most profitable hate-amplification industry.

Algorithms that amplify hate and division in order to “increase engagement” have made Mark Zuckerberg into one of the richest people on the planet, complete with a super-yacht and a doomsday bunker estate in Hawaii; Elon Musk’s X has turned into a sewer of Nazi-style rhetoric while Musk himself has posted, according to The Washington Post, nakedly white supremacist slogans and statements over 850 times just in the past seven months.

The Republican Party writ large has also benefitted from all this, since it was reinvented mid-20th century by Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy and Reagan’s embrace of “states’ rights” as the party of Christian white male supremacy. (The last four Black Republicans in the US House of Representatives are ending their political careers this year.)

Because every rightwing movement in history has been founded on hate and/or xenophobia, the openly neo-Confederate MAGA movement was simply the logical end-point of this turn the Party took a half-century ago. History shows that when the right wants to seize power, it reaches for the oldest weapon in politics: teach people to fear and then hate their neighbors, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

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Finally, the billionaire class and the massive, monopolistic corporations that made them rich benefit from the hate industry because when working-class people are mobilized to hate each other based on race, religion, gender (and gender identity), nationality, or political affiliation they’re far less likely to organize together to demand union rights, benefits, healthcare, education, and/or better wages.

Some even argue that the current state of GOP corruption, billionaire greed, and societal hate in America proves that democracy has run its course. Oddly, most arguing that are the billionaires themselves, or the lickspittle “dark enlightenment philosophers” they celebrate and fund.

Billionaire Peter Theil famously wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and the CEO of his company Palantir recently released an arguably neo-fascist 22-point manifesto claiming that America must resist “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism” and — without a trace of irony about today’s billionaire subculture that’s working to capture our government and crush worker’s movements and unions — that “certain cultures and indeed subcultures” are “regressive and harmful.”

There’s actually a long history for this antidemocratic worldview.

Plato himself argued that democracy would always ultimately lead to tyranny because democratic rule could so easily be co-opted by authoritarians using the tools of democracy itself. Karl Popper rebutted this extensively in 1945, arguing that democracies must become “intolerant of intolerance,” essentially putting limits (like the German people have done for themselves) on “free speech” when that speech is being used to undermine and ultimately destroy a democracy.

The European option would run afoul of our First Amendment, so America must come up with a different way to deal with the hate-industrial complex. There are a few options.

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While corporations will argue that they are “persons” protected by the First Amendment (an argument I rebut extensively in my new book Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told) and will say that their algorithms that favor outrage, hate, and division are merely corporate “free speech,” it should still be possible to regulate these bits of computer code.

I’m not proposing that people lose their right to speak online. The real issue is whether giant social media corporations should have the unlimited right to use their top-secret algorithms to pour gasoline on hate, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, and political violence just because outrage keeps people clicking and that drives engagement/ad-views and thus profits.

That’s not free speech in any meaningful human sense: it’s just a democracy-destroying business model.

Thus, one obvious reform is to separate hosting speech from amplifying it. If somebody wants to post something vile but lawful, that’s allowed under the First Amendment. But when a corporation’s software algorithm identifies that vile content as profit-promoting and shoves it into millions of feeds, that’s no longer passive hosting: it’s active promotion. And active promotion can be regulated.

Another fix is to require transparency. Make these companies openly disclose what their algorithms reward. Do they boost rage reactions, conspiracy content, fear, tribal conflict, and endless doom-scrolling just because it increases ad revenue for their billionaire owners? Let independent researchers audit the systems so the public can see whether hate is being engineered for profit behind the curtain and use public shame to discourage it.

And finally, give social media users real choice. Break up the social media monopolies. Require a simple chronological feed, for example, and an easy opt-out from manipulation-based recommendations, along with a legal duty of care when platforms knowingly drive people toward extremism or violence.

You still get free speech; what corporations lose is the right to use the invisible part of their machines to poison our minds, our children’s minds, and our democracy for money.

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None of this deals with the problem of rightwing billionaires acquiring massive media platforms and then requiring their employees to also spin the news in ways that are anti-democracy and pro-billionaire.

But reversing Reagan’s 1983 decision to largely abandon our anti-trust laws and his 1987 decision to abandon the Fairness Doctrine could go a long way toward mitigating the damage Australian-billionaire-owned Fox “News” and others have done to America.

Combine these steps with rational gun control and a re-commitment to teaching civics and critical thinking (as several European countries have done and we did before Reagan gutted federal education spending) and there’s a good chance America can rise again from the ashes of the hate and violence that today’s conservative movement and billionaire subculture have imposed on us.

The choice before us is stark. We can continue letting rightwing billionaires, monopolists, gun merchants, and hate-profiteers pit Americans against each other while they strip wealth and power from working people, or we can remember the oldest lesson of democracy: when ordinary people refuse to be divided, no oligarch or billionaire can stand against them.

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Louise’s Daily Song: “The Hate-Industrial-Complex Marches On”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. And what we can do about it today.

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The Thom Hartmann Radio & TV Program

In addition to writing the Hartmann Report, Thom broadcasts a live three-hour radio and TV program every weekday, starting at noon ET.

The program is available on multiple outlets, including the Substack app via THOM.TV, YouTube, X, Facebook, Free Speech TV, SiriusXM, Sling, Hulu, Apple TV, and FM and AM radio stations across the US.

Each day, after the program, Sue Nethercott publishes “Sue’s Daily Stack”, a complete summary of everything covered on that day’s program.

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Sue's Daily Stack, The Thom Hartmann Program 04/24/26

Friday’s Daily Stack…

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COMMONWEALTH REPORT

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Commonwealth Report, Friday, April 24, 2026 - AM edition

Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report. News for the public, not the powerful. Sign up at CommonwealthReport.news…

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7 days ago · 47 likes · Thom Hartmann

HUNTER IN A FARMER’S WORLD

ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer's World with Thom Hartmann

A Nation of Hunters: Why the Great Entrepreneurship Surge Is No Coincidence

Something remarkable is happening in the American economy right now, hiding in plain sight behind all the headlines about tariffs and inflation and market volatility: One in three American adults says they plan to start a new business or side hustle in 2026…

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8 days ago · 35 likes · 1 comment · Thom Hartmann

WISDOM SCHOOL

The Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human

Monks and Scientists Rethink the Nature of Consciousness

I first learned to meditate in 1968 when I took instruction in Transcendental Meditation from the Maharishi’s people (at the recommendation of the Beatles). I still practice it, although with a few variations I’ve learned over the years. When you get inside your head on a regular basis, you begin to wonder exactly what consciousness is, and where it com…

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Nationwide Neoliberalism Experiments

The neoliberal ideology of Mises, Hayek and Freidman (et al) has now heavily influenced much of the developed and developing world, creating economic, political, and social disasters from Thailand to South Africa to El Salvador. But its biggest openly-declared national-scale experiments were kicked off in 1973 in Chile, 1981 in the United States, and 1991 in Russia.

In each case, rejecting a democratic government “of, by and for the people” and replacing it with a corporatist government “of, by and for the corporate and wealthy” has produced widespread disaster.

There is literally not one single example of any country in the world that put into place neoliberal policies that hasn’t turned into a violent police state (Chile), devasted its own working class while producing a bumper crop of billionaires (the United States and the United Kingdom), or both (Russia).

Milton Friedman Hearts General Pinochet

One of the most famous examples of neoliberal shock to a nation’s system came in Chile half a century ago.

In 1971, Chile accounted for 20 percent of the world’s known copper reserves; copper was then the world’s most valuable commercial metal (iron was #2) and represented fully three-quarters of that nation’s export earnings.[liv] [lv] And those earnings represented only a small portion of the actual value of the copper Chile exported because three massive American companies, Anaconda, Kennecott, and Cerro (referred to by Chileans as the Gran Minería) claimed to own roughly 80 percent of all that nation’s copper, remnants of 19^th century US claims to the mines.

The Chilean people had long chafed under this foreign ownership and exploitation of the nation’s single largest asset, as well as the way these foreign companies treated Chilean workers and miners.

Under President Frei Montalva through the 1960s the country negotiated a gradual and partial purchase of about half of the mines from the companies, but there was still widespread popular discontent around the issue.[lvi] Imagine how Texans might feel, for example, if 80 percent of all the oil and natural gas in that state was owned by Mexican companies and shipped to Mexico without any reimbursement other than paying taxes to the state of Texas.

As a result, Salvador Allende Gossen was elected president in 1970, after campaigning on fully nationalizing what copper was left in the mines (20% of the world’s reserves). The legislation to do this was presented to the country’s parliament in 1971 and overwhelmingly passed, with even the far-right National Party throwing in all their votes.

A Marxist, Allende had already nationalized the country’s banks by simply purchasing all the bank’s stock on the open market at competitive prices. Over 3 years he nationalized a total of 91 industries, increasing wages and lifting substantial portions of the working poor out of poverty.

On October 28^th 1971 Allende opened a special tribunal in Santiago to determine how much Chile should reimburse the Gran Minería companies. After public hearings, they determined that the companies had done so much damage to both the mines and Chile’s working people and economy that they should pay Chile for some of the copper they’d recently taken out of the country: Kennecott owed Chile, they said, $310 million; Anaconda owed them $78 million; and Cerro, which had been less exploitative of Chilean workers and resources, would receive $18 million from the Chilean state.[lvii]

This set off fireworks in Richard Nixon’s White House, with Henry Kissinger and Nixon’s CIA beside themselves. Nationalization of a country’s natural resources was, they believed, the first step down the road toward total communism, even though Socialist Allende was a pragmatic politician with no intention of disrupting most of the rest of his country’s industries. Capitalism was generally fine with Allende, so long as was Chilean-owned, paid workers well and acted responsibly in the nation’s interest.

But the pressure was on from the copper giants and, when Allende also took the nation’s telecommunications system away from American-owned International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), which owned 70 percent of the system, Nixon decided to act.

As The New York Times reported in July of 1973:

“The International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation submitted to the White House last October an 18‐point plan designed to assure that the Government of Chile’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende Gossen, ‘does not get through the crucial next six months.’ …

“The I.T.T. plan called for extensive economic warfare against Chile to be directed by a special White House task force, assisted by the Central Intelligence Agency; the subversion of the Chilean armed forces; consultations with foreign governments on ways to put pressure on the Allende regime, and diplomatic sabotage.”[lviii]

Nixon authorized $10 million for a covert operation in Chile, specifying that the US Embassy in Santiago was to know nothing about it.[lix]

Allende was tremendously popular in Chile. While Richard Nixon had been elected president in 1972 with the votes of only 35 percent of eligible American voters, Allende’s party had won 37 percent of the 1970 popular vote. He was then elected president by an overwhelming majority in the Parliament, and 800,000 people – one tenth of the entire population of Chile – showed up in Santiago for a huge celebration.

Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA decided to take action, and launched a campaign against Allende that included economic pressure and an alignment with the Chilean military through a general who’d led the so-called Nazi Cell within the Chilean army, firing on and killing striking workers in 1967. General Pinochet had “been several times to the U.S. Southern Command schools in the Panama Canal Zone and has served as military attaché in Washington,” having famously said, “The army’s duty is to kill.” [lx]

On September 11^th 1973 – a 9/11 that Chileans claim as their own – General Augusto Pinochet rolled his tanks and led his soldiers into Santiago while the army and air force bombed the presidential palace. The attack was preceded by hundreds of truckers (some funded and guided by IT&T and the CIA) blocking parts of the city for weeks, shutting down commerce to protest the leftwing tilt of the Allende government.[lxi]

President Allende gave a final address to the nation via radio, then, seeing where things were heading, shot himself in the head.

The violent coup was a shock to Chile. The country had one of the most advanced democracies on the continent, having 160 years of elected governments, the most recent run of democracy in the country lasting 41 years until Pinochet and the CIA took it down.

But Pinochet and the CIA had done their homework; the entire Chilean military went along with the coup. They then proceeded to round up the opposition, arresting and imprisoning over 13,000 people who were seen as allies and supporters of the Allende government. Thousands were taken to the National Stadium, where many were tortured and hundreds were executed. As Rupert Cornwall noted in The Independent, those numbers didn’t even include the “200,000 people who were forced into exile to escape persecution or worse.”[lxii]

By way of intimidating any Chileans who may think about joining opposition to Pinochet’s government, the military routinely left mutilated bodies on roadsides and in the country’s drainage and irrigation canals.

As The New York Times noted when Pinochet died:

“[D]uring his rule, more than 3,200 people were executed or disappeared, and scores of thousands more were detained and tortured or exiled. …

“The press was censored, and labor strikes and unions were banned. A fearsome security apparatus known as the National Intelligence Directorate, or DINA, persecuted, tortured and killed Pinochet opponents within Chile and sometimes beyond its borders. A government-commissioned report issued in 2004 concluded that almost 28,000 people had been tortured during the general’s rule. …

“Tens of thousands of Allende sympathizers were rounded up and brutally interrogated. A majority of the killings took place in the first three months, long after resistance had ended. In most cases, prisoners from a slum or agrarian community would be executed as a means of terrorizing their neighbors into accepting military rule. The killings were often cynically, and falsely, justified as cases in which prisoners were shot while trying to escape. ”[lxiii]

The blank slate of a new Chile offered the perfect laboratory for Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” to try out their exciting new neoliberal experiment. With encouragement from Nixon’s administration, Pinochet brough in a group of economists who’d studied under Friedman and his acolytes, including Chilean economist Sergio de Castro.

They privatized most of the industries Allende had nationalized, threw open the nation’s retail systems to foreign-made products, abandoned wage and price regulations and labor protections, and increased military spending while cutting overall government spending by 10 percent. Pinochet even privatized the nation’s social security system, turning it over to the newly-privatized banks.

The result was an official 375 percent rate of inflation in 1974 (the highest in the world at that time) as cheap imports flooded the country, factories shut down, and workers and families were thrown onto the streets. Food and other necessities were estimated to have gone up as much as 1000 percent in price as malnutrition and hunger haunted the nation’s children.[lxiv]

The Chicago Boys were in a crisis as their experiment seemed to be collapsing all around them, so they convinced Pinochet to bring Milton Friedman himself to Chile to encourage people to continue with the Grand Experiment.

In Friedman’s memoir co-authored with his wife, Two Lucky People, he describes what he laid out to the Chilean people during his March, 1975 visit. “If this shock approach were adopted,” he wrote, “I believe it should be announced publicly in great detail, to take effect at a very close date.”

Pinochet’s 10 percent cut in government spending was way too timid, Friedman thought. Instead, he wrote, it should include:

“A commitment by the government to reduce government spending by 25 percent within six months, the reduction to take the form of across-the-board reduction of every separate budget by 25 percent, the personnel separations [firings of government employees] to take place as soon as possible…”

This gutting of the Chilean government wouldn’t really have much impact on the average person, Friedman said. “The discharge of present government employees will not reduce output but simply eliminate waste – their discharge will not mean the production of one fewer pair of shoes or one fewer loaf of bread.”

Betraying a certain self-consciousness, he added, “[S]ome of the poorest classes will be affected and whether they are or not, the program will be blamed for their distress.”

Summarizing his message to Pinochet and the Chilean people, Friedman notes, “Such a shock program could end inflation in months and would set the stage for the solution of your second major problem – promoting an effective social market economy.”

The problems with Chile’s economy two years into the Chicago Boy’s and Pinochet’s grand experiment were not at all the fault of Friedman’s neoliberal prescription, he wrote.

“This problem is not of recent origin. It arises from trends toward socialism that started 40 years ago and reached their logical – and terrible – climax in the Allende regime. You have been extremely wise in adopting the many measures you have already taken to reverse this trend.”

Pinochet took it to heart and by 1980 public spending under Pinochet was half what it had been when he seized power. But the economy was still in crisis.

“Undeterred,” Naomi Klein writes in Shock Doctrine, “Pinochet’s economic team went into more experimental territory, introducing Friedman’s most vanguard policies: the public school system was replaced by vouchers and charter schools, health care became pay-as-you-go, and kindergartens and cemeteries were privatized. Most radical of all, they privatized Chile’s social security system.”

Ironically, Klein notes, “The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in the early eighties was that Pinochet had never privatized Codelco, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile’s export revenues, which meant that when the financial bubble burst, the state sill had a steady source of funds.”[lxv]

In the end it had all been a futile exercise, as The New York Times noted in Pinochet’s obituary noted in December, 2006:

“But by the time of his death, even some of those economic victories had been called into question. The privatizing of Chile’s social security system, in particular, has come under attack as unjust and is undergoing revision. And across Latin America, many of the countries that had adopted similar reforms are reversing some of them, responding to a growing wave of popular, leftist anger over untrammeled foreign competition and unequal distribution of wealth.”[lxvi]

The neoliberals still largely control Chile, although they’ve become more like Bill Clinton than Augusto Pinochet. But the results are visible. Chile has Latin America’s top GDP per capita but that income and wealth is hardly well distributed; its poverty level is even higher than that of Brazil.

As economic scholar Branko Milanovic note in November 2019, “The bottom 5 percent of Chile’s population have an income level that is about the same as that of the bottom 5 percent in Mongolia. The top 2 percent enjoy an income level equivalent to that of the top 2 percent in Germany. … Chile is the country where billionaires’ share, in terms of GDP, is the highest in the world…The wealth of Chile’s billionaires, compared to their country’s GDP, exceeds even that of Russia’s.”[lxvii]

In his book The Pinochet File, Peter Kornbluh writes:

“The military regime’s problems began in mid-1982 when the country suffered its worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Gross national product plummeted by 14 percent; unemployment rose to 30 percent. Chile’s foreign debt reached $19 billion, then the highest per-capita debt in the world. The ‘economic miracle’ created by the University of Chicago-trained students of free market guru and regime advisor Milton Friedman was discredited.”[lxviii]

Although neoliberal “scholars” and think-tanks funded by American rightwing billionaires have gone to astonishing lengths to try to portray Friedman and Pinochet’s experiment with neoliberalism a success (just check the internet: there are 20 praising them for every one criticizing them), the simple reality is that the Chilean experiment, the world’s first real try at neoliberalism, failed utterly…and killed a lot of people in the process.

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— So, we’re back to firing squads. In the year 2026, the United States government has officially decided that lining up human beings and shooting them to death is an acceptable use of federal power, as Todd Blanche announced this week. And the loudest voices cheering it on are the same hypocrites who never shut up about being “pro-life.”
Joe Biden got this right when he suspended the federal death penalty, and he got it right for exactly the reason he said: he’s a Catholic, he’s a Christian, and he actually believes what those traditions teach about the dignity of human life.
The Catechism is not subtle on this. Pope Francis called the death penalty inadmissible, full stop. John Paul II spent years pleading with governors and presidents to spare condemned prisoners. When the government kills someone in our name, we’re part of it. Our tax dollars buy the bullets, our flag flies over the chamber, and our silence is the permission slip. It coarsens us, and drops us into the category of brutal dictatorships that routinely kill their own people. Strapping a man to a chair, shooting him, or pumping him full of chemicals while witnesses watch through glass, isn’t justice: it’s ritualized brutality.
Firing squads. In America. In 2026. G-d help us, because we are clearly not going to help ourselves.

— Trump’s approval rating and Americans’ economic sentiment collapse together. We’re not yet in a depression or even a recession, but 45 years of Reaganomics — gutted unions, frozen minimum wage, taxes on working people but not billionaires or giant corporations, jobs sent overseas, student debt, exploding medical and housing costs — have left people feeling like we are.
Trump promised to fix it. Instead, he’s made it so much worse that he’s set a record no president wants. His net approval on the economy has cratered to minus 32 — the lowest of any president at this point in any term in modern polling history. Biden, whom Trump mocked relentlessly on the economy, was at minus 25 — seven points better. George W. Bush, also minus 25. Jimmy Carter, the punching bag Trump has invoked for a decade, was at minus 22, a full 10 points better.
Trump entered his second term at plus six, elected because voters trusted him over Kamala Harris on the economy; that’s a nearly 40-point collapse in just over a year. Tariffs, chaos, family grifts, and billionaire giveaways are the economy he’s delivered, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better because of his blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
Reagan built the trap. Trump inherited it, promised to smash it, and instead sprang it on the very suckers voters who elected him.

— Has Trump’s mental health deteriorated so badly he’s a danger to the world? Even his longtime friends are saying yes, now on national television. On Morning Joe Friday, Rev. Al Sharpton — who has known Trump for decades as contemporaries in New York City society — told co-host Jonathan Lemire that Americans should be worried about the president’s state of mind. The trigger: a 79-year-old president posting on Truth Social well after 2 a.m., only to resume again five hours later, ranting about prosecuting the Clintons and whatever else crossed his mind.
Sharpton called the behavior unstable, which is an understatement. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is doing a better job managing the White House than anyone did in term one, but as Sharpton put it, “they’re not containing him.” In the middle of the night, alone with his phone, the president can flip everything from policy to prosecutions to war. America now has a sleep-deprived, paranoid 79-year-old with the nuclear codes who’s awake at 2 a.m. posting rage into a phone and nobody can stop him. What could possibly go wrong? It’s long past time for Congress and his Cabinet to act.

— Brown skin, speak Spanish, even US citizens get deported by Trump’s ICE. Brian José Morales García, 25, was born in Denver and spent much of his life in Mexico where his family lived. When ICE picked him up during a “routine traffic stop” looking for brown-skinned people (now authorized by Pillsbury Doughboy/accused-rapist Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court), he begged to be allowed to go home to get his birth certificate and ID. They said no and shipped him to Mexico.
Here’s the kicker: no U.S. citizen is legally required to carry proof of citizenship while riding shotgun to a job site in Fredericksburg. Morales had his birth certificate, his Social Security card, and hospital records from the Denver hospital where he was born: his lawyer has them all. DHS still insists he’s lying and hasn’t bothered to explain away a single document. A ProPublica investigation found more than 170 U.S. citizens were detained by ICE in just the first nine months of Trump’s second term. Morales is the first we know of who was actually deported. He won’t be the last.

— Trump continues to help Putin by coming up with ways to “punish” NATO allies as he tries to fracture the alliance. The Reuters-obtained memo, reportedly drafted by Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, floats suspending Spain from NATO for refusing to let the U.S. use its Rota and Morón bases to strike Iran, and even includes reviewing the U.K.’s claim to the Falkland Islands, a gift-wrapped favor to Trump’s buddy Javier Milei in Argentina. NATO’s own charter has no mechanism for expelling a member, so this is pure vandalism. Every headline about Washington threatening Madrid or London is another night Putin sleeps well in the Kremlin.

— DeSantis wants to further rig Florida’s electoral maps for Trump. Florida’s constitution flat-out bans drawing congressional districts with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party,” a rule Florida voters themselves approved. But on Tuesday, Ron DeSantis is calling lawmakers to Tallahassee to do exactly that. His plan is a three-tiered end run: draft the maps in secret inside the governor’s office so there’s no paper trail, hide behind executive privilege when the lawsuits come, and run out the clock under the Purcell Principle, which discourages judges from fixing maps close to an election. Republicans already hold 20 of Florida’s 28 House seats even though in the last statewide election Trump got 56% of the vote, not the 71% representation Florida Republicans already have in the US House. DeSantis wants three to five more.
This is what the national redistricting war Trump launched in Texas actually looks like up close: elected officials openly admitting they can’t win a fair fight and plotting how to avoid one. Virginia Democrats just punched back with voter-approved new districts of their own, up to four more Democratic-leaning seats, because, sadly, when one side is cheating, refusing to cheat back is called “losing.”

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Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying and death-dealing infrastructure needed to make it happen has been quietly assembled by the Trump regime over the last fourteen months.

This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.

That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

USSOCOM “[P]rovides elite, combat-ready forces... Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and psychological operations.”

The very next day, U.S. Southern Command announced its own Autonomous Warfare Command focused on the Caribbean and Central America, where Trump and Hegseth have already been criminally blowing up small boats without warrants, trials, or congressional authorization in defiance of both US and international law.

Read those two announcements side by side and you’ve discovered the operating manual for what comes next. To understand why that concerns every American who ever thought about protesting against Trump’s GOP and their ICE Frankenstein’s Monster in person or on social media — and not just the Venezuelan fishermen drifting dead off Curaçao — we’ll first have to travel back three months to a tree-lined street in south Minneapolis, and the morning Renee Nicole Good dropped off her six-year-old son at school.

She was thirty-seven years old, a published poet who’d earned her English degree from Old Dominion, the mother of three, and wife of Becca Good. A few blocks from the school, she came across an ICE operation in her own neighborhood, complete with unmarked vehicles, masked agents, and the shrill whistles that Minneapolis neighbors had been blowing for six weeks every time the masked thugs showed up.

Renee stopped her SUV sideways in the street and pulled out her phone; a few minutes later, ICE goon Jonathan Ross fired three shots through her windshield and window, killing her about a mile from where George Floyd had died five years earlier. Her wife, who’d been standing behind the vehicle questioning the agents, was filmed by bystanders running down the snowy street and staggering back, crying and covered in her wife’s blood.

I’m starting with Renee because she’s the human face of where this country already is under the police state Trump and Miller are assembling, not where we’re headed. By the time she was shot, ICE agents had opened fire on nine people in five states and Washington, D.C., since September. None have been criminally charged.

Just a few days after her killing, federal agents in Minneapolis were reportedly telling bystanders and legal observers “that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” and in Portland, Maine, an ICE thug was caught on video telling a woman who’d been filming him, “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

That’s the culture Trump, Miller, and the GOP have built using human agents with automatic weapons, masks, and fake license plates, while smashing car windows, kicking in front doors, beating and killing with impunity, and now “detaining” some 70,000 people without the due process the Constitution requires.

What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones.

To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”

Lavender then automatically generated a “kill list” of roughly thirty-seven thousand people living in Gaza, based on things like intercepted cell phone metadata and social media activity. It fed that list to human officers who spent an average of twenty seconds rubber-stamping each name before the Israeli Air Force bombed each target’s home, killing those “militants” and their families.

The system had a reported error rate of about ten percent, which, in a population of two million Gazans, translates to thousands of civilians killed because the AI computer was mistaken or drew the wrong conclusions from their social media, phone, or travel activity.

Even more brutal, a companion Israeli system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked those flagged men so they could be bombed when they were home with their wives and kids, because, as one officer told the reporters, it was “much easier” to bomb a family’s home than to try to target a military or business site.

And what about the families of these “militants”? Israeli command approved up to twenty civilian deaths — men, women, children — per low-ranking “militant” killed, and more than a hundred dead when bombing to take out a “senior commander.”

This is how automated killing at industrial scale actually works in real time, how it works right now as you’re reading these words, and it is not science fiction.

Now look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece, based on the Lavender Israeli model and lessons learned from their experience.

ICE has signed contracts worth more than $60 million with Peter Thiel’s Palantir to build something called ImmigrationOS and a targeting app called ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement.

ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from “free” email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a “confidence score” to each person’s current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.

Stephen Miller, the architect of this dystopian enforcement regime, reportedly holds a six-figure financial stake in Palantir, which, as far as I can tell, nobody in Congress has yet demanded answers about.

Meanwhile, ICE has been buying and using Skydio drones for protest monitoring, Customs and Border Protection has been flying MQ-9 Predator drones (the same platform that killed people in Yemen and Pakistan) over anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles, and the FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can’t film federal immigration operations from the air.

That last piece is the the most alarming tell of all: you don’t close the sky above an enforcement agency unless you’re planning to do things there you don’t want photographed.

And it’s not just the feds flying this stuff. Four days ago, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used its “Drone as First Responder” fleet, a program it first sold to the public as an “emergency public-safety tool,” to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” rally in downtown LA, and then last month’s “No Kings” demonstration.

The drones are Skydio X10s, which the manufacturer advertises are capable of spotting a person from more than a mile away (8,000 feet), facially identifying an individual from a half-mile, and reading a license plate from 800 feet. Two officers can run eight of these drones at the same time, each automatically tailing “people of interest.”

This is how mission creep happens. A tool sold for saving lives ends up spying on us at a peaceful protest, logging our faces, our license plates, and the people we marched with. And once that data is collected, it flows — as all law enforcement data in America now flows — into the same Palantir-built federal databases that ELITE and ImmigrationOS are drawing data from right now.

Then there’s the Pentagon. That $54.6 billion Defense Autonomous Warfare Group request I mentioned is buried inside a $1.5 trillion budget big enough to hide almost anything. Southern Command’s new Autonomous Warfare Command is already using drones to blow up small boats in the Caribbean that the Trump regime claims are trafficking narcotics, without anything resembling due process or congressional authorization.

Ken Klippenstein reported this week that the same budget zeroes out funding for “civilian harm mitigation” — avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths — inside Pentagon operations. In other words, we’re building, out in the open, the infrastructure that produced Lavender and kills people in an automated fashion, and we’re doing it with no public debate and no discernible push-back from anybody in Congress.

We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale and overseas. Between 1967 and 1972, the CIA ran a program in South Vietnam called Phoenix that generated intelligence-scored capture-or-kill lists of suspected Viet Cong and eventually killed somewhere between twenty-six- and forty-thousand people, many of them innocent Vietnamese civilians mistakenly flagged by informants and unreliable data.

Phoenix was rubber-stamped up the chain of command and produced the same “responsibility gap” that Lavender’s defenders hide behind now in Israel, where nobody in particular is accountable because the list came from “the system.”

The lesson of Phoenix is that we must build friction, oversight, and human accountability into the machinery of state violence. But now we’re about to remove all of that, and Trump wants to use the system against people he’s already labeled “domestic terrorists” for filming an arrest, posting online, dissing Christianity or “traditional American views on morality,” or attending a protest.

With Renee Good, the decision to kill her was made by a human being who was operating inside a system that had already decided her neighborhood, her opposition to ICE, and her observer status made her a legitimate target. What happens when that decision is made in twenty seconds by a machine down in Florida, and executed by a hovering armed drone as the FAA has cleared the civilian sky so nobody is watching?

If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.

The time to demand transparency on Palantir’s confidence scores is before ELITE is fully deployed, not after.

And the time to call your senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 is this week, to tell them you want hearings on the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a moratorium on armed drones for ICE and CBP to use inside the United States, an audit of ImmigrationOS, and an investigation into Stephen Miller’s financial interests in the contractor building the machine.

If you aren’t yet registered to vote in 2026, do that today. And if you want to help local and state officials push back against federal overreach, openstates.org will connect you to your legislators.

Renee Good deserved to go home to her son that morning. The next Renee Good deserves a country that decided, in time, not to let a cold, soulless machine make that call.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Build Over There”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.

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The “liberal” commentators are shocked. It was reported yesterday that Graham Platner, the Democrat who’ll most likely win the primary to run for the US Senate from Maine, has staked out some “truly radical” positions. The former Marine combat veteran and oyster farmer has called for:

— Impeaching Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for the bribes he took from billionaires,
— Replacing Chuck Schumer as leader of Senate Democrats with a “fighter,”
— Investigating and prosecuting Trump regime officials and underlings who’ve been involved in illegal actions like bombing unarmed boats in the Caribbean,
— Prosecuting ICE thugs who’ve assaulted, terrorized, or killed people and smashed into cars and homes without warrants,
— Going after corruption in the Trump White House, including among the Trump family, the Cabinet, and Trump himself,
— Promoting aggressive new social safety net programs to restore America’s middle class and take on the Epstein class, including a wealth tax on those with more than $1 billion, and
— A national healthcare system modeled on Medicare-for-All.

One cable host mused out loud yesterday that these positions may help the 41-year-old progressive win the primary against septuagenarian moderate Governor Janet Mills, “but can that really win a general election?” This “don’t be Bernie or like AOC” is the great fear and marching anthem of the mainstream media and the Democratic consultant class.

When Trump broke both US and international law joining Israel in bombing Iran without any provocation (and while they were making very real concessions during their negotiations) and in violation of the War Powers Act of 1973, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries didn’t call for the president to be prosecuted, turned over to the Hague, or even impeached.

Instead, he said, “Congress must be fully and immediately briefed.” Yeah, that’ll teach them!

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Trump a liar and the bombing a “major failure” and “Operation Epic Blunder,” but beyond strongly worded press releases also hasn’t called for actual consequences for Trump, Hegseth, or anybody else in the chain of command committing these war crimes.

But consider how it would have played out if Obama or Biden had begun bombing a foreign country with no justification; Republicans would have started impeachment hearings before the second wave of bombs and Fox “News” would be braying for criminal prosecution.

Tragically, the conventional wisdom across the chattering class and within leadership of the institutional Democratic Party seems to be, “Don’t make big promises or real threats, don’t be Bernie or AOC.”

The problem with this strategy is that most Americans now want a modern-day Bernie or AOC, and multiple elections (and Platner’s polling) prove it, but the DNC and “mainstream” Democrats aren’t listening and don’t want to go after rich people.

It wasn’t always this way: there was a time when Democrats boldly promoted programs that literally built the world’s first over-50%-of-the-population middle class, and weren’t afraid to take names and kick ass.

Franklin D. Roosevelt transformed America with his New Deal programs, including legalizing unions, Social Security, the minimum wage, the 40-hour work week, ending child labor, Federal emergency relief (FERA), the FDIC, SEC, FCC, TVA, NLRB, FHA and Fannie Mae, and the National Archives (among others).

He also took on the Epstein Class of his day, establishing a top 90% income tax rate and proclaiming that they and their captive Republicans had declared class war against average working class Americans:

“For out of this modern civilization,” Roosevelt told America, “economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

He used the language of class warfare; as with all wars, the first step is to identify the enemy. For FDR it was the fatcats of his era who weren’t content to just run their businesses and make money but also lusted for the political power they’d been given during the 1920s by Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd roared when he said that. They knew that Republican politicians had worked hand-in-glove with wealthy industrialists to suppress unions, evade taxes, and accumulate fortunes beyond anything ever seen in America. That the GOP had been running an often-violent class war against them for years.

And they were over it. Over the greed, over the theft, and over the self-righteous proclamations that the Constitution protected their avarice. Average working people knew these “economic royalists” weren’t patriots; they were looters, vandals, and political arsonists. FDR gave voice to their anger, disillusionment, and disgust:

“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Republicans had declared class warfare; FDR, like he would later do with the Japanese and Germans, led the charge to fight back and defeat them.

President Lyndon Johnson similarly added to the middle class, while keeping the top income tax rate at a fierce 74% on individuals and 50% on corporations. His Great Society programs included Medicare, Medicaid, Meals on Wheels, Title I aid to low-income-district schools, Pell Grants, Head Start, Job Corps, Community Action Agencies/Community Services Block Grants, VISTA, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, ending racial quotas on immigration, Food Stamps, HUD, NEA, NEH, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR/PBS).

And he and President Kennedy weren’t afraid to go after malefactors in the government itself. As Lamar Waldron and I document in our book Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, Kennedy was the first president in a half-century to take on the Mafia, including its control over FBI Director Hoover; it ultimately cost him his life. LBJ similarly frequently went after big business and corrupt deals between what he called corporate or wealthy “special interests” and Republican politicians.

Had LBJ not blundered (and lied) on the Vietnam War, he may well be remembered as one of our greatest presidents; when it comes to the middle class, he and FDR were singular in their advocacy of programs that lifted working class people from poverty into relative comfort.

And Americans loved those programs, both FDR’s and LBJ’s; to this day, they’re among the most popular in the country’s history.

Progressive politics and policies are once again popular in America, as the foggy bubble of Reagan’s trickle-down economics has burst, leaving us with a $38 trillion hangover and a middle class that’s been wiped out, shrinking from 65% of us when Reagan was elected to 43% of us today (and now requiring two incomes instead of just one).

Polling of Democratic voters who simply failed to show up for Kamala Harris in 2024, handing the election to Trump, found that they failed to vote because they believed Democrats were ignoring “poverty and inequality” and they wanted an explicit “economic message of taxing the wealthy to invest in infrastructure and jobs” that the Harris campaign failed to deliver.

These no-show voters, the pollsters heard, wanted to “hear a story about systemic change; instead, they heard a series of misaligned policy points that failed to connect. Put bluntly, voters felt that Democrats weren’t fighting for people like them or taking on big corporations who profit from price gouging and rich people who don’t pay what they owe in taxes.”

They also discovered that:

“The politicians these voters like most are Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez … as leaders who aren’t afraid to challenge the system.”

Polling consistently shows a huge majority of Americans favor a national healthcare system, free college, widespread unionization, doubling the federal minimum wage, and want politicians who advocate “cracking down on tax cheats,” “putting a stop to price gouging” and “getting people the health care they need.”

Graham Platner’s “shocking” call to actually investigate and prosecute the many corrupt people and open criminals in the Trump administration — including Trump himself and his rapacious kids — is widely popular across a purple state; combine it with bold progressive policies and it’s a winning nationwide formula for 2026 and 2028.

Democrats need to fire their neoliberal advisors left over from the Clinton and Obama years, take a law-and-order posture against the corruption of Trump and his GOP lickspittles, and put forward FDR- and LBJ-like transformational programs to restore America’s middle class and our status as an example for the world.

Anything less merely guarantees — like the lukewarm messages of 2024 did — more Republican victories, more tax breaks for billionaires, and more people living in tents while what’s left of our liberties vanish behind the barbed wire of Trump’s and Miller’s “detention facilities.”

Louise’s Daily Song: “Build It Again!”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.