Loose Tabs [Draft File]

Previous contents moved to here.

This is a safe space for collecting items that may eventually go into a Loose Tabs post.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically (12 times from April-December 2025). My previous one appeared ? days ago, on April 15.

I have a little-used option of selecting bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

Table of Contents:

New Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following section.

Last time:

Epsteinmania:

Cuba:

  • Peter Kornbluh [04-20]: 65 yrs after the first one, Trump's 'Bay of Pigs' may take many forms: "'There were sobering lessons,' JFK said after the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961. There is still time for the current president to learn them." Kennedy does seem to have learned some lessons from the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but not the important one of resigning to live with an independent Cuba. Whether Trump is capable of learning any lessons at all, ever, is open to question. I will say that I'm skeptical that the specific litany of mistakes made in 1961 are likely to be repeated now (both Cuba and the US are very different now). On the other hand, the idea of invading another country just because you think you are entitled to run it (for whatever reason) is as bad as ever.

  • Lee Schlenker [04-23]: Despite Trump's threats, a US-Cuba deal is taking shape: "Talks in Havana are starting to deliver results even as Washington prepares for the possibility of war."

  • William Leogrande [04-26]: In Cuba a deadlock is more likely than a deal: "Trump wants something that the government in Havana is just not willing to give."

  • Blaise Malley [04-28]: Senate kills effort to stop Trump war against Cuba: "By 51-47 vote, Senate blocks debate due to 'US troops not being engaged in hostilities,' despite ongoing blockade."

  • Joshua Keating [05-01]: Trump says Cuba is "next." What does that mean? "But it's not clear what the plan is." Or what the goal is, other than another feather for Trump's cap. Regime change in Venezuela "worked" because the next up was willing to play along. It didn't work in Iran when the next-in-line leaders refused to play along. In neither case did the long-suffering people revolt, but Trump isn't exactly a grass roots democracy kind of guy, so that's not something he really cares about. Cuba is more like Iran than Venezuela. There is reason to believe that lots of Venezuelans really were unhappy with the Maduro government, even if they were unable to do anything about it. That simplified what was basically a cosmetic change. How unpopular the Cuban government is may be hard to gauge. The reporting here is very myopic, with one quotable Cuban dissenter packed in with an armada of the usual anti-Cuban propaganda (there's a whole section called "In Marco we trust?").

The Fed (David Warsh vs. Jerome Powell): Trump originally nominated Powell for Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2017 (term starting in 2018), figuring he would be more reluctant to raise interest rates than the other candidates he was offered (John Taylor and Kevin Warsh). Biden, following the precedent of Clinton and Obama, gave the Republican-appointed Fed Chair a second term — a big political mistake, considering how much power the Fed Chair has over the economy that Democratic presidents will be blamed for. Powell ultimately disappointed Trump, so much so that Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate Powell in an attempt to turn him out of office early. That effort has failed so far, but Powell's term ends on May 15, and he's appointed Warsh to replace Powell. The Senate has yet to confirm Warsh, who for now has to walk a fine line between professing loyalty to Trump and vowing to maintain the independence of the Fed.

  • Claudia Sahm [04-20]: Fed Chair Apprentice: Written in advance of Warsh's Senate confirmation hearing, with sections on Fed independence, Warsh's understanding of inflation, and financial market deregulation (which Warsh favors).

    Warsh accuses the Fed of being stuck in the past: "the tyranny of the status quo." But he is the one resurrecting Milton Friedman's monetarism of the 1970s and Alan Greenspan's productivity studies of the 1990s. Neither fits the current moment well, and they don't even fit together.

  • Mike Konczal [04-27]: Cherry-picking the wrong inflation measures with Kevin Warsh: "Kevin Warsh's favorite inflation metrics ar exactly the ones that failed us during the inflation wave."

White House Correspondents' Dinner: Where a supposedly fun evening was interrupted by a gunman, who was apprehended. Everyone else went home early.

  • Margaret Sullivan [04-23]: Why are White House journalists partying with Trump? "The White House correspondents' dinner has always been a questionable affair. It's even more worrying under an anti-press administration." That's a good question, one I've had since I've heard there even was a White House Correspondents Association, let alone their gala dinner. I've always assumed that the default stance for journalists viz. their subjects is critical and, when necessary, adversarial. I don't doubt that schmoozing with your subjects can yield insights and lead to stories that one otherwise might have missed, but I also have doubts that journalists who get too close to their subjects can still do their jobs. My own experience is mostly in the low-stakes field of music journalism, where I have always thought of myself as a critic, and almost always avoided personal contact (or limited it to publicists, who work for their clients, but have usually shown me courteous respect; after all, not every bridge is worth burning). I recall Bill James writing a piece on the advantages of his outsider status, as opposed to nearly all sportswriters. But covering politics is relatively high-stakes, and we depend on journalists to get the real stories, and not just to parrot what the PR flacks want them to say. The WHCD has always struck me as not just corrupt, but proud of it. I'd go so far as saying that I take offense to the very idea of there even being a White House Correspondents Association. Isn't there a need for all political journalists to be able to trace their stories all the way to the White House? Why should there be a club of insiders controlling access? Except, of course, that their dependence on access makes them so much easier to control.

    Of course, Sullivan also goes into some specific concerns about this particular president.

  • Benjy Sarlin [04-26]: What we know about the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The suspect arrested was Cole Thomas Allen, who released "a manifesto" before the attack, condemning Trump's wars and policies. Trump and his minions are apoplectic that anyone would contemplate doing unto them what they've so carelessly enjoyed doing to others.

Major Threads

War on Iran:

Israel:

  • Tareq S Hajjaj:

    • [03-19]: Food shortages return to Gaza as Israel tightens aid restrictions under the cover of its war on Iran: "Israel's tightened restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza since the US-Israeli war on Iran have led to shortages of basic necessities and an astronomical rise in prices, raising fears of a return to famine."

    • [04-13]: Israel's restriction of aid into Gaza leads to critical shortages in bread, baby formula, and water: "Israel's continued restriction of aid into Gaza has cut bread production by half as hospitals run out of baby formula and water supplies run low. Doctors warn that surging malnutrition cases among children may irreversibly harm an entire generation."

    • [04-20]: Israel is (still) killing aid workers in Gaza: "Officials say Israel's attacks on humanitarian aid workers aim to block essential aid from reaching Palestinians, as Israel continues to impose a blockade on Gaza seven months into the so-called 'ceasefire.'"

    • [05-01]: Inside Hamas's fight against the armed militias that Israel is using to sow chaos in Gaza: "Hamas security leaders tell Mondoweiss that the fight against Israeli-armed militias in Gaza is only one part of the broader effort to counter Israel's campaign to sow chaos in the Strip." I'm surprised to find any sort of Hamas organization has survived. This suggests that Israel was never serious about ending Hamas and/or that the Palestinians' need for organization has repeatedly resurrected Hamas. If you had a real ceasefire, with real organized aid on the ground, and a real effort at standing up democratic self-rule, it would be easy to disband Hamas, servicing what seemed to be one of Israel's fundamental demands. But Israel has always preferred Hamas to democracy and legitimate political representation in Gaza. Israeli-armed gangs in Gaza are further proof that Israel's intentions are evil.

  • Qassam Muaddi:

  • James North [04-11]: Israel is attacking Lebanon to sabotage the Iran ceasefire, but the media is hiding its true motivation: "Israel moved quickly to sabotage the Iran ceasefire with air attacks on Lebanon, but the mainstream media refuses to report this as an attempt to torpedo the fragile talks."

  • Abdaljawad Omar [04-22]: Israelis are being recruited as spies for Iran in what security experts call an espionage 'epidemic': "Israel has long used the same playbook to recruit informants from enemy societies. Iran is now using it to recruit spies in Israel by exploiting new cracks in Israeli society." I have no idea how prevalent this is, but it is indicative of the social and moral corrosion of being at war. How long Iran has been recruiting spies and how extensive their network is isn't clear, but Israel likes to brag about Mossad's exploits (some have been turned into movies), and they seem to have built up a fairly large network in Iran, which they are currently at risk of burning up. (Reports are that Iran has arrested and/or killed hundreds of Israeli spies.) Not much information, but several stories crop up:

  • Zack Beauchamp [04-23]: Netanyahu may finally be in trouble: "The Israeli leader faces an uphill battle in this year's elections." Tell me something new. I'm not hearing it here. Sure, most Israelis by now should be sick and tired of Netanyahu, and a great many do chafe under the tyranny of his religious/settler party allies, but they are trapped, without a viable left alternative — at least until the left can break out of its trap of reflexively supporting ethnocracy and militarism. America would be in a similar pickle if Democrats insisted on not courting or working with black or other minority voters, and only regarded majority support among whites as legitimate. Netanyahu can still lose: he's screwed up so often and so flagrantly that it only takes a modicum of sanity and/or decency to turn against him.

Israel-American-World Relations: I used to try to separate out Israel-related pieces into several bins. The Iran war has its own news section. The Israel section above pertains to security operations in Gaza, Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon, as well as internal Israeli political affairs. This one deals with America's relationship to Israel, and possibly with the world's.

  • Philip Weiss:

    • [04-15]: The Israel lobby is fracturing as young Jews abandon Zionism: "A revolution is underway within the Jewish community as youth abandon Zionism following the Gaza genocide. While the community scrambles to respond, the Israel lobby is being fractured in the process."

    • [04-29]: The mainstream media is finally beginning to echo Americans' outrage at Israeli slaughter: "Over the past two years, Israel has lost the support of the American public and is now losing one of its last bulwarks in the political arena — prominent voices in the mainstream media."

    • [01-15]: J Street is the new AIPAC in the Democratic Party: "AIPAC is suddenly unwelcome among Democrats, but there's a new sheriff in town to enforce the pro-Israel orthodoxy. J Street aims to make liberals 'love Israel again,' but most Democrats are looking to distance themselves due to the Gaza genocide." Older piece I think I missed. I haven't followed Jeremy Ben-Ami or his organization, but they used to be a more decent (but still passionately Zionist) alternative to party-line advocates like AIPAC, so I think it's less likely that they've become "the right-wing Jewish establishment here" than that some of said establishment have moved in search of a less toxic organizational identity. This refers to a piece by Ben-Ami [2025-12-07]: How can I get my kids to love Israel? He's asking the wrong question. It should be: how can we get Israel to be worthy of our kids' love? (I would have preferred "respect" here.) Otherwise, you're just attacking your own kids, while ignoring the problem. Not that I'm sure anyone can (or should) try to change some other country. But the only hope I still have for Israelis to change is by realizing that their blind support in America is lost. Maybe that will trigger some self-examination. (After Shamir's obstinate refusal to even talk about peace alienated the first Bush admin, Israel's voters replaced him with the more flexible and diplomatic Rabin. I suspect that much of Netanyahu's appeal in Israel is due to his reputation as a Trump/Biden whisperer.) Related here:

  • Michael Arria:

    • [04-16]: In historic Senate vote, over 75% of Democrats vote to block arms sales to Israel: "In a historic vote, 75% of Senate Democrats backed an effort to block weapons to Israel. The resolutions failed, but the vote was the latest sign of Democrats' growing consensus against aid to Israel, as support for the country hits an all-time low." I suspect that most of them still want to help Israel, but have come to the conclusion that sending Israel more arms right now is just pouring gasoline on a fire, which is bound in the end to hurt Israel as much as anyone else.

    • [04-16]: Senate Democrats' vote to reject weapons for Israel reveals an out-of-touch party leadership: "Senate Democrats supported two measures to block weapons shipments to Israel in record fashion, but they were not joined by party leadership, who suddenly appear very out of touch with the party's base."

    • [04-23]: Unpacking the liberal Zionist sleight of hand on military aid to Israel: "While it may appear that pro-Israel politicians and organizations are finally embracing calls to end military aid to Israel, a closer look reveals they are simply trying to maintain the status quo."

    • [04-24]: How the corporate media helped fuel Israel's genocide in Gaza: "Mondoweiss speaks with media critic Adam Johnson about his new book detailing how cable shows, newspapers, and online news sites helped build support for the mass killing of Palestinians." Johnson's book is How to Sell a Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. Johnson is also interviewed here:

      • Current Affairs [04-24]: How the media sold a genocide. Long interview with a lot of detail. Here's Johnson on The Atlantic:

        Well, they really are one of the most high-leverage, along with The New York Times, of what I call soft genocide denial for the tote bag set. Their interventions were consistent. They were genocidal. They were racist. They promoted the beheaded babies trope and never retracted it. They published Eliot Cohen's "these people are barbaric" kind of outright racist screeds. They published Hillary Clinton with her "Hamas must go" headline. They didn't have any pro-ceasefire arguments at all. They constantly scolded and demagogued against a ceasefire. They did genocide denial with respect to body counts. Graeme Wood's interventions were really disgusting — his infamous "it's permissible to kill children legally" line. Pretty much every intervention they had was genocidal, and to the extent to which they allowed some hand-wringing, there was no real call to action. No mention of child deaths in any meaningful, rigorous way. No mention of the dozens of journalists who were killed by Israel. No mention of Hind Rajab. Just an obsession with fake college antisemitism. Dozens of articles about Claudine Gay alone, again, without mentioning any other major moral crisis in the context of Gaza.

        Just bottom-rung Zionist propaganda by a former IDF prison guard. But it's all done in this kind of highbrow trappings. It has the aesthetic of serious reportage and the aesthetic of intellectual and academic seriousness. But again, if you read a lot of what I call the "move along, nothing to see here" genre, they would have these multiple rebuttals to claims about genocidal statements by Israelis. They're very unrigorous. I'm sure you've come across this because you're obviously very rigorous when you do this. But they'll sort of say, "Israel didn't mean to be genocidal when they said that." And you're like, "Well, why?" And they don't even say; they just kind of move on. Because it has the trappings and the aesthetics of rigor and think tanks and academic kind of credibility, but it's really just third-rate, sloppy, racist, dehumanizing arguments meant for upwardly mobile liberals who could have maybe been swayed towards the anti-genocide camp.

    • [04-30]: Biden official says Israel committed genocide in Gaza, but the US must keep supporting it: Wendy Sherman, former US Deputy Secretary of State.

  • Aaron Gell [04-21]: What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines 'what Zionism became': Omer Bartov, who has a new book on this, Israel: What Went Wrong?.

  • Alison Glick [04-26]: Latest polling paints dire picture for Israel in US politics: "Israel's plummeting popularity has been driven by the Gaza genocide and Iran war, but it has been building for decades. We are now finally seeing the political results." Picture shows a Pew poll of Democrats, showing that net favorability of Israel has dropped from -26 to -74 among liberals, +3 to -55 among "not liberal" Democrats (self-described moderates as well as conservatives).

  • Eric Cheyfitz [05-02]: Understanding the shared ideology behind settler colonialism in Native America and Palestine: "Both the United States and Israel were founded and exist on land taken during ongoing genocides. Settler colonialism drives these genocides, and both nations share an ideology that justifies the theft and rationalizes the killing." The question of whether (or how) the repopulating of America from 1500-1900 fits into the legal concept of genocide is rather academic, not that you can't find interesting insights from the exercise. My own interest in viewing Israel through the prism of settler colonialism has focused on the demographic tipping point: colonialism has only been successful if the immigrants outnumber the natives, usually by a large margin (US, Australia, Argentina); otherwise they have failed (South Africa, Vietnam, Algeria, Malaysia). There is a secondary factor having to do with the degree of segregation, which was extreme for English colonies, much more muddled for Spanish. Israel has always been marginal (the 1950-67 period, where Jewish Israelis held a 70% majority, had started to stabilize, but the conquests of the 1967 war brought a return of British-style colonial rule). Ethically, of course, settler colonialism has been a disaster, as with every attempt of one group to overpower another. Nor is the disaster limited to the victims, as such power eventually corrodes the humanity of the oppressors as well.

Around the World:

  • Elfadil Ibrahim [04-25]: UAE's dollar swap threats show how brittle these US alliances can be: "The Emirates don't need the money but they are laying down a market: if we take fire because of Washington, we want something in return."

  • Karthik Sankaran [04-28]: UAE leaves OPEC: what it means for the US, oil markets & Saudi: "The Iran war is certainly exposing a lot of long festering wounds, with this rupture certainly stunning Wall Street today." Chart here suggests that UAE can afford to sell oil much cheaper than Saudi Arabia can (breakeven at $49/barrel vs. $90; that has less to do with production costs, which do vary between oil producers, than with other government expenses funded by oil).

    [PS: Yanis Varoufakis commented: "So what that the UAE is leaving when it cannot send a single barrel of oil through the Hormuz Strait!"

Trump Goes to War: I set this section up to deal with Trump's threats of war. We're obviously beyond that now, so see the section on Iran for more on that.

Trump vs. Law:

Trump's Administration: Trump can't remake America in his own image (i.e., destroy the country, culture, and civilization) just by himself. He needs help, and having largely purged the government of civil servants and replaced them with his own minions, this is what they are doing (whether he's paying attention or not):

  • Whitney Curry Wimbish [04-16]: GOP food stamp work requirementsn hit just as jobs dry up: "Millions of people will lose food stamps, according to early estimates."

  • Caitlin Dewey [04-22]: Another Trump official exits in scandal: "Lori Chavez-DeRemer's resignation underscores a familiar pattern in the Trump administration." She was Secretary of Labor.

  • Merrill Goozner [04-22]: RFK Jr. and the perils of peptides: "The Health and Human Services Secretary's push to deregulate unapproved peptides will inevitably lead to worse health outcomes.

  • Pratik Pawar [04-29]: What really happened after Trump slashed HIV funding: "The official numbers are finally here." Well, we're not all dead yet, but they're working on it.

  • Gregg Gonsalves [05-01]: The rise of the Vichy scientists: "Too many scientists are willing to collaborate with Trumpism in the mistaken assumption that obedience will save their own necks." Again with the Nazi analogies, because once again they seem to be the only historical precedents that come close to the gravity of the current situation. Focuses on anti-vaxxers currently in vogue at NHS. Refers to a piece on similar opportunism in the law schools:

    • Steve Vladeck [01-29]: Legal scholarship and the dual state: "A few thoughts on the responsibilities of legal academics in a time of increasing governmental lawlessness." While I've mostly been following Ian Millhiser at Vox, Vladeck also has a newsletter, One First, "aiming to make the Supreme Court's rulings, procedures, and history more accessible to all." It looks to be worth following.

Donald Trump:

Republicans:

  • Gary Blumenthal [03-02]: Is Roger Marshall the worst US Senator in Kansas history? If you want an argument, I'd note that Sam Brownback didn't even get a mention here. I'll also note that I never forgave Bob Dole for his dirty campaigns against Bill Roy, who came within a hair of becoming the best US Senator in Kansas history. But Marshall is pretty bad, and not just for his extraordinary suck up to Donald Trump. Blumental misses the most glaring example: during Covid, while he was still a US Rep running in the Senate primary, as a MD he prescribed Ivermectin for his whole family. Certainly proved he's not the sort to let science or professionalism get in the way of political expediency. By the way:

    • [04-27]: When did anti-semitism become acceptable again? "Will there ever be peace, mutual respect and an end to reciprocal hate?" Blumenthal calls his newsletter Heartland Cynic, but he can't see past one of the hoariest myths of our age: that any criticism of Israel is an attack on all Jews, a revival of two millenia of anti-semitism. Sure, he might take exception to my summary, as he is critical of "the Trump-Netanyahu war of choice," and he opens with photos of both Israeli Jews and Palestinians in mourning. But he insists that "more than half of American Jews say they've experienced anti-Semitism in just the past year" (something I've neither seen nor heard any evidence of, but most of the Jews I know are critical of Israel). He goes on to claim, "People of my faith have heard this crap, throughout recorded history, that Israelis and Jews are aggressors, oppressors, and outsiders." Just because some statements are crap doesn't mean they all are. Let's skip over all of recorded history, and just focus on the last 50-100 years. Before 1947, there were Jews, self-consciously divided between the Yishuv and the Diaspora. Before 1880, there were Jews in Palestine, but no Zionists. Diaspora Jews may have been outsiders, but there is no record of them as aggressors or oppressors. But Israelis are a different story. Every war from 1946 on was aggression by Israelis, and every time they gained power over Palestinians, they oppressed them. Some of the early wars (1947 and 1973 are the best cases) could be characterized as defensive, but in 1947 they seized territory beyond what the UN partition plan had offered them, and they drove some 700,000 Palestinians into permanent exile, while subjecting all of the remaining Palestinians to military rule and second-class status. Israel has continued such discrimination and oppression to the present, and since 2023 have flaunted their power more harshly than ever. I have considerable sympathy for people (many Jews, but also others) who originally developed such an emotional attachment for Israel back in the days when the anti-colonial movement threatened to displace them (as happened to the French in Algeria; the Afrikaners of South Africa gave up political power, but weren't displaced, regardless of what Trump and Musk think). But most of them misjudged the Zionist's lust for power, which far exceeded their quite reasonable hopes for freedom. But these days, you really have to bury your head in the sand not to notice the depths of Israeli malevolence. You also have to completely ignore that Palestinians have long offered peace deals for coexistence, and that Israel could have peace on very favorable terms, but has chosen war and oppression instead. I shouldn't have to go into the obvious point that Jews in America and Europe shouldn't be blamed for Israel — although some, in insisting on solidarity with Israel and all it does, seem to be begging for hatred (not, I may add, as Jews but as Israel hawks, a mental and/or moral disorder that is equally common among other right-wing Americans, especially messianic Christians). Or that the people in America who are most opposed to anti-semtism are the ones opposed to all forms of bigotry and injustice, including the way Israel has treated the Palestinians.

    • Moti Rieber [04-08]: Israel breaks people's brains: Post by a Kansas rabbi who when I first encounted him was as gung-ho on Israel as Blumenthal has ever been. I'm not sure where Blumenthal lives, but that he is commenting on Kansas politics suggests he may be a neighbor.

    • MJ Rosenberg [03-03]: Jewish organizations are setting Jews up for antisemitic attacks: "With the help of Brett Stephens, Bari Weiss, and other Dershowitz successors." Let me quote some of this:

      Because once you sell the country on the idea that Jews and Israel are interchangeable, once you insist "we are one" — you don't just stain every Jew with Israel's crimes. You also paint a target on our backs. And then, when the backlash grows, these same organizations act shocked, pass the hat, and use the fear to recruit and fundraise. Oh how they fundraise!

      I think they like seeing antisemitism spike — not because they want Jews harmed, but because panic is their business model. Fear is their fuel. And the grotesque irony is that they help manufacture the very conditions they later monetize. . . .

      So let me be clear, keep us out of it. We are not "one" with you. We are not "one" with Israel. You don't get to launder state violence through my identity, and you don't get to draft my family into your propaganda let alone turn American Jews into human shields for Israel's war crimes.

      You are not the solution to antisemitism. You are the problem.

  • Naomi Bethune [04-02]: The far-right cash machine: "There's money in bigotry, and specialized crowdfunding platforms are where to get it."

  • Ed Kilgore:

    • [04-23]: Trump's average job approval hits new second-term low: As far as the mid-terms are concerned, the interesting numbers are the "strongly disapprove" (47.5%) and "strongly approve" (22.8%), as mid-term voter turnout always slumps, which makes strongly-held opinions loom even larger.

    • [04-23]: Why the GOP's new midterms strategy won't work: The "new" strategy is actually just the old one: to bash the Democrats, blaming them for everything that's gone wrong under Trump. This is largely because they've convinced themselves that most Americans hate Democrats as much as they do, and for the same reasons (you know, that they are radical communists who will take your guns away, promote abortion and atheism, and convince your children that they'd be happier as another sex). That's never been remotely true, but somehow Democrats manage to look guilty by denying such nonsense. This reminds me of the advice given to lawyers when they neither have facts nor law on their side: pound the table. Given how thin Trump's margins have been, and how disillusioned many people have become since "Trump Will Fix It!" proved a hollow promise, it shouldn't be hard for Democrats to tip the balance. Still, until Democrats show some actual skill at campaigning, we should all be nervous.

Democrats:

  • Ross Barkan [04-23]: Chuck Schumer used to be popular. Now he's stuck. Quotes the D-NY Senator as saying (at an AIPAC conference): "We say it's our land — the Torah says it, but they [Palestinians] don't believe in the Torah. That's the reason there is not peace. They invent other reasons, but they do not believe in a Jewish state, and that is why we in America must stand strong with Israel through thick and thin." Because we Americans, with our separation of church and state, and constitutional guarantees of equal treatment under the law for all, belived that a foreign country that mocks our values should be able to quote a line from the Torah and use it to justify killing, torturing, and otherwise discriminating against and harming a large segment of the people who live there?

  • Eric Levitz [04-27]: Democrats' latest critique of Walmart is wrong — and dangerous: "No, Medicaid is not 'corporate welfare.'" Filed here because the author is calling out Democrats explicitly, although the general complaint is applicable to Republicans as well, who differ mostly in omitting the word "corporate" before attacking "welfare."

  • Zack Beauchamp [04-29]: This billionaire could be California's next governor — and he wants to arrest Stephen Miller: "Tom Steyer talks to Vox about using state power to fight the Trump administration." It takes a lot of ego to run for president, and that's something billionaires have in spades. When Steyer ran for president in 2016, he had the ego (and the money), but he didn't have a campaign that actually appealed to anyone. He seems to have found one now, on the left, which as I've long said is where the answers come from. He's picked up an endorsement from the Bernie Sanders-founded group Our Revolution. Reminds me that Ralph Nader wrote a novel back in 2009 called "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!". JB Pritzker, in Illinois, is another example. (Mike Bloomberg is not.) Sometimes you have to take what you can get. Or as Steyer puts it several times here, that's the world we live in.

  • MJ Rosenberg [05-01]: Death to end stage capitalism: Time for Dems to be the Social Democratic Party: 20 points about capitalism. I could use this as scaffolding for commentary, grouping some things, discarding (or revamping) others. I still see a place for capitalism going forward. It's just not the only place, and it's one that becomes progressively unimportant as we get on to better things.

The Economy (and Economists):

  • Doug Henwood [2015-09-03]: Age of the Unicorn: How the Fed tried to fix the recession, and created the tech bubble: "The number of 'unicorn' tech companies is increasing dramatically — but the bubble will burst eventually." Old piece, featured "from the archive." My impression is that for the most part, the tech bubble is still growing, in what is still "a staggering misallocation of capital." There is a broken link to "the suggestion by Mike Konczal and others to 'socialize Uber,' by turning the thing into a driver-owned cooperative." Sounds like a good idea to me.

  • Hal Singer [03-10]: Another war, another excuse for profiteering: "Every energy crisis is a windfall for oil refiners — and consumers pay the price."

  • Stacy Mitchell [04-20]: How Amazon's AI algorithms raise the prices you pay: "Online price swings look like fierce competition. In reality, they're part of an invisible strategy that steers the entire market upward."

  • Robert Kuttner [04-24]: Time to stop lionizing Powell: "The Fed chair has been an enabler of the economy's hyper-financialization and speculative excess. Resistance to Trump is too low a bar."

Technology (Including AI):

  • Ryan Cooper [04-23]: Meta is a monopoly even if TikTok can compete: "It is foolish to suggest that competition anywhere proves that a company isn't a monopoly." Still, he doesn't make the case as clearly as it should be. Any company that owns a patent (or other exclusive intellectual property) has a monopoly right, at least to the extent that it is able to collect rents beyond what competition allows. Pharmaceutical companies don't compete with each other so much as they exercise and exploit monopolies over individual drugs. HP has a monopoly selling ink for the printers it manufactured. Perhaps at some point words like "monopoly" and "antitrust" should be recognized as antiquated, in that they are really just extreme forms of much broader (and in some cases subtler) behavior. Unfortunately, our "antitrust" laws limiting anti-competitive behavior were mostly passed in the 1880s, leaving us playing catch up with 140 years of rent-seeking innovation (not that the most common and effective means, bribing politicians and officials, is a new development). One monopolistic innovation that has become increasingly prevalent is network effects, which even more than IP is the source of Meta's monopolistic power.

  • John Herrman [04-25]: The downgrading of the American tech worker: "Meta is laying off more stuff — and monitoring the rest to train AI."

Media:

Regular Columnists

Sometimes an interesting columnist writes often enough that it makes sense to collect their work in one place, rather than scatter it about.

Dean Baker:

  • [03-22]: $200 billion for Trump's Iran "Excursion" is real money: First thing I did when I saw this was flash on Everett Dirksen's quip — back from the 1960's, and nowhere in evidence here, so all I'm doing is showing my age — that "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Baker offers other examples of much smaller things one could spend money on, but aside from "Minnesota fraud" the more significant difference is that they're things that generate positive value. Most of them will even result in long-term positive paybacks (although child care and health care may seem nebulous to accountants). The Iran War will only result in negative paybacks, which is to say the massive expenditure now is only a down payment on future inevitable and irrecoverable costs. Even when people talk about burning or blowing up cash, they're showing the limits of their imagination. Reality is far worse.

  • [04-14]: Inflation is a process: Notes the return of "anti-inflation hawks" arguing for "a structural break" causing persistent post-pandemic inflation. Baker argue for an alternative "bad breaks" theory, where the baddest of breaks was Trump becoming president, feeding price rises with tariffs and war (and I would add lax constraints against anti-competitive behavior, including price gouging). By "process" he means that inflation is something that takes time to develop, as higher prices raise costs which get fed back into even higher prices (he cites the "wage-price spiral" of the 1970s). He doesn't go much into what the current process is (after all, he's arguing against any such thing), but what I think is that the supply disruptions by and after the pandemic kicked off a general psychology where businesses discovered they could get away with price gouging (in common discourse described as "inflation") and took advantage of decades of anti-competitive consolidation. The wars and tariff shenanigans just added to the pile of excuses, but another big motivation (for business) was that under Biden workers got a bit of real income gains, and businesses were desperate to claw that back.

  • [04-15]: Are the Republican killing you? "Americans in Republican-led states live significantly shorter lives than those in Democratic states, highlighting major health disparities." The difference in life expectancy is 8 years longer in Hawaii than in West Virginia. "Even moving away a few notches from the extremes, a person living in California can expect to live 5.5 years longer than a person living in Tennessee." Only one of the top ten states is nominally Republican (Utah), while only one of the bottom ten leans Democratic (New Mexico). Baker has fun with his cart by adding some foreign countries, showing not only that Japan and South Korea are way ahead of Hawaii (the top US state), but so are Albania and Costa Rica. Cuba scores higher than Idaho (12 in US), Iran (pre-war) better than Florida (19), Mexico better than Indiana (40), and even Russia beats out Kentucky (49, ahead of India, which also beats Mississippi and West Virginia).

  • [04-17]: The stock market is not your friend: "Stock market gains driven by higher profit shares benefit a minority of investors, while most workers would be better off with higher wages instead." Sadly, many people regard the stock market as measuring the health of the economy, whereas a big part of what it really measures is how much business owners are at screwing everyone else over. (It also factors in real growth, so it's not simply wrong. And it also, more sensitively, not just measures but exaggerates investor panic, which has made it an easy mark for Trump's war machinations.) I suspect much of its allure is that it is reported daily, whereas most other economic measures come out monthly, quarterly, or annually. But that it mostly serves to inflate the importance of the investing class is also part of why corporate media pushes it so hard. (And why it matters to Trump.)

    In principle, the stock market reflects expectations of future after-tax corporate profits. Expected profits can rise because the economy is expected to grow more rapidly, and corporations will get their share as profits rise along with the economy. But that has not been the case over the last quarter-century.

    The after-tax profit share of national income has nearly doubled, going from an average of 6.6 percent in the 1990s to 12.5 percent in the last quarter of 2025. This explains most of the soaring stock market over this period, although the ratio of stock prices to corporate earnings is also near a record high, leading many of us to argue that we have a stock bubble.

    It is hard to see why the bulk of the population, who own little or no stock, should be celebrating the redistribution from wages to profits that provides most of the basis for the run-up in stock prices in the last quarter-century.

    Two further notes:

    There is one other point worth noting in this respect. As I said, the price-to-earnings ratios in the stock market are near record highs. That is also not something most of us have cause to celebrate.

    The run-up in house prices has far exceeded the run-up in rents over the last decade. This is likely at least in part attributable to people with big gains in the stock market bidding up house prices. Many of the big winners in the market have two or three homes.

    The common denominator here is that because rich people have more money than they can productively invest (let alone spend), they're driving up asset prices, possibly to bubble levels. In the case of house prices, this can have a major impact on affordability.

  • [04-18]: A $600 billion increase for the military is a ton of money: "Trump's massive military budget proposal highlights how enormous spending increases often go underexamined without meaningful context." Again, he's comparing this waste to other more sensible possible expenditures. Even I find the figure so mind-boggling I'm not sure where to start. The $900 billion the old Department of Defense spent each year was almost totally wasted. Sure, it produced a jobs program for contractors and indolent youth, and provided some degree of a socialist safety net for the soldiers (and veterans, who had their own budget, as did the nukes and the supplementals for unplanned wars). But it subtracted from the productive economy, and shipped a lot of that money abroad, so jobs and education for Americans could have been handled much more efficiently. Still, when you take an enterprise which is already pretty close to worthless, and throw 60% more money at it, what happens? You're going to hire more soldiers, but you're going to get somewhat less than 60% more: not that many people want to waste their lives "in service," so maybe you bump up the pay and perks and get 20-30% more people (probably less qualified and trained; the recent expansion of ICE hiring is worth studying). And you can buy more stuff, but again you have too much money chasing too little value, so you'll wind up paying more to get anything of value, and since value is so hard to evaluate in war, you'll probably wind up with a lot of no value at all. Some of the latter will be pure fraud. Much of it will be software, especially AI, where the gap between sales pitch and reality may turn out to be infinite. Of course, you could just buy a lot of bombs and bullets, but that's just going to build up pressure to use them. Given that management has already renamed Defense to the Department of War, the worst possible outcome seems destined.

  • [04-20]: We don't need billionaires, and we can structure the market so we don't have them: "A critique of claims that billionaires are essential to innovation, arguing that policy choices, not individuals, create extreme wealth." As Baker points out, there is no reason to think that "the innovations [billionaires] are associated with would not have taken place otherwise." (I'd add that many billionaires, including Trump, are responsible for no worthwhile innovations whatsoever.) But the bulk of the piece argues that "capitalism can be structured differently, with sections on:

    • Government-tranted patent and copyright monopolies
    • Let the financial industry enjoy the free market: as opposed to repeatedly bailing them out
    • Whack private equity: The structure of bankruptcy laws is not intrinsic to capitalism
    • Make non-compete agreements unenforceable
    • Capitalism needs to be restructured to produce less inequality

    These are old themes for Baker (see his book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer), and much more can be written both about the problems and the solutions. I'd like to see bankruptcy laws changed so that companies can be restructured under employee ownership, which would preserve competition and jobs.

  • [04-21]: Trump hits a home run for the green transition: "Trump's war-driven energy shock may unintentionally hasten the global shift to clean energy while weakening US dominance." This is more like a Wrong Way Corrigan touchdown than a home run for anyone, but it does underscore how right Chinese leaders were when they shifted focus from coal in the 1980s-90s to wind and solar, and moved their fledgling automotive sector from gas to electric. Roughly up to 2000, the Chinese saw emulating the west as the definitive development strategy, but since then they've dared to find their own way, starting with avoiding the warmongering the US succumbed to after 2001.

Current Affairs: Including interviews by Nathan J Robinson.

  • Ben Burgis/Matt McManus [04-15]: Steve Pinker doesn't know anything about Marxism: "Bill Gates' favoritre writer keeps spewing out lazy clichés about Marxism being a 'disaster' whenever it's 'implemented.' But he's way off-base, and Marx deserves better critics." I think it's a little late in the day to care much whether people give Marxism proper respect, although I will point out that people who do will learn a lot of things that might otherwise escape them. Some time ago, I bought a copy of Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, because I'm sympathetic with its thesis, and I think that our sympathy with and desire for violence has in fact declined over recent centuries. But I never got around to reading the book, or anything else by him. But even if his thesis is valid over the long term, it's hard to deny that there is still a lot of violence in the world, and that there are periods (including the "30 years war of the 20th century" that so disturbed Adorno, and the current period where Netanyahu, Trump, and Putin are on the warpath seems to qualify) where violence has at least temporarily intensified.

  • Nathan J Robinson [04-23]: In praise of "virtue signaling": "Signaling our convictions to one another is an important part of the push for moral progress." Ok, but not a point I really feel like making. He wants to map "virtue" onto "morality" and "signal" onto "expression," so what he's really defending is expressing your views of morality. The reason they call it "virtue signaling" is that they don't want to talk about morality; they want to talk about the superior airs you seem to be taking on when you assert that your moral views are better than theirs. That's almost always a caricature of what's actually going on, but does it really help your case to fight them on their terms?

  • Adam McKay [04-27]: Staring at the pointing hand: "How do we actually get people to pay attention to the crises unfolding around us? As corporate media fails, we need to build a mainstream consensus against fascism and climate collapse."

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [04-24]: "A picayune detail": Nazi science heads west. An updated chapter from the book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press.

  • [05-01]: Roaming Charges: Bad citizens: Starts with a section on WHCD "shooter" Cole Allen, suggesting that he didn't shoot, but was shot at (five times) by the Secret Service (who may have hit one of their own).

    + One of the inevitable problems with leading a conspiratorial movement, as Trump has done, is that your paranoid, conspiracy-minded followers will ultimately come to turn those conspiracies against you, as has happened in the Butler, PA shooting and already just a few hours after the shooting (if there was a shooting) in the hallway of the Washington Hilton . . .

    + Pete Hegseth: "The one institution that should win the Nobel Peace Prize every single year is the United States military."

    + Financial Times: "The number of white-collar prosecutions in the US has fallen to its lowest level in at least 40 years, leaving many white-collar criminal defence lawyers facing a major problem: they have nothing to do." Grift, graft and greed are good again!

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

TomDispatch:

  • Tom Engelhardt [04-21]: "You dirty ORANGE maniac! You blew it all up! Damn you to hell!": The editor appears to be blowing a gasket, but actually just scraped this title off a No King's Day protest sign. This makes me wonder what a truly unhinged screed against Trump might look like. I'm reluctant to guess, but it shouldn't stop mid-way to lament, "And the worst thing is that I feel I've written all of this before." Indeed, he has, especially the seemingly inevitable recycle of "he's also launched another brutally losing war against Planet Earth." Whenever I read something like that, I can only sigh, "Planet Earth is going to cope with whatever we throw at it (or dump onto it). It's what we're doing to ourselves that we should be worried about.

  • Alfred McCoy [4-23]: Military disasters and the end of empire: Writes about "what modern historians now call 'micro-militarism,'" which Google AI defines as "the tendency of declining imperial powers to launch small-scale, often ill-fated military interventions to project strength and regain fading glory, which often acceleratres their decline." And citing TomDispatch, is "often driven by emotional, irrational responses from leaders, not strategic necessity." I wasn't familiar with the term, so had to look it up. I don't much care for the term, nor for any explanation of modern events that harkens back to ancient Greece for examples. Current cases remind me of Trilling's decay of conservative thought into mere "irritable mental gestures." It matters little whether they lead to loss of power or merely reflect the fear that power has already been lost.

    • Michael Schwalbe [2012-11-26]: Micro Militarism: Examples here include "patriotic displays at sporting events, such as flyovers and national anthem singing, as a form of cultural militarism that discourages debate on war policy," and "celebrating military personnel in media, normalizing war-making as an integral part of national identity."

  • William D Hartung [04-26]: Shutting down the war machine: Co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home, which Trump and Hegseth now want to give an extra $500 million to (beyond the $200 million "supplemental" they want for Iran?). It's tempting to fixate on the insane waste in this spending, but worse still is the off chance that someone in charge might be stupid enough to think they can actually use this military (especially now that someone has, so we're no longer talking hypotheticals).

  • Andrea Mazzarino [04-28]: The trauma and the terror among us, or "The global war on terror's journey home: the collective trauma of America's twenty-first century wars."

  • William deBuys [04-30]: The border wall thrives, the borderlands don't.

  • Tom Engelhardt [05-03]: A world in Trumple deep "(And we are all his apprentices now)": Another tirade, self-conscious enough to forgo "section titles for a simple reason. It's all about Donald J. Trump and when it comes to him, in this strange world of ours, no one ever really gets a break." As usual, this winds up with Trump's making "climate-change denial seem like a far too mild term."

Books:

Other media:

Some notable deaths: Mostly from the New York Times listings. Last time I did such a trawl was on February 27, so we'll look that far back (although some names have appeared since):

Some other names I recognize:

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas.

  • David Everall [04-30]: Forwarded a post from Chalkie Davies, noting that "Lester Bangs died on this day 44 years ago," and including an obituary written by Robert Christgau (also available here).

  • SteVen Hendricks [04-27]:

    Communication Con Job

    As a former corporate communications and government affairs executive, I've been watching Donald Trump answer questions with the media for more than 10 years now. The confidence, the certainty, and the way he controls media interviews. It's no wonder some people "think" that he's a skillful communicator.

    Every single time that Donald Trump is asked a question — any question — he runs the same exact seven 'deceitful' steps — the same exact order—without exception.

    This is not one's personality, not confidence nor is it charisma either. This is a deliberate repeatable "control the lie" formula — and here is the formula.

    1. KILL THE QUESTION (First thing every time — make the question itself the problem.) —"That's a stupid question." / "Fake news."
    2. KILL WHO ASKED IT (Destroy the source so the question has nowhere to stand.) —"Your ratings are terrible. Nobody watches your network."
    3. INSERT HIMSELF (Every topic. Every time. Without fail. It always lands here.) —"Nobody has ever done what I've done."
    4. SCALE IT TO THE BIGGEST CLAIM POSSIBLE (Not good. Not great. The greatest—ever— In history. Every single time.) — "More than any administration — by far." / "Nobody has ever had crowds like I've had in history, for any country."
    5. UNNAMED PEOPLE AGREE (Faceless. Countless. Unverifiable. Always there.) — "Smart people are saying it. Great people. A lot of people."
    6. VAGUE THREAT (Something bad will happen. Never specified. Always implied.) — "All hell will break out." / "They know it. Believe me."
    7. LOOP BACK TO HIMSELF (Different words. Same destination. Formula complete.) — "It's been an amazing period of time. Page after page of accomplishments."

    The question was never answered — the formula was just executed. Go back and watch any news clip, any interview, any topic, any reporter. Count the steps — they're all there.

    And this is the part that nobody wants to believe . . . A "control the lie" formula runs the same seven steps whether the topic is war, Epstein Files, or egg prices. Which means the response was never built for the question; it was built for you—the listener; to feel certain; to stop you from noticing that nothing was actually answered.

    And it worked — for years it has worked. It's why he lies with such confidence, with such arrogance, with such certainty — he's controlling the moment — and he's doing it without people noticing.

    Pull any news clip video, any interview transcript, any public statement and count the steps yourself. This isn't about politics. This is about controlling what you were never supposed to notice — and Donald Trump is a master it!

    MAGA Trumpublicans eat it up and they fall for Trump's "communication con job" — every single time! Unfortunately, so does a lot of other people!

  • Tom Carson: Picture of a guy who looks like Lindsey Graham in a "69 47" T-shirt."

  • Astra Taylor: She seems to have a new book coming out, combining forces with Naomi Klein, called "End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World." Book is scheduled for September release. Quote from Naomi Klein:

    Trapped in Bad Fiction

    Must the future be this corny? Are we really doomed to live inside the half-remembered childhood fantasies of overgrown teenage boys? To be cast as bit characters in a misunderstood book that Elon Musk or Peter Thiel may or may not have finished reading? Is it even possible to write about those hackneyed futures without becoming a cliché yourself?

    Over the past year, as Astra Taylor and I have immersed ourselves in what we call End Times Fascism, I have returned to these questions often. Whether it's Musk's dreams of space colonization, Sam Altman's prediction of an imminent machine-human merger, or Pete Hegseth's Armageddon complex, it often feels as if we are trapped inside very bad science fiction.

    Our book comes out in September and now that we are through the copyedit (and the fact check, and the legal review . . . ) I finally have a little space to engage in real time conversations about how apocalyptic stories about the end times are shaping the news cycle, from everyone accusing everyone else of being the Antichrist, to Donald Trump's obsessive drive to build a gilded ballroom over a fortressed bunker (which I think of as a sort of drydock Titanic).

    I love this new direction because it speaks directly to that uncanny feeling, shared by so many of us, of being caught in somebody else's kitschy version of the future — one we have all been warned against countless times. The cold blues recall several classic Isaac Asimov jackets, and the retro rocket ship brings the same scifi era to mind.

    Jim Stoddart, who designed the cover for Allen Lane, explains that the rocket's exodus "illustrates the most extreme metaphor of the super-rich believing they can escape the rest of humanity — whether fleeing to islands on the other side of the globe or rocketing off to Mars — while exacerbating devastation behind them." And, of course, the Earth on the cover is imperiled, "being metaphorically shrouded with poison intentions by the privileged few." But Stoddart points out, all is not lost: "the planet has not yet been entirely overwhelmed — and there lies the hope for the future."

    Astra and I firmly believe that to be the case, which is why we wrote the book and immersed ourselves in that poison since Trump re-entered the White House. A huge part of the reason why a dystopic future can feel inevitable is precisely because versions of that violent story have been told and retold so many times, riffing off the same template that appears in the Book of Revelation, which casts armageddon as a necessary stage on the way to a frictionless, lifeless heavenly utopia. Unfortunately, we have far less practice imagining versions of the future in which we come together to fight for all that is irreplaceable in the blessedly imperfect, friction-filled living world.

    And yet we are surrounded by examples of people doing just that, from parched communities coming together to resist AI data centres to the historic summit happening right now in Santa Marta, Colombia, where 60 governments have convened to chart a path away from fossil fuels, refusing to let the breakdown of climate negotiations at the United Nations be the last word in the fight against climate breakdown. With the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran showing us all — yet again! — the enormous perils of fossil fuel dependence, the summit comes at a critical moment.

Current count: #^c