Today is a day to celebrate a great man: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. No one spoke about the relevance of our founding ideals more eloquently than Dr. King. He called to account to live up to those ideals. Dr. King called on us to be the very best possible Americans.
We are not there yet but we must never stop trying.
I am always grateful to read Heather Cox Richardon’s voice of reason, putting events into perspective, tying together past and present.
In this post, she reflects on the heroes among us.
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2025.
Trump has his eye on what matters most: making more money. MONEY! PROFIT! He can never get enough!
The New York Times reported on his latest money-making scheme:
President-elect Donald J. Trump and his family on Friday started selling a cryptocurrency token featuring an image of Mr. Trump drawn from the July assassination attempt, a potentially lucrative new business that ethics experts assailed as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.
Disclosed just days before his second inauguration, the venture is the latest in a series of moves by Mr. Trump that blur the line between his government role and the continued effort by his family to profit from his power and global fame. It is yet another sign that the Trump family will be much less hesitant in this second term to bend or breach traditional ethical boundaries.
Mr. Trump himself announced the launch of his new business on Friday night on his social media platform, in between announcements about filling key federal government posts. He is calling the token $Trump, selling it with the slogan, “Join the Trump Community. This is History in the Making!”
The venture was organized by CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, which already has been selling an array of other kinds of merchandise like Trump-branded sneakers, fragrances and even digital trading cards.
But this newest venture brings Mr. Trump and his family directly into the world of selling cryptocurrency, which is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Trump recently disclosed he intended to name a cryptocurrency advocate as S.E.C. chairman.
A disclosure on the website selling the tokens says that CIC Digital and its affiliates own 80 percent of the supply of the new Trump tokens that will be released gradually over the coming three years and that they will be paid “trading revenue” as the tokens are sold.
The move by Mr. Trump and his family was immediately condemned by ethics lawyers who said they could not recall a more explicit profiteering effort by an incoming president.
“It is literally cashing in on the presidency — creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office” said Adav Noti, executive director of Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit ethics group. “It is beyond unprecedented.”
Trump’s greed cannot be restrained. And there are no boundaries because the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that he has “absolute immunity” while he is president.
How low can he go? Just watch.
Greg Olear is simply amazing. Read the post here and perhaps you will agree. He is wise, smart, learned, insightful, and inspiring. I know of no other writer who weaves together politics, literature, and history as seamlessly as Olear. He writes at Substack and charges no fee.
Dear Reader,
The great British historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote an indispensable series of books in which he divides the 20 decades after the French Revolution into historical “ages.” The period from the 1789 storming of the Bastille to the uprisings sweeping across Europe in 1848 he termed the Age of Revolution. Eighteen forty-eight until the end of the Great Boom circa 1875 is the Age of Capital. The Age of Empire spanned from the mid-1870s until the start of the Great War in 1914. And the “short twentieth century,” a term he coined, was dubbed the Age of Extremes, and ran from the assassination of the archduke until 1991.
Ever since I discovered his books in 2012, the year of his death, I’ve often wondered what Hobsbawm would have called the fifth historical “age”—the one that began in 1991. That was the year of the first Gulf War, and the banishment from Saudi Arabia of Osama bin Laden that kickstarted his Al Qaeda movement; the mysterious death of Robert Maxwell—friend to the British royal family, mentor to Jeffrey Epstein, business partner of the Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich, and Israeli spy—who fell off his yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands; the repeal of the apartheid laws in South Africa, where Errol Musk made his fortune; the rollout of the WorldWideWeb; and the breakup of the Soviet Union—on Christmas, no less, capitalism’s holiest of holy days.
Today, a mere 24 hours and change before we hand the federal government off to a hateful confederacy of Nazis, mobsters, Opus Dei weirdos, white Christian nationalists, and billionaire dorks, I think I know not only the name of the period after the Age of Extremes, but also its termination date. As I type this, we are living in the last few hours of the Age of Unreality. It ends tomorrow at noon.
Something else happened in 1991, you see—something that likely eluded Eric Hobsbawm. Producers at MTV were developing a TV show that would begin filming in February of 1992. It was called The Real World: New York. It was the first reality TV show—or, at least, the seminal reality TV show of the subsequent reality TV explosion. Riding the reality TV wave was a British producer named Mark Burnett, who would give us Survivor in 2000, and, four years later, what wound up being the most historically significant reality TV show of all time, The Apprentice.
Although I confess to having enjoyed a few seasons of The Surreal Life, back when our eldest son was a baby—Flavor Flav does not disappoint!—I have never liked reality TV shows, encouraging, as they often do, the very worst of human behavior. I don’t like meanness. I don’t like ruthlessness. I don’t like watching anyone being voted off the island. I don’t like when people are fired. I don’t like talentless humans. I don’t like Kardashians. Most of all, I don’t like the unscripted-but-very-much-scripted fluff that has replaced actual shows written by actual writers. By encouraging us to believe in a heavily-retouched fictional universe presented as the real world—or, I suppose, The Real World—reality TV has left us more susceptible to Russian disinformation, to deep fakes, to conspiracy theories, to manufactured media narratives, to tech-bro charlatans, to pseudo-scientific arguments against vaccines, and to mendacious politicians who have supercharged lying to a form of warfare.
I have often grumbled, half in jest, that reality TV would bring about the end of Western civilization. I did not think it would also bring about the end of Western democracy. To paraphrase Don DeLillo: Reality TV has given us Joe Rogan; that alone warrants its doom.
(Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Freddie Mercury died in—when else?—1991.)
One of the most significant, world-altering events in this Age of Unreality was, of course, 9/11. In response to the WTC attacks, the FBI shifted its focus from transnational organized crime, which was already operating in the United States and growing more powerful by the day—a genuine threat to our society—to Islamic extremist terrorism, which involved not very many crazy people mostly living in caves far, far away from New York. In response to 9/11, we have to subject ourselves to TSA search before boarding an airplane. In response to 9/11, Bush and Cheney launched a long and expensive war on Saddam Hussein, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks, while simultaneously cutting taxes for their wealthy benefactors—two actions that, in tandem, starved the U.S. treasury and put the country so far into the red that it may never recover. In Britain, meanwhile, Tony Blair’s blind loyalty to Bush—a foreshadowing, perhaps, of Joe Biden’s blind loyalty to Bibi Netanyahu—paved the way for BREXIT and the series of hapless prime ministers that followed the disastrous decision to LEAVE.
Five days after 9/11, Anthony Lane, the New Yorker’s savagely witty film critic, published what remains one of the finest pieces of writing on the attacks, a short essay called “This Is Not a Movie.” I go back and revisit it every once in a while, when the mood strikes me. Reading it now, I see that Lane perfectly articulates the paradox of the Age of Unreality, the uneasy blur between fact and fiction, when he comments on “the degree to which people saw—literally saw, and are continuing to see, as it airs in unforgiving repeats—that day”—that is, September 11, 2001—“as a movie.” He notes that the elapsed time between the initial hijackings and the collapse of the north tower was “a little over two hours;” the length of a summer blockbuster disaster film.
Lane writes:
We are talking…of the indulgence that will always be extended to an epoch blessed with prosperity—one that has the leisure, and the cash, to indulge its fancies, not least the cheap thrill of pretending that the blessing could be wiped out. What happened on the morning of September 11th was that imaginations that had been schooled in the comedy of apocalypse were forced to reconsider the same evidence as tragic. It was hard to make the switch; the fireball of impact was so precisely as it should be, and the breaking waves of dust that barrelled down the avenues were so absurdly recognizable—we have tasted them so frequently in other forms, such as water, flame, and Godzilla’s foot—that only those close enough to breathe the foulness into their lungs could truly measure the darkening day for what it was.
There are echoes of this in the fires that have ravaged Los Angeles. Looking at those horrific images, it is impossible not to describe the fiery scenes as something from a movie—or, rather, a limited series, because, unlike with 9/11, the L.A. fires did not confine themselves to a movie-length running time. They began last Tuesday, almost two full weeks ago, and are still ongoing. If 9/11 was, as Lane suggests, a disaster film come to life, the fires are a combination of disaster film and horror movie: not just the fires themselves but the hundred-mile-an-hour winds and the dread of the fires spreading. Only those close enough to breathe the foulness into their lungs could truly measure the darkening days for what they are. My heart breaks for everyone in L.A., even as I know I can never fully understand their ordeal.
The fires are not a movie, just like 9/11 was not a movie. The fires are all too real.
As a country, we have not even begun to comprehend the extent of the damage, or its impact on all those hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena and beyond, much less the effect the fires will have nationally, culturally, societally—not least because the recovery will ultimately be overseen by an incoming administration not much known for its compassion, its competence, or its love for Hollywood.
The last paragraph of Lane’s essay is achingly, hauntingly beautiful. Many, many people wrote about 9/11 in the days that followed it, and it always struck me as both unlikely and somehow appropriate that a film critic would offer the purest take:
To be forced to disdain the ideal in favor of the actual is never a pleasant process. Even at its worst, however, it can deliver a bitter redemption. We gazed upward, or at our TV screens, and we couldn’t believe our eyes; but maybe our eyes had been lied to for long enough. Thousands died on September 11th, and they died for real; but thousands died together, and therefore something lived. The most important, if distressing, images to emerge from those hours are not of the raging towers, or of the vacuum where they once stood; it is the shots of people falling from the ledges, and, in particular, of two people jumping in tandem. It is impossible to tell, from the blur, what age or sex these two are, nor does that matter. What matters is the one thing we can see for sure: they are falling hand in hand. Think of Philip Larkin’s poem about the stone figures carved on an English tomb, and the “sharp tender shock” of noticing that they are holding hands. The final line of the poem has become a celebrated condolence, and last Tuesday—in uncounted ways, in final phone calls, in the joined hands of that couple, in circumstances that Hollywood should no longer try to match—it was proved true all over again, and, in so doing, it calmly conquered the loathing and rage in which the crime was conceived. “What will survive of us is love.”
Larkin, the poet who wrote that line—and who is, like Lane, British—was not at all a sentimental sort. His stuff is gloomy, sourpuss, almost defeatist. Throughout his poems we see a struggle between, on the one hand, recognizing the futility of life, and on the other, being paralyzed by the fear of death. It is his poem “This Be The Verse,” about how our parents “fuck us up,” that the pub owner quotes, somewhat incongruously, in Ted Lasso:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Sunny stuff, right? Larkin’s entire worldview is neatly encapsulated in this line from “Aubade,” a title that indicates this is a poem about the dawn:
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
The antecedent of the “it” in the first line is “death.” But we may just as well substitute “Trump,” and the lines work just as well: the standing chill, the furnace-fear and the rage, the necessity of other people and a good stiff drink, the futility of courage.
The poem that Lane quotes is called “An Arundel Tomb.” At Arundel, a medieval British town, is the tomb of Richard FitzAlan, the tenth Earl of Arundel, who died in 1371, and that of his second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster, who predeceased him by a few years. The tomb is capped by stone statues of the couple, who are, surprisingly, holding hands:
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Larkin, a dour librarian and bemoaner of the decline of civilization who seems not to have believed in love (even as he juggled three women for most of his adult life), calls bullshit on this romantic display:
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
In other words, while the holding of stony hands has stood the test of time, the love it represents was probably a figment of the artist’s rosy imagination. (Note the double meaning of “lie.”)
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly theyPersisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. . .
Until,
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age. . .
Only an attitude remains:Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Larkin is saying that what the statues represent isn’t real—that our “almost-instinct” is to believe in the much-ballyhooed power of love, and that the “stone fidelity” of the earl and his wife is so compelling as to make said love-power “almost true.” Almost true is not true; almost true is AI true—a lie we want badly to believe in. The entire poem is him expressing his deep, nasty cynicism. The oft-quoted last line is intended to be ironic—a fitting epitaph for our Age of Unreality.
Even so, what survives of Larkin is “What will survive of us is love.” And I like to think, as Lane does, that, whatever the poet’s intention, the Arundel sentiment is real.
The Age of Unreality began in 1991, when all the ingredients of the historical cocktail were thrown into the shaker: the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the Russian mafia, the ascendance of Jeffrey Epstein, the dawn of reality TV, the end of apartheid, and the last time that a coalition of Western democracies repulsed an attempt by a despot to invade a sovereign nation—thus upholding the tenets of the Westphalian order. Out of that cocktail shaker, cold as ice, was poured Jeffrey Epstein and Semion Mogilevich, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Tomorrow, that mindfuck age draws to a close, and a new one begins. What it has in store for us is anyone’s guess. Will the last barriers between fantasy and reality be worn away, or, as Lane poetically puts it, have our eyes been lied to for long enough? Will democracy really die, as the fascism scholars have been warning us for years, or will the Trump power-grab finally wake up the American people and restore our love of liberty? Will generative AI destroy all art, or will a new analog artistry emerge? What will happen to our beloved Hollywood, to which Trump has named meathead Sylvester Stallone, rightwing wacko Jon Voigt, and radical Catholic weirdo Mel Gibson his MAGA “ambassadors?”
I take some small solace in knowing that we’ve been here before. As Hobsbawm notes in The Age of Capital, the United States in the late nineteenth century—the America Trump wants us to return to—was marked by
the total absence of any kind of control over business dealings, however ruthless and crooked, and the really spectacular possibilities of corruption both national and local—especially in the post-Civil War years. There was indeed little that could be called government by European standards in the United States, and the scope for the powerful and unscrupulous rich was virtually unlimited. In fact, the phrase ‘robber baron’ should carry its accent on the second rather than the first word, for, as in a weak medieval kingdom, men could not look to the law but only to their own strength—and who were stronger in a capitalist society than the rich? The United States, alone among the bourgeois world, was a country of private justice and armed forces….
Our current crop of robber barons is orders of magnitude worse than its forebears—but maybe the abject awfulness of these despicable people will make their reigns shorter, their fall more humiliating, and their historical impact less profound.
Even so, for all my optimistic tendencies, I fear tomorrow as surely as Larkin feared death, which he describes as
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
Death is permanent and absolute, but dictatorships are neither; moreover, Donald isn’t a dictator yet, and may well never be. Even as I have witnessed the poltroonish capitulation of our political leaders, our robber barons, our media figureheads, even our Snoop Doggs, I have faith that we will somehow find a better way, that we will repulse this ugly MAGA incursion, that the moral arc of the universe will bend towards justice, that the better angels of our nature will prevail. My faith will be tested, surely. But it will remain.
Nothing more true than this: What will survive of us is hope.
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, no longer writes a column for The New York Times. Instead, he has a blog on Substack where he writes whatever strikes his fancy.
In this post, he ponders what billionaires want. Why aren’t they satisfied to have “only” $500 million? Or “only” $1 billion? I always thought that their insatiable desire for more stemmed from competitiveness, from obeisance to the maxim “He who dies with the most toys wins,” attributed to magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes. Who has the most houses? Who has the biggest superyacht? Who has a yacht to follow his superyacht?
Krugman has a different take.
He writes:
Today’s newsletter will be a bit different from my usual. In general, I do data-driven posts, mainly about economics — and that will remain the norm. But right now, as some of the worst people in America are about to take power, doesn’t feel like the time for charts from FRED. So this entry will be informal and impressionistic, based partly on things I’ve seen, partly on speculation.
So: Much of the political and business world is prostrating itself at the feet of the least-qualified man, morally and intellectually, ever to occupy the White House.
It’s understandable if not excusable why many of those declaring fealty are doing so. If you look at what has happened to Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger you realize that Republican politicians who stand up to Trump destroy their political careers and put themselves at real personal risk. Many businesspeople — including media owners — fear that they will suffer monetarily if they cross the new regime.
But what’s truly extraordinary is the way billionaires have been abasing themselves before Donald Trump, a spectacle highlighted by Ann Telnaes’s now-famous cartoon — the one Jeff Bezos spiked, causing her to quit the Washington Post:
PS: I strongly urge everyone to show Ann Telnaes some love by reading her Substack, getting a paid subscription if you can afford it.
Why is this self-owning by billionaires so extraordinary? Well, ask yourself: What’s the point of being rich?
Past a certain level of wealth, it can’t really be about material things. I very much doubt that billionaires have a significantly higher quality of life than mere multimillionaires.
To the extent that there’s a valid reason for accumulating a very large fortune, I’d say that it involves freedom, the ability to live your life more or less however you want. Indeed, one definition of true wealth is having “fuck you money” — enough money to walk away from unpleasant situations or distasteful individuals without suffering a big decline in your living standards. And some very wealthy men — most obviously Mark Cuban, but I’d at least tentatively include Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — do seem to exhibit the kind of independence wealth gives you if you choose to exercise it.
The likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, however, surely have that kind of money, yet they’re prostrating themselves before Trump. They aren’t stupid; they have to know what kind of person Trump is and understand — whether or not they admit it to themselves — the humiliating nature of their behavior. So why do they do it?
The answer, I believe, is that many (not all!) rich men are extraordinarily insecure. I’ve seen this phenomenon many times, although I can only speculate about what causes it. My best guess is that a billionaire, having climbed to incredible heights, realizes that he’s still an ordinary human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and asks, “Is this all there is?”
So he starts demanding things money can’t buy, like universal admiration. Read Ross Douthat’s interview with Marc Andreessen, in which the tech bro explains why he has turned hard right. Andreessen says that it’s not about the money, and I believe him. What bothers him, instead, is that he wants everyone to genuflect before tech bros as the great heroes of our age, and instead lots of people are saying mean things about him and people like him.
Of course, Trump’s victory won’t do anything to restore the adulation he misses, so I can confidently predict that Andreesen and others in his set will keep on whining — that there will be so much whining that we’ll get sick of whining. Actually I already am.
Or consider the Elon Musk gaming scandal. Many people in the gaming world, which is huge, believe that Musk, who claims to be an avid and expert gamer, has been faking it, either by having someone else play for him or by using a more skilled player’s account.
It’s a deeply embarrassing story, if true. And while I don’t know anything about gaming, the accusations seem credible — and completely consistent with Musk’s behavior in areas I do know something about. His attempts to pose as a budget guru and a macroeconomist have, for those familiar with even the most basic facts, been as cringeworthy as his apparent fakery in video games — although for sheer cringe value nothing matches Mark Zuckerberg’s talk about “masculine energy.”
What the gaming story suggests is something I already suspected: Musk’s frenetic interventions on behalf of right-wing, racist politicians around the world are doing real harm — he definitely helped Trump win, his influence is one reason horrible people like Pete Hegseth will probably be confirmed for office, and sooner or later Musk will end up inspiring violence. But they shouldn’t be seen as a coherent political strategy. They are, instead, efforts to fill the emptiness inside.
But what about Bezos and Zuckerberg? Both made bids to define themselves as more than their wealth, Bezos by buying the Washington Post, Zuckerberg by unveiling Threads as an alternative to Nazified Twitter. But both lost their nerve. Bezos, initially seen as the Post’s savior, ended up trashing its reputation (and readership) with his political cowardice. Zuckerberg implemented an algorithm that made Threads uncontroversial and hence irrelevant, then lobbied hard and successfully to block efforts to protect children from the clear harm social media does.
So now they are defined by their wealth and nothing more, which I believe explains their submission to Trump. Trump would probably be able to damage their businesses if they didn’t bend the knee, but that would still leave them immensely wealthy, just possibly no longer among the wealthiest men on the planet.
The problem for them is that their status as the richest of the rich is, in ego terms, all they have left, which leaves them far more vulnerable than they would be if they were just run-of-the-mill billionaires.
So as I said in this post’s subtitle, fuck-you money has become fuck-me money. And the cravenness of billionaires will have dire consequences, not just for their reputations, but for the rest of us.
Andy Borowitz is a humorist of the highest order. He used to write for The New Yorker, now he has a blog at Substack.
Here is his list of what to watch tomorrow instead of the inauguration of you-know-who.
He invites you to submit your ideas.
I suggest not only films, but activities.
Take a long walk unless you are in a state hit by the Arctic freeze.
Read a good book. Fahrenheit 451? 1984? Brave New World? The Handmaid’s Tale?
Listen to music that soothes your soul.
Go to the zoo.
Do something kind for others because kindness will be in short supply for the next four years..
What else?
Heather Cox Richardson is wise not to put titles on her posts. They combine several topics. But this day’s posting has a common thread: the next four years will see a changed focus: from the public interest to private greed. Please read it all!
She writes:
Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July when it asked eight large companies to turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices. The FTC focused on the middlemen hired by retailers. Those middlemen use algorithms to tweak and target prices to different markets.
The initial findings of the FTC using data from six of the eight companies show that those prices are not static. Middlemen can target prices to individuals using their location, browsing patterns, shopping history, and even the way they move a mouse over a webpage. They can also use that information to show higher-priced products first in web searches. The FTC found that the intermediaries—the middlemen—worked with at least 250 retailers.
“Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage,” said FTC chair Lina Khan. “The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service.”
The FTC has asked for public comment on consumers’ experience with surveillance pricing.
FTC commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson, whom Trump has tapped to chair the commission in his incoming administration, dissented from the report.
Matt Stoller of the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, which is working “to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power,” wrote that “[t]he antitrust enforcers (Lina Khan et al) went full Tony Montana on big business this week before Trump people took over.”
Stoller made a list. The FTC sued John Deere “for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment,” released a report showing that pharmacy benefit managers had “inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion,” “sued corporate landlord Greystar, which owns 800,000 apartments, for misleading renters on junk fees,” and “forced health care private equity powerhouse Welsh Carson to stop monopolization of the anesthesia market.”
It sued Pepsi for conspiring to give Walmart exclusive discounts that made prices higher at smaller stores, “[l]eft a roadmap for parties who are worried about consolidation in AI by big tech by revealing a host of interlinked relationships among Google, Amazon and Microsoft and Anthropic and OpenAI,” said gig workers can’t be sued for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and forced game developer Cognosphere to pay a $20 million fine for marketing loot boxes to teens under 16 that hid the real costs and misled the teens.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “sued Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by misleading consumers over savings accounts,” Stoller continued. It “forced Cash App purveyor Block…to give $120 million in refunds for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers,” “sued Experian for refusing to give consumers a way to correct errors in credit reports,” ordered Equifax to pay $15 million to a victims’ fund for “failing to properly investigate errors on credit reports,” and ordered “Honda Finance to pay $12.8 million for reporting inaccurate information that smeared the credit reports of Honda and Acura drivers.”
The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice sued “seven giant corporate landlords for rent-fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage,” Stoller went on. It “sued $600 billion private equity titan KKR for systemically misleading the government on more than a dozen acquisitions.”
“Honorary mention goes to [Secretary Pete Buttigieg] at the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and fining Frontier for ‘chronically delayed flights,’” Stoller concluded. He added more results to the list in his newsletter BIG.
Meanwhile, last night, while the leaders in the cryptocurrency industry were at a ball in honor of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency. By morning he appeared to have made more than $25 billion, at least on paper. According to Eric Lipton at the New York Times, “ethics experts assailed [the business] as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.”
Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told Lipton: “It is literally cashing in on the presidency—creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office. It is beyond unprecedented.” Cryptocurrency leaders worried that just as their industry seems on the verge of becoming mainstream, Trump’s obvious cashing-in would hurt its reputation. Venture capitalist Nick Tomaino posted: “Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it.”
Yesterday the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, asked X, the social media company owned by Trump-adjacent billionaire Elon Musk, to hand over internal documents about the company’s algorithms that give far-right posts and politicians more visibility than other political groups. The European Union has been investigating X since December 2023 out of concerns about how it deals with the spread of disinformation and illegal content. The European Union’s Digital Services Act regulates online platforms to prevent illegal and harmful activities, as well as the spread of disinformation.
Today in Washington, D.C., the National Mall was filled with thousands of people voicing their opposition to President-elect Trump and his policies. Online speculation has been rampant that Trump moved his inauguration indoors to avoid visual comparisons between today’s protesters and inaugural attendees. Brutally cold weather also descended on President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, but a sea of attendees nonetheless filled the National Mall.
Trump has always understood the importance of visuals and has worked hard to project an image of an invincible leader. Moving the inauguration indoors takes away that image, though, and people who have spent thousands of dollars to travel to the capital to see his inauguration are now unhappy to discover they will be limited to watching his motorcade drive by them. On social media, one user posted: “MAGA doesn’t realize the symbolism of [Trump] moving the inauguration inside: The billionaires, millionaires and oligarchs will be at his side, while his loyal followers are left outside in the cold. Welcome to the next 4+ years.”
Trump is not as good at governing as he is at performance: his approach to crises is to blame Democrats for them. But he is about to take office with majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, putting responsibility for governance firmly into his hands.
Right off the bat, he has at least two major problems at hand.
Last night, Commissioner Tyler Harper of the Georgia Department of Agriculture suspended all “poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales” until further notice after officials found Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or bird flu, in a commercial flock. As birds die from the disease or are culled to prevent its spread, the cost of eggs is rising—just as Trump, who vowed to reduce grocery prices, takes office.
There have been 67 confirmed cases of the bird flu in the U.S. among humans who have caught the disease from birds. Most cases in humans are mild, but public health officials are watching the virus with concern because bird flu variants are unpredictable. On Friday, outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra announced $590 million in funding to Moderna to help speed up production of a vaccine that covers the bird flu. Juliana Kim of NPR explained that this funding comes on top of $176 million that Health and Human Services awarded to Moderna last July.
The second major problem is financial. On Friday, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen wrote to congressional leaders to warn them that the Treasury would hit the debt ceiling on January 21 and be forced to begin using extraordinary measures in order to pay outstanding obligations and prevent defaulting on the national debt. Those measures mean the Treasury will stop paying into certain federal retirement accounts as required by law, expecting to make up that difference later.
Yellen reminded congressional leaders: “The debt limit does not authorize new spending, but it creates a risk that the federal government might not be able to finance its existing legal obligations that Congresses and Presidents of both parties have made in the past.” She added, “I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”
Both the avian flu and the limits of the debt ceiling must be managed, and managed quickly, and solutions will require expertise and political skill.
Rather than offering their solutions to these problems, the Trump team leaked that it intended to begin mass deportations on Tuesday morning in Chicago, choosing that city because it has large numbers of immigrants and because Trump’s people have been fighting with Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat. Michelle Hackman, Joe Barrett, and Paul Kiernan of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, reported that Trump’s people had prepared to amplify their efforts with the help of right-wing media.
But once the news leaked of the plan and undermined the “shock and awe” the administration wanted, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said the team was reconsidering it.
—
Christina Jewett wrote in The New York Times that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to block the release of all COVID vaccines in 2121, at the height of the pandemic.
In the past, I have referred to Mr. Kennedy as a crackpot. I was wrong. He’s more than a crackpot. He’s a dangerous man, whose non-scientific ideology has the potential to kill thousands of people. He should not be confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. His views are lethal. If a new form of COVID or some other contagious disease were to emerge, we would all be in danger.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to lead the nation’s health agencies, formally asked the Food and Drug Administration to revoke the authorization of all Covid vaccines during a deadly phase of the pandemic when thousands of Americans were still dying every week.
Mr. Kennedy filed a petition with the F.D.A. in May 2021 demanding that officials rescind authorization for the shots and refrain from approving any Covid vaccine in the future.
Just six months earlier, Mr. Trump had declared the Covid vaccines a miracle. At the time Mr. Kennedy filed the petition, half of American adults were receiving their shots. Schools were reopening and churches were filling.
Estimates had begun to show that the rapid rollout of Covid vaccines had already saved about 140,000 lives in the United States.
The petition was filed on behalf of the nonprofit that Mr. Kennedy founded and led, Children’s Health Defense. It claimed that the risks of the vaccines outweighed the benefits and that the vaccines weren’t necessary because good treatments were available, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which had already been deemedineffective against the virus.
I’m posting this latest missive from Jeff Tiedrich because it made me laugh out loud. I once again apologize for his generous use of words I don’t allow on this site. But he uses the F word to make you laugh and to emphasize his point. The next four years will give him plenty to work with. I subscribe to his blog. You should consider doing so.
He writes:
as another stupid week comes to a close here in America, let’s look back at some of the highlights.
it’s been a hot minute, so let’s check in on America’s new christofascist overlords. here’s newly-elected Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita.
“with your help, together, we will make Indiana a truly free state … where we can raise our children as God intended, without interference by woke schools, doctors or courts … where we are no longer vaxxed or masked.”
sure, absolutely. it’s a well-known fact that Jesus was all about spreading preventable diseases. it’s right there in the Sermon on the Mount: blessed are the science-deniers, for they will choke to death on their own infectious mucus.
I’m no scholar, but I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing in the Bible about vaccinations — but as long as we’re going to adhere to “God’s intentions,” here’s one he’s pretty specific about.
if you wear linen and wool at the same time, you should be fucking slaughtered.
Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.
that’s good old Leviticus 19:19. now here’s Leviticus 19:27.
Ye shall not round off the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.
what do you have to say for yourself, Todd, you infidel? because it looks to me like you’re definitely marring the corners of thy beard.
that’s what I love about these cristofascist hypocrites. they cherry-pick the Bible to prove whatever oppressive notion they want to inflict on the rest of us — but when it comes to actually adhering to the laws that are right there in the Bible, it’s fucking crickets.
Tuesday was Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, and Senate Republicans brought all the props out in support of his candidacy — because nothing says I’m a serious legislator whose issues should be taken seriously more thanmisspelling the word military.
in their own defense, Senate Republicans had been out all night getting hammered with Piss-Drunk Pete, and were too hung over the next morning to notice.
during oral arguments regarding a Texas law requiring age verification in order to access porn sites, Fishin’ Trip Sammy Alito raised a cogent question.
“Justice Alito is asking if websites like Pornhub have ‘essays, modern day Gore Vidal, stuff like that’ like the old Playboy.”
um, who wants to tell him?
I suppose on the one hand, it’s admirable that Steal Stoppin’ Sammy should be so ignorant of the online porn experience that he’d ask such a ludicrous question — but on the other hand: why the fuck are ancient white men allowed to rule on technologies they’re too out-of-touch to understand?
remember the old “the internet is a series of tubes” meme? here’s where it came from: an old white man who had no clue what he was gibbering about.
back in 2006, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was railing against streaming services. he wanted to shut them down. he was convinced they were going to break the internet — because, as he explained it, the internet is “a series of tubes.” here is exactly what Senator Stevens said.
“And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”
these people should not be setting policy affecting millions of Americans. they should be enjoying a nice, hot cup of shut the fuck up in a managed care facility.
oh, and for the record, “I download porn for the articles” is a joke I made twelve years ago.
you’re welcome.
oh frabjous day, the toxic incels are at it again.
pro tip: posting shit like this is proof you’ve failed as a human being.
also, can you fucking idiots get your stories straight?
just two weeks ago, the Space Nazi was extolling the virtues of c-sections — promising that if women would opt out of giving birth the old-fashioned way, all of us could have brains as big as his.
“There are certainly other factors at play, but heavy use of c-sections allows for a larger brain, as brain size has historically been limited by birth canal diameter.”
so which is it, incels?
while writing these daily posts, there’s a line find myself I using over and over: “it’s so easy to solve all the world’s problems when you have no fucking clue what you’re talking about.” the reason I keep repeating it, is because Republicans keep proving it’s true.
here’s failed wig model Rand Paul, explaining how he knows more about water management than all the water managers.
“I see these homes burning and I’m like wow, if they just had a generator and a hose, you start sucking the water out of the The Pacific Ocean. but you can do more than that. you can pump it and put it in cisterns up in the hills a mile or two in. why don’t they take the ocean water and put it in cisterns have a bunch of water ready when a wildfire shows up? once again, bad local government.”
hey everybody, Rand Paul just invented reservoirs. that’s some Nobel Prizewinning stuff right there.
this fucking arrogant asshole, lecturing Los Angeles on why don’t you just have reservoirs?
you nincompoop, Los Angeles has reservoirs. plenty of them. and they were all full when the fires started. that’s not the issue. Rand Paul is conveniently forgetting about the part where LA was dealing with literal hurricanes made out of fire that were too massive and fast-moving to control or contain — by any fire department, anywhere.
talking out of your ass from the floor of the Senate is easy. actually dealing with problems is hard — and Republicans are proving it every day.
hey, it’s still morning as I sit here writing this. but give it time, I guarantee you that some dipshit wingnut is going to do something stupid before the day is over. you can set your watch to it.
everyone is entitled to my own opinion is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
do you have a nomination for This Week in Stupid? email me at jefftiedrich@gmail.com. thanks!
Heather Cox Richardson wrote the following brilliant article about the machinations of the Republican Party in North Carolina. Since winning control of the General Assembly (legislature) in 2010, the state GOP has gerrymandered Congressional districts and state districts to hold onto power. Democrats win statewide races, as they did in 2024, but the legislature strips the powers of the Governor and the state Attorney General.
It’s a shocking story .
She writes:
Almost ten weeks after the 2024 election, North Carolina remains in turmoil from it. Voters in the state elected Donald Trump to the presidency, but they elected Democrat Josh Stein for governor and current Democratic representative Jeff Jackson as attorney general, and they broke the Republicans’ legislative supermajority that permitted them to pass laws over the veto of the current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. They also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the state supreme court.
Republicans refuse to accept the voters’ choice.
In the last days of their supermajority, under the guise of relieving the western part of the state still reeling from the effects of late September’s Hurricane Helene, Republican legislators stripped power from Stein and Jackson. They passed a law, SB 382, to take authority over public safety and the public utilities away from the governor and prohibited the attorney general from taking any position that the legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans, does not support.
The law also radically changes the way the state conducts elections, giving a newly elected Republican state auditor power over the state’s election board and shortening the amount of time available for the counting of votes and for voters to fix issues on flagged ballots.
Outgoing governor Cooper vetoed the bill when it came to his desk, calling it a “sham” and “playing politics,” but the legislature repassed it over his veto. Now he and incoming governor Stein are suing over the law, saying it violates the separation of powers written into North Carolina’s constitution.
There is an important backstory to this power grab. North Carolina is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. In 2010, Republican operatives nationwide launched what they called Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take control of state legislatures across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census.
It worked. In North Carolina, Republicans took control of the legislature for the first time in more than 100 years. They promptly redrew the map of North Carolina’s districts so that the state’s congressional delegation went from a split of 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans in 2010 to a 9–4 split in favor of Republicans in 2012 despite the fact that Democrats won over 80,000 more votes than their Republican opponents. By 2015 that split had increased to 10–3.
The same change showed in the state legislature. North Carolina’s House of Representatives has 120 seats; its Senate has 50 seats. In 2008, Democrats won the House with 55.14% of the vote to the Republicans’ 43.95%. And yet in 2012, with the new maps in place, Republicans won 77 seats to the Democrats’ 43. The North Carolina Senate saw a similar shift. In 2008, Democrats won 51.5% of the vote to the Republicans’ 47.4%, but in 2012, Republicans held 33 seats to the Democrats’ 17.
When they held majorities in both chambers, Democrats passed laws that made it easier to vote, and voter turnout had been increasing with more Black voters than white voters turning out in 2008 and 2012. But in 2012, Republicans used their new power to pass a sweeping new law that made it harder to vote.
When courts found those maps unconstitutional because of racial bias, the state legislature wrote a different map divided, members said, not according to race but according to political partisanship, despite the overlap between the two.
“I’m making clear that our intent is to use the political data we have to our partisan advantage,” said state representative David Lewis, who chaired the redistricting committee. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage of 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Lewis declared: “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
That map, too, skewed representation. Although Democrats won a majority of votes for both the state House and the state Senate in 2018, Republicans held 66 out of 120 seats in the House and 29 of 50 seats in the Senate. Although they had lost the majority of the popular vote, Republican leaders claimed “a clear mandate” to advance their policies.
The fight over those maps went all the way to the Supreme Court, which said in Rucho v. Common Cause that the federal courts could not address partisan gerrymandering. Plaintiffs then sued under the state constitution, and in late 2019 a state appeals court agreed that the maps violated the constitution’s guarantee of free elections. A majority on the state supreme court agreed.
The court drew a new map that resulted in an even split again in the congressional delegation in 2022 (North Carolina picked up an additional representative after the 2020 census). But Republicans in that election won two seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court. In late spring 2022 the new right-wing majority said the state courts had no role in policing gerrymandering. The state legislature drew a new congressional map that snapped back to the old Republican advantage: in 2024, North Carolina sent to Congress 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats.
But they also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the North Carolina Supreme Court, by 734 votes. Her challenger, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has refused to concede, even after the two recounts he requested confirmed her win. He is now focusing on getting election officials to throw out the ballots of 60,000 voters, retroactively changing who can vote in North Carolina.
There has been a fight over whether the case should be heard in federal or state court; Griffin wants it in front of the state supreme court, which has a 5–2 majority of Republicans. Last Tuesday the state supreme court temporarily blocked the state elections board from certifying Riggs’s win while it hears arguments in the case.
As Will Doran of WRAL News explains, Republicans currently have a court majority, but three of the seats currently held by Republicans are on the ballot in 2028. Taking a seat away from Riggs would ensure Democrats could not flip the court, leaving a Republican majority in place for redistricting after the 2030 census.
The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gives North Carolina an “F” for its maps. In states that are severely gerrymandered for the Republicans, politicians worry not about attracting general election voters, but rather about avoiding primaries from their right, pushing the state party to extremes. In December, Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Washington Post noted that Republican leaders in such states are eager to push right-wing policies, with lawmakers in Oklahoma pushing further restrictions on abortion and requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, and those in Arkansas calling for making “vaccine harm” a crime, while Texas is considering a slew of antimigrant laws.
This rightward lurch in Republican-dominated states has national repercussions, as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in December sued New York doctor Margaret Daly Carpenter for violating Texas law by mailing abortion pills into the state. Law professor Mary Ziegler explains that if the case goes forward, Texas will likely win in its own state courts. Ultimately, the question will almost certainly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.
The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful, and today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system. But the political machinations that supported their efforts came from the work of New York politician Martin van Buren, whose time in the White House from 1837 to 1841 ultimately had less effect on the country’s politics than his time as a political leader in New York.
In the early 1800s, van Buren recognized that creating a closed system in the state of New York would preserve the power of his own political machine and that from there he could command the heavy weight of New York’s 36 electoral votes—the next closest state, Pennsylvania, had 28, after which electoral vote counts fell rapidly—to swing national politics in the direction he wanted. Van Buren’s focus was less on reinforcing enslavement for racial dominance—although he came from a family that enslaved its Black neighbors—but on money and power.
Van Buren set up a political machine known as the Albany Regency, building his power by taking over all the state offices and judgeships and by insisting on party unity. He opposed federal funding of internal improvements in the state, recognizing that such improvements would disrupt the existing power structure by opening up new avenues for wealth. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1820, he used his machine to elect Andrew Jackson to the White House on a platform promising “reform” of the federal government calling for economic development, a government the Democrats claimed had fallen into the hands of the elite. Once in power, Jackson used the federal government to benefit the enslavers who dominated the southern states.
That focus on preserving power in the states to keep political and economic power in the hands of a minority is a key element of our current moment. After the 1950s, as federal courts upheld the power of the federal government to regulate business and promote infrastructure projects that took open bids for contracts, they threatened to disrupt the economic power of traditional leaders. While state power reinforces social dominance as a few white men make laws for the majority of women and racial, gender, and religious minorities, it also concentrates economic power in the states, which in turn affects the nation.
When a Republican in charge of state redistricting constructs a map based on his idea that “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” and when a Republican candidate calls for throwing out the votes of 60,000 voters to declare victory in an election he lost, they have abandoned the principles of democracy in favor of a one-party state that will operate in their favor alone.
Diane Ravitch's blog 