Category: Economic issues

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Trump speaking at a Women’s History Month event. Source: the White House.

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It’s remarkable — and exceedingly scary — how what we’re now reading about the world economy is so similar to what happened during the Covid pandemic. A virus caused the pandemic and the inflation that followed. Trump and his pack of righteous simpletons did it this time.

Apparently they thought that bombing Iran would be a quick and easy win — wham bam, kill the ayatollah, install a puppet, drown out Epstein, make fools of those who are unmanly and timid, and fill the airwaves with footage of smoke over Tehran and Republicans doing victory laps.

Instead:

• Oil and gas prices have jumped.

• It’s planting season, and farmers have to deal with fertilizer shortages, fertilizer prices, and higher costs of diesel fuel.

• Iran’s promise to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed is driving up the cost not just of oil, but of everything that is shipped by sea. As the New York Times writes this morning: “Beyond its effects on oil and gas, the unfolding war in the Middle East is roiling shipping and airfreight, threatening the availability of a vast range of goods.”

• Manufacturers, from electronics to textiles, are not getting the materials they need. We’re nowhere near Covid-level disruptions, but the longer the Middle East is in turmoil, the worse the situation will become.

• If the turmoil continues, grocery prices will start to go up. Grains and oils and everything that contains them will increasingly become a problem. Fresh produce shipped by air is already becoming a problem, as producers watch things rot and buyers either do without or pay more.

• We’re being reminded that we’re just as globalized as we were during Covid. Just-in-time supply chains are just as brittle. Manufacturers will have to deal not only with missing inputs but with falling demand.

• Trump wanted interest rate cuts. Instead he’s got more inflation pressure, more uncertainty, and less room for the Fed to cut.

• The stock market is nervous and is looking awfully toppy.

• The longer this keeps up, the more people will panic over gas and grocery prices.

• The best estimate is that about 2,000 people have been killed so far, including American soldiers and 160 people in an Iranian children’s school. In Lebanon, more than 800,000 people have been evacuated because of the bombing and are now refugees.

The MAGA warriors thought that their little excursion would look good on television, win them votes, and improve their ratings. Instead it is starting to look like Covid with drones and missiles and no Biden to blame. They’ve had their cakewalk. Now they have to eat it.

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Note: ChatGPT 5.4 helped with the research for this post.

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Dick Cheney with some Saudis, 1990. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Paul Krugman’s Substack post this morning is about Dick Cheney’s “drill baby drill” energy report from 2001. Krugman quotes from the report:

By 2020, non-hydropower renewable energy is expected to account for 2.8 percent of total electricity generation.

As of March 2025, 50.8 percent of American electricity came from renewable sources.

Even though George Bush and Dick Cheney were boy scouts compared with Donald Trump and JD Vance, we must never forget that they were wrong about everything, and that the ways in which they were wrong did enormous harm in the world while making the super-rich richer and setting the stage for the 2008 financial crisis. In 2016, the Brookings Institution wrote: “Looking back, one could argue that this ‘oil escalation’ strategy failed on all counts, exacerbating instability in the Middle East and setting the U.S. and the world back a decade and a half in the fight against climate change.”

It was a huge relief when at last we saw the helicopters carrying Bush and Cheney out of Washington for the last time. I’d have thought that with Bush/Cheney we had hit rock bottom. Now we know that the global oligarchy was just getting started. And this time they don’t intend to give up their power because of a mere election.

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Ezra Klein in attention-seeking mode. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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All liberal pundits have an inherent conflict of interest, a constant temptation that tends to lead them astray. Those of us who read the output of the punditry must always be alert to that conflict. It’s that competing for attention may sometimes override their integrity and wisdom. They have to be at least a little provocative.

We’re all familiar with the extreme versions of this on the right. Think Rudy Giuliani, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Lauren Boebert. They have no integrity at all. Their entire schtick is about theatrics for the sake of getting attention. Ezra Klein, certainly, has too much integrity to go that far — though I think it’s true that part of what led formerly serious pundits such as Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald off the right-wing edge of the earth is that they went where the attention is.

Klein’s bid for more attention was his book Abundance, published earlier this year. He apparently calculated, quite correctly, that there was a lot of attention to be had, as a liberal, for arguing that regulation was behind shortages of things such as housing.

Klein got his butt kicked in an interview this morning in the New York Times. It’s Ross Douthat interviewing Lina Kahn, who was head of the Federal Trade Commission under President Biden.

Douthat says: “There’s been a really stark division between people who want to organize liberal thinking around antimonopoly, anti-corporate power thinking, and people, like my colleague Ezra Klein, who have been arguing basically that the Democratic Party doesn’t have a strategy for dealing with the intense thicket of regulatory obstacles to building things and homes and factories in America.”

Khan (who I think is much smarter than Douthat, by the way), says: “Look, we need to talk in a market-by-market way, but if you are offering a diagnosis that is also suspiciously quiet about the role of corporate power, I think that should raise some questions as well.”

Some examples

Kahn is being subtle, and she is being fair. She is saying that Klein is ignoring the many ways that corporate power, in addition to regulation, leads to a shortage of affordable housing. I asked ChatGPT 4o to list some of the ways corporate interests inflate the cost of housing and the cost of renting:

• Large corporate entities — private equity firms, real estate investment trusts (REITs), hedge funds — have increasingly purchased single-family homes and rental properties, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis.

• Large developers and investment firms often buy and hold land (especially in growing urban fringes) without building, waiting for values to rise.

• Corporate developers increasingly construct entire neighborhoods of single-family homes intended solely for rent, not sale.

• A handful of large firms dominate sectors like building materials, cement, and lumber distribution, contributing to inflated construction costs.

• Corporate landlords and real estate lobbies (e.g. National Multifamily Housing Council) invest heavily in lobbying to block rent control, eviction moratoria, and tenant union protections.

• Some large landlords use rental pricing software (e.g. RealPage’s YieldStar) to algorithmically set rent levels and discourage undercutting.

Klein is on probation now

Klein, in my view, has traded a chunk of his credibility in trying to buy more attention. To me, this calls into question his integrity as well as his credibility. This can be a slippery slope, the slope that corrupted Greenwald and Taibbi so badly that only the right-wing mediasphere can stomach them.

This is happening at a time when corporate-owned media are increasingly pressuring their liberal pundits to compromise themselves to increase their appeal to right-wing readers. This is why Paul Krugman left the New York Times. It’s why Lillian Rubin left the Washington Post.

Let’s hope that Klein comes to his senses and doesn’t slip down that slope.

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AI image by GPT-4o. When I asked GPT-4o for an image of a burning Tesla, it said: “I can’t generate or provide images of real-world accidents, injuries, or disasters, including depictions of vehicles like Teslas crashing or catching fire. However, if you’re looking for a fictional or stylized representation for artistic or storytelling purposes — like a sci-fi scene involving a futuristic electric vehicle damaged in some event — I can help with that. Just let me know the context or tone you’re going for!” I replied, “OK, then. Make it fictionalized.” This was the result. It sure looks like a Tesla to me.

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The Atlantic has a chilling (though overly long) piece about the legal war over Ayn Rand’s estate: “The curse of Ayn Rand’s heir.” It refers to Rand as “the queen of selfishness.”

Here are a couple of examples of the vile things she said: “If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.” Also: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”

It’s Ayn Rand whom Elon Musk was parroting when he said (on a Joe Rogan podcast), “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on” … “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

I have not read Ayn Rand’s books, and I never will. But we know that she spent her life developing this primitive, dog-eat-dog philosophy. It became a religion. I wouldn’t hesitate to call it satanic. A cult formed around her. It is easy enough to see what kind of people Rand’s philosophy appeals to: the sociopaths, the narcissists, the brats on the lower end who have nothing but who fantasize about how much they can take, and the predators like Elon Musk on the upper end who use their money and power not only to get more, more, more, but also to try to turn the world into the jungle empire that Ayn Rand and her cult imagine.

True-believing members of this cult, now installed in Washington, are doing everything they can to break the parts of the American government that don’t serve the rich and to use American power to beat the empathy out of American institutions and Western civilization. Even by 2016, they had all too easily succeeded at beating the empathy out of the American “evangelical” church. If you consider everything that Trump and MAGA have done so far and are trying to do, you’ll find that it’s all consistent with Rand’s philosophy.

Who is going to stop them? Some people are optimistic. Their case is that the courts will stand in Trump’s way, and that we will have a free and fair election in 2026 in which Republicans lose control of Congress. I hope they are right.

Maybe, ultimately, American democracy can be saved. But are we prepared for the damage and calamity that are inevitable before we can stop these people from doing what they obviously intend to do?

Our first image of a Trump concentration camp. In the photo, Kristi Noem is wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch. The Trump White House actually staged this photo, as propaganda, and is proud of what it shows. MAGA types cheered. This is what Ayn Rand’s world looks like. To them, it’s beautiful.

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The view from an upstairs window

It’s a bleak time for those of us who live in the world of ideas as much as in the real world. Today, unless gangs of violent and raging liberals egged on by Joe Biden storm the U.S. Capitol and try to prevent the Congress from certifying Trump as the winner of the November election, the Congress will … certify Trump as the winner of the November election. We liberals, creatures of the Enlightenment, can only grit our teeth and watch as democracy and the law take their course.

It’s a stunning piece of work. An elite of highly privileged people who openly hate democracy have used the institutions of democracy to advance their project of dismantling democracy. It takes a lot of lies to do that. It also takes a lot of people (77,303,573, to be precise) ignorant enough and foolish enough to fall for it.

And it also takes a lot of weakened institutions that could have stood in their way but didn’t, with the media, the justice department, and the courts at the top of the list.

I admit that, every day of late, I find myself pacing back and forth, from upstairs window to upstairs window, trying to figure out what is likely to happen in the next four years. But mostly, I think, what happens in the next four years is unpredictable.

We know what they want. We recoil at the horror of their ideas, best described as the Dark Enlightenment. We know that the men who are about to install themselves in the White House very much believe in this Dark Enlightenment and have a playbook.

But what’s unpredictable is what they actually will do, and to what degree the institutions of democracy remain strong enough to stand in their way. Even though they have a theoretical playbook, they have conflicting interests, and they are not nice people. We can expect them to waste a big part of their energy in conflict with each other, as opposed to conflict with the beast — the Enlightenment — that they all hate and want to overthrow. As JD Vance told a podcaster, “There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.”

Vance uses the word “conservatism” to describe the ideas that are threatened by the universities. I’d call it something else. It’s not just people that we’re up against. It’s also ideas, ideas that are very dark and very ugly.

For those of us who live in the world of ideas and thus know some history, these dark ideas, along with their ugly playbook, are things we’ve seen before. They want something that can’t be done without violence and a means of getting a lot of people out of their way. They’ve already used violence, and they’ve already made a lot of threats against people who are in their way. Now we will see how far they will go.

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Source: Wikimedia Commons.

On December 9, Paul Krugman wrote his last column for the New York Times. He had been writing for the Times for almost 25 years. Now more than ever, with four years of Trumpian madness ahead of us, we need intellects like Krugman’s. Krugman is still with us. He has moved to Substack.

His most recent Substack post, from December 26, is Trump’s Great Illusion: Conquest doesn’t make a modern nation — or its leader — great.

Axios reports this morning on a poll which found that two-thirds of Americans say they are limiting their intake of political news. An exception is Fox News, where viewership has increased since election day.

I can only guess what this means, but here’s my guess. Of all the low-information clodpolls who voted for Trump, Fox-watchers are the sickest and also the most highly motivated. There are not as many of them as we sometimes think. During prime time, about 2.5 million people watch Fox News. That’s far less than 1 percent of the American population. They are probably basking in post-election triumphalism.

As for the rest of us, people are exhausted.

But what about us high-information types?

I don’t think it’s just me, because it’s something that shows up constantly (as contempt and, often, as vitriol) in the comments section of political pieces in the New York Times and the Washington Post. We are fed up with MAGA-cowed both-sides “journalism” that treats MAGA depravity and disinformation as something to be taken seriously. We blame this sanewashing and the normalization of depravity and disinformation for helping Trump get back into the White House.

I have no idea why Paul Krugman retired from the New York Times, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was under pressure to both-sidesify his columns. At Substack, we will hear what Krugman is thinking knowing that mid-level editors at the New York Times, nervous for their jobs, aren’t pressuring Krugman in any way.

I am not among the many who have canceled their subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Though their political reporting is not to be trusted, those two newspapers are still the only remaining news organizations in the country with the resources to cover everything else. And, besides, we need to monitor the degree to which the corporate media are capitulating to Trump and Trumpism.

Speaking only for myself, I’m as eager as always to try to figure out what’s going on in the world. But it’s clear that we’re in an era in which we must give far greater weight to independent voices, and far less weight to corporate sources trying to play both sides.

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It’s a complicated world. Fortunately there are experts who have put extraordinary efforts into understanding it. We ordinary folk must rely on those experts. In a sea of propaganda and disinformation, the trick is to find the people who know the terrain and who aren’t trying to deceive us.

Sarah C. Paine is a historian and professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College. Watching this video will require two and a half hours of your time. But I can’t imagine a quicker way to get a high-altitude view of what’s behind the conflicts that are roiling the world today, conflicts that each of us feel in our own lives, no matter how isolated we may think we are.

I have long argued that these conflicts boil down to something simple enough for anyone to understand. This also is the key to understanding the purpose of the disinformation and propaganda with which we all are targeted, disinformation and propaganda that on November 5 swung an American election and put Donald Trump, America’s Putin, back into the White House.

It boils down to this: There are those who believe that democracy and the rule of law are the best way to order societies and to create wealth. And there are those who believe that authoritarianism and corruption are the best way to order societies and to create wealth. The difference is in who gets the wealth and who holds the power — the many, or the few.

The only flaw of this video is that the interviewer is a peacock and a windbag. Sarah Paine’s answers are usually more concise than the rambling, wordy questions. So try to ignore the interviewer as best you can. Sarah Paine, though, won’t waste a second of your time.

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Hat tip to Ken, who referenced this video in a recent Substack article.

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