See also Heather Cox Richardson post about the long US history of plutocrats saying out loud that only they should have the right to determine where the country goes, that capitalists should be allowed to do whatever they want to us, and that the good life doesn't belong to the common people. That's today's Tech Bros and they are getting away with too much.
HCR, Krugman and Zeteo are doing a great job making the NYT and WaPo irrelevant for real news; delegating them to the occasional amusing op-ed, spelling or crossword quiz.
I didn’t renew my annual Washington Post subscription last month. It was set to renew just a few days before Trump’s re-election. I’ve been a subscriber for almost a decade and have seen every kind of right-wing pundit you could imagine, but this feels different. Now, they write as if Trump is permanently looking over their shoulders.
Before this, I couldn’t imagine journalists in a democratic society—protected by all kinds of free speech safeguards—would second-guess themselves this way. Back in the 2000s, when billionaires were acquiring these outlets, I even supported it as a sign of commitment to free markets and the rule of law. Now I’m learning the hard way.
That’s why I believe freedom is indivisible. You cannot build corporate monopolies and still expect freedom to thrive in society as a whole. The Supreme Court will find a to let Trump pursue its tarrifs, applied depending on whomever give him money...
The problem with billionaires and faceless hedge funds gobbling up newspapers is that there's no real pressure to honor the common good for the communities that built them. In the '80s, when newspapers were somehow imagined to be "cash cows," investors snapped them up and attempted to slash and burn while expecting less staff to produce more, and cutting further when that didn't happen. It's been downhill (mostly) ever since. I worked for a mid-sized paper in the 80s and 90s, and many legendary outlets survived in spite of the carnage. But once advertising and readers' habits fled to the internet all bets were off. The ground was then laid for companies without any sense of public service or vision to sell off historic headquarters and anything not nailed to the wall and bleed what was left to death. In a way it's quite remarkable that the few that are left survived. But Bezos, like a snake in the grass, waited to show his true colors. Once the novelty wore off and he realized his billions could be threatened, he turned and ran straight into the arms of Trump.
They have truly become the darkness. Nothing more than people chasing their pittance. I saw lifelong journalists there reverse course from Trump 1 to Trump 2, writing with disclaimers like, “Dear readers, do not think I am praising Trump, but…”. Without Trump, these cowards could have retired as principled journalists, setting an example for future generations. Instead, Trump forced them to end their seemingly excellent careers in disgrace.
That's the problem with "billionaires and faceless hedge funds" in general: they aren't accountable to anyone or anything but their own bottom lines. Which, as we keep seeing, are way down in the depths indeed. Readers of Krugman and other economically savvy Substacks get it, but most USians -- even fairly well-informed ones -- don't realize that economic power can undermine and co-opt the three constitutional branches of government. Thanks to the Republicans, it's managed to do exactly that.
I recommend David Halberstam's The Powers That Be for a look at the media in the 20th century. The current cringing is extreme, but it's not unprecedented.
Yes, I pick and choose. We stopped watching and reading mainstream news on November 5th. They were complicit in the election of Trump by never reporting factually his lies and misrepresentations. They bashed Biden daily calling him senile and out of touch. They never point out the worst mispronunciations of Trump or his word salads. We are never going back. We have found so many more intelligent and factual writers on Substack.
Yes, but they read them through a skeptical lens, looking for bias and outright misinformation that their experience allows them to detect, perhaps, better than most of us.
The original headline was “women” ruined the office, not feminism. They changed it after the backlash. Based on Thiel, Musk, Vance, Yarvin and the assorted podcast bros, the original headline was more reflective of their opinion. They have the mentality of eight year olds. This begs the question why, with their money, they don’t just retreat to a boys-only treehouse compound in a country more to their liking and leave the rest of us alone.
These individual journalists/professors don't have the budget or reach that the NYT, WaP and WSJ have.
Those media institutions are still important. I usually read one or two articles in the NYT and WSJ that I find interesting. Yes, they are bending in the wind, but it's better to be a bit flexible than rigid and break. The still do investigative reporting. The WSJ's graphic on the Epstein e-mails showing who is references the most at a given time was fascinating. The NYT just did a big expose on how Homeland Security has been swamped with chasing down large numbers of immigrants diminishing the work of finding and prosecuting sex traffickers, child pornography, terrorist threats, cycber threats...etc.
I supplement my reading with the BBC (best Gaza coverage) the Economist, Foreign Affairs (which is getting a bit slow as things are changing very fast) and our wonderful local Courier.
Huh? If M Corbett read the "delegating them to the occasional amusing op-ed, spelling or crossword quiz." as reference to and criticism of HCR and Krugman perhaps read the entire sentence again. The occasional opeds and crosswords is in reference to what can be had from the NYT and WaPo.
Respectfully submit that you have your causality wrong. The orange dotard is the symptom, not the cause. Massive inequality is the cause, and actually very easy to fix if we had the will to return to both democracy and capitalism.
Hammer, meet head of nail. The clumping of wealth at the very top has been a multi-decade Republican project that has now succeeded to a dangerous extreme. It underlies angst and anger across the political spectrum, from MAGAts railing at "elites" to progressives gobsmacked by housing, education, and healthcare costs, to fiscal conservatives decrying runaway public debt (40 years of ratcheting down tax revenues), and on and on.
So how did we manage to re-elect (after a four-year hiatus that proved we're talking about a criminal fraudster) a horrible excuse for a human being who personifies the core problems caused by extreme inequality?
Pervasive, coordinated right-wing propaganda in an age of chronic distractions. And the political power that such outsized wealth can purchase with their pocket change.
We re-elected the criminal because the mainstream media bashed Biden daily while never factually reporting the gobble of nonsensical thoughts being spewed by Trump. Putin paid millions to right wing pod casters that repeated lies about the democrats. Fox brainwashed millions 24/7 with more propaganda supporting Trump. The democrats pushed by Biden let Harris run without accepting the fact that no woman will be elected to the presidency of the US with the misogynistic male electorate and women voters. who jealously won't vote for a woman.
He says the really important thing loud and clear. A positive vision on policies shaping a better Future for all of America is required NOT a return to the pre-Trump status quo.
40:17 the democracy can survive. But l will say Sam is that what we need to learn from 2024 is that nobody is going to really be up for saving democracy unless they belleve that if Dermocrats get power, we are going to do radical things to transform our democracy to make it work better for people. And and dont really get it. Like this party when l first got involved talked all the time about getting dark money and billionaire money out of politics. Campaign finance reform, whether that's the right phrase or not, was like a top three issue for Democrats. And somewhere along the way in the last 20 years, it it stopped being a priority for us. And if we don't get back to being a party that talks about how we will unrig our democracy um as a top one, two, three issue for us, people will be less enthusiastic about stepping up for our democracy. lts a long way of saying threat to democracy, lthink, puts us in a that the threat to their pocketbook and the position next fall to win a lot of seats in places like Alaska or Texas or lowa that maybe would have been unthinkable as political possibilities just six nonths ago, Yeah, I forgot that the question was about the Senate. Way to get there.
This is a bit of a mash-up of HCR's and Dr. K's columns. By the oligarch's logic, every child should be treated exactly the same until adulthood - finances, education, recreation, braces (see: HCR Nov. 16), etc. Then the doctrine of everyone should be judged on the basis of their initiative and native intelligence would be fair. The silver-spooners would no longer get a free pass and at the other end of the spectrum, those born with boots on their necks would have an equal chance at success. I'm not holding my breath.
A good book on the political machinations of plutocrats in the last century is "Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism" by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson.
Someone inquired earlier on Matt Stoller's Substack blog's most recent post if he knew of a book about how WW I led to the rise of Mussolini--he replied that he didn't. So I did a net search with key terms, including -AI (the search engines must have caught on to our trying to get away from their use of AI). Results are Revisiting the Rise of Italian Fascism on a website: CEPR.org, An Economic Crisis is the Mother of Fascism on Medium (paywall). Behemoth: The Structure & Practice of National Socialism 1933-44 by Franz Leopold Neumann really has more to do with Nazi Germany...in Hipster Historian's trailer of Babylon Berlin, it was depicted that right-wing governments were militarily working with one another (Hitler testing weaponry on anti-fascists in Franco's Spanish Civil War.....however, then communist Russia was also keeping an eye on what the fascist governments had in the way of military weaponry by supporting the Spanish anti-fascists).
Have you read Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat's book "Strongmen: How they Rise, Why they Succeed, How They Fall"? I got the European version, but the contents are the same. Mussolini is in that book, and she talks about what led to Mussolini's rise to power in her book.
I'm certainy no expert on post war Italy, but I believe that one major factor there and certainly in Germany was the return and poor integration of former soldiers (see the Friekorps) There were wandering bands of soldiers who had bonded at the front and could find no place in their return. This was especially a factor with Hitler and other Nazi's (Goering.)
Stalin didn't just support Spanish anti-fascists, he killed any who weren't communist.
On the other hand, it was the neoliberals who pointed out that running huge fiscal deficits would eventually destroy us. NeoKeynesians always claimed the party could go on forever, and the more the better.
The Keynesian stance has always been that you pay off your deficits when times are good, so you have a buffer when times are not. NeoKeynesians have never said that the party can go on forever. We just had the Neoliberals that failed to have that fiscal discipline, and ate the seed corn rather than build up buffers for bad times in good (by failing to sufficiently tax the gains in boom times, because they got WAY too cozy with the billionaire class).
I think you are mistaken. Professor Krugman himself frequently wrote that fiscal deficits and debt don't matter. I believe he held this view as recently as 2021, when he supported Biden's C)VID stimulus plan, I think he was certain that it would not cause inflation. Now, he seems to be starting to change his tune.
Again, both parties share guilt of generating deficits. That has nothing to do with what economists are saying.
not sure that's exactly what he said. I believe the caveat was... "while $ is very cheap, there's needed infrastructure and we're not near full employment". I'm not going to argue whether the stimulus plans were the best move, but he has shown many times that the US economy bounced back much faster (people paying taxes instead of receiving gov't benefits) while inflation was comparable to Europe.
Huge fiscal stimulus will always make an economy bounce back faster. That's definitional. It's also money printing and will always cause inflation. Unaccountably, Prof. Krugman did not understand that. Neither did 99% of economists. But I did.
and he clearly currently takes the view that the spending in 2021 was necessary at the time, and that it worked, and that the American economy recovered very well from the short-term inflation it caused.
Charles, there is no on the other hand with Neoliberals when they are the greedy people who got us those deficits, and they are also tied to an inevitable outcome of fascism by Monbiot.
On the other hand, it was Republicans AND Democrats who got us these deficits. Economics is very different from politics. I'll admit I had to look up "Monbiot." He appears to be a typical left wing conspiracy spinner but I'll check out his work just in case he's got something interesting to say. P.S. I know plenty of greedy liberals too. They also tend to be hypocrites.
Well, in my opinion that's an existential problem. I wish someone could come up with a workable solution. I wish I could. But I'm skeptical that human behavior will change sufficiently to reverse it. The change will have to be technological. I wish we were spending trillions of dollars on that rather than gargantuan AI data centers, which make the problem much worse and will ultimately leave us with hundreds of abandoned boxes filled with obsolete silicon.
The great historian Will Durant stated the in every country and time period there will be people who are lucky, intelligent, ruthless, hard working who will accrue wealth in such abundance that the state will always need to find a way to redistribute that wealth. (Heather’s articles are wonderful!)
Between that and Project 2025's dogmatic religious, Nazi insanity, we're going to have to fight pretty hard to stay a Constitutional Democratic Republic. What Heritage, MAGA, neo-Nazis and billionaires want to install, impose and inflict, as HCR outlined for us this morning, is not what the Framers had in mind - well, except for the landowning, white male voting part.
Wealth’s most effective counter offensive came in the form of a memo written in 1971 to the Chamber of Commerce by (soon to be Justice) Lewis Powell. One, little doubt, prompted by the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965), and consumer activists like Ralph Nader. The memo was, “a blueprint for conservative business interest to retake America.” Read — the power of wealth is at risk.
Just as there are millions of relatively poor white nationalists who are willing to vote for policies that work against their economic interests while pretending to cater to their cultural biases, there is a world of college-educated people nowhere near the top 1% who are nonetheless sufficiently impressed with their own good fortunes to imagine themselves as in alignment with the aristocratic oligarchs pulling the strings.
Thanks Paul for your great article. We should let President Macron of France know about this. Macron is still afraid to raise taxes for the very rich, as he thinks they will flee his country. He should read your article, too!
However, in France the very rich reduce their taxes by using holding companies to lower them. It seems that as long as people get taxed for income and not investments they will be able to finagle their way around paying their "fair" share of taxes.
I retired and moved to Germany because I have citizenship in Germany as well and my husband is German. It surprises people how much thing like groceries and toiletries are here. Housing is cheaper too in all but the biggest cities like Berlin, München and Hamburg. If you don't own a car transportation here is cheaper, and many Expats do not own a car because they are not really needed to get around. Some have car sharing when they want a car for an occasional trip. I tend to take the train to other cities in Germany, and even to other places in Europe unless I go with my daughter, who is in university and usually has a limited time for vacation. Then we might fly somewhere.
If they all followed up on it that would be around 26 million women leaving the country. Too many for any one country to absorb. So, I think the article I wrote last November is still relevant. It is called "A 'Plan B' for Catastrophe."
thanks for sharing. It's always good to hear the perspectives of folks living in Europe. I'm very surprised about your comments on housing, though I suspect the majority of Germans live in those 3 cities so perhaps Germans on average do pay a lot for housing. Here in the states the 3 huge cost issues are health care, child care and secondary education. The cost of housing is an issue, but over time almost everyone 'wins' as values keep increasing. I sort of laugh when people think about the cost of toilet paper- it's rounding error. I'm spending more on health care for 2 people this year than all food, entertainment, insurance and 2 cars. And the insurance still has high deductible.
The majority of Germans do not live in those 3 cities, or things would be really different here. No more Autos! There are around 84 million Germans. Berlin has 3.5-3.8 mil. Hamburg has just under 1.8 mil, and München has just under 1.6 mil. That is under 8 million. So less than 1/10th of the population.
Cost of health care alone was not my worry, but the fact that the country keeps discussing getting rid of or privatizing medicare. It is too unstable. I want to be somewhere where I can pretty much assume that the population is not going to be allowing that. Health care which includes a fee for long term care costs are rising here too. However, I just feel it is more stable, and no filing bankruptcy.
Germans have a lot of reasonably priced insurances for almost everything, from work insurance--that will pay if you cannot work, to personal liability insurance, to legal insurance that might not pay the full price for your lawyer if you go for one that charges more than the standard fee, but will pay for up to the standard fee. There are all sorts of other insurances depending on your lifestyle and needs.
My friend's daughter was recently visiting her dad in the US, and she said she paid 3 times more for groceries then she does here. I had to have someone come to my house each day for a few weeks to bandage my leg, and I had to pay 10% of the cost of that, but my share of the fee was 52€.
I hope you can figure it out. If you move to France it could blaze a path for your kids to move too. It starts with them visiting you and then seeing how you live, and then figuring out how they could live there too. I am watching friend of ours figure out how to move to Germany. She has studied here before and he came from Germany, but they cannot find jobs that compare to their incomes in the US. No one here earns like that of the American I know, and yet, they all have comfortable lives which includes traveling when they have breaks, or on the weekend to visit friends in other cities, which people do easily here because of the trains, and going out when they want to. It just so much less stressful a life here. We are not worrying about gun crime when we go somewhere at night. There are areas where I would not go, but in the US, there is no where that I would go.
When Trump came back and the TechBros and 2025 folks started destroying the country with all haste, I was desperate to leave. I'm resigned now. If my kids don't leave, then I won't. I'm encouraging them to look abroad, visit other places, but it's hard to move, even if you feel like you're a Jew in Nazi Germany.
If I was young, I'd move, but I'm not.
We live in interesting times. I'm curious as to how things will play out. This isn't a short term thing and if the US does recover as a nation there will need to be many Constitutional changes, codifying in law all of those good governance things (independence of the Justice Department) that were norms but are now ignored.
Notice that Trump's taking the tariffs off of some grocery items? People will remember that he deliberately raised them. He will take the heat, deserved or not, for rising prices. As the economy slows and falters, little maga will remember. Whether they support good governance, or an even worse demagogue, remains to be seen.
Folks who don't have to show up at an office often do flee high tax places. I live in VT- no income tax NH is next door. I know many wealthy folks who moved 10 miles east. Many wealthy NYers bought places in FL during the pandemic. I have no evidence but suspect many spend 150 days in NY still (you need to spend >180 outside NY to not pay NYS income tax). The issue isn't so much tax rates as the option to avoid paying it that drives people to relocate partially or fully.
The only problem is that when Mitterand was elected president the first time, all the money really did leave France, notably for New York. The uber wealthy French are already tax residents in Belgium or Luxembourg.
Ahhh but Macron has something of a legitimate concern. Come a French election, the 5th largest city in which to campaign (in terms of number of French voters) is London. While some French businesspeople might want to move to Francophone Belgium or Luxembourg, they have the same problem as Griffin’s move to Miami. There just isn’t the concentration of international business there. Whereas Macron is legitimately worried about London.
The answer to your question of when will people stop listening to whining plutocrats is now.
New Yorkers overwhelmingly decided to ignore their threats (promises?) to leave the city if Mamdani won the election. New Yorkers, in particular, are fabulously adept at identifying blowhards. We all have mirrors, after all.
The rest of the nation is starting to catch on. People have had it with the excesses, lies and preposterous greed of our wealthiest citizens. The pendulum is swinging back to democracy.
Thanks to voices like yours, we as a nation are finding the courage again to stand up for ourselves.
Interesting as well that in Jacob Silverman's Gilded Rage (recent guest on this Substack) he discusses attempts by tech bros to build their version of Galt's Gulch and failed ... seems one of the hitches is bringing in minions.
You need someone to clean the offices, cook the meals, watch the 14 children of a particular plutocrat. That can't be done by the "Masters of the Universe."
Someone pointed out that while Trump calls Mamdani a communist lunatic he also calls Xi, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, a very smart guy.
I was so grateful when Ken Griffin left Illinois. He fought against us having a graduated tax, and now Pritzker does not try this again. It is unfortunate.
As for Mamdani, I was reading a Bulwark article that shared his campaign video strategy and it made him even more likable to me.
I am here in Germany, where people see Mamdani being elected as hopeful, at least in my Green-Left-Social Democratic city.
As the Guardian pointed out, Europeans can appreciate Mamdani because the concerns he wants to address sounds like politics in Europe and what people want.
Still, it would have been good for NYC if some billionaires moved out. They don't pay their share of taxes and they vote against the common good.
Let them leave. We’ve been hearing these threats for years in the blue states. Lots of high value employees might say ‘no thanks’ to working in Texas, or Florida, and good luck with your RTO mandates.
As Jordan Klepper pointed out on the Daily Show, one million New Yorkers fleeing communist New York City would open up one million apartments. Housing crisis solved, even before Mamdani takes office. This would make him the most effective NYC mayor since Fiorello LaGuardia.
Probably not 1 million apartments as some of those would be families etc. But they would be high end apartments. Of course, you do have to live in FL if you move there. Schools are a real problem because the public schools are terrible (same in TX) and there are not enough independent school spots.
People who overpaid for the lesser apartments will move into the swankier apartments. The lesser apartments then become available. Everything is connected.
I do agree with that to a certain extent. My son pays 2600 for a fifth floor walk-up in a great neighborhood but he wouldn't upgrade to a 4000 a month place. He could go as high as 3300 or so, but all you would get for that might be an elevator, and/or a dishwasher. Hudson Yards starts at 6k. It depends on what you make.
The Tech bros also seem to be embracing Eugenics. It aligns with their worldview and feeling of ineptness in actually solving any real problems. Instead, they want to build their own cities, cull the existing herd, toy with human extinction, and go to an inhabitable planet that would take 6 months to get to and a person would have to live inside forever. Now, they are promoting AI which seems to be alot of hype....all of this for summaries/Cliff Notes? Why on earth aren't we calling them out for their insanity instead of praising their "genius" and throwing them more money?
"go to an inhabitable planet that would take 6 months to get to and a person would have to live inside forever."
Recommended reading for anyone thinking about this: A City on Mars by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_on_Mars). They go over what it would take to build a "2nd earth" to include physical, medical, industrial, political, biological, legal, technical, etc. Bottom line - not going to happen (as a 2nd earth independent of the Earth) for at least a century.
They said the same thing about the millionaires tax here in Massachusetts and we actually gained some more millionaires. And the revenue has helped pay for education and transport and other services. So whine away, plutocrats. Then pay your fair share.
I repeat: the characterization of Mamdani as a dangerous radical is further evidence of how weirdly exceptional the US has become. In Canada and most of the world he would be a normal, slightly left of centre politician!
First of all, I assume you do not live in Europe and have no idea of the detailed platforms of the various coalition parties in power. Mamdani is quite far from centre right seen through a Western European lens. Much closer to say, the left flank of labour in the UK or various social democratic parties.
This tracks with the WSJ's recent piece about billionaires retreating to Miami for more "privacy." Miami is not a place for business. It is a place for billionaires to hide their hedonism. Always has been. Always will.
In Germany right now, for just €59 a month, you can use public transport all across the country. It’s a wonderful place to live, with excellent healthcare for everyone and affordable organic food, including fresh vegetables and fruits.
See also Heather Cox Richardson post about the long US history of plutocrats saying out loud that only they should have the right to determine where the country goes, that capitalists should be allowed to do whatever they want to us, and that the good life doesn't belong to the common people. That's today's Tech Bros and they are getting away with too much.
HCR, Krugman and Zeteo are doing a great job making the NYT and WaPo irrelevant for real news; delegating them to the occasional amusing op-ed, spelling or crossword quiz.
The times, they are a changin'.
I didn’t renew my annual Washington Post subscription last month. It was set to renew just a few days before Trump’s re-election. I’ve been a subscriber for almost a decade and have seen every kind of right-wing pundit you could imagine, but this feels different. Now, they write as if Trump is permanently looking over their shoulders.
Before this, I couldn’t imagine journalists in a democratic society—protected by all kinds of free speech safeguards—would second-guess themselves this way. Back in the 2000s, when billionaires were acquiring these outlets, I even supported it as a sign of commitment to free markets and the rule of law. Now I’m learning the hard way.
That’s why I believe freedom is indivisible. You cannot build corporate monopolies and still expect freedom to thrive in society as a whole. The Supreme Court will find a to let Trump pursue its tarrifs, applied depending on whomever give him money...
They actually were correct with the byline "democracy dies in darkness", only now they are the darkness
That byline has now become the mission statement.
The problem with billionaires and faceless hedge funds gobbling up newspapers is that there's no real pressure to honor the common good for the communities that built them. In the '80s, when newspapers were somehow imagined to be "cash cows," investors snapped them up and attempted to slash and burn while expecting less staff to produce more, and cutting further when that didn't happen. It's been downhill (mostly) ever since. I worked for a mid-sized paper in the 80s and 90s, and many legendary outlets survived in spite of the carnage. But once advertising and readers' habits fled to the internet all bets were off. The ground was then laid for companies without any sense of public service or vision to sell off historic headquarters and anything not nailed to the wall and bleed what was left to death. In a way it's quite remarkable that the few that are left survived. But Bezos, like a snake in the grass, waited to show his true colors. Once the novelty wore off and he realized his billions could be threatened, he turned and ran straight into the arms of Trump.
They have truly become the darkness. Nothing more than people chasing their pittance. I saw lifelong journalists there reverse course from Trump 1 to Trump 2, writing with disclaimers like, “Dear readers, do not think I am praising Trump, but…”. Without Trump, these cowards could have retired as principled journalists, setting an example for future generations. Instead, Trump forced them to end their seemingly excellent careers in disgrace.
That's the problem with "billionaires and faceless hedge funds" in general: they aren't accountable to anyone or anything but their own bottom lines. Which, as we keep seeing, are way down in the depths indeed. Readers of Krugman and other economically savvy Substacks get it, but most USians -- even fairly well-informed ones -- don't realize that economic power can undermine and co-opt the three constitutional branches of government. Thanks to the Republicans, it's managed to do exactly that.
I recommend David Halberstam's The Powers That Be for a look at the media in the 20th century. The current cringing is extreme, but it's not unprecedented.
Thanks
Thanks for the tip on Zeteo. I’m a subscriber now.
It can get expensive…
Yes, I pick and choose. We stopped watching and reading mainstream news on November 5th. They were complicit in the election of Trump by never reporting factually his lies and misrepresentations. They bashed Biden daily calling him senile and out of touch. They never point out the worst mispronunciations of Trump or his word salads. We are never going back. We have found so many more intelligent and factual writers on Substack.
Can’t argue with that.
So true. Now if we could just get those 77 million“mudsills“ to turn off Fox and subscribe to a few of these Substacks, we might make progress.
They read those NYT and WaPo (and others) to get their material.
Yes, but they read them through a skeptical lens, looking for bias and outright misinformation that their experience allows them to detect, perhaps, better than most of us.
Well, I have the NY Times food section - and ignore all of their entreaties to renew my subscription to the actual paper at very low low costs....
I get the games! So glad since the piece about feminism ruining the workplace. Which a satiric piece in the Atlantic skewered in a hilarious way!
The original headline was “women” ruined the office, not feminism. They changed it after the backlash. Based on Thiel, Musk, Vance, Yarvin and the assorted podcast bros, the original headline was more reflective of their opinion. They have the mentality of eight year olds. This begs the question why, with their money, they don’t just retreat to a boys-only treehouse compound in a country more to their liking and leave the rest of us alone.
Yes, I was aware of the headline change but decided to just write about this part today. Thanks for your reply
These individual journalists/professors don't have the budget or reach that the NYT, WaP and WSJ have.
Those media institutions are still important. I usually read one or two articles in the NYT and WSJ that I find interesting. Yes, they are bending in the wind, but it's better to be a bit flexible than rigid and break. The still do investigative reporting. The WSJ's graphic on the Epstein e-mails showing who is references the most at a given time was fascinating. The NYT just did a big expose on how Homeland Security has been swamped with chasing down large numbers of immigrants diminishing the work of finding and prosecuting sex traffickers, child pornography, terrorist threats, cycber threats...etc.
I supplement my reading with the BBC (best Gaza coverage) the Economist, Foreign Affairs (which is getting a bit slow as things are changing very fast) and our wonderful local Courier.
NYT has been for decades the newspaper for writing three day old fish and nothing else!
I amazed you subscribe to HCR and Krugman; why? If you are so sure they are wrong?
Huh? If M Corbett read the "delegating them to the occasional amusing op-ed, spelling or crossword quiz." as reference to and criticism of HCR and Krugman perhaps read the entire sentence again. The occasional opeds and crosswords is in reference to what can be had from the NYT and WaPo.
indeed - I can't recall any puzzles (besides trying to understand MAGA's appeal) in HCR or Krugman. I go elsewhere for my daily Wordle.
try radio -- real news and a good way to escape MSM >
– KHOI 89.1 FM (Ames, Iowa)
– KICI.LP 105.3 FM (Iowa City, Iowa)
– WHIV 102.3 FM (New Orleans, Louisiana)
– KPIP-LP, 94.7 FM (Fayette, Missouri)
– KCEI 90.1 FM (Taos, New Mexico)
– KRFP 90.3 FM (Moscow, Idaho)
– WGRN 94.1 FM (Columbus, Ohio)
-- WJLQ 99.7 FM (Muskegon, Michigan)
I only use the Times for the puzzles now.
Like you, the only reasons I subscribe to the NYT anymore are the crossword and the occasional op ed
The robber barons are back during the orange dotard's lawless banana republic regime.
Respectfully submit that you have your causality wrong. The orange dotard is the symptom, not the cause. Massive inequality is the cause, and actually very easy to fix if we had the will to return to both democracy and capitalism.
Hammer, meet head of nail. The clumping of wealth at the very top has been a multi-decade Republican project that has now succeeded to a dangerous extreme. It underlies angst and anger across the political spectrum, from MAGAts railing at "elites" to progressives gobsmacked by housing, education, and healthcare costs, to fiscal conservatives decrying runaway public debt (40 years of ratcheting down tax revenues), and on and on.
So how did we manage to re-elect (after a four-year hiatus that proved we're talking about a criminal fraudster) a horrible excuse for a human being who personifies the core problems caused by extreme inequality?
Pervasive, coordinated right-wing propaganda in an age of chronic distractions. And the political power that such outsized wealth can purchase with their pocket change.
We re-elected the criminal because the mainstream media bashed Biden daily while never factually reporting the gobble of nonsensical thoughts being spewed by Trump. Putin paid millions to right wing pod casters that repeated lies about the democrats. Fox brainwashed millions 24/7 with more propaganda supporting Trump. The democrats pushed by Biden let Harris run without accepting the fact that no woman will be elected to the presidency of the US with the misogynistic male electorate and women voters. who jealously won't vote for a woman.
I agree.
Interview Senator Chris Murphy (D).
He says the really important thing loud and clear. A positive vision on policies shaping a better Future for all of America is required NOT a return to the pre-Trump status quo.
Transcript at 40:17
Full interview with Texas Tribune here :
https://youtu.be/MtE_1B1HgCg
40:17 the democracy can survive. But l will say Sam is that what we need to learn from 2024 is that nobody is going to really be up for saving democracy unless they belleve that if Dermocrats get power, we are going to do radical things to transform our democracy to make it work better for people. And and dont really get it. Like this party when l first got involved talked all the time about getting dark money and billionaire money out of politics. Campaign finance reform, whether that's the right phrase or not, was like a top three issue for Democrats. And somewhere along the way in the last 20 years, it it stopped being a priority for us. And if we don't get back to being a party that talks about how we will unrig our democracy um as a top one, two, three issue for us, people will be less enthusiastic about stepping up for our democracy. lts a long way of saying threat to democracy, lthink, puts us in a that the threat to their pocketbook and the position next fall to win a lot of seats in places like Alaska or Texas or lowa that maybe would have been unthinkable as political possibilities just six nonths ago, Yeah, I forgot that the question was about the Senate. Way to get there.
This is a bit of a mash-up of HCR's and Dr. K's columns. By the oligarch's logic, every child should be treated exactly the same until adulthood - finances, education, recreation, braces (see: HCR Nov. 16), etc. Then the doctrine of everyone should be judged on the basis of their initiative and native intelligence would be fair. The silver-spooners would no longer get a free pass and at the other end of the spectrum, those born with boots on their necks would have an equal chance at success. I'm not holding my breath.
A good book on the political machinations of plutocrats in the last century is "Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism" by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson.
Short. Sharp. Excellent.
Someone inquired earlier on Matt Stoller's Substack blog's most recent post if he knew of a book about how WW I led to the rise of Mussolini--he replied that he didn't. So I did a net search with key terms, including -AI (the search engines must have caught on to our trying to get away from their use of AI). Results are Revisiting the Rise of Italian Fascism on a website: CEPR.org, An Economic Crisis is the Mother of Fascism on Medium (paywall). Behemoth: The Structure & Practice of National Socialism 1933-44 by Franz Leopold Neumann really has more to do with Nazi Germany...in Hipster Historian's trailer of Babylon Berlin, it was depicted that right-wing governments were militarily working with one another (Hitler testing weaponry on anti-fascists in Franco's Spanish Civil War.....however, then communist Russia was also keeping an eye on what the fascist governments had in the way of military weaponry by supporting the Spanish anti-fascists).
Have you read Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat's book "Strongmen: How they Rise, Why they Succeed, How They Fall"? I got the European version, but the contents are the same. Mussolini is in that book, and she talks about what led to Mussolini's rise to power in her book.
I'm certainy no expert on post war Italy, but I believe that one major factor there and certainly in Germany was the return and poor integration of former soldiers (see the Friekorps) There were wandering bands of soldiers who had bonded at the front and could find no place in their return. This was especially a factor with Hitler and other Nazi's (Goering.)
Stalin didn't just support Spanish anti-fascists, he killed any who weren't communist.
On the other hand, it was the neoliberals who pointed out that running huge fiscal deficits would eventually destroy us. NeoKeynesians always claimed the party could go on forever, and the more the better.
The Keynesian stance has always been that you pay off your deficits when times are good, so you have a buffer when times are not. NeoKeynesians have never said that the party can go on forever. We just had the Neoliberals that failed to have that fiscal discipline, and ate the seed corn rather than build up buffers for bad times in good (by failing to sufficiently tax the gains in boom times, because they got WAY too cozy with the billionaire class).
I think you are mistaken. Professor Krugman himself frequently wrote that fiscal deficits and debt don't matter. I believe he held this view as recently as 2021, when he supported Biden's C)VID stimulus plan, I think he was certain that it would not cause inflation. Now, he seems to be starting to change his tune.
Again, both parties share guilt of generating deficits. That has nothing to do with what economists are saying.
not sure that's exactly what he said. I believe the caveat was... "while $ is very cheap, there's needed infrastructure and we're not near full employment". I'm not going to argue whether the stimulus plans were the best move, but he has shown many times that the US economy bounced back much faster (people paying taxes instead of receiving gov't benefits) while inflation was comparable to Europe.
Huge fiscal stimulus will always make an economy bounce back faster. That's definitional. It's also money printing and will always cause inflation. Unaccountably, Prof. Krugman did not understand that. Neither did 99% of economists. But I did.
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/aint-nothin-but-a-party
I think Prof K argued that deficits don’t matter in the context of % gains in GDP that are larger than the % interest on the national debt.
and he clearly currently takes the view that the spending in 2021 was necessary at the time, and that it worked, and that the American economy recovered very well from the short-term inflation it caused.
Charles, there is no on the other hand with Neoliberals when they are the greedy people who got us those deficits, and they are also tied to an inevitable outcome of fascism by Monbiot.
On the other hand, it was Republicans AND Democrats who got us these deficits. Economics is very different from politics. I'll admit I had to look up "Monbiot." He appears to be a typical left wing conspiracy spinner but I'll check out his work just in case he's got something interesting to say. P.S. I know plenty of greedy liberals too. They also tend to be hypocrites.
Monbiot is strong on climate change.
Well, in my opinion that's an existential problem. I wish someone could come up with a workable solution. I wish I could. But I'm skeptical that human behavior will change sufficiently to reverse it. The change will have to be technological. I wish we were spending trillions of dollars on that rather than gargantuan AI data centers, which make the problem much worse and will ultimately leave us with hundreds of abandoned boxes filled with obsolete silicon.
Are we ruined yet?
The great historian Will Durant stated the in every country and time period there will be people who are lucky, intelligent, ruthless, hard working who will accrue wealth in such abundance that the state will always need to find a way to redistribute that wealth. (Heather’s articles are wonderful!)
Just read Curtis Yarvin. But take some Pepto Bismol first.
And some Tylenol.
Too bad oxy will kill you.
Klonopin. It requires something longer lasting.
Between that and Project 2025's dogmatic religious, Nazi insanity, we're going to have to fight pretty hard to stay a Constitutional Democratic Republic. What Heritage, MAGA, neo-Nazis and billionaires want to install, impose and inflict, as HCR outlined for us this morning, is not what the Framers had in mind - well, except for the landowning, white male voting part.
Wealth’s most effective counter offensive came in the form of a memo written in 1971 to the Chamber of Commerce by (soon to be Justice) Lewis Powell. One, little doubt, prompted by the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965), and consumer activists like Ralph Nader. The memo was, “a blueprint for conservative business interest to retake America.” Read — the power of wealth is at risk.
https://kenmelvin.substack.com/p/the-people-vs-wealth
please post the link to it
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-16-2025-190
Just as there are millions of relatively poor white nationalists who are willing to vote for policies that work against their economic interests while pretending to cater to their cultural biases, there is a world of college-educated people nowhere near the top 1% who are nonetheless sufficiently impressed with their own good fortunes to imagine themselves as in alignment with the aristocratic oligarchs pulling the strings.
Definitely.
A conversation between Paul Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson would be amazing!
Tech bros see the world divided into:
Bros
Breeders
Serfs
Vermin
Thanks Paul for your great article. We should let President Macron of France know about this. Macron is still afraid to raise taxes for the very rich, as he thinks they will flee his country. He should read your article, too!
However, in France the very rich reduce their taxes by using holding companies to lower them. It seems that as long as people get taxed for income and not investments they will be able to finagle their way around paying their "fair" share of taxes.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2023/06/06/france-s-ultra-rich-pay-less-tax-new-study-confirms_6029311_5.html
Here we call them "shell" companies. Mostly Bermuda post office box "headquarters".
You are taxed on investment income in France.
American retirees are packing up already and dusting off their American passports & ready to move out of France. 🇫🇷
Yes. And John Howard just wrote a piece on being tax wise when you do this. Here is a link. https://open.substack.com/pub/leavingamerica/p/when-is-the-best-time-of-year-to?r=f0qfn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I retired and moved to Germany because I have citizenship in Germany as well and my husband is German. It surprises people how much thing like groceries and toiletries are here. Housing is cheaper too in all but the biggest cities like Berlin, München and Hamburg. If you don't own a car transportation here is cheaper, and many Expats do not own a car because they are not really needed to get around. Some have car sharing when they want a car for an occasional trip. I tend to take the train to other cities in Germany, and even to other places in Europe unless I go with my daughter, who is in university and usually has a limited time for vacation. Then we might fly somewhere.
This article came out on Gallup about how 40% of women 15-44 wanted to leave the USA. https://news.gallup.com/poll/697382/record-numbers-younger-women-leave.aspx
If they all followed up on it that would be around 26 million women leaving the country. Too many for any one country to absorb. So, I think the article I wrote last November is still relevant. It is called "A 'Plan B' for Catastrophe."
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/a-plan-b-for-catastrophe?r=f0qfn
thanks for sharing. It's always good to hear the perspectives of folks living in Europe. I'm very surprised about your comments on housing, though I suspect the majority of Germans live in those 3 cities so perhaps Germans on average do pay a lot for housing. Here in the states the 3 huge cost issues are health care, child care and secondary education. The cost of housing is an issue, but over time almost everyone 'wins' as values keep increasing. I sort of laugh when people think about the cost of toilet paper- it's rounding error. I'm spending more on health care for 2 people this year than all food, entertainment, insurance and 2 cars. And the insurance still has high deductible.
The majority of Germans do not live in those 3 cities, or things would be really different here. No more Autos! There are around 84 million Germans. Berlin has 3.5-3.8 mil. Hamburg has just under 1.8 mil, and München has just under 1.6 mil. That is under 8 million. So less than 1/10th of the population.
Cost of health care alone was not my worry, but the fact that the country keeps discussing getting rid of or privatizing medicare. It is too unstable. I want to be somewhere where I can pretty much assume that the population is not going to be allowing that. Health care which includes a fee for long term care costs are rising here too. However, I just feel it is more stable, and no filing bankruptcy.
Germans have a lot of reasonably priced insurances for almost everything, from work insurance--that will pay if you cannot work, to personal liability insurance, to legal insurance that might not pay the full price for your lawyer if you go for one that charges more than the standard fee, but will pay for up to the standard fee. There are all sorts of other insurances depending on your lifestyle and needs.
My friend's daughter was recently visiting her dad in the US, and she said she paid 3 times more for groceries then she does here. I had to have someone come to my house each day for a few weeks to bandage my leg, and I had to pay 10% of the cost of that, but my share of the fee was 52€.
I'm an American retiree who would love to move "to" France if I didn't have kids here in the US who can't move....
I hope you can figure it out. If you move to France it could blaze a path for your kids to move too. It starts with them visiting you and then seeing how you live, and then figuring out how they could live there too. I am watching friend of ours figure out how to move to Germany. She has studied here before and he came from Germany, but they cannot find jobs that compare to their incomes in the US. No one here earns like that of the American I know, and yet, they all have comfortable lives which includes traveling when they have breaks, or on the weekend to visit friends in other cities, which people do easily here because of the trains, and going out when they want to. It just so much less stressful a life here. We are not worrying about gun crime when we go somewhere at night. There are areas where I would not go, but in the US, there is no where that I would go.
When Trump came back and the TechBros and 2025 folks started destroying the country with all haste, I was desperate to leave. I'm resigned now. If my kids don't leave, then I won't. I'm encouraging them to look abroad, visit other places, but it's hard to move, even if you feel like you're a Jew in Nazi Germany.
If I was young, I'd move, but I'm not.
We live in interesting times. I'm curious as to how things will play out. This isn't a short term thing and if the US does recover as a nation there will need to be many Constitutional changes, codifying in law all of those good governance things (independence of the Justice Department) that were norms but are now ignored.
Notice that Trump's taking the tariffs off of some grocery items? People will remember that he deliberately raised them. He will take the heat, deserved or not, for rising prices. As the economy slows and falters, little maga will remember. Whether they support good governance, or an even worse demagogue, remains to be seen.
Why do you want to move to France? What do you know about it?
Have you lived there before?
Not France for us, if we could. The kids and grandkids can't, so we're staying. We think they're going to need us if all this (gestures) keeps up.
Name two. Other than yourself and spouse.
Being a tax lawyer and in a family office where I see everything, that game is ending. CNDC and new surveillance rules will changing that.
Carol, how is it ending?
Is CNDC supposed to be obvious?
Google didn't really help, even with additional terms of "tax" or "surveillance".
It appears to mean something in Colorado, Canadia and Argentina. Elsewhere too.
Folks who don't have to show up at an office often do flee high tax places. I live in VT- no income tax NH is next door. I know many wealthy folks who moved 10 miles east. Many wealthy NYers bought places in FL during the pandemic. I have no evidence but suspect many spend 150 days in NY still (you need to spend >180 outside NY to not pay NYS income tax). The issue isn't so much tax rates as the option to avoid paying it that drives people to relocate partially or fully.
The only problem is that when Mitterand was elected president the first time, all the money really did leave France, notably for New York. The uber wealthy French are already tax residents in Belgium or Luxembourg.
Ahhh but Macron has something of a legitimate concern. Come a French election, the 5th largest city in which to campaign (in terms of number of French voters) is London. While some French businesspeople might want to move to Francophone Belgium or Luxembourg, they have the same problem as Griffin’s move to Miami. There just isn’t the concentration of international business there. Whereas Macron is legitimately worried about London.
Same logic. Paris is not about to tank because Tech Bros have to pay more for their pieds à terre.
The answer to your question of when will people stop listening to whining plutocrats is now.
New Yorkers overwhelmingly decided to ignore their threats (promises?) to leave the city if Mamdani won the election. New Yorkers, in particular, are fabulously adept at identifying blowhards. We all have mirrors, after all.
The rest of the nation is starting to catch on. People have had it with the excesses, lies and preposterous greed of our wealthiest citizens. The pendulum is swinging back to democracy.
Thanks to voices like yours, we as a nation are finding the courage again to stand up for ourselves.
Have a wonderful week with your European friends.
Interesting as well that in Jacob Silverman's Gilded Rage (recent guest on this Substack) he discusses attempts by tech bros to build their version of Galt's Gulch and failed ... seems one of the hitches is bringing in minions.
You need someone to clean the offices, cook the meals, watch the 14 children of a particular plutocrat. That can't be done by the "Masters of the Universe."
Someone pointed out that while Trump calls Mamdani a communist lunatic he also calls Xi, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, a very smart guy.
That’s because the right side of his mouth doesn’t know what the left side of his mouth is saying.
Or, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the right side of his mouth doesn't know what the far right side of his mouth is saying.
I had no idea that I was paraphrasing Reagan because I’ve never been a fan—not even when he was all Hollywood.
He can get money out of Xi. Mamdani doesn't have any, so he's ignored.
I was so grateful when Ken Griffin left Illinois. He fought against us having a graduated tax, and now Pritzker does not try this again. It is unfortunate.
As for Mamdani, I was reading a Bulwark article that shared his campaign video strategy and it made him even more likable to me.
I am here in Germany, where people see Mamdani being elected as hopeful, at least in my Green-Left-Social Democratic city.
As the Guardian pointed out, Europeans can appreciate Mamdani because the concerns he wants to address sounds like politics in Europe and what people want.
Still, it would have been good for NYC if some billionaires moved out. They don't pay their share of taxes and they vote against the common good.
they are greedy sociopaths most of them
You say most, I say ALL!
Trumpy and his ultra wealthy are epic whiners !
Sign for next demo:
Trumps Whines
Like a Minor
Plutocrat!
Snowflakes!
Let them leave. We’ve been hearing these threats for years in the blue states. Lots of high value employees might say ‘no thanks’ to working in Texas, or Florida, and good luck with your RTO mandates.
I agree. Definitely not safe to be pregnant in Texas with their abortion laws. So if you can’t raise a family???
As Jordan Klepper pointed out on the Daily Show, one million New Yorkers fleeing communist New York City would open up one million apartments. Housing crisis solved, even before Mamdani takes office. This would make him the most effective NYC mayor since Fiorello LaGuardia.
Probably not 1 million apartments as some of those would be families etc. But they would be high end apartments. Of course, you do have to live in FL if you move there. Schools are a real problem because the public schools are terrible (same in TX) and there are not enough independent school spots.
People who overpaid for the lesser apartments will move into the swankier apartments. The lesser apartments then become available. Everything is connected.
I do agree with that to a certain extent. My son pays 2600 for a fifth floor walk-up in a great neighborhood but he wouldn't upgrade to a 4000 a month place. He could go as high as 3300 or so, but all you would get for that might be an elevator, and/or a dishwasher. Hudson Yards starts at 6k. It depends on what you make.
The Tech bros also seem to be embracing Eugenics. It aligns with their worldview and feeling of ineptness in actually solving any real problems. Instead, they want to build their own cities, cull the existing herd, toy with human extinction, and go to an inhabitable planet that would take 6 months to get to and a person would have to live inside forever. Now, they are promoting AI which seems to be alot of hype....all of this for summaries/Cliff Notes? Why on earth aren't we calling them out for their insanity instead of praising their "genius" and throwing them more money?
"go to an inhabitable planet that would take 6 months to get to and a person would have to live inside forever."
Recommended reading for anyone thinking about this: A City on Mars by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_on_Mars). They go over what it would take to build a "2nd earth" to include physical, medical, industrial, political, biological, legal, technical, etc. Bottom line - not going to happen (as a 2nd earth independent of the Earth) for at least a century.
They said the same thing about the millionaires tax here in Massachusetts and we actually gained some more millionaires. And the revenue has helped pay for education and transport and other services. So whine away, plutocrats. Then pay your fair share.
I have never been so glad to live in MA despite its flaws.
I’m never living anywhere else.
I think it was the great philosopher Yogi Berra who said about New York, "No one lives there anymore because it's too crowded."
I repeat: the characterization of Mamdani as a dangerous radical is further evidence of how weirdly exceptional the US has become. In Canada and most of the world he would be a normal, slightly left of centre politician!
in europe, he would be center right
https://platform.dsausa.org/communities/
First of all, I assume you do not live in Europe and have no idea of the detailed platforms of the various coalition parties in power. Mamdani is quite far from centre right seen through a Western European lens. Much closer to say, the left flank of labour in the UK or various social democratic parties.
Platform of the Democratic Socialists of America. They’re not centre. I live in Canada.
https://platform.dsausa.org/communities/
To be fair, that million leaving a city would do a lot of Mamdani's work to create affordable housing. :P
I doubt that....there are plenty of overstuffed pockets in NYC to tap but Mamdani will have to rely on the Gov to tax these plutocrats
Good one!
This tracks with the WSJ's recent piece about billionaires retreating to Miami for more "privacy." Miami is not a place for business. It is a place for billionaires to hide their hedonism. Always has been. Always will.
In Germany right now, for just €59 a month, you can use public transport all across the country. It’s a wonderful place to live, with excellent healthcare for everyone and affordable organic food, including fresh vegetables and fruits.
In Luxembourg we have free public transportation all across the whole country.
Perhaps Mamdani should lay on an ethnic food canteen for the National Guard if the mango Mussolini sends them to New York.
Not a bad idea for any of the states feeling the National Guard pressure.
At least it will give the Guard something to do.
Besides litter patrol and landscaping duties on taxpayer's money.