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Wages Are Falling. Wealth Is Surging.

For decades now the Republican Party has strived to recreate the Gilded Age while slashing programs that help support the working and middle classes. Despicable House Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled that next year the GOP seeks to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare claiming budget constraints as requiring cuts while ignoring the trillions of dollars of lost tax revenues as a result of huge GOP tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy (think the Felon's "big beautiful bill").  In some ways the GOP effort has exceeded the party's wildest dreams as wealth disparities now exceed those that existed during the actual Gilded Age, albeit with less efforts by the super rich to fund charities, libraries and other things that added to the larger public good.  The Felon promised in the 2024 campaign that he would lower prices on "day one". That, of course has not happened and instead consumer prices have surged and increased energy costs thanks in part to the Felon's war of choice have wiped out incomes for many, many Americans.  Now, returning from France where the husband and I saw royal palaces and incredible chateaux, it's as if the GOP and the billionaire set are as blind as the French aristocracy was to the plight of the many on the eve of the French Revolution.   A  column in the New York Times looks at the struggles of most Americans while the few enjoy obscene levels of wealth:

Two events from the past week help crystallize this strange, contradictory moment for the U.S. economy.

On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the surge in energy prices had wiped out a year and a half of wage gains for the average American worker. On Friday, the public-markets debut of SpaceX made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

That stark juxtaposition helps explain why many Americans, in survey after survey, say they no longer believe the U.S. economy is working for them. A few people are getting fabulously, unimaginably wealthy at the same time that entire generations of families worry they will never be able to afford to buy a house, raise children or enjoy a comfortable retirement.

Inequality is hardly a new feature in America. But the explosion of wealth at the very top is without precedent in U.S. history. At the height of the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, the richest handful of Americans had a net worth equivalent to about 3 percent of the country’s annual economic output, according to data compiled by the French economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez. Today, the fortunes of the same 0.00001 percent — about 20 individuals — make up roughly four times as large a share, equivalent to 12 percent of annual output.

Other economists, using different methodologies, come up with somewhat different numbers. But hardly anyone disputes the basic fact that the wealthiest few have made extraordinary gains in recent years.

The picture for the other 99 percent of Americans is more nuanced. More than half of U.S. households own stocks, either directly or through retirement accounts, meaning they have benefited at least somewhat from the record-setting run-up in share prices. Wealth has risen more slowly for middle-class families than for the rich over the past decade, Federal Reserve data shows, but it has still risen.

For most Americans, however, “wealth” is a somewhat abstract concept, tied up in the house where they live and the retirement accounts they hope to leave untouched for as long as possible. What matters more, day to day, is their income. And the share of national income going to workers has been trending down for decades. It hit a record low in the first quarter of the year, according to data from the Commerce Department.

Now, rising costs are again taking a bite out of workers’ paychecks. The recent jump in energy prices — a result of the war with Iran — pushed the annual inflation rate to a three-year high in May. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, have fallen for three months in a row, erasing all the gains made during President Trump’s first year in office. Measures of consumer sentiment have plummeted as gas prices have risen.

But relief at the pump is not likely to end Americans’ anxiety after years of one economic shock after another. First, the Covid-19 pandemic shut down large parts of the economy and put tens of millions of people out of work, at least temporarily. Then inflation soared to the highest level in four decades. Since then, Americans have endured high interest rates, tariffs and repeated recession scares. . . . . ‘How am I supposed to plan for the future?’” said Elizabeth Wilkins, president of the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

Ms. Stantcheva, the Harvard economist, has found that bouts of high inflation take a long-term toll on consumers’ economic attitudes. That is not only because of the strain on their budgets but also because it seems unfair — the wealthy are able to absorb higher prices relatively easily, while lower-income households struggle. . . . “It goes hand in hand with a big sense of inequity and injustice,” she said.

Now Americans face a new threat in the form of artificial intelligence, which tech industry leaders warn could eliminate whole categories of white-collar work. Many economists are skeptical of those predictions, but polls show that many workers are worried about what the technology will mean for their careers. Voters across the country have also rebelled against plans to build A.I. data centers in their communities, citing their impact on electricity bills, water supplies and air quality.

Given those concerns, it is hardly surprising that the public is uncomfortable with the surge in wealth that has accompanied the A.I. boom. . . . “Many of the tech moguls who are the current superrich have not helped themselves in the conversation by saying, ‘My innovation is going to obliterate your life,’” said Glenn Hubbard, an economist at Columbia Business School who served as a top adviser to President George W. Bush. “It’s not too crazy to imagine a backlash.”

Mr. Hubbard said he did not necessarily see a problem with the existence of billionaires or even trillionaires, as long as people were getting rich through entrepreneurship and innovation rather than through corruption or cronyism. But he said policymakers should take the public attitudes seriously. Congress should consider ways to tax billionaires more effectively, he said, and to ensure that the wealthy don’t exert undue influence on the political system.

Many progressive economists, however, argue that enormous fortunes like Mr. Musk’s inherently distort both the economic and the political systems, giving the superrich too many ways to avoid regulation, taxation and oversight. . . . . No wonder so many Americans feel that the economy is rigged against them, said Heather Boushey, who served as an adviser in the Biden administration and has written a book about the economic impact of inequality.

“Clearly our economy is designed to create a handful of billionaires and a trillionaire,” Ms Boushey said. “It is no longer about creating opportunity and stability for the majority.”

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

The Not-So-Secret Impulse Behind The Felon's Vulgar Birthday Party

The Felon seems to have three main motivations: (i) ever enriching himself, (ii) bolstering his insecure masculinity and appearing "tough", and (iii) satiating his narcistic vanity.  All three, of course inter-relate. His vulgar and unseemly birthday celebration schedule tomorrow which includes a UFC fight match in forecast 94 degree temperatures with forecasts of possible severe thunderstorms likely plays to all three, but particularly his insecure and toxic Masculinity.  Only 16% of Americans support the gladiatorial like event with the Felon playing the role of a modern day Nero or Caligula - which means event a good chunk of the MAGA base finds the event repellant. Meanwhile, for the 39th time the Felon is claiming a deal with Iran is "close" although details are fuzzy and his deal with likely make the one Barack Obama brokered look absolutely amazingly good in comparison. In some ways garishness and unseemliness of the costly event is appropriate for the 80 year old convicted felon who views himself I suspect as America's Caesar even as much of the world loathes and laughs at him. Perhaps the only one truly grinning is Vladimir Putin as he surveys the immense damage the Felon has done to American power and prestige as well as the American economy.  A piece in the New Republic looks at the vulgar event, Here are excerpts:

The president turns 80 on Sunday, and, as with everything pertaining to Donald Trump, his need to place himself at the center of our attention is pathological. He could not just have a dinner at the White House, or a party at Mar-a-Lago. No; he had to build a massive arena on real estate that belongs to the people of the United States to host a vulgar, garish event that is one of the most violent forms of spectacle available to the human race today. Trump will be sitting there like some Roman emperor at the Colosseum watching enslaved men try to stave off lions. The man who wanted law enforcement to shoot protesters “in the knees” is probably bummed he couldn’t just replicate that.

But if you can’t have lions, six UFC fights are the next best thing. . . . I’ve also read that its popularity may have peaked; here’s a 2025 piece by a sportswriter who has followed “combat sports” for 15 years, showing that the number of matches is in steep decline.

But guess what’s strikingly, the event is overwhelmingly not popular? The idea of hosting such fights at the White House, on grounds we tend to associate with understated, democratic solemnity. A poll released Thursday found that just … wait for it … 16 percent of Americans considered it appropriate to hold MMA cage matches on the White House grounds. Meanwhile, 46 percent opposed. Even among Republicans, only 31 percent considered it appropriate. Yet a narrow plurality of Republicans in the survey backed the event, by said 31 percent to 22 percent.

Democrats opposed it by huge margins, 75 to 5 percent. Independents were strongly against it too, by 45 to 11 percent. So once again, it’s Republicans—no; specifically, it’s MAGA Republicans, because they’re undoubtedly that 31 percent—who are way out of step with what real Americans think. Yet they—Trump, his lackeys, and all those Soviet-style propagandists on Fox and Newsmax and One America and elsewhere—will of course spend the entire weekend equating men beating each other to a pulpy mass on hallowed civic ground with “real” patriotism.

It’s sickening. Oh—and it’s also, as we’ve come to expect with Trump, deeply corrupt. First of all, the cost of constructing the arena is around $60 million. Supposedly UFC is picking up that check, but with Trump, who really knows? We taxpayers will undoubtedly be on the hook for something. Meanwhile, the chief sponsor—surprise, surprise!—is Crypto.com.

Out in the real world, Trump is being reduced to impotence by a bunch of dictators who are even more reactionary than he is. He’s about to cut a “deal” with Iran that sounds like it will be little more than an extended ceasefire. It will, many experts fear, compare unfavorably to Barack Obama’s 2015 accord, which Trump tore up in 2018. Trump may achieve what Obama achieved, in terms of getting Iran to agree not to enrich uranium at anywhere close to weapons-grade levels. But as I’ve noted several times, the thing to watch is how much money Trump agrees to transfer to Iran. Which in a sense is fine; it’s Iran’s frozen money. But when Obama agreed to give Iran $1.7 billion, right-wingers screamed that it was capitulation and even treasonous. Iran now wants up to $24 billion. We’ll see how Mr. Art of the Deal fares.

But even if he does strike a decent deal, he’s already done enormous damage to the U.S. economy, the global economy, and American prestige and power projection. To sane observers in the United States and across the world, he looks like exactly what he is: a weak and hollow and insecure man who started a needless and counterproductive war out of nowhere because it looked “tough.”

But inside his little MAGA cocoon on Sunday night, he’ll be a manly man, presiding over watching other manly men spill each other’s blood for the leader’s greater glory. It’s the most undemocratic pageant one could imagine, a fact that—given that scant 16 percent support—the people know in their bones. In fact, this is exactly what fascism is: grotesque, violent spectacle that repulses most of the population but drives the fervent worshippers to a frenzied state and tries to bully its way into being synonymous with what it means to be a real American.

It’s all made worse by the fact that Dear Leader will be embarking upon his ninth decade of life that night, and that six in 10 Americans believe he lacks the mental sharpness to serve as president. So that’s the not-so-secret meaning of this event.

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Republicans Thought They Owned "Values." Not Anymore

For years the Republican Party and the "Christian Right" - which is neither truly Christian or morally right - have claimed to be the protectors of "family values" and "values" in general.  Other than pushing a hate-filled, racist and anti-LGBT Christian nationalist agenda now fully embodied in Project 2025, these claims were never true given the way the GOP constantly pushes a reverse Robin Hood agenda that takes from the poor and gives to the obscenely wealthy as self-styled "Christians" aligned with the GOP utterly ignoring Christ's social gospel message and resembling the Pharisees Christ condemned in the gospels.  Now, with the GOP little more than a cult of the Felon - a man who is the embodiment of virtually everything a true Christian should find disgusting and reject - the claims of supporting "values" are even more empty and filled with hypocrisy.  True, the Christian nationalists and their minions in the GOP continue their same old tired attacks on gays - they are labeling Pride month as "Family and Morality month" implying gays are immoral - blacks and a host of others, given the abject moral bankruptcy of the Felon, Ken Paxton, and much of the every greed driven billionaire class (think Elon Musk), the messaging is hollow and has provided Democrats with an opening to crusade as the true defenders of families, the working class and those who do believe in Christ's social gospel message.  A column in the New York Times looks at this reversal who are the protectors of family and moral values. Here are highlights:

The values voter became a hot political commodity some two decades ago. A catchy rebranding of the religious right, the label was inspired by a controversial exit poll question in the 2004 presidential election finding that 22 percent of voters cast their ballots on the basis of “moral values” and 80 percent of them supported George W. Bush. The assumption took hold that Americans who cared about values were conservatives animated by opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

The 2026 campaign is reminding us that this narrow view of how voters think about values is out of step with a long American tradition that gave rise to moral appeals for improving society as a whole, particularly at times of great economic and technological change. We are witnessing the return of a politics of morality organized around the injustices of the economic system and an array of related problems: the costs of technological change, the unraveling of community, civil rights, and financial and work-balance issues confronting families.

These themes are powerful in the campaigns of Democrats this year across the party’s philosophical spectrum — and it’s about time. . . . Georgetown professor Michael Kazin argues that “the most fruitful strategy for Democrats over time” has involved criticizing the failures of the status quo in the name of an alternative “moral capitalism.”

Moral engagement with the economy, social justice and technological revolution has deep American roots, both secular and religious. At the high tide of the Progressive Era, Walter Rauschenbusch, a Protestant pastor and theologian, gave voice to the social gospel movement in his 1907 book, “Christianity and the Social Crisis.” The civil rights movement of the middle of the 20th century, like the abolitionist movement before it, highlighted the moral urgency of equal rights and linked their defense to religious values.

In 2026 the resurgence of a Christian left is most explicit in James Talarico’s Senate campaign in Texas. Mr. Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, speaks often about his faith and regularly invokes Scripture. He is inspired by Jesus’ overturning of the money changers’ tables outside the temple, described in all four Gospels. The top of his campaign website features Mr. Talarico’s signature line, “It’s time to start flipping tables.”

His campaign against the Republican nominee, Ken Paxton, will provide the starkest contest between the old values debate and the new one. Mr. Paxton has denounced Mr. Talarico’s theology and issued familiar attacks from the religious right, notably around trans issues. The scandalous personal baggage weighing down Mr. Paxton will complicate his talk about morality.

The list of possible 2028 presidential contenders who make religiously inflected arguments for social change is long. It includes both of Georgia’s senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock (Mr. Warnock is a Baptist minister); the former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg; Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania; and, increasingly, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. In September, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky will publish a book about faith, “Go and Do Likewise,” with a title and message inspired by the parable of the good Samaritan.

Mr. Trump’s corruption and self-dealing have provided a new foundation for arguments inflected by appeals to values. The president’s close (and often remunerative) ties to some of the nation’s wealthiest individuals and interests lead naturally to a broader assault on oligarchy — a word popularized from the left by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but now in common use across the party.

The closest thing to a manifesto for the Democrats’ new values offensive is Senator Chris Murphy’s book published last month, “Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America.”

Defeating Mr. Trump is necessary, Mr. Murphy argues, but the president’s rise is also a symptom: “A deeper rot festers in the American soul.” Its elements, he writes, include “a callousness toward our neighbors” and “a me-first selfishness,” along with what he sees as the worship of “false cults,” among them “profit at any cost, consumerism instead of citizenship” and “a blind faith in technology.”

The Democrats’ new moral language suggests an understanding that the backward-looking “again” in Mr. Trump’s MAGA slogan was about more than a return to reactionary approaches to race and immigration. It also spoke to many who yearned for, as Mr. Murphy put it, “a time when Americans felt more connected to community and neighbor.”

Former Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat running for a Senate seat in North Carolina, is one candidate who has translated these larger ideas into the shorthand of the political spot, narrating an ad about his childhood on a family farm. . . . “I grew up working on this farm,” Mr. Cooper says. “Mom was a teacher. Dad, a small-town lawyer and farmer. Fridays were football. Sunday was church. I’m Roy Cooper. Life felt easier back then. I’m running for the Senate to make life easier today, to go after insurance companies ripping you off, to make sure you can retire with dignity and to build an economy that finally values working people.”

Mr. Ossoff, who is the only Democratic senator up for re-election in a state Mr. Trump carried in 2024, called down the judgment of the prophet Amos as Mr. Ossoff addressed “the political and moral crisis that we face in our nation” at Elizabeth Baptist Church in Atlanta last month. “Amos attacked the moral corruption of his time,” he declared, adding that “the people struggled to survive while the wealthy and the powerful lived in luxury and opulence.”

Americans have quarreled over Prohibition, birth control, abortion, sexuality and other aspects of individual behavior. But we have also confronted the corruption of political and economic systems and our responsibilities to put things right.

We are in a transition in how we talk about values because now is a moment to tend to the demands of our common life — and our obligations to one another.

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Prediction: Iran is “Trump’s Vietnam”

Having been in Paris for eight days and then boarding the Queen Mary 2 in Le Havre heading to New York (with stops in Cherbourg and Southampton) along with many French, Danish, British and other European passengers.  One thing is very clear, the Felon is deeply loathed by most in Europe, but the animosity does not extend to individual Americans especially if one is polite and friendly.  The reception is even better if one makes it clear you loathe the Felon as much or more than they do,  We have had particularly interesting conversations with four Danish citizens onboard the ship.  The other things that are notable are (i) that Europe is all in on green energy and in each port we passed through we saw materials for constructing wind turbines, and (ii) Chinese electric cars are making inroads - up close, they are stylish and seem popular.  Of course, in America, the Felon has attacked both green energy development and subsidies to support a robust electric car industry.  The over arching issue, however, is the Felon's disastrous war of choice against Iran and the adverse impact on both the European economies and global economy.  While the Felon has claimed again that a peace deal is close - for the 37th or 38th time - no end to the war is in sight and all such pronouncements do is offer insider trading opportunities for the Felon, his sleazy family, and his billionaire buddies.  A piece at Salon looks at what some experienced government officials see as the parallels between the Felon's misbegotten war and the Vietnam debacle. Here are excerpts:

Leon Panetta has been in politics as long as any of us can remember. . . . and for his final chapter in government served as Barack Obama‘s CIA director in the first term and defense secretary in the second. To say he’s got extensive experience would an understatement.

Panetta has always been a centrist, and I’ve been critical of his “maverick” track record over the years — he’s had a tendency to burnish his own reputation to the detriment of those he works for. But at age 87, from his perch as the head of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, it’s hard to imagine he now thinks he has anything left to prove. So when Panetta appeared on CNN to talk about the Iran war, a subject he is well qualified to discuss, and says that it’s shaping up to be “Trump’s Vietnam,” you can’t help but be a bit startled. If anyone still in public life knows how much freight that phrase carries, it would be him.

That comparison might sound hyperbolic . . . . But Panetta drew the comparison based on the argument that Donald Trump‘s war was an equally terrible miscalculation of the adversary’s resilience and commitment, where we’re dealing with misinformation and propaganda coming from the U.S. administration and an untrustworthy negotiating partner on the other side.

In other words, Americans have once again overestimated their own prowess and underestimated their enemy; our own government is constantly lying about the war, and the Iranians are unlikely to stick to any deal without solid verification, which is going to be difficult to manage at best. To state the obvious, the U.S. under Trump is equally untrustworthy, having torn up the hard-fought nuclear agreement negotiated under Obama, which by all accounts the Iranians had been honoring.

We can add another dimension to this misadventure that makes it much more complicated than Vietnam. That war had a dreadful human cost but it did not threaten the entire world economy the way this one does. The protracted and unresolved dispute over the Strait of Hormuz and the enormous amounts of crude oil that travel through it is pretty dire, and not likely to get better anytime soon.

Fuel prices have spiked around the world since the war started, for obvious reasons. But in fact, they haven’t gone up quite as precipitously as we might have expected, considering that about 25% of the world’s oil supply has been bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz for the past few months. That respite is about to end. Last week, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said that the “buffers and the shock absorbers” in the global petroleum market “are being steadily drawn down, and the ability for the market to absorb this imbalance is drastically diminished today versus where we started.”

According to Politico, industry executives have been privately warning the White House that prices are about to surge dramatically over the next month. but Trump officials claim they haven’t heard a thing about it. In fact, they insist there’s no supply problem and that as soon as the strait is open, fuel prices will go back down to where they were in February and everything will be hunky-dory. Anyone who buys that line is going to be very disappointed. One expert told Politico, “I’ve never seen inventory numbers fall so much so quickly. It is stunning.”

There are other reasons why the prices haven’t risen more sharply, one of which is arguably a huge positive for the long term. As Ryan Cooper writes in The American Prospect, one surprising factor that’s keeping the supply somewhat steady is been green energy. Since much of fossil fuel energy can be replaced by solar power, wind power and battery-powered electric vehicles, Cooper reports, “Chinese exports of solar and EVs are soaring, and even very poor countries are buying in bulk.”

In countries like Egypt, where sunlight is ample and the price of oil has created a massive burden on consumers, renewable energy is an absolute necessity. It’s a godsend that many of these new technologies are available off the shelf right now, and this crisis will likely speed up the energy transition all over the world. Sadly, the U.S. is likely to be left behind, both in consumption and in manufacturing, since our government has perversely placed all its chips on fossil fuels. This week, Trump pledged $700 billion to reinvigorate the dirty, failing coal industry and he’s been halting renewable energy projects left and right, . . . So the U.S. is already well behind the curve, and that’ll get worse if the Iran war turns into the Vietnam-style quagmire that Panetta predicts.

Trump’s antiwar stance was always a joke. But a lot of his followers believed it, and along with the economic stress it’s causing, this “excursion” — in his infelicitous phrase — is creating a new set of calculations for Republicans.

It’s hard to imagine that this GOP will muster the courage to confront Trump directly, but then this war has been massively unpopular from the get-go as well as extremely costly. Everyone who’s been paying attention knows it was a huge mistake made by a president who refused listen to those around him who knew this would probably happen and tried to warn him off, even if many of those people won’t admit it now. We’ve been here before: That sounds an awful lot like Vietnam, which was an epic disaster that the country has never really gotten over.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take 20 years to end this war, but there are no signs that it’s going to be over anytime soon, whether Trump declares victory or not. Panetta says he thinks America will be back fighting Iran again in a few years, no matter what happens now. Donald Trump has started another forever war, which was exactly the thing he promised he would never do.

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