In a recent CBS interview Musk said, "I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing." As usual Trump promised great returns, used someone, and then betrayed him leaving a real mess behind. The sickness of gaining endless wealth and the use of smoke and mirrors to distract people from economic issues by cultural ones continues. Put simply, this gang doesn’t want a strong middle class. Until enough people wake up and effectively organize, they will go on with their plans and the devil take the hindmost.
And I see he turned on Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, who basically picked the judges he nominated. He called him a “real ‘sleazebag’” and a “bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America” because the trade court (which Leo had nothing to do with) opposed his tariffs. It’s the usual pattern, when things go wrong, blame somebody else. And the buck never stops here.
I meant Musk. According to Google, he has amassed $429 billion. I think he may have caused even more in damages. That NYT article may be the tip of the iceberg.
Trump is another matter. He has immunity. It takes a few Congressional Republicans to get the ball rolling. His complaints about Leo relate to judges and justices HE appointed. I hope it pisses them off.
I really appreciate all the good information in today's letter. Bringing up Reagan, however, still amazes me as to how so many people voted for a B grade actor with a Bonzo on his back and who traitorously made a deal with the Ayatollah in order to get elected. How soon we all forgot Iran Contra. Didn't he also have full blown dementia for what, the last 2 years of his presidency?
Professor Hartmann, you are a brilliant fountain of knowledge that educates us and makes us wiser. I cannot thank you enough for sharing your knowledge with us. I dint realize how much destruction reagan caused. Followed by every effing republican since. The ahole fits right in because he is full of hate.
I see the current Big Beautiful budget toxicity as the demise (and natural consequence of) of the petit bourgeois middle class of my youth -- mosly "light blue" blood Republicans -- who voted themselves into oblivion.
Whereas Lansing, Thom's hometown, still has hospitals, many others don't have any. And the threat to Medicaid will aggravate and exacerbate the situation and could destroy the economies of many small towns.
The Trump threat includes to turn your dollars into his crypto. You mine sixteen tons and what do you get?
All this reminds me....Once I built a railroad.....
Pure schadenfreude Daniel. Those rural areas, those small towns, the farmers that are going to be hurt and are hurting because of Trump, are the reason his #47...Yet from what I have read, they still have his loyalty.. the culture war, despite the fact that rural America is far far removed from exposure to racial, ethnic and sexual minorities. The less the exposure the more the bigotry.
Mr. Hartmann, when Reagan took office the U.S. was the world's number 1 creditor nation. When he left office after 8 years the U.S. was the world's number 1 debtor nation. From the top of the list to the bottom in 8 years of his policies. Americans had to go into debt to maintain a semblance of their economic way of life. American's savings shrank dramatically in the same 8 years. Today the savings of Americans is so diminished that any shock to our economy would cause a dreadful financial reaction because of that lack of personal savings, as in 2008-2009. Americans have nothing to fall back on. The economy has little financial flexibility in lean times.
When I was a boy credit cards were rare. My dad had an American Express card because he travelled constantly on business. That was one of the few cards available and few people had one. It was a treat for me to occasionally take my friends to a good restaurant and pay for the bill with my father's card, which he would allow me to borrow for that purpose. This was part of middle class life. I had friends who did the same thing with their father's credit card.
Today millions of Americans hold one of the many credit cards available and those people are often continuously in debt to a bank just as a regular part of their life. The cards historically proliferated so Americans could continue their level of consumption by going into debt on a massive, collective scale, as they began to use the cards everywhere.
Many people never fully discharge their credit card debt, from month to month. I count myself as one of the lucky ones who always pay their credit card bill in full each month. The number of us who can do so is, unfortunately shrinking, especially among the elderly. Late fees make matters worse, for the consumer of course; while increasing the bank's profits. Many banks automatically convert an overdraft on a checking account into a high-interest loan. As checking accounts are now being phased out of the system, banks are doing the same thing with credit cards. It breaks my heart when I see some bank advertisement encouraging ordinary working stiffs to "get access to $53, 538" by signing up for that bank's credit card.
You're right, but what he did was expand defense spending.... Consumer demand increased and we didn't have a consumer protection agency. Even before Reagan, bankruptcies boomed. Ralph Nader was all over it.
Apologists say he did it to bankrupt the Soviet Union, which could not keep up......
But he enriched his pals to the detriment of the little guy.
Thom, two points. 1. Its not just income inequality, its capitalism, which is structurally an autocratic econoomic systems. In the early days of the great energy boom and industrialization, capitalism did, for awhile, result in many workers having good incomes. But maximizing profit for shareholders,, not a healthy society, is the goal of a capitalistic economy. Most people in the US engaged in farming, and farmworkers were often,in the north indentured servants, or prisoners working off their punishements. The Constitution was written by educated men, in a country where most citizens worked for themselves. 2. Its not just about money, the rise of capitalism also created an economy where very few people had a chair at the table of decision-making about thier work. The discovery of fossil fuels, which drove the industrialization of the economy, also resulted in the rapid takeover of the economy by capitalism, How else could it be that we contnue to seek a rising GDP, when we are destroying the resources we need to survive as a civilization?
"Serving shareholders’ “best interests” is not the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value. "Shareholder value," for one thing, is a vague objective: No single “shareholder value” can exist, because different shareholders have different values. Some are long-term investors planning to hold stock for years or decades; others are short-term speculators.
"Also, most investors care not only about their portfolios, but also about their jobs, their tax burdens, the products they buy and the air they breathe. Which is to say, companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them."
Thus shareholder derivitive suits.
The concept that speech is money as Thom says is derived from the corruption of a SCOTUS decision which equates corporations to persons under the 14th Amendment. A headnote issued by the court reporter in the 1886 Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. claimed to state the sense of the Court regarding the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as it applies to corporations, without the Court having actually made a decision or issued a written opinion on that point.
First , you are conflating classical economic theory with neo-classical economic theory, both of which are libararies of b.s.. Regardless, classical theory at least acknowledged reality. Second, showing us how it is: that maximizing profits could harm shareholder value (and I presume therefore could be stopped) is not the way the corporate economy works in the real world. Corporations, climate scientists, and various other organizations and individuals have known for 70 years that continuing to mine, drill, and frack for fossil fuels could lead to the destruction of the habitibility of much of the planet, certainly for mammals, and most other complex life forms. I would consider that a fairly clear-cut case of long-term destruction of shareholder value to maiximize short-term profit. In addition, fossil fuel corporations have actively worked to avoid public disclosure of the truth abouit the effects of continuing to "drill, baby, drill', as our president would say. Carbon capture, "green" hydrogen, and quadrupling plastic production are their publicly stated solutions to the problem of climate change. The burning of fossil fuels has continued to increase throughout those 70 years, and no corporation has followed your hypothetical principles of corporate governance, which is noble b.s. Its not the way they do things. Those of us who believe facts and are concerned about Citizens United are well aware that the Supreme Court used a note written by (or ordered written by) the chief justice of a ruling in a case that bore on the corporations as people controversy which corporations have been bringing back to the Supreme Court for 160 years, incorrectly as a Supreme Court decision. My understanding is that the it is not clear that the other justices were even aware that it occurred (the note that said the ruling would not negate the possibility that corporations could have the same rights as human beings generally). It clearly was not a ruling that was voted on by the court, and it was not a comment formally submitted by the chief justice.
Your arrogance is impressive. Nothing personal. Its just business.
Not really. Capirtalism is an economic, not a governmental system.
When the nation was founded there were few corporations. They are state chartered. They are not mentioned in the Consitution, except for the Postal Service. The Federal government had little to do with them until the corrupt Santa Clara decision. The concept of a "trust": was realively new -- developed for Rockefeller....and limited by antitrust laws inder TR and Taft.
Snarky, arrogant comment. Response. You are a hedonistic reptile, spitting your venomous poison at every warm-blooded living animal you can. Enjoy your spiteful, spitting, poison.
Thank, you, Captain my Captain now I know the facts on this too. Happy Rabbits, Rabbits, Rabbits, day! Good luck is on the way! Always steering us in the right direction, Captain my Captain. We need direction more than ever now.
In a recent CBS interview Musk said, "I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing." As usual Trump promised great returns, used someone, and then betrayed him leaving a real mess behind. The sickness of gaining endless wealth and the use of smoke and mirrors to distract people from economic issues by cultural ones continues. Put simply, this gang doesn’t want a strong middle class. Until enough people wake up and effectively organize, they will go on with their plans and the devil take the hindmost.
Makes a great target defendant. Can't use an Aspergers' defense.
And I see he turned on Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, who basically picked the judges he nominated. He called him a “real ‘sleazebag’” and a “bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America” because the trade court (which Leo had nothing to do with) opposed his tariffs. It’s the usual pattern, when things go wrong, blame somebody else. And the buck never stops here.
I meant Musk. According to Google, he has amassed $429 billion. I think he may have caused even more in damages. That NYT article may be the tip of the iceberg.
Trump is another matter. He has immunity. It takes a few Congressional Republicans to get the ball rolling. His complaints about Leo relate to judges and justices HE appointed. I hope it pisses them off.
When Trump insults Leonard Leo he is quite literally biting one of the hands that feed him. Possibly another sign of his developing dementia.
I really appreciate all the good information in today's letter. Bringing up Reagan, however, still amazes me as to how so many people voted for a B grade actor with a Bonzo on his back and who traitorously made a deal with the Ayatollah in order to get elected. How soon we all forgot Iran Contra. Didn't he also have full blown dementia for what, the last 2 years of his presidency?
Professor Hartmann, you are a brilliant fountain of knowledge that educates us and makes us wiser. I cannot thank you enough for sharing your knowledge with us. I dint realize how much destruction reagan caused. Followed by every effing republican since. The ahole fits right in because he is full of hate.
I see the current Big Beautiful budget toxicity as the demise (and natural consequence of) of the petit bourgeois middle class of my youth -- mosly "light blue" blood Republicans -- who voted themselves into oblivion.
Whereas Lansing, Thom's hometown, still has hospitals, many others don't have any. And the threat to Medicaid will aggravate and exacerbate the situation and could destroy the economies of many small towns.
The Trump threat includes to turn your dollars into his crypto. You mine sixteen tons and what do you get?
All this reminds me....Once I built a railroad.....
Pure schadenfreude Daniel. Those rural areas, those small towns, the farmers that are going to be hurt and are hurting because of Trump, are the reason his #47...Yet from what I have read, they still have his loyalty.. the culture war, despite the fact that rural America is far far removed from exposure to racial, ethnic and sexual minorities. The less the exposure the more the bigotry.
Either don' or won' have hope. IMHO the budget may be dead....
This morning I watched David Feldman. Better than Saturday Night Live.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPx_etxYtUYRyrdOszrDA0g
Jake Tapper wasted his time, except to activate the salivary glands of MAGA, writing a book on diminished Biden.
Coward lacks the guts to do the same for Trump.
Fucking weasels, nothing but weasels.
Mr. Hartmann, when Reagan took office the U.S. was the world's number 1 creditor nation. When he left office after 8 years the U.S. was the world's number 1 debtor nation. From the top of the list to the bottom in 8 years of his policies. Americans had to go into debt to maintain a semblance of their economic way of life. American's savings shrank dramatically in the same 8 years. Today the savings of Americans is so diminished that any shock to our economy would cause a dreadful financial reaction because of that lack of personal savings, as in 2008-2009. Americans have nothing to fall back on. The economy has little financial flexibility in lean times.
When I was a boy credit cards were rare. My dad had an American Express card because he travelled constantly on business. That was one of the few cards available and few people had one. It was a treat for me to occasionally take my friends to a good restaurant and pay for the bill with my father's card, which he would allow me to borrow for that purpose. This was part of middle class life. I had friends who did the same thing with their father's credit card.
Today millions of Americans hold one of the many credit cards available and those people are often continuously in debt to a bank just as a regular part of their life. The cards historically proliferated so Americans could continue their level of consumption by going into debt on a massive, collective scale, as they began to use the cards everywhere.
Many people never fully discharge their credit card debt, from month to month. I count myself as one of the lucky ones who always pay their credit card bill in full each month. The number of us who can do so is, unfortunately shrinking, especially among the elderly. Late fees make matters worse, for the consumer of course; while increasing the bank's profits. Many banks automatically convert an overdraft on a checking account into a high-interest loan. As checking accounts are now being phased out of the system, banks are doing the same thing with credit cards. It breaks my heart when I see some bank advertisement encouraging ordinary working stiffs to "get access to $53, 538" by signing up for that bank's credit card.
You're right, but what he did was expand defense spending.... Consumer demand increased and we didn't have a consumer protection agency. Even before Reagan, bankruptcies boomed. Ralph Nader was all over it.
Apologists say he did it to bankrupt the Soviet Union, which could not keep up......
But he enriched his pals to the detriment of the little guy.
Thom, two points. 1. Its not just income inequality, its capitalism, which is structurally an autocratic econoomic systems. In the early days of the great energy boom and industrialization, capitalism did, for awhile, result in many workers having good incomes. But maximizing profit for shareholders,, not a healthy society, is the goal of a capitalistic economy. Most people in the US engaged in farming, and farmworkers were often,in the north indentured servants, or prisoners working off their punishements. The Constitution was written by educated men, in a country where most citizens worked for themselves. 2. Its not just about money, the rise of capitalism also created an economy where very few people had a chair at the table of decision-making about thier work. The discovery of fossil fuels, which drove the industrialization of the economy, also resulted in the rapid takeover of the economy by capitalism, How else could it be that we contnue to seek a rising GDP, when we are destroying the resources we need to survive as a civilization?
This is when I remind people who we are. Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1728 – 4 April 1774) laid it out. Preceded Wealth of Nations.
Politics and economics may be similar, but that whole concept of maximizing capital as law did not occur in US law until after WWI. Mosly bullshit. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits
"Serving shareholders’ “best interests” is not the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value. "Shareholder value," for one thing, is a vague objective: No single “shareholder value” can exist, because different shareholders have different values. Some are long-term investors planning to hold stock for years or decades; others are short-term speculators.
"Also, most investors care not only about their portfolios, but also about their jobs, their tax burdens, the products they buy and the air they breathe. Which is to say, companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them."
Thus shareholder derivitive suits.
The concept that speech is money as Thom says is derived from the corruption of a SCOTUS decision which equates corporations to persons under the 14th Amendment. A headnote issued by the court reporter in the 1886 Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. claimed to state the sense of the Court regarding the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as it applies to corporations, without the Court having actually made a decision or issued a written opinion on that point.
First , you are conflating classical economic theory with neo-classical economic theory, both of which are libararies of b.s.. Regardless, classical theory at least acknowledged reality. Second, showing us how it is: that maximizing profits could harm shareholder value (and I presume therefore could be stopped) is not the way the corporate economy works in the real world. Corporations, climate scientists, and various other organizations and individuals have known for 70 years that continuing to mine, drill, and frack for fossil fuels could lead to the destruction of the habitibility of much of the planet, certainly for mammals, and most other complex life forms. I would consider that a fairly clear-cut case of long-term destruction of shareholder value to maiximize short-term profit. In addition, fossil fuel corporations have actively worked to avoid public disclosure of the truth abouit the effects of continuing to "drill, baby, drill', as our president would say. Carbon capture, "green" hydrogen, and quadrupling plastic production are their publicly stated solutions to the problem of climate change. The burning of fossil fuels has continued to increase throughout those 70 years, and no corporation has followed your hypothetical principles of corporate governance, which is noble b.s. Its not the way they do things. Those of us who believe facts and are concerned about Citizens United are well aware that the Supreme Court used a note written by (or ordered written by) the chief justice of a ruling in a case that bore on the corporations as people controversy which corporations have been bringing back to the Supreme Court for 160 years, incorrectly as a Supreme Court decision. My understanding is that the it is not clear that the other justices were even aware that it occurred (the note that said the ruling would not negate the possibility that corporations could have the same rights as human beings generally). It clearly was not a ruling that was voted on by the court, and it was not a comment formally submitted by the chief justice.
Your arrogance is impressive. Nothing personal. Its just business.
Not really. Capirtalism is an economic, not a governmental system.
When the nation was founded there were few corporations. They are state chartered. They are not mentioned in the Consitution, except for the Postal Service. The Federal government had little to do with them until the corrupt Santa Clara decision. The concept of a "trust": was realively new -- developed for Rockefeller....and limited by antitrust laws inder TR and Taft.
I note your profession. Try the Stellazine.
Snarky, arrogant comment. Response. You are a hedonistic reptile, spitting your venomous poison at every warm-blooded living animal you can. Enjoy your spiteful, spitting, poison.
Thank, you, Captain my Captain now I know the facts on this too. Happy Rabbits, Rabbits, Rabbits, day! Good luck is on the way! Always steering us in the right direction, Captain my Captain. We need direction more than ever now.