Opinion

On a per capita basis, California’s gross domestic product is greater than the economies of the US, China, Germany, and Japan. Setting aside per capita comparisons and measuring productivity in hard dollars, California’s state economy ranks fifth in the world, just behind the national economies of those four countries.

Home to 39 million people, California is also the most populous state in the US. Given these facts, California’s fire devastation will ripple through the entire nation, and may be the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history.

Trump’s ethos of expansion came into view this week when his ‘jokes’ about invading Greenland and Panama morphed into serious threats.

Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a founding member of NATO, and long-term US ally. Panama has controlled the Panama Canal for decades under the terms of a 1979 treaty. Speaking to reporters, Trump said he would not rule out the use of military force against either of them. “The Panama Canal is vital to our country,” he announced, and “We need Greenland for national security purposes.”

Donald Trump is in the habit of accusing his enemies of pretty much anything, even eating dogs and cats, in order to draw attention away from his scam. In response, liberals and Democrats have developed a habit of their own. Don’t get distracted, they usually tell us. He’s just playing politics: Keep your eyes peeled on what’s really going on.

However, I think it’s worth it to focus on the accusations themselves. For one thing, they are evidence for drawing conclusions about him. For another, we are setting ourselves up for failure by ignoring them. We take the high road. Trump takes the low road. Guess who wins?

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (wearing a $900,000 watch) announced yesterday morning that across their over-7-billion-user-strong social media empire — Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp — they’ll be dialing back on fact-checking. They’re also preparing to promote more “political” content (among other changes that support those two moves, like no longer filtering out trash-talking women, queer people, or immigrants, and moving what’s left of their Trust & Safety team from liberal California to conservative Texas).

Here’s the problem: Republican politicians rely on lies, distortions, and falsehoods to sell most of their policies and candidates.

Donald Trump isn’t yet in office, but some critics are acting like he’s already done himself in. They point to Tuesday’s press conference, in which he said absolutely insane things. He plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico. He might annex Canada by “economic force.” Just crazy.

Critics suggest behavior like this will lead to his demise.

To get the public to go along with the kind of radical social change that strips people of rights and privileges — and, eventually, their wealth — requires a shock to the political system which can then be exploited by a cynical political leader, his party, and their media allies.

In the second month of his reign, for example, Hitler had his Reichstag Fire, which pushed the German Parliament to pass “emergency” laws expanding his executive power and limiting the reach of parliament and the rights of average people. It ended the rights of assembly, freedom of speech and the press, protections against unlawful search and seizure, and gave him the power to designate persons and organizations as terrorists by decree.

Yesterday, Congress certified the electoral vote count making a billionaire president again, starting after he’s sworn in on January 20th.

Yes, we chose a billionaire. Again. After other billionaires spent billions to convince us to make that choice.

2025: The year American Oligarchy officially begins? I’m an unpaid volunteer member of the board of directors of a nonprofit that’s making use of a multi-million-dollar endowment, and working with their professional investment advisors over the years has given me insight into some of the ways the morbidly rich get richer, faster, and in ways impossible for average people: there are multiple types of investments and investment advisors that are only accessible to people or organizations that can pony up millions or hundreds of millions of dollars at a time.

Thus, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, Elon Musk (for example) went from being worth $25 billion in 2020 to $428 billion a few weeks ago. During that same time, Jeff Bezos (who apparently just censored a Washington Post comic showing him bowing down and handing a bag of money to Trump) reportedly went from $113 billion to $235 billion; similarly, three heirs to the Walmart fortune reportedly went, during the same period, from $161 billion to $317 billion. We see a similar phenomenon with members of Congress using inside information to trade stocks, something that would land you or me in jail.

On Thursday, October 25, 2024, I pronounced The Washington Post to be dead.

That was the day their wormy, billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, crashed through the wall separating news from business — fact from fiction — and had his henchman in the newsroom pull an editorial that was set to run that weekend endorsing the person who didn’t lead an attempted coup, Kamala Harris, for president of the United States of America.

When a radicalized US Army veteran mowed down 15 people in New Orleans, Donald Trump wasted no time pointing his finger, blaming immigrants and a non-existent ‘open border’ for the tragedy:

This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS... The DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors… are incompetent and corrupt, having spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME.... Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen to our Country.

Trump says he’s going to imprison and then deport millions of brown-skinned immigrants. He’s going after the wrong people.

It seems that ever time a Republican goes on one of the national political TV shows, they make sure to get in the lie that “Joe Biden opened the southern border wide open,” or toss in a reference to “Biden’s open borders.”

As we look at the upcoming year, the most urgent question facing us is whether the assault Putin, Orbán, Trump, Musk, and Vance have planned for our political system in 2025 will succeed.

In 1926 Ernest Hemmingway published his novel The Sun Also Rises, which has this extraordinary bit of dialogue about how change happens in most aspects of life — and how governments rise and fall.