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Survival of the Richest
All Are Equal, Except Those Who Aren’t
• February 26, 2019
• 2,600 Words • 134 Comments • Reply
Like a gilded coating that makes the dullest things glitter, today’s thin veneer of political populism covers a grotesque underbelly of growing inequality that’s hiding in plain sight. And this phenomenon of ever more concentrated wealth and power has both Newtonian and Darwinian components to it. In terms of Newton’s first law of motion: those... Read More
Nomi Prins: Building a Great Wall of Wealth
• February 26, 2019
• 400 Words • 10 Comments • Reply
Honestly, the inequality gap in America should stagger the imagination or, on second thought, maybe it shouldn’t, not with the first billionaire in the White House and at least two more threatening to join him in a run for the presidency in 2020. After all, we now live on the planet of the billionaires. In... Read More
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War with China?
It’s Already Under Way
• February 17, 2019
• 3,300 Words • 184 Comments • Reply
In his highly acclaimed 2017 book, Destined for War, Harvard professor Graham Allison assessed the likelihood that the United States and China would one day find themselves at war. Comparing the U.S.-Chinese relationship to great-power rivalries all the way back to the Peloponnesian War of the fifth century BC, he concluded that the future risk... Read More
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Wall Street, Banks, and Angry Citizens
The Inequality Gap on a Planet Growing More Extreme
• December 13, 2018
• 2,400 Words • 91 Comments • Reply
As we head into 2019, leaving the chaos of this year behind, a major question remains unanswered when it comes to the state of Main Street, not just here but across the planet. If the global economy really is booming, as many politicians claim, why are leaders and their parties around the world continuing to... Read More
Nomi Prins: A World That Is the Property of the 1%
• December 13, 2018
• 400 Words • 12 Comments • Reply
This year, I simply couldn’t get one fact out of my head: according to a 2017 report from the Institute for Policy Studies, three billionaires -- Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates -- have amassed as much wealth as the bottom half of American society. That’s 160 million people! (And unlike our president, I... Read More
Nomi Prins: Cooking the Books in the Trump Universe
• September 16, 2018
• 400 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
There’s a clear pattern to Donald Trump’s life. Put simply: he gets away with it. Yes, sometimes (but not usually) he has to pay a penalty, but generally he has a knack for leaving others holding the bag. He’s stiffed untold numbers of people (plumbers, painters, cabinet-makers, waiters, lawyers, bartenders) whom he hired to do... Read More
The Donald in Wonderland
Down the Financial Rabbit Hole With President Trump
• September 16, 2018
• 2,800 Words • Leave a Comment
Once upon a time, there was a little-known energy company called Enron. In its 16-year life, it went from being dubbed America’s most innovative company by Fortune Magazine to being the poster child of American corporate deceit. Using a classic recipe for book-cooking, Enron ended up in bankruptcy with jail time for those involved. Its... Read More
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Beijing’s Bid for Global Power in the Age of Trump
“America First” Versus China’s Strategy of the Four Continents
• August 21, 2018
• 4,100 Words • 353 Comments • Reply
As the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and sixth of Xi Jinping’s draws to a close, the world seems to be witnessing one of those epochal clashes that can change the contours of global power. Just as conflicts between American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George produced a failed peace after... Read More
Nomi Prins: The Disrupter-In-Chief
• August 2, 2018
• 500 Words • 3 Comments • Reply
Two weeks ago, another Trump business went down in flames. Caught in the whirlpool of her father’s presidency, with major department stores and other retail distributors continuing to drop her brand under pressure from consumer boycotts here and in Canada, daughter Ivanka shut down her line of clothes. This should have surprised no one. When... Read More
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The Entropy Wars
Five Financial Uncertainties of 2018 (So Far)
• August 2, 2018
• 2,800 Words • 62 Comments • Reply
Here we are in the middle of the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and if there’s one thing we know by now, it’s that the leader of the free world can create an instant reality-TV show on geopolitical steroids at will. True, he’s not polished in his demeanor, but he has an unerring way... Read More
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National (In)Security
In the United States of Inequality
• July 15, 2018
• 2,600 Words • 80 Comments • Reply
So effectively has the Beltway establishment captured the concept of national security that, for most of us, it automatically conjures up images of terrorist groups, cyber warriors, or “rogue states.” To ward off such foes, the United States maintains a historically unprecedented constellation of military bases abroad and, since 9/11, has waged wars in Afghanistan,... Read More
Rajan Menon: The Wages of Poverty in America
• July 15, 2018
• 400 Words • 6 Comments • Reply
In these years, much attention has been paid to the rise of the national security state and little indeed to what TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon calls the national (in)security state. The Trump administration and a Republican Congress have, of course, given a remarkable gift, a tax “reform” bill, to the already fabulously wealthy and are... Read More
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Credit-Card Wars
Today’s War-Financing Strategies Will Only Increase Inequality
• June 28, 2018
• 2,000 Words • 18 Comments • Reply
In the name of the fight against terrorism, the United States is currently waging “credit-card wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Never before has this country relied so heavily on deficit spending to pay for its conflicts. The consequences are expected to be ruinous for the long-term fiscal health of the U.S., but they... Read More
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Imperial President or Emperor with No Clothes?
How Donald Trump’s Trade Wars Could Lead to a Great Depression
• June 21, 2018
• 2,600 Words • 207 Comments • Reply
Leaders are routinely confronted with philosophical dilemmas. Here’s a classic one for our Trumptopian times: If you make enemies out of your friends and friends out of your enemies, where does that leave you? What does winning (or losing) really look like? Is a world in which walls of every sort encircle America’s borders a... Read More
Nomi Prins: What's the End Game?
• June 21, 2018
• 400 Words • 4 Comments • Reply
In the rush of Trumped-up events, history -- of the last month, week, hour -- repeatedly gets plowed (or tweeted) under. Who can remember what happened so long ago? Perhaps it’s not surprising then that, in the wave of abuse from the president and his men (including economic adviser Larry Kudlow and trade hardliner Peter... Read More
Missing in Action
The Poor in America
• June 17, 2018
• 2,200 Words • Leave a Comment
Imagine this: every year during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 there were nearly four million home foreclosures. In that period, with job losses mounting, nearly 15% of American households were categorized as “food insecure.” To many of those who weren’t foreclosed upon, who didn’t lose their jobs, who weren’t “food insecure,” to the pundits writing... Read More
Beverly Gologorsky: What Does Poverty Feel Like?
• June 17, 2018
• 400 Words • 4 Comments • Reply
When you come from the South Bronx, you have the option of writing about different kinds of characters than those who so often inhabit the universe of fiction we’re used to. That was true of Beverly Gologorsky’s first novel, The Things We Do to Make It Home, which focused on the lost vets of the... Read More
Nomi Prins: The Return of the Great Meltdown?
• April 26, 2018
• 300 Words • Leave a Comment
In her new book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, Nomi Prins remembers how the 9/11 attacks affected her. She was, at the time, working for Goldman Sachs (which has been sending key former employees directly into top government posts ever since, most recently, of course, Steven Mnuchin as Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary). Before... Read More
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Donald Trump and the Next Crash
Making the Fed an Instrument for Disaster
• April 26, 2018
• 2,400 Words • 50 Comments • Reply
Warning: What you are about to read is not about Russia, the 2016 election, or the latest person to depart from the White House in a storm of tweets. It’s the Beltway story hiding in plain sight with trillions of dollars in play and an economy to commandeer. While we’ve been bombarded with a litany... Read More
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Trump’s Financial Arsonists
The Next Financial Crisis -- Not If, But When
• February 1, 2018
• 2,800 Words • 38 Comments • Reply
There’s been lots of fire and fury around Washington lately, including a brief government shutdown. In Donald Trump’s White House, you can hardly keep up with the ongoing brouhahas from North Korea to Robert Mueller’s Russian investigation, while it already feels like ages since the celebratory mood over the vast corporate tax cuts Congress passed... Read More
Nomi Prins: How to Set the Economy on Fire
• February 1, 2018
• 600 Words • 4 Comments • Reply
There’s no way to measure just how cheery this period really is -- not if you’re the CEO of a major company. Just as the World Economic Summit was opening in Davos, Switzerland, and President Donald Trump was flying in to put his mark on the moment, PwS, a global consulting firm, released its annual... Read More
The Norwegian Menace
Should We Build a Wall to Keep Them Out?
• January 23, 2018
• 2,500 Words • 10 Comments • Reply
In the past couple of weeks, thanks to the president’s racist comments about Haiti and African countries he can’t even name -- remember “Nambia”? -- as well as the stamp of approval he awarded future immigrants from Norway, we’ve seen a surprising amount of commentary about that fortunate country. Let me just say: those Norwegians... Read More
Todd Miller: The Market in Walls Is Growing in a Warming World
• December 7, 2017
• 600 Words • 31 Comments • Reply
Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands. The U.S. got clobbered. Three category 4 or 5 Atlantic hurricanes of startling intensity, a record for any single season, whacked the country. Records were also set for rainfall and destruction. Two of those mega-storms, Irma and Maria, their power intensified by waters growing ever warmer thanks to... Read More
The Era of Walls
Greeting Climate-Change Victims With a Man-Made Dystopia
• December 7, 2017
• 3,300 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
When I first talked to the three Honduran men in the train yard in the southern Mexican town of Tenosique, I had no idea that they were climate-change refugees. We were 20 miles from the border with Guatemala at a rail yard where Central American refugees often congregated to try to board La Bestia (“the... Read More
Twenty-First-Century American Populism
Or Putting Your Mouth Where Your Money Isn’t
• November 28, 2017
• 2,900 Words • 4 Comments • Reply
Among the stranger features of the 2016 election campaign was the success of Donald Trump, a creature of globalization, as an America First savior of the white working class. A candidate who amassed billions of dollars by playing globalization for all it was worth -- he manufactured clothes and accessories bearing his name in low-wage... Read More
Nomi Prins: You, Sir, Are No Alexander Hamilton
• November 7, 2017
• 600 Words • 5 Comments • Reply
Who can keep up with the madness of our never-ending Trumpian media moment? Each day is a lesson in the bizarre, in ever-wilder comments, accusations, charges, and claims of every sort from or against The Donald and crew. Each day spotlights subjects you hardly knew were subjects until they burst onto cable news and individual... Read More
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Steven Mnuchin, Foreclosure King of America
Secretary of the Treasury for the .01%
• November 7, 2017
• 3,000 Words • 36 Comments • Reply
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin doesn’t exactly come across as the guy you’d want in your corner in a playground tussle. In the Trump administration, he’s been more like the kid trying to cop favor with the school bully. That, at least, is the role he seems to have taken in the Trump White House. When... Read More
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Dear President Trump: Breaking Up (Banks) Isn’t So Hard to Do
Glass-Steagall or Another Economic Meltdown?
• June 8, 2017
• 3,300 Words • 15 Comments • Reply
Donald, listen, whatever you’ve done so far, whatever you’ve messed up, there’s one thing you could do that would make up for a lot. It would be huge! Terrific! It could change our world for the better in a big-league way! It could save us all from economic disaster! And it isn’t even hard to... Read More
Nomi Prins: In Washington, Is the Glass(-Steagall) Half Empty or Half Full?
• June 8, 2017
• 500 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
Remember when “draining the swamp” was something the Bush administration swore it was going to do in launching its Global War on Terror? Well, as we all know, that global swamp of terror only got muckier in the ensuing years. (Think al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, think ISIS.) Then, last year, that swamp left terror... Read More
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The Empire Expands
Not the American One, But Trump’s
• May 2, 2017
• 2,800 Words • 26 Comments • Reply
President Trump, his children and their spouses, aren’t just using the Oval Office to augment their political legacy or secure future riches. Okay, they certainly are doing that, but that’s not the most useful way to think about what’s happening at the moment. Everything will make more sense if you reimagine the White House as... Read More
Climate Change as Genocide
Inaction Equals Annihilation
• April 20, 2017
• 2,800 Words • 6 Comments • Reply
Not since World War II have more human beings been at risk from disease and starvation than at this very moment. On March 10th, Stephen O’Brien, under secretary-general of the United Nations for humanitarian affairs, informed the Security Council that 20 million people in three African countries -- Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan -- as... Read More
Michael Klare: Do African Famines Presage Global Climate-Change Catastrophe?
• April 20, 2017
• 500 Words • 18 Comments • Reply
There are the terrorists, who get attention out of all proportion to their actual clout, and then there are those with big-time clout -- I think of them as the terrarists -- who get almost no attention at all. Back in May 2013, I came up with that term and here’s how I described those... Read More
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The Goldman Sachs Effect
How a Bank Conquered Washington
• January 29, 2017
• 2,700 Words • 46 Comments • Reply
Irony isn’t a concept with which President Donald J. Trump is familiar. In his Inaugural Address, having nominated the wealthiest cabinet in American history, he proclaimed, “For too long, a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished -- but the people... Read More
John Feffer: A Globalism of the 1%
• January 24, 2017
• 600 Words • 3 Comments • Reply
In a sense, the damage is already done and who can doubt that what follows will be a demolition derby -- with an exception almost too obvious to mention. In the pre-inaugural period, one simple fact of the Trumpian accession stood out boldly: just about every one of his appointees to a non-national-security post was... Read More
Donald Trump Against the World
The Birth of a New Nationalist World Order
• January 24, 2017
• 3,500 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
Donald Trump is a worldly fellow. He travels the globe on his private jet. He’s married to a Slovene and divorced from a Czech. He doesn’t speak any other languages, but hey, he’s an American, so monolingualism is his birthright. His fortune depends in large part on the global economy. He has business interests in... Read More
Drowning the World in Oil
Trump’s Carbon-Obsessed Energy Policy and the Planetary Nightmare to Come
• December 15, 2016
• 2,800 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
Scroll through Donald Trump’s campaign promises or listen to his speeches and you could easily conclude that his energy policy consists of little more than a wish list drawn up by the major fossil fuel companies: lift environmental restrictions on oil and natural gas extraction, build the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, open more... Read More
Michael Klare: Donald Trump's Energy Nostalgia and the Path to Hell
• December 15, 2016
• 600 Words • 11 Comments • Reply
The Trump administration-in-formation is a stew of generals, billionaires, and multimillionaires -- and as in the case of retired Marine General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, the likely new secretary of defense, even the military men seem to have made more than a few bucks in these last years. In retirement, Mattis, for instance, joined the... Read More
Nomi Prins: Too Big to Fail, Hillary-Style
• October 27, 2016
• 500 Words • 9 Comments • Reply
Donald Trump has long campaigned on the promise of running the country the way he's run his businesses. On that basis, we essentially already know what it would mean if he entered the Oval Office and applied his personal business acumen to this nation (and the rest of the world). There's a surprisingly full record... Read More
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Waking Up in Hillary Clinton’s America
Wall Street in the Saddle
• October 27, 2016
• 3,100 Words • 44 Comments • Reply
As this endless election limps toward its last days, while spiraling into a bizarre duel over vote-rigging accusations, a deep sigh is undoubtedly in order. The entire process has been an emotionally draining, frustration-inducing, rage-inflaming spectacle of repellent form over shallow substance. For many, the third debate evoked fatigue. More worrying, there was again no... Read More
Peter Van Buren: Class of 2017 -- So Sorry!
• September 18, 2016
• 600 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
Let’s start with the basics. In an era when the U.S. seemed to have no great power rivals on the horizon, its national security state was expanded to monstrous proportions and given the “right” to commit acts ranging from kidnapping to torture, surveillance of its citizenry toassassination, based on the horrific events of a single... Read More
We, the Plutocrats vs. We, the People
Saving the Soul of Democracy
• September 11, 2016
• 6,100 Words • 3 Comments • Reply
Sixty-six years ago this summer, on my 16th birthday, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town of Marshall where I grew up. It was a good place to be a cub reporter -- small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something every... Read More
Bill Moyers: Money and Power in America
• September 11, 2016
• 600 Words • 7 Comments • Reply
Hope: it’s in short supply in America this year. I was reminded of that recently when I spoke at a kick-off event for the school year hosted by the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. The Institute’s namesake is, of course, Bob Dole, the war hero turned Republican congressman, senator, minority and... Read More
Hooked!
The Unyielding Grip of Fossil Fuels on Global Life
• July 14, 2016
• 2,800 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
Here’s the good news: wind power, solar power, and other renewable forms of energy are expanding far more quickly than anyone expected, ensuring that these systems will provide an ever-increasing share of our future energy supply. According to the most recent projections from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, global... Read More
Michael Klare: Fossil Fuels Forever
• July 14, 2016
• 300 Words • 12 Comments • Reply
Think of them as omens of our age. While global temperatures have been soaring lately -- May was the 13th month in a row to break all-time heat records -- the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just reported, more parochially, that this was the hottest June on record for the lower 48 states. (USA! USA!)... Read More
Michael Klare: The Oil World in Chaos
• May 26, 2016
• 600 Words • 6 Comments • Reply
One small aspect of a trip I took to El Paso, Texas, back in the 1970s remains in my mind: the weather. No, not the weather in El Paso, which is more or less the same much of the year, but the weather on the local television news. I remember watching a weatherman begin his... Read More
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Gimme Shelter (From the Tax Man)
• May 5, 2016
• 3,400 Words • 13 Comments • Reply
There’s a pile of money hiding offshore. It’s true that jobs are also leaving the United States because American companies find it convenient to cut labor costs by moving manufacturing abroad, the economic issue you’re hearingmost about in this election season. But the stunning amount of money that continues to flow across American borders (and... Read More
Debacle at Doha
The Collapse of the Old Oil Order
• April 28, 2016
• 2,600 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
Sunday, April 17th was the designated moment. The world’s leading oil producers were expected to bring fresh discipline to the chaotic petroleum market and spark a return to high prices. Meeting in Doha, the glittering capital of petroleum-rich Qatar, the oil ministers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), along with such key... Read More
Michael Klare: The Coming World of "Peak Oil Demand," Not "Peak Oil"
• April 28, 2016
• 500 Words • 10 Comments • Reply
In a Greater Middle East in which one country after another has been plunged into chaos and possible failed statehood, two rival nations, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have been bedrock exceptions to the rule. Iran, at the moment, remains so, but the Saudi royals, increasingly unnerved, have been steering their country erratically into the region’s... Read More
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The Blue State Model
How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich"
• March 29, 2016
• 2,600 Words • 37 Comments • Reply
[This piece has been adapted from Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (Metropolitan Books).] When you press Democrats on their uninspiring deeds -- their lousy free trade deals, for example, or their flaccid response to Wall Street misbehavior -- when you press them on any... Read More
Thomas Frank: The Inequality Sweepstakes
• March 29, 2016
• 400 Words • 7 Comments • Reply
Reading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, I was reminded of the snapshot that Oxfam offered us early this year: 62 billionaires now have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population, while the richest 1% own more than the other 99% combined.... Read More
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Bragging Rights
Eight Exceptional(ly Dumb) American Achievements of the Twenty-First Century
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Letter to an Unknown Whistleblower
How the Security State’s Mania for Secrecy Will Create You
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And Then There Was One
Delusional Thinking in the Age of the Single Superpower
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