2025 Archives

We Watched Others Fall: Now the Edge Is Beneath Our Feet Putin and Orbán showed us the edge. Trump’s ready to push us over… We watched it happen in Russia. We watched it happen in Hungary. Democracies, once imperfect but alive, were hollowed out from within by strongmen who declared emergencies, rewrote the rules, and convinced enough people that fear was freedom and corruption was strength. We told ourselves it couldn’t happen here. That our guardrails were stronger. That our Constitution was invincible. But now, we stand where they once stood: at the jagged edge of the authoritarian cliff. The wind has picked up, the ground beneath us trembles, and the man leading us forward isn’t walking, he’s charging. Not because he wants to save America, but because he wants to rule it as an absolute autocrat.

As predictably as the sun rises, every Sunday a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows says — without being challenged —that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. The weekend as I’m writing this chapter, it was CNN’s turn. All my life, the media has told us that the GOP is the “party of business.” It may have once been true under Eisenhower when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution. Republicans kill economies; Democrats rescue and build them.

Housing bubbles, financial scams, and political sabotage are converging into a historic, preventable disaster. Republicans may be fixing to crash the economy again — Republican presidents oversaw 10 of the last 11 recessions and the Republican Great Depression — and they're doing it to satisfy the greed of the billionaires they serve. Today, for example, is the day that some of Trump's worst tariffs are supposed to go into effect, and many folks on Wall Street are deciding where they want to hide when the ceiling starts falling in. The horrible jobs report just released hours ago highlights not only how bad things were in July, but they had to "revise downward by 285,000 jobs" previous reports; it looks like Trump's people have been cooking the books.

A 15% tariff on EU-branded drugs will make medicine more expensive, sick people sicker, and Big Pharma richer. Trump, doing this illegally, calls that "winning"... Americans pay more for medications than anybody else in the world. We're the planet's suckers: although everybody on the planet uses, by and large, the same meds, the drugs that carry the highest prices are — you guessed it — ours, the ones sold here in the USA. And Donald Trump is committed to making it even worse. He's barely been back in the White House six months and he's already lobbed a grenade straight into America's medicine cabinet, and he was grinning when he pulled the pin. Not only that, he's doing it in violation of the Constitution, which gives the sole power to impose tariffs to Congress; Trump's claiming emergency powers to override Congress' authority, but there is no emergency. He's simply breaking the law, and nobody is holding him to account. His administration's newly announced 15% tariff on branded European pharmaceuticals — a framework unveiled just days ago — is already sending shock-waves through the healthcare system. And it will jack up the price of lifesaving medicines for millions of Americans.