ANS -- Connect Trump’s lousy economy to his corrupt regime.

This is a post from Robert Reich suggesting what the Dems need to do and say to win in November.  So you agree with what he says?

--Kim

rt Reich's Post

Robert Reich 

13 hours ago ·

Friends,

Here’s a memo to Democrats as they begin campaigning in earnest for control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections. (Please send to any candidates you care about.)

***

TO: Democratic candidates in the 2026 midterm elections

RE: Connect Trump’s lousy economy to his corrupt regime.

The purpose of this memo is to help you shape your midterm message around the crisis of affordability and Trump Republican corruption. I urge you to present these two issues as aspects of the same underlying problem: The economy is lousy for most Americans because Trump Republicans are enabling super-rich oligarchs to siphon off most of its gains while exerting increasing control over it. Their — and Trump’s — self-dealing is undermining trust and confidence in the U.S. economic system.

1. Republicans in the House and Senate have put oligarchs in charge of America.

House and Senate Republicans have allowed Trump’s war and his tariffs to drive up prices and Trump’s corruption to undermine faith in the economy. They’ve allowed Trump to gild his White House in gold leaf, plan a giant Arc de Trump, throw lavish parties, and build a Billionaire’s Ballroom — at a time when most Americans can’t afford gas or groceries.

They raided Medicaid to pay for Trump’s giant tax cut, whose benefits are going mostly to the rich. Legislative efforts advanced by House Republicans and signed into law have targeted up to $2 trillion in federal health care cuts, forcing millions of Americans off Medicaid rolls to pay for these tax reductions.

They refused to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. This is causing average premiums to more than double and has already pushed 1.2 million people off coverage because they can’t afford it. Coverage losses are mounting as many who initially selected a plan or who were automatically reenrolled have to drop coverage.

Big Tech oligarchs — centi-billionaires Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, and other robber barons — paid for Trump’s 2024 election, his inauguration, and his ballroom and are major donors to Senate and House Republicans. They’ve shown up at Trump’s inauguration, White House dinners, and official visits to China.

In return, these oligarchs have been allowed to monopolize and drive up the prices we pay and silence Trump critics. Bezos’s Amazon, for example, won’t allow any seller on the site to post lower prices on any other site, and Bezos won’t allow his Washington Post editorial page to criticize Trump. Larry and David Ellison have bought CBS and sanitized “60 Minutes” of Trump criticism and effectively canceled Stephen Colbert. After buying X (formerly Twitter), Musk turned it into a pro-Trump voice box.

The AI oligarchs have bribed Trump and congressional Republicans to allow unfettered and unregulated growth of AI and its data centers, threatening millions of jobs and posing potential dangers to human life itself.

The crypto oligarchs have bribed Trump and congressional Republicans to allow them to create the world’s largest Ponzi scheme — which is enriching Trump and his family while providing a means for criminals to hide insider trades, child trafficking, and drug deals.

The Big Oil and aerospace oligarchs have bribed congressional Republicans to allow Trump to go to war in Iran, resulting in massive profits for Big Oil — while the rest of us pay $1.50 more per gallon of gas — and giant profits for giant military contractors.

This war spending has also contributed to higher inflation, which the rest of us pay for in higher mortgage rates and higher rates on car loans and education loans. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate has surged to over 6.6 percent, reaching its highest level in nearly nine months, driven by rising Treasury yields, higher oil prices, and broader economic inflation concerns stemming from the war in Iran. The major beneficiaries of these higher rates — who pocket the higher payments we have to make — are the biggest banks and super-rich who make the loans.

Oligarchs have also bribed Trump and congressional Republicans to (1) get no-bid contracts, (2) deregulate Wall Street, (3) roll back environmental safeguards and worker safety, and (4) get massive subsidies for their corporations — all of which have made them even richer while making life for the rest of us more dangerous and more costly.

2. Republicans have created crony capitalism on steroids.

The system is an extreme form of crony capitalism. Congressional Republicans have rubber-stamped Trump’s corruption or pretended not to notice it, while average Americans get shafted and billionaires do better than ever. Corporate profits have never been higher. But wages aren’t keeping up with prices, which means most people are getting poorer, and the confidence of average consumers has never been lower.

Trump and his family’s corruption are leading the pack, setting an example for the rest of the American oligarchy.

Congressional Republicans have been silent in the face of bribes paid to Trump and his family. They didn’t raise a word about Jeff Bezos’s outright bribe to Melania Trump of $40 million for her film rights and $35 million to promote it, for a total of $75 million, when the best-case scenario is that Bezos’s Amazon earns $10 million on it.

But that’s just one example of the bribes coming Trump’s way. Qatar gifted Trump a Boeing 747 luxury jet valued at $400 million. Days before Trump’s second inauguration, the United Arab Emirates’ “Spy Sheikh” secretly bought 49 percent of the Trump family’s crypto firm. Months later, the administration handed over America’s most sensitive AI chip technology to the United Arab Emirates despite national security concerns. The Trump cryptocurrency business has rolled out a stablecoin called (USD1) pegged to the U.S. dollar. The stablecoin was utilized in a subsequent $2 billion investment into the cryptocurrency exchange Binance by MGX, an Abu Dhabi government fund. And so on.

Congressional Republicans have been silent as Trump has executed thousands of stock trades, many in individual stocks affected by his regime’s policies. And congressional Republicans won’t pass legislation to stop the regime from profiting off its policies. They’ve been silent as Trump praises and boosts corporations (as he did Apple on March 11) on the same day he invests in them and won’t hold Trump or the regime to any ethical standards.

Congressional Republicans have been silent in the face of the Trump family’s looting of America. In his first year of his second term of office, Trump increased his net worth by almost $4 billion to $7.8 billion by the end of 2025, according to TIME. Forbes estimated that in 2025, Eric Trump became 10 times richer, ending up worth some $400 million, and Donald Trump Jr. became six times richer, ending up worth some $300 million. Even Barron Trump, while still in college, reportedly ended up worth some $150 million in 2025.

Congressional Republicans have also been silent about Trump’s “agreement” with the Justice Department to create a $1.8 billion slush fund and immunity to all future IRS audits of Trump and his family. The agreement was based on Trump’s withdrawal of his absurd $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for damages (after a contractor leaked Trump’s tax information during his first term), when the federal judge to which the case was assigned indicated she’d throw it out because Trump can’t be in charge of both sides of the lawsuit.

So Trump’s own Justice Department then offered him — not as an official legal “settlement” but as a kind of consolation prize — a $1.8 billion slush fund, enabling him to compensate anyone he feels has been unfairly convicted. Likely beneficiaries would include fat-cat contributors to the Republican Party, as well as those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The Justice Department has also offered Trump and his family immunity from any IRS audit ever again — allowing him and his family to permanently bury any and all illegal bribes they’ve received.

This is outright robbery from the citizens of the United States. Billions of dollars that Trump and his family have pocketed — from foreign governments, billionaires, and corporate supplicants — are now untraceable, unaccounted for, and hidden for good.

Republican members of Congress are reportedly unhappy with this agreement, presumably because their constituents are furious about it. But they won’t take any action or even say anything about it for fear of angering Trump; their silence about it is deafening.

3. The larger Republican scam is to replace our economy with bribes.

The Republicans’ increasingly corrupt political system — rife with crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and payoffs to the powerful — inevitably produces a corrupt economy. That’s because politics determines the rules by which an economy functions — and if those rules are products of corruption, the economy is corrupted.

In such an economy, investors can no longer rely on a system of stable rules and reliable laws. Everything depends on bribes and personal deals made by the biggest Republican loyalists and grifters, oligarchs and plutocrats, billionaire and multi-billionaires, and monopolists.

This inevitably leads to economic sclerosis and decline, as political and economic deal-making become personal transactions. Greed and payoffs replace trust. It’s happened before, after America’s first Gilded Age (see the Great Crash of 1929, leading to the Great Depression).

4. A lesson: Péter Magyar’s victory over Viktor Orbán relied on connecting the economic problems of ordinary Hungarians with Orban’s corruption.

Finally, recall that the key to Péter Magyar’s remarkable defeat of Viktor Orbán’s entrenched regime was Magyar’s ability to connect the economic problems faced by ordinary Hungarians to Orbán’s corruption.

Magyar showed how Hungary’s soaring cost of living and crumbling public services were linked to the illicit enrichment of Hungary’s ruling elite. He exposed how state resources were siphoned into a “mafia state” and showed that Hungary’s crumbling healthcare system, dilapidated schools, and failing infrastructure were a consequence. The inner circle of Orbán-aligned oligarchs had amassed immense fortunes while ordinary Hungarians suffered from high inflation, stagnant growth, and an erosion of their purchasing power.

Magyar’s anti-corruption message resonated because he presented elite graft not merely as a moral or governance issue, but as the root cause of Hungary’s cost-of-living crisis and declining standards of living.

Democrats should do the same. The parallels between what happened under Orbán and what’s happened under Trump and the Republicans are almost exact.

5. The Republican Party is responsible for the corruption. Democrats must respond with a plan to revive the economy and end the corruption.

The Democrats’ record on corruption is not perfect, to be sure, but Republicans are now in charge of the entire government — and we have never before witnessed corruption on this scale. The twin issues of an economy that’s unaffordable for most Americans and a system overwhelmed with corruption are closely linked, and Trump and his Republican Congress are largely responsible.

Most Americans are beginning to catch on, but Democrats need to hammer this home — and propose ways to lower prices while fighting the corruption.

Democrats should propose: (1) more vigorous anti-monopoly enforcement, including busting up giant corporations, (2) prohibiting insider trading by all elected officials and their families, (3) getting big money out of politics (see here), (4) raising taxes on the super-wealthy, including a wealth tax, and (5) using the proceeds to improve the lives of average working Americans through Medicare for all, universal childcare, paid leave, and free public higher education.

ANS -- PTSD and a Walk in the Park - Addendum

One of our readers sent this in reply: 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/15/francine-shapiro-obituary

Her obituary confirms her breakthrough.

Stephen

ANS -- Women & Power: A Manifesto.

This is about power and women being kept out of power positions for 3,000 years.  

--Kim

Moments from the Past

Suggested for you ·sorotpSnde4h1h1acu0c7cigi837u7147u2lhcfi2g3h612mt3g28a243h6h ·

She’s a 69-year-old classics professor who studies ancient Rome. When she became publicly visible, she received rape and death threats. Her response: write a book proving women have been silenced for 3,000 years.

Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. She studies ancient Rome—a civilization that collapsed 1,500 years ago. For most of her career, this meant academic papers read by other scholars, lectures for students, and quiet research in libraries.

Then she started appearing on television.

In the 2000s, Mary began presenting BBC documentaries about ancient Rome. She was brilliant, accessible, and funny—making 2,000-year-old history feel deeply relevant and alive.

She also didn't look like what television expected female presenters to look like.

Mary was in her fifties, with long gray hair, a distinctive gap in her teeth, and zero interest in conforming to TV beauty standards. She dressed casually. She didn't wear makeup designed for cameras. She looked like a professor, not a model.

And the internet lost its mind.

The comments were vicious: she was "too ugly" for television. She should "stay in the library." One viewer said she had "a face for radio." Others were far crueler.

When Mary spoke about politics or contemporary issues—things male public intellectuals do constantly without controversy—the backlash escalated. She received rape threats. Death threats. Graphic descriptions of violence strangers wanted to inflict on her simply for having opinions while being a visible woman.

In 2013, after Mary appeared on a BBC program discussing immigration, a man tweeted that he'd like to see her genitals mutilated. He faced prosecution, but the pattern continued: every time Mary spoke publicly, a torrent of misogynistic abuse followed.

Most people would have retreated, deleted their social media, or stopped appearing publicly. Mary did the opposite. She started studying why this happened.

Not psychologically—she's not a therapist analyzing individual trolls. She looked at it historically and structurally, using the exact same analytical tools she'd applied to ancient Rome for decades.

What she discovered is that this pattern of silencing women isn't modern. It's ancient.

In 2014, Mary delivered a lecture for the London Review of Books titled "The Public Voice of Women." In 2017, she expanded it into a short book: Women & Power: A Manifesto.

The book is only 115 pages long. But it traces 3,000 years of evidence showing how women have been systematically excluded from public authority since the very beginning of Western civilization.

Mary starts with Homer's Odyssey—written around 700 BCE, and one of the foundational texts of Western literature. Early in the story, Penelope comes downstairs to ask a bard to stop singing a particular song because it upsets her. Her son Telemachus—who is barely an adult—tells her: "Mother, go back upstairs and tend to your own tasks... Speech will be the business of men."

This is literally one of the first scenes in Western literature: a man telling a woman to shut up and go back to women's work, declaring that public speech belongs solely to men.

Mary traces this pattern forward through three millennia:

Roman women who spoke publicly were described as "barking" or "yapping"—animal sounds, not human speech.

When women in ancient Rome tried to speak in the Forum, they were physically removed, or their speech was described as unnatural, transgressive, and dangerous.

Medieval women who claimed religious authority were often labeled witches or heretics.

Elizabeth I had to rhetorically transform herself into an honorary man ("I have the body of a weak woman but the heart and stomach of a king") to claim authority.

Throughout history, powerful women have been masculinized, demonized, or reduced to their relationships with men rather than recognized for their own power.

The pattern is consistent across civilizations: women are welcome to have private influence, to whisper advice to powerful men, or to work behind the scenes. But public authority—the power to speak, to command, and to make decisions that others must follow—has been coded masculine since the Odyssey.

Mary's argument isn't just that women have been completely excluded from power. It's that power itself has been defined in ways that make female authority seem unnatural, transgressive, and wrong.

Even when women achieve positions of authority, they face constant pressure to adjust: lower their voices (but not too much, or they're "shrill"), assert themselves (but not too much, or they're "bitchy"), and demonstrate competence (but not too much, or they're "threatening").

Male leaders are just leaders. Female leaders are constantly navigating impossible double binds—criticized for being too feminine (weak) or too masculine (unnatural).

This isn't an individual failure. It's structural design. The institutions, the language of authority, the very concept of what a leader looks and sounds like—all of it was built around men for thousands of years.

Mary's own experience proves her thesis. She's one of the world's leading experts on ancient Rome, has published dozens of scholarly books, and is a Professor at Cambridge. Her qualifications are unquestionable.

Yet, when she became publicly visible, the response wasn't an engagement with her ideas. It was an attack on her appearance, her age, and her right to speak at all. Strangers told her she was too ugly for television—a criticism never leveled at male historians with far less impressive credentials.

The threats she received were designed specifically to silence her by invoking sexual violence, reminding her that her body could be violated just for speaking publicly.

Her response wasn't to retreat or to argue that individual trolls were just bad people. Instead, she showed that this silencing mechanism has always existed, that it predates the internet by millennia, and that it's deeply embedded in how Western civilization understands authority.

Women & Power doesn't just document exclusion. It asks: what would power look like if it weren't defined by masculinity? What if authority didn't require masculine voices, masculine styles of leadership, or masculine ways of asserting dominance? What if we rebuilt power structures around collaboration instead of hierarchy? Around inclusion instead of exclusion?

Mary doesn't claim to have all the answers, but she insists we need to ask different questions. Not "How can women fit into existing power structures?" but "Why were those structures built to exclude women in the first place, and how do we build something different?"

Since publishing the book, Mary has continued her work as a public intellectual. She still receives abuse—but she also receives messages from women and girls saying her work helped them understand that the barriers they face aren't personal failures. It's not that they aren't good enough, assertive enough, or leadership material.

It's that the definition of leadership was designed entirely without them.

Mary Beard is 69 years old. She's spent her career studying dead Romans and has become one of the most important voices on living power structures. She proved that if you want to understand modern misogyny, you need to understand ancient misogyny—because the patterns haven't fundamentally changed in 3,000 years.

Women have been told to shut up and go back to "women's work" since the Odyssey. The tools have changed—social media instead of the Forum—but the impulse is identical: keep women out of public authority.

Mary's response: document it all. Show the pattern. Prove it's not new, not individual, and not fixable by women simply "leaning in" or adjusting their behavior. The structure itself has to change. Because as long as power is defined by 3,000 years of masculine norms, women will keep being told they don't belong—no matter how qualified, capable, or brilliant they are.

Mary Beard received rape threats for being a visible female intellectual. She responded by proving that pattern goes back to Homer.

That's not just scholarship. That's using history as a weapon against the present.

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