If these horrible billionaires control everything we see and hear in the media and on social media, they won’t have to spend a penny on elections to keep their candidates in power.

US Billionaires Compete for ‘Most Awful Human Being’ Award

Dean Baker in Beat the Press

Our billionaires seem to be in a competition for most awful human being alive. We have Larry Ellison, along with son, taking over CBS and immediately destroying its prized news show, 60 Minutes. They appointed Bari Weiss, a right-wing apparatchik, to oversee CBS’s entire news operation. She has immediately sought to make the news more Trump-friendly. 

This has led to many reporters being fired and threats to others to make their reporting toe the Trump line or risk being fired. Many of the network’s longest-serving reporters just quit.

The fun doesn’t stop here. The Ellison clique is also getting control of CNN through Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Presumably we can look forward to more Trump-friendly reporting there also.

To be clear, neither of these networks was a paragon of objective reporting before the Ellison family takeover. Both networks regularly marginalized and belittled progressives in the US and around the world. But they did at least have an ostensible commitment to objectivity, unlike, say, Fox News.

Then we have Mark Zuckerberg, who seems to view the huge Meta social media platforms as important mechanisms for pushing his political agenda. Last Saturday, the Instagram site for the No Kings march went down for four hours, exactly when it was being most widely used. Meta claimed there was no political motive; it was just incompetence.

We might be more inclined to accept the incompetence story if there wasn’t a comparable picture in Brazil in the lead-up to its presidential election. Lula, the incumbent president, is locked in a tight race with Flavio Bolsanaro, a right-winger who is openly allied with Donald Trump. It seems that the sites of supporters of Lula and his supporters have repeatedly run into the same sort of technical difficulties with Meta.

Then we go to everyone’s favorite evil billionaire, Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter with the explicit intention of using it as a vehicle to support his politics. He not only opened the gates to all sorts of racist, sexist, and harassing material; he has throttled the accounts of many progressives so that their comments are less widely viewed.

Trump says high prices for gas, diesel and heating oil are great because “We’re making a freaking fortune”

Question for Trump: who is this “We” you’re talking about?

Olivia Rosane for Common Dreams

Add "We're making a freakin' fortune" to this list

If there was any doubt, Donald Trump made it very clear Saturday evening that he cares more about wealthy oil and gas executives than ordinary people.

During a midterm campaign rally in Perry, Georgia, Trump acknowledged the high price of oil and gas, but said that the US fossil fuel industry was “making hundreds of billions of dollars.”

His advisers, he told the crowd, had instructed him not to mention this “because people are paying a little higher,” he said in a condescending voice. “That number’s going to come way down,” he continued, “but what we’ve done for this country, we’re making money like this country has never made before,” seemingly conflating the fortunes of wealthy oil and gas companies with the US as a whole.

“Trump to people who want lower gas prices: ‘Fuck you, I’m making money!’” Melanie D’Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, posted on social media. “Just run this as an ad.”

Nation writer Jeet Heer made a similar point, saying that Trump’s remarks were an “amazing closing argument—for the Democrats. They just need to run this clip.”

Drop Site News reporter Ryan Grim noted the tone of Trump’s voice.

“Trump here does a widdle baby voice to mock people who are complaining about high gas prices, explaining that the oil and gas industry is making ‘hundreds of billions, trillions,’” Grim wrote on social media. “It’s never been clearer how much he hates the people who voted for him.”

New data shows Charlestown is still unaffordable

You need an annual income of $216,356 to afford a median-priced single-family home

HousingWorksRI factbooks - CLICK HERE.

And there's this from GoLocal with a slightly higher median home price:

MAGA, this one's for you

The Real Fix for Social Security

We may be on the brink of a bipartisan solution that’s fair

Robert Reich

Today I want to talk to you about Social Security.

The trustees of Social Security — of which yours truly was once a member — say the program will be able to pay full benefits only until 2033. After that, Social Security will be able to dole out only roughly 77 percent of benefits due.

This summer, Ohio’s Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno joined Sen. Elizabeth Warren in proposing to raise the payroll tax cap so people with higher incomes pay more into the program.

Fairly suddenly, the idea is emerging as an acceptable fix among other GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Tom Cole (Oklahoma), the influential chair of the House Appropriations Committee.

Cole thinks the political blowback from Social Security benefit cuts would be far worse than a comprehensive solution that includes raising taxes.

It’s another example of Republicans deserting Trump, who thinks the “fix” for Social Security is to repeal taxes on Social Security benefits. Trump’s fix will not save Social Security. In fact, quite the opposite. Without the revenue from Social Security taxes, the Social Security trust fund will run out of money even sooner.

I’m encouraged by what looks like the start of a Republican turnaround on this. Not only are Republicans deserting Trump, but they’re beginning — just beginning — to become sensitive to what average voters need and want.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the reason Social Security is running out of money is not because so many boomers are retiring.

The Social Security trustees anticipated the boom in boomer retirements. This is why Social Security was amended back in 1983, to gradually increase the age for collecting full retirement benefits from 65 to 67. That change is helping finance the boomers’ retirement.

The real reason Social Security is running out of money is something the trustees never anticipated: how much of the nation’s total income is going to the top.

There’s a name for working families who are surviving but not thriving in Rhode Island: ALICE

Remember when they were called the working poor?

By Janine L. Weisman, Rhode Island Current

In her neon yellow shirt and pink hard hat, Ashlynn Jorge extended her arm and held her palm out to halt traffic approaching a sidewalk construction site on Kay Street in Newport shortly before 10 o’clock Thursday morning.

But the 26-year-old union laborer can’t stop the bills. 

South County numbers are lower

Jorge earns about $4,800 a month. But rent for the three-bedroom house in East Providence where she lives with her boyfriend and their two children, ages 6, and 3, is $2,500 a month. The lease on her Hyundai Palisade is $767 a month. Food, utilities and other expenses eat up the rest of her income.

It costs less for her boyfriend, also 26, to stay home and take care of their son and daughter than for him to work and pay for childcare, she said.

“Live paycheck to paycheck,” said Jorge, who gets up each workday at 4:30 a.m. “I try to give my kids what they deserve, so I try my best to work overtime sometimes.” 

The gap between earnings and the cost of basic living is the focus of a new report from the United Way of Rhode Island released Thursday morning at the same time Jorge and her coworkers were rebuilding a section of sidewalk.

Jorge’s income is well over the $33,000 federal poverty threshold for a household of four. But that still means her family is among the 1 in 3 Rhode Island households working and struggling to afford adequate food, housing and health care, unable to save money for the future.

There’s a name for these households: ALICE.

Survey data reveal demographic divides in Americans’ COVID vaccine hesitancy

Too stupid to live

Laine Bergeson

Vaccine hesitancy in the United States predated the COVID-19 pandemic, but the pandemic added fuel to the fire. During the crisis, inconsistent public health messaging and emergency-use authorization of the COVID vaccine gave rise to a “parallel pandemic of vaccine hesitancy,” write researchers from Rush University College of Nursing in a new analysis published in Vaccine. That hesitancy led to many people being unnecessarily infected and hospitalized. 

“Some research has estimated nearly a quarter of a million preventable deaths due to non-vaccination in the US, during the period May 2021-Sept 2022,” they write. Average life expectancy in the United States decreased by almost two years because of COVID.

To better understand what drives Americans’ vaccine hesitancy, the researchers analyzed surveys from nearly 14,000 people. Their findings suggest that vaccination rates differed significantly by education level and age, and reasons for remaining unvaccinated differed by race and education level. 

USA! USA!

Americans are not as well off as people in peer nations

Stephen Bagwell, University of Missouri-St. Louis and Susan Randolph, University of Connecticut

As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, the global data we collect and analyze shows that the country is failing to “promote the general Welfare,” as the Constitution’s framers promised a little more than a decade later.

We are scholars of human rights. Alongside the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, a nonprofit that tracks how well more than 200 countries and territories are meeting the human rights commitments their governments have made, we annually update scores measuring whether people can actually get the basics of a decent life, such as healthcare, adequate food and a quality education.

The latest data our team has amassed shows that the U.S. is falling short compared with what it could achieve, given its US$32 trillion economy. This is not a one-year blip – the U.S. has been underperforming for the past 25 years.

A recent poll found that 80% of American respondents viewed wealth inequality as a problem

Yes, It’s Time to Tax the Rich

Lawrence Wittner for Common Dreams

With the deadline for paying federal income taxes fast approaching, the thoughts of American taxpayers turn naturally toward the age-old question: Why isn’t there a fairer tax system?

Currently, in fact, campaigns for state tax-the-rich legislation are flourishing in California, Colorado, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, and Virginia, and have already succeeded in getting such legislation adopted in Massachusetts and Washington. Similarly, in Congress, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) have introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Wash.) are sponsoring the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act. The tax-the-rich proposals range from increasing the tax rate for the very highest annual income earners, to instituting an annual wealth tax on the very richest Americans, to a combination of both.

Although the most affluent Americans, like other Americans, have always paid taxes to fund public services, the dispute has been over how much they should pay. Sales taxes and property taxes place a heavy burden on people of modest means, but a much lighter burden on the wealthy. Therefore, the wealthy have tended to favor these generators of public revenue and to oppose a progressive income tax, under which the rich would pay at a higher rate than the poor. A lengthy political battle for a tax system based upon ability to pay led to passage of the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution, which empowered Congress to levy an income tax.

Initially, the new income tax, though progressive, was rather small-scale. But as the federal government took on new and costly tasks―particularly funding US participation in two world wars and the Cold War―the federal income tax grew accordingly. By 1944, the official tax rate for the highest income earners stood at 94%―although, thanks to deductions, loopholes, and the rate’s confinement to the top increment of their income, the richest Americans actually paid at a much lower rate.

Trump's whoppers about oil and gas prices

Big Oil wins. You lose.

Noah Berlatsky

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Donald Trump boasted on Truth Social.

Oil prices are, of course, going up because Trump launched an illegal war of aggression against Iran without considering the (incredibly obvious) possibility that Iran might retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices have spiked 60 cents this month as oil hit $100 a barrel, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright refused to rule out the possibility oil might even rise to $200 a barrel.

Trump’s blasé trumpeting of the virtues of rising prices is in part simple fecklessness — he’s a liar who insists everything he does is brilliant and awesome.

But Trump’s decision to attack Iran and put upward pressure on prices at home puts him a political pickle, since he excoriated Biden for the high cost of gas during the 2024 campaign. In fact, the day before he launched his war, Trump preened about how far prices had fallen. But suddenly high prices are good, because as long as Trump is shuffling gaseously from Mar-a-Lago to the White House, it’s always an orange utopia in America.

To some degree, though, Trump’s love of high prices is sincere. Our current fascist president is a crony capitalist and loves the idea of screwing consumers, who he sees as suckers and marks. He identifies with the wealthy and likes it when the rich get richer. His populist mouth noises have always been a put on — as an instinctual oligarch, he gets a little shiver of pleasure whenever he can harm the little guy.

Not many of us live on Wall Street

Why U.S. middle-aged adults report more loneliness and poorer health than peers abroad

Midlife crisis is complicated in the US

By Arizona State University

Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan

Americans born in the 1960s and early 1970s report higher loneliness and depressive symptoms and show poorer memory and physical strength than earlier generations. Such declines are largely absent in peer countries, particularly in Nordic Europe, where outcomes have improved over time.

In a new study, psychologist Frank J. Infurna of Arizona State University and co-authors, analyzed survey data from 17 countries seeking to identify why U.S. trends diverge from other wealthy nations.

"The real midlife crisis in America isn't about lifestyle choices or sports cars. It's about juggling work, finances, family, and health amid weakening social supports," Infurna said. "The data make this clear."

The findings, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, point the way to likely solutions for individuals and U.S. society.

Cancer is becoming a global crisis shaped less by biology than by inequality, risk exposure, and access to care.

“Impending Disaster”: Scientists Warn That Cancer Deaths Are Surging Worldwide

By The Lancet

Global cancer diagnoses and deaths rose sharply between 1990 and 2023, even as treatments improved and prevention efforts expanded. Without swift action and focused investment, projections indicate that 30.5 million people will be newly diagnosed with cancer and 18.6 million will die from the disease in 2050, with more than half of new cases and nearly two thirds of deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), according to a major analysis by the Global Burden of Disease Study Cancer Collaborators published in The Lancet.

Although the total number of cancer cases and deaths is expected to climb significantly from 2024 to 2050, there is a more nuanced picture beneath those totals. When cancer incidence and mortality are adjusted for age, global rates are not projected to rise. This indicates that much of the increase is being driven by population growth and the expanding proportion of older adults worldwide.

Even so, this trend falls well short of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of cutting premature deaths from non-communicable diseases, including cancer, by one third by 2030.

The wealthiest 15 billionaires in America saw their wealth grow over 30 percent in 2025.

America’s Wealthiest Are Getting Even Richer

By Chris Mills Rodrigo

The top 15 wealthiest people in America are part of a very, very exclusive club: those with over $100,000,000,000 in net worth. After double checking those zeroes, we can confidently say that yes, there are 15 centi-billionaires living among us.

And, according to a new Institute for Policy Studies analysis of data from the Forbes real time billionaire list, the combined wealth of that 12-figure club grew from $2.4 trillion to $3.1 trillion over the course of 2025.

For context, that 30.3 percent rate of growth outpaced both the S&P 500 (16 percent) and billionaires in general (20.8 percent) over the last year. To put it succinctly, the wealthiest Americans are accumulating capital faster than everyone else.

The top 15 wealthiest billionaires aren’t the only ones doing well for themselves. Our analysis found that found that the number of U.S. billionaires increased from 813 with combined wealth of $6.7 trillion at the end of 2024 to 935 U.S. billionaires with combined assets of $8.1 trillion.

The Trump Administration’s $3 Meal: ‘A Piece of Chicken, a Piece of Broccoli, Corn Tortilla, and One Other Thing’

Maybe they expect you to add roadkill and lard

Jessica Corbett

The Trump administration was again blasted for grocery prices this week after Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins discussed the new federal dietary guidelines during a NewsNation appearance.

“We’ve run over 1,000 simulations,” Rollins said in a clip shared on social media by journalist Aaron Rupar on Wednesday. “It can cost around $3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla, and one other thing.”

“So there is a way to do this that actually will save the average American consumer money,” Rollins continued, pushing back against host Connell McShane’s inquiry about whether the new guidelines expect people to spend more money on food.

The Guardian noted that “data from the consumer price index, as referenced by McShane, showed that food prices kept rising in December, increasing by 0.7%, the biggest month-to-month jump since October 2022. Prices for produce rose 0.5%, coffee increased by 1.9%, and beef went up 1% over the month and 16.4% compared with a year earlier.”

Responding to the clip, Chasten Glezman Buttigieg, an author and teacher married to former Democratic Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, said, “Private jets and tax breaks for them and their rich friends, and one piece of broccoli *AND* a tortilla for you!”

Five ways to become a billionaire

None have anything to do with “free market” capitalism

Robert Reich

One of the most notable characteristics of 2025 has been the shamelessness of the billionaire class and the conspicuousness of its corruption.

For many years, whenever I’ve warned that an increasing portion of the nation’s wealth is falling into the hands of an ever-smaller number of people, the moneyed interests have responded: “But that’s just the free market,” or “the free market has decided they deserve it.”

Rubbish. There’s no such thing as a “free market” to begin with. Today’s so-called “free market” is the outcome of political decisions over monopolization, labor organization, private property, finance, trade, taxes, and much more.

Who’s behind these political decisions? Increasingly, the same small number of ultra-rich who have gained disproportionate influence over our politics. They’ve created five ways for themselves to accumulate a billion dollars or more.

1. First, exploit a monopoly.

Does Jeff Bezos deserve his billions because he founded and built Amazon?

No. Amazon is a monopolist with nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce retail sales in America. In addition, Amazon is protected by a slew of patents granted by the U.S. government.

In 2023, the U.S. government — through the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states— charged Amazon with illegally maintaining a monopoly by crushing competition, inflating prices, and harming consumers through anticompetitive practices like punishing sellers who offer lower prices elsewhere. (The trial is currently scheduled to begin in 2027.)

If the government fully enforced anti-monopoly (antitrust) laws and didn’t give Amazon such broad patents, Bezos would be worth far less.

If anti-monopoly laws were enforced, other titans of high tech would be worth far less, too — among them, Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

Tax Unfairness Soars Under Donald Trump

Big bucks for billionaires in first year of Trump 2.0  

By Gerald Scorse, Progressive Charlestown guest columnist 

Three incredible what-ifs, one right after the other, underscore the direction of America’s tax code over the last several decades. They appear early on in the 2021 book Tax the Rich! How Lies, Loopholes and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer. 

Shock after shock, here they come: 

“If you had worked every single day from the time Columbus sailed to America to the present and earned $5,000 per day, you would still have less money than Jeff Bezos makes in a week.” 

“If you had made $100,000 every single day since the year 1 A.D. and saved every penny, you would still have less money than Bill Gates has.”  

“If you had started working when the human race, Home sapiens, first walked upright, around 200,000 thousand years ago, and saved $100,000 a year, you would still not have as much money as Mark Zuckerberg has.” 

All three are not only true, they’re super-true: The totals for the “if” dollars fall far short of the totals for the actual dollars pulled in by Zuckerberg, Gates and Bezos. Now comes David Kamin of NYU with a real-world parsing of the numbers, factoring in the ongoing effects of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and his first-term Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. As Kamin sees it, the sirens are already sounding.  

Whatever Happened to Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ for American Workers?

Trump NEVER intended to help working people - he just lied and said he would

By Lawrence S. Wittner

Although Donald Trump’s Department of Labor announced in April 2025 that “Trump’s Golden Age puts American workers first,” that contention is contradicted by the facts.

Indeed, Trump has taken the lead in reducing workers’ incomes. One of his key actions along these lines occurred on March 14, 2025, when he issued an executive order that scrapped a Biden-era regulation raising the minimum wage for employees of private companies with federal contracts. Some 327,300 workers had benefited from Biden’s measure, which produced an average wage increase of $5,228 per year. With Trump’s reversal of policy, they became ripe for pay cuts of up to 25 percent.

America’s farmworkers, too―many of them desperately poor―are now experiencing pay cuts caused by the Trump administration’s H-2A visa program, which is bringing hundreds of thousands of foreign agricultural workers to the United States under new, lower-wage federal guidelines. The United Farm Workers estimates that this will cost U.S. farm workers $2.64 billion in wages per year. 

As in the past, Trump and his Republican Party have blocked any increase in the federal minimum wage―a paltry $7.25 per hour―despite the fact that it has not been raised since 2009 and, thanks to inflation, has lost 30 percent of its purchasing power. By 2025, this wage had fallen below the official U.S. government poverty level.

Furthermore, the Trump administration is promoting subminimum wages for millions of American workers. 

Although the Biden administration had abolished the previous subminimum wage floor for workers with disabilities by bringing them up to the federal minimum wage level, the Trump Labor Department has restored the subminimum wage. In addition, the Trump administration is proposing to strip 3.7 million home-care workers of their current federal minimum wage guarantee.

Trump’s Labor Department has also scrapped the Biden plan to expand overtime pay rights to 4.3 million workers who had previously lost eligibility for it thanks to inflation. 

And it is promoting plans to classify many workers as independent contractors, thereby depriving such workers of key labor rights, including minimum wages and overtime pay.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on December 18, 2025 that, from November 2024 to November 2025, the annual growth of the real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) of American workers had fallen to 0.8 percent.

Why Canadians don't move here and don't want to be the 51st state

 

Ya think?