guy has a trillion dollars, 0 friends, and has never landed a joke. I know a pact with the devil when I see one.
– Amy (@lolennui.bsky.social)
This week’s featured post is “What to make of Graham Platner“.
Ongoing stories
- Trump’s assault on American democracy. Our rapidly declining empire has hit its bread-and-circuses phase. For the Mad King’s birthday yesterday, we witnessed the corrupt spectacle of a UFC cage match on the White House lawn.
- Climate change. You don’t have to deny scientific data you never collect. So the Trump regime is dismantling our ocean sensors.
- Iran war. An agreement was announced yesterday, but we don’t have the text, and the most contentious issues were put off until the next round. If we’re lucky, it will get us back to where we were before Trump launched his ill-fated war.
- Ukraine. This week’s update from Phillips O’Brien focuses on Ukraine’s effort to cut Crimea off from Russia. If they succeed, Crimea becomes a drain on Russia’s war effort rather than a strategic asset.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the Iran agreement
After months of Trump claiming a deal was at hand and Iran saying no, some kind of agreement was announced yesterday and is supposed to take effect Friday. No specific text was released, so I can’t tell you exactly what is in it. We just have to go on what various leaders are saying about it.
Apparently, the Strait of Hormuz will be open again, as it was before the US and Israel attacked Iran. The US will drop its blockade of Iranian ports, so Iran will be able to sell oil as it did before the attack. The US and Iran will be negotiating about the future of Iran’s nuclear program and the fate of the Iranian assets frozen in the US-controlled banking system, as they were doing before the attack. The ceasefire will be extended 60 days and will include Israeli forces in Lebanon, which Israel may not accept.
The obvious question now is: What did we gain from launching this war? Trump and Hegseth have been claiming victory since the first day, but what did we win? Aren’t we just back where we were before we got 15 of our own people and God knows how many Iranian civilians killed, spent hundreds of billions, depleted our stockpile of missiles and other weapons, cost American consumers billions at the gas pump, and disrupted the world economy?
The right comparison is not between today and yesterday’s worst-case scenario. The right comparison is between today and the day before the war began.
And we may not even be back to where we started. There appear to be several points of possible misunderstanding, like this one:
[Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem] Gharibabadi said those negotiations [over Iran’s nuclear program] would only begin once Iran can verify that the U.S. has complied with the current agreement, which he said included unfreezing Iranian assets and lifting the naval blockade. U.S. officials, however, said Iranian assets would not be unfrozen until Tehran had demonstrated compliance with the agreement.
Sellers lists the possible issues in the agreement, and offers practical tests for judging them. Example: “does Hormuz return to normal freedom of navigation, or does Iran emerge with a new coercive role over passage?”
Whatever the reality, Trump will spend the next several weeks claiming he got concessions that aren’t in the agreement, in order to tell his base that his claims of victory weren’t lies. Iran will not validate these claims, but we’ll see if they will be content to let Trump do what he does. That would give the world 60 days of breathing space before reality must be faced again.
My best guess: Something like this agrement will eventually take effect, but first it will have to come apart a couple more times. Maybe Israel will scuttle it, or the “memorandum of understanding” will fail to reflect a mutual understanding of its terms. And maybe Trump will just blow it up when his MAGA base starts to accuse him of weakness.
Meanwhile, the global markets seem to be taking this agreement at face value. I’ve never been a commodities trader, but if I were, I’d be tempted to buy oil futures and wait for the first glitch. If this does all come apart, a true catastrophe looms: The world has been burning through its oil reserves, and the tanks seem to be a month or two from running dry.
and about symbolic milestones
So Elon Musk’s net worth crossed $1 trillion (due to the SpaceX IPO I warned you to avoid last week). And after a bunch of legal flailing by Trump’s puppet board, his name came off the Kennedy Center. (I think.)
Trump used his power under the Defense Production Act to put $700 million of your tax dollars behind the coal industry, which is doomed for economic reasons even if you ignore the environmental damage it does. In May, for the first month ever, the US used more solar energy (12.8% of total electricity use) than coal (12.2%). Remember when Republicans wanted the market rather than the government to sort out energy use?
Musk’s trillionaire status has sparked debate about what our economic system rewards or doesn’t reward. Exemplars of vast wealth are always controversial, but it seems to me that previous ones gave their fans more to work with than Musk has. If you drove a car, you understood what Henry Ford had done. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie represented oil and steel, which anyone could appreciate.
Bill Gates exemplified the personal computer revolution (whether it would have happened without him or not). For better or worse, Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton changed the way we shopped.
But Musk? His fortune is based on dreams of a future that may never come to pass, or may be made real by a competitor rather than Musk himself: self-driving cars, humanoid robots, colonies on Mars. Tesla and Starlink are real, but so far they account for very small parts of the car or communications industries.
Paul Krugman elaborates:
But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius.
We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme. … Which brings me to my final point. The immense human Ponzi scheme that is Elon Musk will eventually collapse.
In a different post, Krugman compares our era to the Gilded Age.
So, are we living in a second Gilded Age? If only. We surpassed Gilded Age levels of income and wealth inequality decades ago. We’re now in an era of oligarchy in which the power of great wealth and the abuse of that power by a tiny elite eclipse anything we saw in the late 19th and early 20th century. And the super-wealthy themselves are far more lacking in redemptive qualities than their predecessors.
If you really enjoy seeing someone dunk on Musk, follow Will Lockett’s substack. In particular, this post examines the one piece of SpaceX that is supposed to be profitable already: Starlink. But is it really profitable, or do those earnings come from an accounting game enabled by Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill?
Then there’s Musk’s most serious downside: Current Affairs interviews Nicholas Enrich, who has a book out about the destruction of USAID during Musk’s months as head of DOGE. And Musk was involved: He bragged about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”.
[USAID] was kind of the embodiment of American generosity overseas. We operated under a flag of people shaking hands that said “from the American people”, but it wasn’t just a charity organization. I think that that’s it’s really important. It was an implement of national security. It kept Americans safe from infectious diseases. You know, we had developed a global early warning system, so that countries could detect and respond to infectious diseases before they could potentially threaten us. We built partnerships over decades with countries that enhanced stability and increased American soft power around the world, that really allowed for Americans to thrive in a stable world order for over 60 years.
Enrich gives a few simple examples of threats to national security: When the Ebola outbreak started in Uganda, USAID wanted to screen passengers boarding international flights out, because “that’s how you get an international catastrophe”. The funding was denied. Clinical trials of drugs to fight currently drug-resistant tuberculosis were stopped, creating a risk of new TB strains resistant to those experimental drugs.
Enrich wasn’t prepared for the level of ignorance he encountered from the DOGE people.
There was another political appointee who told me, when I was pushing to restart lifesaving Ebola activities, he told me just that Ebola is a scam.
The first signs of the unfolding disaster were
families that had spent all day walking to a clinic in Sudan—you know, with the USAID logo on it—expecting to get food and medical supplies, seeing that clinic ends up being shuttered and were then forced to go home and then make the heart-wrenching decision of which of their children to feed. And there were pregnant women who were unable to access emergency childbirth services because the ambulance service that provided them was cut off and they ended up perishing. These were just like the initial anecdotal experiences that we started to hear that have since expanded.
Now we’re seeing conservative estimates show that 750,000 people have already died, most of those are children, and that’s within the first year. And unfortunately, what we’re learning is that really this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s what we’re going to see in the next few years, where new babies who are born are no longer getting the immunizations we used to provide, babies are being born with HIV at high rates in some clinics, where just a year ago those rates were near zero. The impacts of this are going to—we’re not going to see the full effects of them for four years. I mean, I honestly believe that when the dust settles on the Trump administration, his cuts to USAID will end up being a major part of his legacy, because of just how far-reaching those impacts really are.
The Lancet medical journal published a study anticipating the results from a global cut in official development aid (ODA).
Sudden and severe reductions in ODA funding could have catastrophic consequences, with a potential global death toll comparable to—or even exceeding—that of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even modest defunding that simply extends current downward trends is likely to lead to sharp increases in preventable adult and child mortality, potentially resulting in tens of millions of excess deaths in the coming years.
It’s important to understand the full evil of Musk’s actions. For decades, I’ve been hearing conservative rhetoric about how private aid should replace government aid. But not only does Musk (unlike Bill Gates or Warren Buffett) give essentially nothing from his vast wealth to help the world’s least fortunate. (The Musk Foundation has focused on self-dealing with his businesses, and funding schools his children attended.) But he uses his wealth to buy political power, and then uses that power to prevent any help from reaching the poor.
Trump is being as petty as possible about taking his name off the Kennedy Center. Legal challenges went to the last minute, and then a 12-hour extension was granted. After the name came off, they left the tarp up so that no one can see the place where his name was taken down. The tarp serves no purpose but to avoid giving Trump’s enemies the satisfaction of defeating him.
News articles about taking down Trump’s name quote a lot of opinions about whether he deserves such an honor. The answer seems obvious to me, but it’s an irrelevant point: Trump and his puppet board had no power to change the name of the Kennedy Center. Only Congress can do that.
This is typical of a lot of Trump’s legal controversies. Whether what he wants to do is a good idea or not — I usually think not — he gets into trouble because he exceeds his legal powers. The tariffs are a prime example. Whether the US would benefit from higher tariffs is something reasonable people can argue about. But under the law, Trump had no power to impose his tariffs. The right argument to have there isn’t against tariffs, but against dictatorship.
Consider this exchange in the court case about Trump destroying the East Wing of the White House and beginning to build his gilded ballroom. Trump’s DoJ is arguing that courts have no power to intervene.
“If the government decides, very quickly, to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty,” asked Judge Patricia Millett, “[if] the government moved too fast…nothing can be done?”
“I think that’s right, yes,” [DoJ attorney] Roth replied, which, according to ABC News, “sparked audible gasps in the courtroom.”
Now, nothing in the Constitution commits the US government to maintaining the East Wing (or the Statue of Liberty). But under our system of government, such decisions aren’t based on the whims of one man.
Republicans would recognize this truth immediately if the one man were a Democrat. President Obama was denounced (more than once) for putting his feet up on the Resolute Desk. (“The picture of Obama with his feet on the desk in the Oval Office shows that he has never been taught manners. That desk is history and should be treated with respect.”) Imagine if he’d torn down a wing of the White House purely on his own authority.
and Graham Platner
See the featured post.
and Social Security
As if Republicans running for Congress this fall didn’t face enough problems, Speaker Johnson just gave them one more: If he’s still speaker after the elections, he has a plan for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to be “adjusted and fixed“.
We know what this means, because it’s been a staple on the Right for decades: Any government spending that benefits people creates a budget problem. But there is infinitely much money available to pursue wars, cut billionaires’ taxes, and glorify God-Emperor Trump.
In particular, a Heritage Foundation article from 2024 proposes to “fix” Social Security by raising the retirement age to 69 or 70, establishing a “more accurate” (i.e., less generous) inflation metric, and partially privatizing the program.
The ostensible reason to “fix” Social Security is that the SS trust fund will run out of money in the early 2030s. If no other funding is provided by Congress, benefits will be limited to the Social Security taxes that come in, necessitating cuts.
However, the trust fund has always been a bookkeeping device rather than anything real. As Paul Krugman explains, the real question is whether the country wants to keep funding its elders at this level, not whether it can afford to.
and a war crime
Almost since the beginning of the Iran War, Trump has been threatening to commit war crimes. Occasionally, people have debated whether something we’ve done in Iran is a war crime or not. Bombing the girls school, for example, would be a war crime if it had been done intentionally. Attacking bridges and power plants might be war crimes, if the intent was to destroy economic infrastructure rather than impede Iran’s military.
Tuesday, all doubt was removed. After Trump unleashed another round of war-crime threats on Truth Social, this happened:
On the evening of June 9, the USA, with what seems to be intent, attacked two reservoirs and a water treatment facility in southern Iran. Almost immediately afterwards, water was cut off to about 20,000 Iranian civilians who live around the southern Iranian town of Sirik.
Why was this most likely a deliberate attack? Well, there seems to have been nothing nearby of military value and the destruction was precise.
When asked about this attack and the possibility that it was a war crime, Pete Hegseth offered no defense.
Well, it’s precisely the kind of disingenuous question that I’m used to from the media, impugning the motives of the folks on our side who are incredibly professional and incredibly effective.
and Trump’s birthday
Yesterday Trump held a UFC cage match on the White House lawn. Not only was this garish and violent, it often turned partisan. Also, it was another example of Trump profiting off his office: He owns stock in the TKO Group, which sponsors UFC fights. And the White House was not the only federal property involved: Weigh-ins and other pre-match festivities took place at the Lincoln Memorial.
and you also might be interested in …
Don Moynihan raises an interesting point about the Supreme Court’s assault on Black representation in Congress. It really comes in two parts:
- States can’t intentionally create majority-minority districts because that violates the Court’s “color-blind” interpretation of the Constitution.
- States can gerrymander for partisan purposes, which in red states has the effect of eliminating majority-minority districts that might arise naturally, i.e., in urban areas with large minority populations.
Moynihan considers what would happen if both partisan and racial gerrymandering were unconstitutional.
By accepting partisan gerrymandering as a regrettable but inevitable part of American democracy, the courts made racial justifications, rather than broadly democratic justifications, the last basis for maintaining constraint on gerrymandering. So isolated, it became easier to eliminate this last line of defense.
Nothing about this was inevitable. Imagine an alternative scenario, where the courts decided that both racial considerations and partisan gerrymandering were unconstitutional. Commentators like Rubenfeld could still have trumpeted the end of “the racial districting game” but Black and Democratic voters would still have had a realistic chance at representation.
A new analysis at the New York Times by Nate Cohn and Eve Washington adds numbers to the debate. It makes clear how monumental the decision to accept partisan gerrymandering was to blocking a truly colorblind map.
A map that was organized more simply around the non-partisan values of natural geographic settings would preserve a similar number of Democratic and minority-leaning opportunities.
Video of a crime committed by one particular Sudanese asylum-seeker in Southhampton went viral and resulted in an anti-immigrant riot in Belfast. Wired examines the role a far-right youth group played in making the riots happen. The New Yorker has a longer, deeper article on how anti-immigrant politics is spreading in the UK and elsewhere.
Approaching the 10-year anniversary of the Brexit vote, the UK economy is clearly doing worse outside the EU than it would have done remaining inside.
One of the more controversial parts of FISA surveillance law is Section 702, which allows intelligence agencies to monitor the communications of certain foreign nationals, even when they communicate with Americans that the agencies are not supposed to spy on. Section 702 gets reauthorized from time to time, because it’s been too controversial to make permanent.
The tricky point is what the agencies can do with their databases of collected information. Maybe the NSA (say) has no justification to surveil you, but it has your conversations with foreign nationals in its database. Can it search that database for your communications without a warrant, essentially spying on you via its spying on other people?
Anyway, the appointment of Trump attack dog Bill Pulte as acting DNI raised the profile of this issue, and Congress failed to renew the authority when it lapsed last week.
Laurie Garrett explains:
young men aren’t eager to marry, and Japanese women are more than happy to pursue life without them. Marriage rates continue to plummet, along with birth rates. This is less about policy initiatives the government might take than it is due to a wide gender gap in hopes, dreams, aspirations, concepts of family and cultural interests.
But of course, the US is developing similar gender gaps, and a similar (if less extreme) drop in births-per-woman.
Japan is not the exception – rather, it is the avant garde, the cutting edge, the leader the rest of us ought to pay close attention to as it struggles to find the right combination of humanity, gender equity, financing and social policy to care for its elders, encourage its young adults, bridge the political and economic gaps between men and women, and grow its children.
This is an issue conservatives recognize, but their approach is 180 degrees off. The decline in White reproduction is a key part of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. The true part of the theory is that if our economy continues to create jobs and our people don’t produce children to fill them, immigration is the obvious way to keep the wheels spinning. This will inevitably shift the racial demographics.
But the MAGA approach to increasing fertility is basically to roll the clock back, so that women have fewer choices in life and are essentially forced into motherhood. Garrett suggests another path: Change male culture so that men take more responsibility for children. If men and women see equivalent costs and rewards for raising children, their expectations will begin to align.
If you’re wondering about the current legal situation around Trump’s slush fund for the January 6 criminals, the best summary is here. Two courts are still wrestling with issues related to the fund, and the regime is claiming the courts’ concerns are moot, because the fund isn’t happening. At least one judge wants a written commitment from the Justice Department that the fund really is dead and won’t be revived. We’ll see if DoJ gives that commitment.
The Trump administration is dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative,
a $386 million network of more than 900 instruments funded by the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation (NSF), which has provided real-time data on the world’s oceans for more than a decade. The sensors are distributed across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems, and ocean currents that influence the global climate.
The decision to end OOI, described by the foundation as a “descoping,” will remove nearly all in-water infrastructure located off the states of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and North Carolina, and the Irminger Sea, an area between Iceland and Greenland. The OOI was designed as a 25-to-30-year project specifically to capture long-term climate signals, which scientists say require at least three decades of continuous data to be meaningfully detected. The network has achieved just 10 years of observations.
The simplest way to deny climate change is to refuse to gather data on it.
and let’s close with something precious
“Rare photo of a mother wrench feeding her young. Breathtaking.” – ScottH
The Weekly Sift 