Month: August 2024

Months after Donald Trump declared the debate over reproductive rights in America settled, the former president is still straining to navigate the …

Former President Donald Trump describes his term in office and post-presidency in his own words, captioning photos with Vladimir Putin, …

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s promised tariff on imports could hit U.S. voters where it hurts — their gas tanks. Trump has called …

Swedish supergroup ABBA has asked Donald Trump to stop using their music at campaign rallies, but the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign …

The “fireside chat” with Trump on Friday night will serve to shore up his support with a key part of his base, conservatives who agree with him …

Here’s Why Prices Are Still High

Americans feel like they’re still being price-gouged, even as inflation has come down. In many ways they’re right.

If we take a closer look at a few of the biggest drivers of inflation, we’ll see that some corporations are still using their power and shady techniques to keep prices high while they rake in record profits.

Let’s start with rent. In another video, I’ve told you how Wall Street investors are infiltrating the housing market by buying up hundreds of thousands of homes and rental properties.These corporate landlords then jack up rents on their units by hundreds of dollars every year.

In the first quarter of 2024, the six largest corporate landlords in America saw their collective profits climb by nearly $300 million thanks to rent increases. They’re raking it in while spending nearly a third of those profits on stock buybacks to enrich wealthy shareholders.

Each of these corporations is using a software company called RealPage, which allegedly allows them to collude with each other to fix rental prices. RealPage’s technology is used to price 16 million apartments nationwide.

What about gas prices?

In 2022, the top five Big Oil companies collectively made nearly $200 billion in profits, double the prior year. Then they spent $100 billion on stock buybacks and dividends. 2023 was another banner year for Big Oil. While you continued to pay through the nose at the pump, corporations like Chevron “returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas than any year in the company’s history,” according to its CEO.

According to recent findings from the Federal Trade Commission, a major Big Oil executive allegedly colluded with OPEC in recent years to artificially cut supply and drive up prices across the industry. By one estimate, that price-fixing scheme resulted in a windfall of $205 billion in excess profits — which cost each American consumer an average of more than $2,000 a year.

That’s more than $2,000 Americans could have spent on groceries. But of course groceries are another burden on our pocket books.

Americans have been paying an arm and a leg in particular for beef, pork, and poultry. Meat producers don’t need to worry about competitors with lower prices because four companies control the bulk of all meat processing in America. This has helped each of those companies siphon more money from you while raking in record profits over the past few years.

And the biggest meat producers use a high-tech pricing tool from a data company called Agri Stats that allegedly allowed them to share information and coordinate price hikes.

None of these price increases has anything to do with government spending or pandemic relief checks from four years ago, despite what you might hear. And workers aren’t to blame, either. After decades of stagnant wages, workers have finally seen modest pay bumps. But this pales in comparison to corporate profits, which are at record highs.

The problem is too much corporate power. And the solution is to crack down on corporations profiteering at your expense.

The Department of Justice under President Biden is investigating RealPage’s facilitation of rental price-fixing and launched a massive antitrust lawsuit against Agri Stats. And Biden’s Federal Trade Commission is suing to block the megamerger of Kroger and Albertsons that would send food prices through the roof.

House Democrats are investigating Big Oil for price fixing, based on the FTC’s damning report. Senate Democrats have introduced legislation to crack down on price-gouging.

Of course much more needs to be done.

Americans are struggling to get by while corporations are raking it in.

We need to keep tackling corporate power.

Project 2025: The MAGA Plan to Take Your Freedom 

A second Trump term would be more dangerous than the first — in part because of something called Project 2025, a plan to extend Trump’s grip into every part of your life.

Trump’s gross incompetence in his first term wasn’t all bad. It kept some of his most extreme goals out of reach. That’s why his inner circle, including more than 20 officials from his first term, have written a step-by-step playbook to make a second term brutally efficient.

At nearly a thousand pages, it’s longer than most Stephen King novels, and a lot scarier. The Associated Press wasn’t kidding when they called it “a plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision,”

Project 2025 is a road map to ban abortion, give greedy corporate oligarchs everything they want, and strip Americans of our most basic freedoms — all without needing any support from Congress.

There’s more to it than I can get into, but here are three things I want you to know.

#1 How would Project 2025 work?

Every nonpartisan government agency would be turned into an arm of the MAGA agenda.

Some of the worst things Trump reportedly tried to do as president — like having the military  shoot protesters or seize voting machines to overturn the election  — were only stopped because sensible leaders in the military or the professional civil service refused to go along with it.

In a second term, there would be no sensible leaders in the military or professional civil service because Trump would fire anyone more loyal to the Constitution than to him.

Trump started the process in October 2020 with an executive order that would have let him fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA henchmen. I’m talking about traditionally non-political positions, like scientists at scientific agencies and accountants at the IRS.

Trump could not act on the executive order then because he lost the election. If he wins now, he’s pledged to pick up where he left off and go further…

TRUMP: …making every executive branch employee fireable by the President of the United States.

#2 Project 2025 is about controlling Americans’ lives & bodies

Restricting abortion is such a big part of Project 2025 that the word “abortion” appears 198 times in the plan.

Trump largely made good on his campaign promise to ban abortion.

Thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court justices, 1 in 3 American women of childbearing age live in states with abortion bans. Project 2025 would make that even worse, without needing new laws from Congress.

Page 458 of the playbook calls for a MAGA-controlled FDA to reject medical science and reverse approval of the medications used in 63% of all abortions, effectively banning them.

Page 455 plans “abortion surveillance” and the creation of a registry that could put people who cross state lines to get an abortion at risk of prosecution.

Another way around Congress is to enforce arcane laws that are still technically on the books. Page 562 plans for a MAGA-controlled Justice Department to enforce the Comstock Act of 1873, which bans the mailing of “anything designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” This could be used to block the shipment of any medications or medical instruments needed for abortions.

But Project 2025’s control of American families goes even further. It plans for government agencies to define life as beginning at conception — a position at odds with the process used for in vitro fertilization.

Page 451 declares that “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” thereby stigmatizing single parents, same-sex couples, unmarried coparents, and childless couples.

Project 2025 even takes a stand against adoption, declaring on p. 489 that “all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.”

#3 Project 2025 would turn America into a police state.

Maybe you live in a blue city or state, where you think plans like arresting teachers and librarians over banned books (which is on p. 5) could never happen. Well, guess again.

Trump has said one of the big things he’d do differently in a second term is override mayors and governors to take over local law enforcement.

Page 553 lays out how to do this, and even plans for Trump’s Justice Department to prosecute district attorneys he disagrees with.

Immigration enforcement is to be conducted like a war, with the military deployed within the U.S., and millions of undocumented immigrants rounded up and placed into newly constructed holding camps. This is outlined starting on p. 139.

Members of the Project 2025 team also reportedly told the Washington Post about plans to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against anti-Trump protests.

There is much more to Project 2025. There are more than a hundred pages of anti-environmental policies that would help Trump make good on what he reportedly promised to do for oil executives if they contribute a billion dollars to his reelection. It would make drilling and mining a top national priority while killing clean energy projects, barring the EPA from regulating carbon emissions, and replacing all government climate scientists with climate deniers.

There are even cartoonishly cruel plans like slaughtering wild horses. Yes, that’s really in there on p. 528.

I thought I understood the stakes of this election, but reading this plan… Well, it gave me chills. If Trump gets the chance to put this plan into place, he will. The country it would turn America into would be hard for any of us to recognize.

JD Vance Is a Working Class Phony

J.D. Vance wants to con America into believing he’s some “working class hero.” 

Baloney!

He worked for a law firm that lobbied for Purdue Pharma — the company that pleaded guilty to three felonies for its role in creating America’s opioid crisis.

He’s a former venture capitalist who benefited from tax loopholes designed for the super-rich.

He won his Senate seat thanks to tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who spent $15 million on Vance’s Senate campaign.

He visited a picket line for a photo op, but opposed legislation to protect workers’ rights to organize.

He weakened his own railway safety bill at the request of rail and chemical lobbyists.

He opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, which has unleashed a wave of investment in American manufacturing and created over 300,000 clean energy jobs so far.

J.D. Vance isn’t a “populist.” He’s a phony.

He doesn’t give a fig about workers.

The former president made the announcement Thursday, as reproductive rights loom over the first post-Roe presidential election.

Vice President Harris answered Republicans’ gripes by sitting for her first interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.