Yes, it’s still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is the author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy.
John Oliver discusses the upcoming elections in the UK, why the race for prime minister hinges on 76,000 voters who live in a small area called Makerfield, and which party leader looks like his first words were “British East India Company.”
Tim Miller on just one horrid aspect of Trump’s cage matches last night:
“Michelle Obama is a man” shouted on the White House lawn in a ring sponsored by Bud Light only available on Larry Ellison’s Paramount Plus. What a way to celebrate America 250 and the twilight of liberal democracy.
Meanwhile, by all signs, Trump’s answer to the judge’s order to remove his name from the Kennedy Center is to cover up JFK’s name as well
On that theme, from Paul Krugman today:
Many people have compared our current era to the Gilded Age. But that analogy is deeply unfair to the Gilded Age. Like the robber barons of yore, today’s oligarchs are immensely wealthy — even wealthier, relative to the economy as a whole, than their predecessors. And extreme wealth corrupts our democracy. But the corruption is deeper and more destructive now than it was then: The mitigating factors that once put some brakes on the harm done by excessive wealth concentration are now mostly gone.
About wealth concentration: The standard source for information on extreme wealth is the Forbes 400 list. Forbes only began compiling that list in its current form in 1982, but it published its first listing of America’s top fortunes in 1918. The chart above compares the wealth of the richest 5 Americans in 1918 with that of the richest 15 in 2025 — 15, not 5, because the total U.S. population more than tripled over that period. I scale their wealth both as a percentage of total wealth and as a share of GDP.
Either way, the concentration of wealth at the very top is much higher now than it ever was during the Gilded Age. And these are numbers from last year, before the SpaceX IPO. The robber barons were pikers compared with today’s oligarchs.
This level of wealth brings with it immense political influence. A New York Times analysis found that 300 billionaires accounted for 19 percent of political contributions in the 2024 election. And since the election the power of money has grown even stronger.
In part this reflects the way great wealth has been used to corrupt the media. Elon Musk bought Twitter, not as a financial investment, but to turn it into the right-wing fever swamp it has now become. Larry Ellison, America’s second-richest man, purchased CBS basically to destroy it as an independent news source and convert it into Fox News 2.0, a goal he is achieving — and he is now on track to do the same to CNN.
On top of this, the presidency is now more or less openly for sale. “Donald Trump,” writes Forbes, “has presided over the most lucrative presidency in history,” adding $4.2 billion to his personal wealth since regaining the White House.
There were many corruption scandals during the Gilded Age, but none on this scale.
Yesterday, on Trump’s birthday, the NY Times asked a handful of celebs what is the best and worst thing about reaching your 80s. If you missed Bob Dylan’s response:
The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.
The worst thing
The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.
The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.
Music Pick
You’ve liked these in the past, so here’s another anti-Trump parody song from the Piedmont Grannies, this time to the tune of “Hey, Mr. Tangerine Man.”
From Tune to Toons
Barry Blitt:
Rowe:
Goris:
Photo Finish
The oddly-named Red Bellied Woodpecker
Lotta us birds got odd names, like my cousin Yellow Bellied Sapsucker.
Great quote from Dylan, especially as I age (now 73)…and as a gout sufferer I concur with Barry Blitt!