Something to Know - 21 October

I am growing weary, very weary, of all the theatrical drama as election day approaches.   I am tired of all the candidate solicitations for money.   I have done voted; signed sealed and delivered with a message that my ballot has been received and will be counted.   If there is a spray  that could be applied to the rot of the Republican Party, I will gladly donate to rid the air of the stench.   Never has there been such a despicable display of the underbelly of corruption on display from the worst possible president.   Did I say that I was sick of it?  Need I say more?

Robert Reich Unsubscribe	Mon, Oct 19, 1:10 AM (2 days ago)
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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more The Tragic Death of the Republican Party The only hope for its rebirth would be a total Democratic victory on November 3 Robert Reich Oct 19   READ IN APP   Friends, The Republican Party once stood for limited government, active opposition to Soviet aggression, and a balanced budget. Now it stands only for Trump and his authoritarian neofascism, demanding total loyalty to him. Yet Trump’s approval among U.S. adults now stands at 33 percent, with 66 percent disapproving; 52 percent said they disapprove strongly. (That approval rating is 4 percentage points lower than in July and 8 points lower than at this point last year. It’s lower than at any point in his first term.) In other words, the Republican Party has tied itself to Trump, but the vast majority of Americans believe Trump a failure. So where does that leave the GOP? Nowhere. The GOP is dead. The death of the Republican Party is tragic to me personally. I got my first job in government in Republican Gerald Ford’s administration. I argued Supreme Court cases in Ford’s Department of Justice. Years later, as secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, I worked closely with Republicans in the House and Senate to enact the Family and Medical Leave Act, raise the minimum wage, and protect workers’ pensions. My father was a Republican who voted for Dwight Eisenhower for president in 1952 and 1956. His father, my grandfather Alexander Reich, was a Republican who voted for Alf Landon for president in 1936 and Wendell Willkie in 1940. Gerald Ford is as far from the current Republican Party as was or is any Democratic president. Sad to say, in 2024, the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation declined to present the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service to former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney out of fear that, should he become president again, Trump would retaliate against the organization by taking away its tax-exempt status. In response, Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer David Hume Kennerly resigned from the board. In his resignation letter he wrote that “Gerald Ford became president, in part, because Richard Nixon had ordered the development of an enemies list and demanded his underlings use the IRS against those listed. That’s exactly what the executive committee fears will happen if there’s a second coming of Donald Trump.” Kennerly added: “Did [Lieutenant] Gerald Ford meet the enemy head-on [in World War II] because he thought he wouldn’t get killed? No. He did it despite that possibility. This executive committee, on the other hand, bolted before any shots were fired. You aren’t alone. Many foundations, organizations, corporations, and other entities are caught up in this tidal wave of timidity and fear that’s sweeping this country. I mistakenly thought we were better than that. This is the kind of acquiescent behavior that leads to authoritarianism. President Ford most likely would have come out even tougher and said that it leads directly to fascism.” Ford’s biggest mistake as president was to pardon Nixon. Ford believed that America had to be shielded from the pain and disruption of a president put on criminal trial and possibly imprisoned. Yet to many Americans, the fact that Nixon would not be held accountable felt like another assault on the common good. All subsequent Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, have used Nixon’s playbook, relying on a coalition of corporate America and the white working class, and using bigoted racial dog-whistles. Nixon infected the modern Republican Party with a sickness that would ultimately kill it. Trump applied the coup de grace. The Republican Party purged their honest lawmakers who refused to go along with Trump’s Big Lie, the most dangerous one in American history in terms of its consequences for Americans’ confidence in democracy. On April 14, 2024, on ABC’s “This Week,” host George Stephanopoulos asked New Hampshire’s then Republican governor Chris Sununu about his switch from supporting former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the Republican presidential nomination to supporting Trump. “Your words were very, very clear on January 11, 2021,” Stephanopoulos reminded Sununu. “You said that President Trump’s rhetoric and actions contributed to the insurrection. No other president in history has contributed to an insurrection. So, please explain.” Sununu responded, “For me, it’s not about him as much as it is having a Republican administration.” Near the end of the interview, Stephanopoulos said: “Just to sum up, you would support [Trump] for president even if he is convicted in classified documents. You would support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You would support him for president even though you believe he’s lying about the last election. You would support him for president even if he’s convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?” Sununu replied, “Yeah, me and 51 percent of America.” Stephanpoulos: “I’m asking you about right and wrong. You’re comfortable with the idea of supporting someone who’s convicted of a federal crime as president?” Sununu: “No, I don’t think any American is comfortable with any of this. They don’t like any of this, of course, but I mean, when it comes to actually looking at each of these trials as they kind of take place whether it’s this year or next year or as they kind of line up. Right now this is about an election. This is about politics.” I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Politics is not about right and wrong? It has no moral content? Is it only about winning? Chris Sununu’s willingness to destroy American democracy so his party could stay in power — a rejection of our system of government and an abrogation of the self-government that generations of Americans have fought and died for — is shared by most Republican officeholders today. The Republican Party’s end is tragic because America needs two parties capable of governing; two parties with a sense of the common good, even if their interpretations of it differ; two parties dedicated to democracy, even if politics is sometimes dirty and often frustrating. The death of the Republican Party illustrates what happens when presidents are not held accountable. It is evidence of what occurs when a large portion of the public feels it’s been cheated. It shows that many Americans have lost sight of our history and ideals or have become so cynical and hopeless that they are willing to chuck it all in favor of an atrocious human being who claims to be on their side. The Republican Party went from a governing institution into a crazed cult, intent on turning America into an authoritarian nation. A large, angry, anxious working class craved a strongman who’d shake up the system, but strongmen are utterly inconsistent with democracy. Hence, the GOP’s death. I fervently hope that many of the Trump cultists now in Congress who call themselves Republicans will be thrown out on November 3. That would be the best thing that could happen to the Republican Party, because it could give the GOP the chance it desperately needs — to start over.

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Juan Matute

R.B.R.

C.C.R.C.

Something to Know - 20 October

Next time you are in your local Dollar Store, or Dollar General, or discount store, and you see a few high end luxury cars in the parking lot and post-pickleball attire roaming the aisles, you are witnessing the stress of the high cost of living hitting those whose standards of living are beyond the pale, and they are hurting as well.   Now, do we feel sorry for them?    Probably not.

A new round of stories asks us to feel sorry for families living paycheck-to-paycheck on $500,000 a year

Casa Encantada is a 40,000-square-foot Bel-Air mega-mansion that sold in 2024 for $130 million to billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

(Simon Berlyn)

By Michael Hiltzik

Business Columnist Follow

Oct. 20, 2026 3 AM PT

Why does a family with $500,000 in income feel financially strapped? It’s not the price of groceries or gasoline, but lifestyle choices.

Ben Franklin was wrong. The certain things in life aren’t only death and taxes, but death, taxes and news articles about how wealthy families are living “paycheck-to-paycheck.”

We’re undergoing a new round of this coverage, triggered this time by a survey from Goldman Sachs titled “New Economics of Retirement: Making Every Dollar Saved Work Harder.” Candidly, the “new economics of retirement” described in the survey resemble the same old economics of retirement — families trying to save for college and generally make ends meet find it hard to put money aside in retirement accounts today, just as it always was.

The eye-opening bullet point in this survey, however, is that households with income of $500,000 and more feel as strapped as those at the lowest reaches of the income ladder, say with income of $50,000 to $100,000.Something to K

That latter segment encompasses the median household, with income of about $84,000 in 2024. The highest segment encompasses the proverbial 1%, who average about $700,000 in annual inflow.

The survey begat headlines in the media, especially in finance-oriented publications like Fortune and Barron’s, that figuratively wrung their hands over the travails of the upper crust.

I’ve pointed out in the past that articles like these are a genre of financial reporting all its own. “The idea seems to be that wealth doesn’t buy happiness or even, really, wealth, so we shouldn’t judge these people too harshly,” I wrote in 2017. Spates of them appear every couple of years, often inspired by surveys of financial contentment like Goldman’s. Very little about them has changed over time, except perhaps for the threshold of unhappiness, which has tended to rise with inflation.

But they’re particularly piquant at this moment, when plutocratic influences on our government, economy and politics have come under heightened scrutiny. A key driver of the discussion has been the billionaire tax on the California ballot for next month’s election. The leading character in the political brouhaha over the tax is Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google and one of the richest men in the world, who has lobbed more than $100 million into the opposition campaign from an out-of-state perch.

Some coverage of the Goldman Sachs survey implies that since low-income and high-income families experience similar levels of unease about their finances, they’re all in the same boat. That’s not exactly what the survey found, however.

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Goldman Sachs discovered a U-shaped phenomenon among segments of household income. As one might expect, it found that lower-income households struggle to fund their retirement because their resources are consumed by child-care expenses, staples such as food and gas and housing.

Curiously, households with income between $100,000 and $300,000 reported the most contentment with their ability to save for retirement — their “earnings appear sufficient to cover the essentials, service debt, and still leave room to build toward the future,” according to the report.

Things turn darker for those with $300,000 or more. Goldman Sachs notes judiciously that “their reported insecurity is not about covering the essentials but about ... more complex financial lives [and] higher lifestyle expectations.”

The bank acknowledges that the source of strain is entirely distinct among these cohorts. “For one, it may be the strain of making ends meet. For the other, it may be the strain of one’s lifestyle and the expectations that often outpace a rising income.”

To dive deeper into what we can say about wealth and penury in today’s America, let’s examine the standard features of the articles about the supposedly financially strapped rich—whom economist Greg Kaplan, then of Princeton, and colleagues termed the “wealthy hand-to-mouth” in a 2014 paper.

Several such articles appeared in March 2017, after personal finance writer Sam Dogen published a piece on his Financial Samurai website titled “Scraping By on $500,000 a Year: Why It’s So Hard for High Income Earners to Escape the Rat Race.”

Dogen wrote of an ostensibly genuine but unidentified couple living in New York City with two kids on combined incomes of $500,000. After their annual expenses, he wrote, they were left with $7,300.

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April 2, 2026

As not a few commentators observed (myself included), that paltry sum was what remained after expenditures on what middle-class families, say those living on $70,000 to $150,000, might see as unattainable luxuries. Those included funding their 401(k) accounts with the then-maximum $36,000, mortgage payments of $5,000 a month on a $1.5-million three-bedroom apartment, child care ($42,000), three vacations a year ($18,000), car payments on a BMW and Toyota Land Cruiser ($9,600) and food for four including “date nights” every two weeks ($23,000).

I noted then that two cars in New York City were non-necessities by any measure. Date nights every other week would plainly drive up child-care costs and render average couples with two toddlers at home prostrate with envy.

Dogen also listed $18,000 for charity, including donations to the couples’ universities, and $10,000 on “miscellaneous (something always comes up),” meaning that their actual leftover cash wasn’t $7,300 but $17,300. Things like 401(k) contributions shouldn’t even count as spending, since they still have that money — they’ve just put it aside for the moment.

For this couple, like those featured in other such explorations, most of this spending is on items that result from choices, not necessities. Redoing the math, the truth emerges that they had $155,000 available, from which they could pay for their retirement funds, child care, cars, vacations, charitable contributions and miscellaneous expenses.

(At the time, Dogen defended his calculations as reasonable for a couple living in New York and responsible spending for a family helping their children get ahead).

Another round of such reporting erupted in 2020 when Joe Biden, then the Democratic candidate for president, said he would raise taxes only on the rich, whom he defined as those collecting $400,000 a year or more. Market Watch responded with the headline, “Joe Biden defines income of $400,000 as ‘wealthy,’ but here’s why it’s barely scraping by for some.”

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July 8, 2025

Dogen weighed in again, with a piece cited by CNBC and others. His family of four ended the year with only $34 in hand for “miscellaneous” expenses. Along the way, however, they salted away $39,000 in their 401(k) plans and $18,000 in college savings and spent $81,000 on a $1.6-million mortgage and $37,200 on day care.

A new element in some recent stories is the assertion that the wealthy are so financially straitened they’re cutting back. Last year, Fortune reported that “more than seven in 10 of these high earners are now being forced to shop at discount grocery chains to save cash” — as if at gunpoint?

The source of the claim was a survey by Clarify Capital, a small-business lender, which in effect defined “high earners” as anyone with $100,000 or more in income. Today, however, that encompasses solidly middle-class, even working-class, households, not the $500,000+ cadre. The sample was 750 persons.

What’s usually undefined in these analyses is living “paycheck-to-paycheck.” Obviously, a family that is left with pennies after paying for food, shelter, healthcare and utilities, sees it differently from a family that spends on all those things and also on retirement and college funds, luxury cars, vacation travel and date nights.

Kaplan and his co-authors made an important distinction between the “wealthy hand-to-mouth” who hold little or no liquid wealth (such as ready cash) “but do have significant amounts of illiquid assets on their balance sheet,” and the “poor hand-to-mouth” who hold little or no liquid wealth and no illiquid wealth.

Both groups spend down all the liquid wealth they receive. But the first group has plenty of wealth in places such as retirement accounts, which they’re reluctant to spend because of the transaction costs of accessing it. To an outsider, both groups may be equally strapped when they’ve spent down their cash, but the first group is still rich.

There’s no question that rising prices are being felt these days by both groups. A $1.4-million 30-year mortgage costs more than $6,600 a month to pay down when rates are at 4%, as they were not a very long time ago; when rates are at 7.5%, about where they are now, a loan of only about $950,000 would require about the same monthly payment and a $1.4-million mortgage would cost nearly $9,800 a month.

A wealthy hand-to-mouth family might well be able to cover the latter by dipping into their illiquid reserves (and they’d have more liquid income, too). The same numbers might prompt a middle-class or working-class family to put a home purchase on hold, for the foreseeable future. That’s the sort of distinction that gets glossed over when we fret about rich families living “paycheck to paycheck.” And it’s the reality today.

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Juan Matute

R.B.R.

C.C.R.C.

Something to Know - 19 October

Kompromat is the Russian term for "compromising".   Russian KGB Agent Vladimir Putin is skilled in getting dirt on people which in turn provides a vehicle for manipulation and control.   In the early part of this century, Donald Trump struggled to secure international financing for his hotel and casino businesses because reputable banking institutions denied him loans due to his previous bankruptcies and business practices.   So, Putin was able to make Trump a KGB asset by linking him with the Russian Oligarchs who had gobbled up all of the Soviet assets when Russia privatized the businesses.   Only problem was that the Oligarchs had Rubles, and needed to convert them into US dollars, which Putin arranged, using Germany's Deutsche Bank, via outlets in Cyprus.   During this hustle and bustle of business, Putin was able to get Trump into some compromising streaks of recorded behavior that Trump gleefully played out for Putin.   This Kompromat is the leverage that compels Trump, as President to act as an agent for Russia.   Putin is calling in the chips now, because he senses that Trump may be forced out, impeached, or might die soon, and will no longer be of use to Putin.    Trump will do anything to save his ass from the embarrassment of the world knowing just how craven and despicable he really is.    Do I have any evidence for my conspiracy theory....?    Not one bit.   Just a big hunch from following the news for all of these years.

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>	Sun, Oct 18, 11:20 PM (11 hours ago)
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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more October 18, 2026 Heather Cox Richardson Oct 19   READ IN APP   Tonight Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine. The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine. A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence. After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin. In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war. And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect. Putin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted an AI-generated image of the U.S. eagle standing next to a Russian bear, snarling at a British lion standing next to the flag of the European Union—the U.S. and Russia standing shoulder to shoulder against the United Kingdom and Europe—with the caption “Things Have Changed…” Over the post, Dmitriev wrote: “Together.” He cheered on Trump’s waiving of the sanctions imposed by the Graham Act and, in response to a post claiming that Trump’s move to bolster Russia had caused panic in Europe and Ukraine, posted: “Checkmate.” In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted with evident disgust: “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.” This decision, Nichols wrote, appears to have had nothing to do with the national interest of the United States. Instead, Trump appears to have thrown out the world order because of his own personal interests, his admiration for Putin, his resentment of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.” Outrage over Trump’s actions has come from across the political spectrum. Nichols notes that former federal prosecutor turned conservative commenter Andrew McCarthy wrote that Trump is giving Putin “aid and comfort.” Those words echo Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason against the United States, as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” McCarthy’s blistering article in the National Review on Saturday reminds readers that Putin is a murderous dictator who is actively supporting Iran’s military operations against the United States with both intelligence and drones and provoking U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And yet Trump is siding with him against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. McCarthy demanded Congress hold “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.” The backlash appears to have pushed Trump to try to justify his gutting of the Graham Act, at least. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one.” He went on to claim that he didn’t want “to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table” in the quest for a peace deal with Ukraine. He shrugged off Russia’s support for Iran in its war against the U.S. by suggesting it “is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way.” And then he attacked Zelensky, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries rather than his own war on Iran for the high cost of diesel in the U.S. and claiming that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.” Nichols tore through this screed, calling it a pathetic admission of Trump’s weakness “in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.” “The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet,” Nichols pointed out, “is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.” Until now, Nichols wrote, “[a] world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was…the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies.” Now that alliance exists. Nichols laments that Trump and Putin have fulfilled the dreams of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Cold War leaders who followed him, humbling and humiliating the mighty United States. The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant. They believed U.S. representatives would be so fearful of a leader’s abuse of power that they would impeach any president who overstepped his authority, and that U.S. senators would be so jealous of their own power they would convict, and tyranny would not be able to take root. The Framers especially did not anticipate that senators, to whom they deliberately gave longer terms than they gave the president, would put party over country and stand aside as a president and his appointees captured the prerogatives of the Senate. And yet, here we are. But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator. —

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Juan Matute

R.B.R.

C.C.R.C.