Raw Story

President Donald Trump warned that courts ruling against him could bring on the economic "ruination of the United States."

In a Sunday post on his Truth Social platform, the president said that he did not expect the court to strip him of the power to impose tariffs.

"If the Courts somehow rule against us on Tariffs, which is not expected, that would allow other Countries to hold our Nation hostage with their anti-American Tariffs that they would use against us," he wrote.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

"This would mean the Economic ruination of the United States of America!" Trump added.

Last week, the president suggested the conservative Federalist Society was to blame after a judge he appointed ruled that some tariffs were illegally imposed.

"I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations," he insisted on Thursday.

It happens every few generations. It’s what drove the fascist oligarchs of the Confederacy to reach out and try to conquer the entire United States in the 1860s. It caused the Robber Barons to murder union organizers and ultimately crash America into the Republican Great Depression in the early decades of the 20th century. And it’s why wages have been stagnant while billionaires’ wealth has exploded in the years since the Reagan Revolution.

What I’m talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness, what’s either a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or a defect in impulse control called Hoarding Syndrome.

Because most hoarders never invite people into their homes, it’s an almost invisible illness. But, as Drs. Randy Frost and Gail Steketee write in their book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things:

“Recent studies of hoarding put the prevalence rate at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the population. That means that six million to 15 million Americans suffer from hoarding that causes them distress or interferes with their ability to live.”

That’s tough enough; people afflicted with hoarding syndrome are often tortured by their obsession and socially embarrassed to the point of removing themselves from all but the most essential social situations. They’re functionally invisible. But, from a societal point of view, they’re generally only harming themselves: hoarding syndrome is considered a psychiatric condition, not a crisis for democracy itself.

With one giant exception: morbidly rich people who are also afflicted with hoarding syndrome but don’t live in or even close to poverty.

When people with hoarding syndrome are born with or come into massive wealth, suddenly what was once a personal, psychiatric issue can become a crisis for all of society.

Like Scrooge McDuck of Disney comics fame, instead of filling their mansions with old newspapers, tin cans, and balls of string they obsessively fill their money bins, overseas bank accounts, and investment portfolios with billions of dollars.

And then, driven to continuously hoard more and more money — that now being the object of their addiction — they reach out to use the power of government itself to redirect more and more cash into their greedy hands.

As historian and political scientist Michael Parenti notes:

“Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for still more fortune. There is no end to the amount of money one might wish to accumulate, driven onward by the auri sacra fames, the cursed hunger for gold.

“So the money addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration.”

It blots out their concern for their fellow humans. It blots out their willingness to take climate science seriously. It blots out their ability to see the damage they’re doing to their own country and its democratic institutions.

Ultimately, they don’t care about the damage they do to society; such considerations are overwhelmed by their obsession. They don’t care how many children must grow up in poverty or even die young to support their massive wealth. They don’t care about destroying everybody else’s future, so long as they can get more, more, more money!

We defeated Confederate oligarchs with this disease back in 1865. We beat money hoarders back again after the Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. We thought we were safe, as the middle class grew from around 10 percent of us to around two-thirds of us (with a single paycheck!) by the late 1970s.

But then, in 1978, in the Bellotti decision written by “Powell Memo” author Lewis Powell himself, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that money is actually “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It floated Ronald Reagan into office in 1981 on a tsunami of oil and banking industry money. Five other corrupted SCOTUS Republicans doubled down on that bizarre ruling in 2010 with Citizens United, creating an entirely new form of corrupt political bribery via something they created out of thin air that are called SuperPACs.

As a result, today these morbidly rich hoarders shovel small amounts (millions) into the pockets of captured politicians who then provide them with tax breaks, profit-driving deregulation, and government subsidies that return billions to them. And the impact on average Americans over the past 47 years that we’ve been living in the Reagan Revolution has been dramatic.

While every other developed country in the world offers free or nearly free healthcare to its citizens, free or nearly free education including college, and almost universal unionization and a high minimum wage, we’re stuck living in the nation these billionaires have forced on us just to satisfy their own avaricious obsession with more, more, more money:

• Almost 30 million Americans lack health insurance altogether, and 43 percent of Americans are so badly under-insured that any illness or accident costing them more than $1,000 in co-pays or deductibles would wipe them out.
• Almost 12 percent of Americans, over 37 million of us, live in dire poverty, and 60% of us live in poverty, 201 million Americans. According to OECD numbers, while only 5 percent of Italians and 11 percent of Japanese workers toil in low-wage jobs, as CBS News reports, “For the bottom 60 percent of U.S. households, a minimal quality of life is out of reach.” (And low-income Japanese and Italians have free healthcare and college.)
• More than one-in-five Americans — 21 percent — are illiterate. By fourth grade, a mere 35 percent of American children are literate at grade level, as our public schools have suffered from a sustained, four-decade-long attack by Republicans at both state and federal levels to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.
• Fully a quarter of Americans (26 percent) suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year: over half of them (54 percent) never receive treatment and, because of cost and a lack of access to mental health care, of the 46 percent who do get help, the average time from onset of symptoms to the first treatment is 11 years.
• Every day in America an average of 316 people are shot and 110 die from their wounds. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children, a situation not suffered by the children of any other country in the world.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg of statistics about how Americans suffer from Reagan’s 40-year-long GOP war on working-class and poor people that has managed to make America the nation with the world’s largest number of the world’s wealthiest billionaires.

• Almost half (44 percent) of American adults carry student debt, a burden virtually unknown in any other developed country in the world (dozens of countries actually pay their young people to go to college).
• Americans spend more than twice as much for healthcare and pharmaceuticals than citizens of any other developed country. We pay $11,912 per person per year for healthcare; it’s $5,463 in Australia, $4,666 in Japan, $5,496 in France, and $7,382 in Germany (the most expensive country outside of us).

And we don’t get better health or a longer lifespan for all the money; instead, it’s just lining the pockets of rich insurance, pharma, and hospital executives and investors, with hundreds of billions in profits every year going to the morbidly rich. “Dollar Bill” McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth, for example, took over a billion dollars in compensation.

• The average American life expectancy is 78.8 years: Canada is 82.3, Australia is 82.9, Japan is 84.4, France is 83.0, and Germany is 81.3.
• Our public schools are an underfunded mess, as are our highways and public transportation systems. While every other developed country in the world has high-speed train service, we still suffer under a privatized rail system that prevents Amtrak from running even their most modern trains at anything close to their top speeds.

In the 42 years since the start of the Reagan Revolution, bought-off politicians have so altered our tax code that fully $51 trillion has moved from the homes and savings of working class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich money hoarders.

As a result, America today is the most unequal developed nation in the world and the situation gets worse every day: many of our billionaires are richer than any pharaoh or king in the history of the world, while a family lifestyle that could be comfortably supported by a single income in 1980 takes two people working full-time to maintain today.

In the years since the Court first began down this road in 1976, the GOP has come to be entirely captured by this handful of mentally ill billionaires and the industries that made them rich.

As a result, Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the slaughter of our schoolchildren with weapons of war; ignore or ridicule the damage fossil fuel-caused global warming is doing to our nation and planet; and continue to lower billionaire and corporate taxes every time they get full control of the federal or a state government.

All because our courts and politicians, now well-captured by rightwing billionaires, refuse to do anything about the ravages of hoarding syndrome among the very wealthy.

Solving this problem won’t be easy but also isn’t complicated. Just like we did with the Robber Barons, the first step is to identify and publicize the problem of mentally ill people among the morbidly rich having seized control of our political system.

We did this before.

As President Grover Cleveland — the only Democrat elected during that post-Civil War period — proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

And as FDR pointed out when he began to pull America out of the Republican Great Depression:

“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

FDR took on those “economic royalists” and defeated them. He explicitly called them out when the Democratic Party renominated him for president in 1936 in Philadelphia:

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.

“Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd roared, delighted that he’d turned back the Republican Great Depression and put millions to work while undoing the climate-destroying Dust Bowl by creating, among other three-letter agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to plant millions of trees across the country. And he raised the top tax rate on the obscenely wealthy back up to 90 percent, while stopping an effort to kidnap him and turn the government fascist.

“In vain, they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Cleveland’s and Roosevelt’s work now falls to us, as a new generation of obsessively money-hoarding Robber Barons have emerged from Reagan’s tax cuts and these horrible Supreme Court decisions. It’s thus now our job to educate the American people about the mental illness that’s frozen our economy and is dismantling our democracy.

Our task in this time of crisis is to create a societal consensus across America that we’re done indulging these wealthy pampered babies’ every desire, and begin the serious reforms necessary to put an end to this crisis and, like in the 1890s and 1930s, break up monopolies and raise their damn taxes so we can begin to pay down our nation’s debt and rebuild the middle class.

It’ll take a few years, in all probability, but it’s been done before. We can do it again.

Tag, we’re it! Spread the word…

The reasons given by White House insiders on why Donald Trump withdrew the nomination of Elon Musk associate Jared Isaacman to head NASA are now being questioned.

According to a report from the New York Times' Maggie Haberman and Ryan Mac, the dismissal of Isaacman was officially described as being due to “prior associations,” which was meant to convey it was because he had previously donated to Democrats.

According to insiders, the president was only recently alerted to Isaacman's Democratic largesse, but now, with Musk out of the White House, that excuse is being questioned.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

The Times is reporting, "... those donations were old news. While Mr. Trump privately told advisers in recent days that he was surprised to learn of Mr. Isaacman’s contributions and that he had not been told of them previously, he and his team were briefed about them during the presidential transition in late 2024, before Mr. Isaacman’s nomination, according to two people with knowledge of the events."

The report adds that Isaacman also has confirmed he "directly told Mr. Trump about those donations when they met in person weeks after the 2024 election."

With the White House not responding to questions clarifying who knew what and when, the Times report added, "Mr. Trump is said to have deferred to Mr. Musk on the choice, given his success with SpaceX. But Mr. Trump told Mr. Musk on Friday, his last day in the government, that he planned to pull Mr. Isaacman’s nomination. Allies of Mr. Musk and some allies of Mr. Trump spent part of Saturday publicly trying to salvage the nomination."

You can read more here.

Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA) was relentlessly booed at a town hall over her support for President Donald Trump.

The first jeers came just moments into her event on Wednesday.

"Families in Iowa have told me for the last four years that we want to make sure we have safe streets, we have affordable groceries and gas, and that kids have the opportunity to be able to live out the American dream," Hinson said. "And that is what President Trump is delivering for us. And the president is, I believe, fighting for you and fighting for me."

The congressman's words were met with immediate boos and heckling.

"And I think God saved President Trump's life in Butler," she insisted. "I think he saved his life in Butler, Pennsylvania for a reason."

Voter Steve Peterson said he was "really concerned about is the corruption in Washington."

"And I think that it undermines our faith in our government, and I think it undermines our faith in representatives," he said. "In particular, I'm thinking about the $400 million jet that was given to Mr. Trump."

"I'm thinking about the meme coins and the dinner at the White House, I'm thinking about the Liberty Fund and the Ponzi scheme and the billions of dollars that are coming into there," he continued. "So there's lots of reasons why somebody like you might be silent. You might be scared to say something. You might actually like to see the corruption. I know there are some that are making a lot of money from it."

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

"I think it's really unfair to imply that I like to see corruption in Washington, D.C.," Hinson complained. "I reject that premise wholeheartedly. I am here answering your questions in public because I care about transparency."

"I was actually just named to the House Ethics Committee because I do things the right way," she added to laughs. "I'm answering your question."

Hinson later said she did not support an impeachment inquiry into Trump. Her words were again met with boos.

Watch the video below from C-SPAN.

A Missouri town that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the 2024 election has come to regret its choice after a beloved neighbor was detained by ICE, according to The New York Times.

In the farming town of Kennett, MO, population 10,000, Times reporter Jack Healy met with residents who "supported in theory" Trump's tough talk on immigration. Now they're rallying around a Hong Kong immigrant named Ming Li Hui, who went by "Carol" in her adopted hometown.

"In the 20 years since she arrived from Hong Kong, she had built a life and family in Kennett, working two waitressing jobs and cleaning houses on the side," Healy wrote. He quoted a Kennett city councilwoman who said, “Everyone knows Carol."

But Hui has since been arrested and detained by the Department of Homeland Security as she awaits deportation back to her birth country.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” one woman told Healy. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”

According to Hui's attorney, she hoped to gain permanent resident status in the U.S. after paying "an American citizen $2,000 to enter into a sham marriage."

"Ms. Hui was never criminally charged for the fake marriage, which ended in divorce in 2009," Healy wrote. "Court papers indicate that she has no criminal record." In the meantime, Hui stayed on in the U.S. even as her tourist visa expired.

One resident told Healy, "She’s exactly the sort of person you’d want to come to the country. I don’t know how this fits into the deportation problem with Trump.” Another declared, "I can’t believe they’re doing this to her."

Some of Hui's neighbors "said they had implored state and national Republican lawmakers representing the area to intervene to stop Ms. Hui’s deportation, but had gotten mostly cursory responses," Healy wrote.

Read The New York Times article here.

A woman yelling profanity and racist slurs went viral after she threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a U.S. citizen selling Mexican food.

Oscar Lopez told NBC 4's Tracey Leong that he shared the video on social media after the woman repeatedly drove past his food stand in Palmdale, California.

"It's illegal to have a Mexican flag and not an American one!" the woman could be heard shouting. "I'm calling ICE!"

"She started screaming all these things. It was very racial, especially against Mexicans, and also that she was going to call ICE," Lopez recalled. "It was very, I don't know, very scary at the moment."

"She mentioned the flag not being with an American flag on the side," he said. "And the reason of the Mexican flag is the food that we sell. It's nothing else trying to do anything else with it."

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

Lopez was born in the United States. His wife is from El Salvador. The couple's food truck specializes in serving Mexican cuisine.

"I think as a Hispanic and the culture that we live in, we should appreciate each and every good food from every country," Lopez said. "I would like everybody to be aware of [what's] going on."

Watch the video below from NBC 4.