Gosh, I miss the old days of CEO greed, when the pay gap between Boss Hog and everyday employees was merely gross.

Today, the guiding ethic for top executive enrichment is to have no ethics. Grab as much as you can as fast as you can, everyone else be damned. And never mind that as chief, you did absolutely nothing to “earn” that exorbitant stash of cash.

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How exorbitant? Corporations try to hide the actual numbers, but under an insider accounting measure called “compensation actually paid” reveals the obscene truth. Last year, America’s 10 highest paid CEOs averaged more than a billion dollars each in pay. One person, one year, one billion.

And the Number One highest-paid corporate honcho last year, Alex Karp, made off with nearly $7 billion! That’s $560 million a month in personal pay. With the exceptions of Jesus and Dolly Parton, no one is worth anywhere near that!

And what does Alex do? He’s the CEO of Palantir, a high-tech outfit now working for Donald Trump to collect and computerize all of your and my personal data, creating government dossiers so federal agents can monitor us. Sleazy, but in today’s Corporate America, that’s a path to untold riches.

Still, for the insanely rich, too much is not enough. So, they, their lobbyists, and Republican congress critters are now furiously pushing for what Trump calls a “Big Beautiful Bill.” It would cut Medicaid, food stamps, and other basic human needs for America’s lowest-paid working families. Why? To give a billion-dollars more in annual tax cuts to hucksters like Karp… and Trump himself. This is worse than kleptocracy – it’s sleazocracry.

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If the barrage of MAGA nuttiness and raw meanness is getting you down, ponder this passage from the classic novel, Don Quixote: “It is not possible for the bad or the good to last forever… and since the bad has lasted so long, the good is close at hand.”

Of course, the good only comes when fed-up people openly rebel against the bad. And, sure enough, Trump’s awful tyranny is revving up a majority movement for the common good.

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Soaking in self-delusion, tyrants start sipping their own bathwater, thinking it’s champagne. So, today’s Washington MAGA moguls, drunk on narcissism, are imperiously rigging the rules so their clique can grab more wealth and power from the rest of us. Maybe they thought we commoners wouldn’t notice… or care. But we did and do, so the rebellion is on and gaining steam with nationwide protests and a surge in grassroots populist defiance.

Predictably, Trump & Co. is now resorting to the same losing tactic that panicky despots always fall back on – deploying police and military to subjugate the people. He has commanded the Army and Marines to shut down public protests. Then, posturing as a “strongman,” this 1960s draft dodger spent 45 million of our tax dollars to stage a made-for-TV, Stalin-style military parade on his birthday, letting him strut around as warrior-in-chief.

These are not shows of strength, but pathetic confessions of personal insecurity and presidential weakness. Sad. Don Quixote was right – the good is close at hand. So, to all of you in the growing democracy movement, keep pushing, push harder, push further! Thanks to you, we’re getting there. And we’ll get there sooner rather than later.

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Chances are, if you’re a subscriber to this publication, you’ve heard about the ramping up of fascism here in the U.S.— obviously for a while now, but very acutely this week. We wanted to make sure you’ve got information that you need so that you can contribute meaningfully to the work at hand. Protesting, yes, but also, there’s a myriad of other ways to help defeat this authoritarian escalation.

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Look at all these scheduled protests for Saturday, June 14th! If you’re still looking for one to attend, check out the No Kings website for locations, resources, toolkits and more.

There are a million reasons that folks won’t be able to attend an actual protest: Disability! Work conflicts! Family care! Safety! You don’t have to justify your reasons for not putting your body out there. But, if you’re committed to solidarity, this is also not the time to hide under the covers and hope it all goes away, either. Let’s find something that you can do.

One of my favorite resources has been making the rounds this week. Longtime movement strategist and generally excellent human created this framework for understanding all of the roles that need to be filled for a successful social movement.

An Instagram post from Alyssa, founder of Queer Latines, talks about how she sees this particular moment: protests are where the disrupters and frontline responders can show up and be highly effective. But we also need caregivers (can you watch someone’s kids while they attend? Can you make and hand out free food and water to folks?), storytellers (can you write a letter to the editor of your local paper?), builders (can you donate some time or money to structural needs?), and all the other roles laid out in Deepa’s map.

The media focuses on protests because protests create a spectacle that’s easy to feature. And showing up to protests when we’re able is absolutely critical to show others that they’re not alone, and that people are fighting for the common good. Our culture and media don’t get interested in many things that aren’t spectacles, so you don’t often see people working on jail support for arrested protesters, making donations to organizing or showing up for mutual aid work. And because of that, us everyday people don’t necessarily feel like we’re having an impact. This is where we’ve got to trust in our solidarity with one another, that all of our “smaller” actions are contributing to changing the future.

I’m reminded of a concept I learned from Judaism called “tikkun olam.” The definition that was taught to me was that, early on, the universe had shattered into a bazillion little pieces, and it's up to each of us to take one little tiny shard and put it back together. No one person can put the whole universe back together, but we all have a responsibility to put our two shards back together. What are the shards you can grab right now?

If you’d like to dig a little bit deeper into the The Social Change Map, don’t hesitate to reach out to Deepa—she does deep dives, workshops, conversations and more into and with the framework, helping groups and coalitions apply it.

In the meantime, leave your favorite suggestions in the comments for how people can support the organized resistance in all the myriad of ways this map lays out! We love as a daily source of inspiration for these— here are the recommendations for tomorrow:

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How sweet it is to be a corporate criminal these days!

I don’t mean common price gougers, polluters, and such, but full-fledged, executive-suite mobsters. They run huge corporate syndicates, treating fraud and even murder as necessary business tools. For example, Boeing Incorporated.

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In 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX passenger jet suddenly nose-dived into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. A freak accident, declared top bosses of the multibillion-dollar giant, disavowing any responsibility. Indeed, even though he knew that the MAX had a fatally flawed maneuvering system, the CEO rushed out to assure fliers that the jet was “as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies.”

But, oops – five months later, another MAX nosedived in Ethiopia, killing 157 more people. Whistleblowers and federal investigators later revealed that the bosses had long been shortchanging safety in order to jack up profits… and their own pay. Last summer – in a rare legal victory over business-as-usual coddling of corporate abuses – Boeing had to admit that it “knowingly” defrauded safety regulators and was, in fact, guilty of the criminal violations. So, justice!

Uh… not quite. Just a few weeks later, Trump happened, and he immediately turned the Justice Department into a full-service corporate whorehouse. So, after Boeing donated a cool million bucks in tribute to the new president, Trump’s attorney generally obligingly decreed that the confessed corporate criminal could simply “withdraw” its guilty plea, pay a minimal fine for killing 346 people… and “move on.”

Politicians bark at us commoners: “Do the crime and you’ll do the time.” Unless, of course, you can buy a corporate Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card from a corrupt president.

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Ok, let’s have a show of hands: How many of you voted to hand ALL of your most personal data to Trump’s intrusive government?

By “all,” I mean he is setting up one Silicon Valley “data aggregator” to collect, store, and control your Social Security number, bank codes, health records, tax filings, voting history, biometrics… and, well, the whole statistical YOU. This aggregator will vacuum up all these unconnected data points and reconstruct them into a full computerized profile of your life, behavior, and beliefs.

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This mass surveillance infrastructure isn’t some 1984ish fiction, but a fast-moving reality spun from Trump’s Project 2025. In an executive order quietly issued in March, he decreed that every federal agency must dump our personal data into a new centralized computer system, effectively creating government dossiers on each of us. Like every tyrant everywhere, Trump says his order is benign, merely “streamlining” data searches to increase government “efficiency.”

But this is no paper-shuffling decree, for Project 2025 operatives have already moved into the IRS, ICE, Social Security, the Pentagon, etc. – putting the technology in place to aggregate the master file.

Trump has – with no public input – already appointed a right-wing, high-tech data espionage outfit to be America’s surveillance overlord. Named Palantir, it was created and financed by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley Republican billionaire, anti-democracy crusader, and self-absorbed plutocrat. Palantir bluntly declares that its role in amassing and rummaging through our private information is “the finding of hidden things.”

You think you have “nothing to hide,” right? But tyrants can “find something” on everyone. To help stop Trump’s thugs from weaponizing ourselves against ourselves, go to Electronic Frontier Foundation: eff.org

Extra, extra: For more on just how lousy (and dangerous) of a human Peter Thiel is, check out the 4-part series that the podcast Behind the Bastards produced on him in late 2024.

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Let’s say you like shrimp. Whether you go for a chain restaurant’s happy hour shrimp boil or a pricey plate of “shrimp à la grandioso” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort – a good question to ask is: Where do they get their shrimp?

Even if the restaurant has an ocean view and a shrimp boat out front, chances are its crustaceans come from industrial aquaculture farms thousands of miles away in India, Ecuador, Vietnam and Indonesia. Astonishingly, our country now imports 94 percent of the shrimp we eat!

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Astonishing, because our oceans have an abundance of top-quality shrimp, and we are blessed with highly-skilled shrimping families. Worse, those foreign industrial operations, financed by Wall Street and global profiteers, are infamous for using forced labor, banned antibiotics, and destructive environmental methods. Then they dump their grossly-cheap product into the US market, pushing out our superior-quality domestic product and devastating entire shrimping communities.

Yet, restaurant and supermarket prices for shrimp are at historic highs, with no disclosure to us consumers of where the product is from. The import industry effectively bribes lawmakers to avoid exposing, much less punishing, this multibillion-dollar swindle of American producers and eaters alike. The bait-and-switch conspiracy is now so pervasive that at last year’s National Shrimp Festival, four out of five vendors were – shhhh – quietly serving industrially-raised imported shrimp.

Of course, corporations have no conscience, but our tough-on-crime political leaders are so pusillanimous that they won’t even stand up for their own local shrimpers. A recent Louisiana law, for example, “boldly” requires restaurants to disclose if they’re peddling imported shrimp. But, the legislature meekly provided no penalty if violators ignore the law. So… they do.

For information on real reform, connect with SanAntonioBayWaterKeeper.org.

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The right-wing routinely demonizes family-friendly policies of liberals as “social engineering.”

But look out! Here come those same politicians, putting on MAGA hardhats and firing up their political bulldozers to push one of the most arrogant and intrusive social schemes imaginable. They intend to re-engineer the American family! These “pronatalists” want families to conform to a Christian Nationalist family structure – specifically, a dominant man married to a subservient stay-at-home woman, having beaucoup children. Not a couple of kiddos but six, 12, or more!

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For example, extremist MAGA senator Josh Hawley has become a cheerleader for a federal policy to entice women to quit work, stay home, and have more babies. He proposes a tax credit of $5,000 per child, gushing that this would cause working families to exclaim, “Oh, my gosh, we can actually raise our kids.”

Well, “gosh” right back at you, Josh! Just giving birth can cost more than $5,000 – and raising a child is multiples above that every year. So, you want to take away a mom’s job and her income, and add thousands in costs to the family budget – in exchange for a government tax credit? The slickest loan sharks aren’t that diabolical.

Oh, wait. Right-wing pronatalists have another government incentive to jack-up birth rates. Incredibly, Trump officials have proposed a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who have six or more children! Wow, what should that medal look like, be made of, and say? And when and where should it be worn? Also, will un-medaled women socially ostracized?

If right-wingers actually wanted to help families, they’d be backing family-level wages, free child care, and Medicare for all. Everything else is political BS.

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My fondest memory of Ronnie Dugger is him in his cluttered cubbyhole of an office, his brow furrowed and his mind whirring as he pounded away on an old Royal typewriter, churning out another punch to the snout of the moneyed and right-wing elites

Dugger was once my boss, and we became longtime friends, and progressive allies. He died this week at 95, and most obituaries rightly hailed him as a “titan of journalism,” praising his smart, insightful and often-elegant writing. True enough, but an equally true side of Ronnie is that he was a boisterous, joyful brawler for life’s underdogs and an uncompromising champion of democratic values.

A working-class, rumpled digger of hard truth, he was founding editor of the scrappy Texas Observer when he was only 24, and he subsequently spent a lifetime traversing backroads and poking into backrooms as a relentless investigative journalist. His importance is that he went beyond the surface “story” that most media cover, not only revealing who was doing what to whom, but also who was behind it… and why. But Dugger always went further. He was not a dispassionate reporter of fact, but a believer that the truth only matters if there is action behind it—so he mobilized, organized, and inspired others (like me) to do the same. He was a true journalist-with-a-purpose.

Moreover, he rejoiced in the fight. Cursing and laughing at the same time, Ronnie believed that that battling the bastards is just about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Every journalism school in America ought to have a course on Becoming Ronnie Dugger.

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The most embarrassing thing about the ballyhooed war-on-government-waste, run by Elon “Chainsaw” Musk, is not even that it has generated more waste than it has cleaned up. More damning is that the clean-up crew quietly tiptoed around the biggest and stinkiest piles of waste – namely the billions of our tax dollars doled out annually to corporate welfare moochers. Such as – Hello – Elon Musk!

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Son of a South African diamond dealer, Elon glided from a life of privilege all the way to being filthy rich, transported by extravagant taxpayer subsidies and government favors. And now he’s back at the trough, demanding a blank government check for his biggest boondoggle of all: Rocketing to Mars.

Not him (unfortunately), but you and me. A flaming megalomaniacal flimflammer, Musk says he’s a genius rocket scientist who will “save civilization” by relocating our human species to the Red Planet. Proclaiming that our Blue Marble is doomed to a hellish future, he is already using millions of earthly tax dollars to fund his fever dream.

Getting there, however, would be the cheap and easy part. Mars is already hellish, with killer levels of surface radiation, toxic dust, and so-called air that analysts say “will boil the saliva off your tongue before it asphyxiates you.”

The only real question is why the hell anyone is listening to this narcissistic flimflammer. He can’t run a government waste project, much less a planet. Speaking of waste, why is he so eager to throw away Earth? Our salvation lies not in the stars, Musk, or other techno-profiteers, but in our democratic values, connection to nature, and down-to-Earth creativity.

Let Musk go to hell – I’m sticking with the home team.

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There is a species of birds named “superb starlings,” and I propose that we elect one of them to be our next president.

That’s because these wise creatures have figured out how to make egalitarianism central to their society, with a diversity of birds actively supporting each other. When bringing food back to their chicks, for example, adult starlings commonly share some with hatchlings of an unrelated flock. In turn, those birds repay the good deed in later breeding seasons.

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Contrast this bird-nest ethic of the Common Good with the culture of right-wing minginess now being pushed furiously by Trump’s kakistocracy of billionaires and despotic ideologues.

Four of his overprivileged cabinet appointees, for example (Bobby Kennedy, Mehmet Oz, Brooke Rollins, and Scott Turner) recently ganged up on hard-hit poor families who receive modest public help for essential human needs, like food and health care. The four politicos piously wailed that welfare programs are an intolerable burden on wealthy taxpayers, so they intend to slash spending by forcing the poor to take jobs before getting any public help.

But their claim that hordes of worthless sponges are living high on food stamps and Medicaid is the same BS such plutocrats always spread when trying to keep our society from being as smart, decent, and ethical as starlings. Their scolding dictate that “you must work” is pointless grandstanding. Nearly all Medicaid recipients, for example, already have jobs – or they are children, seniors, or disabled.

There’s a four-letter vulgarity that fits Kennedy, Oz, Rollins, and Turner: “Mean.” Okay, technically, “mean” is not an obscenity, but when powerful tax-paid elites like them are mean to poor people for political gain, they are, in fact, obscene… and disgusting.

Medicaid cuts don’t just affect people on Medicaid— they hurt us all. For example, many hospitals, especially rural hospitals, rely on the revenue they receive from Medicaid reimbursements just to survive.

A number of people around the country are encouraging everyday folks to share the facts about Medicaid in their areas, and are creating infographics for you to use to tell your stories. Calling your representatives is always good, but we’re also finding that local media coverage is having a huge impact (in part because your representatives deeply care about how they’re perceived in your local media).

Here’s where you can find all the Medicaid graphics for each state; additionally, activist has created a series of Medicaid graphics for states with large rural contingents here.

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