It is increasingly clear that Trump's grift, inflation, Gaza, MeToo, George Floyd, Epstein, ICE, DOGE, data centers, and Iran are foundationally all the same issue. It's a crazy quilt held together by the batting underneath: hyper-concentration of power by the elite. Occupy Wall Street made wealth concentration a front-page issue in 2011 but the focus on "the 1 percent" did not last. Plus, lefties live in issue silos rather than craft broad narratives that pull disparate threads together into a cohesive narrative, an easily understood story. It's an intramural form of divide and conquer.

Paul Krugman comments this morning that public sentiment, however, is catching on again since 2025. "Suddenly it's OK to sound the alarm about the political power of billionaires," Krugman writes, backing up the claim with charts. He wonders why the backlash to billionaire "powemaxxing" hasn't come sooner. Because they're picking our pockets:

So why should the rest of us care about how the other 0.0002% live? One important reason is that wealth at the top is, to a significant extent, coming at the expense of American workers. As a recent report from the New York Fed documents, the share of national income going to workers is at an 80-year low:


Source: Liberty Street Economics

The ultrawealthy, Krugman writes, "are seriously undermining American democracy as well as lowering the living standards of ordinary Americans." And since Citizens United, they're buying up our democracy the way real estate speculators buy up available housing.

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