Life and Times of Ogn Dulk

Why America’s Oligarchs May Regret Their Obedience 100+The Atlantic by Anastasia Edel / Apr 7, 2025 at 6:03 AM When tech billionaires and crypto moguls hailed Donald Trump’s reelection and flocked to his inauguration ceremony and ball, million-dollar donations in hand, some were abandoning previous liberal affiliations and all were now lining up behind an openly authoritarian president. The surface rationale is that megabusiness leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Marc Andreessen are safeguarding their companies and their shareholders’ interests. The underlying explanation is that America is being reborn as an oligarchy. This new class—with Trump megadonor Elon Musk as its self-appointed tribune—has thrown its support behind a libertarian economic agenda that maximizes private power and minimizes public accountability. Whether the billionaires’ alignment with Trump and Musk is merely pragmatic or sincerely ideological, they stand to gain from the new administra...

early and often There’s Nothing Conservative About Trump 2.0 Portrait of Ed Kilgore By Ed Kilgore, political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015 One of the interpretations often heard about the 2024 elections is that the outcome represented a conservative “correction” for the progressive excesses of the Biden presidency. And indeed, it’s possible to view much of American political history as a left-right oscillation in which one major party’s dominance is countered by a reaction benefiting the other major party. Thus, for example, the Hoover administration’s conservative ineffectiveness against the ravages of the Great Depression led to a New Deal revolution that was mitigated significantly by a bipartisan “conservative coalition” in Congress and eventually the Republican landslide of 1952. But as should be abundantly clear by now, any hopes that Trump 2.0 would represent a mild and conservative “correction” of anything in living memory are hallucinatory. Indeed, it’s as good a ti...

The Economist on Trump’s Mindless Tariffs Trump's tariffs impact economy perception •5KDaring Fireball by John Gruber / Apr 3, 2025 at 1:01 PM The Economist: On economics Mr Trump’s assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America’s trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet as any of the president’s economists could have told him, this overall deficit arises because Americans choose to save less than their country invests — and, crucially, this long-running reality has not stopped its economy from outpacing the rest of the g7 for over three decades. There is no reason why his extra tariffs should eliminate the deficit. Insisting on balanced trade with every trading partner individually is bonkers — like suggesting that Texas would be richer if it insisted on balanced trade with each of the other 49 states, or asking a company to ensure that each of its suppliers is also a customer. And Mr Trump’s grasp of the t...