U.S. President Trump Pressures the G7 to Release Oil Reserves

Is democracy more susceptible to being run by large corporations or to mob-rule? I contend that the police and military power of the U.S. eviscerates the risk of a mob of people making much headway against a government. That same power can be used by American governments to enforce policies that are in the financial interests of companies. In fact, some retail companies hire weaponized police employees to enforce not only municipal law (against shoplifting), but also company policies, as if they constituted law and therefore legitimate a police response rather than action by a security guard. To be sure, even security guards act sometimes as if they were police officers, and too many consumers fall for the presumptive ploy to intimidate. Security-guard companies even uniform their respective employees to look like police, even SWAT, officers, as if impersonating a police officer were not a crime. In terms of the American political economy, elected representatives of the American governments looked the other way in whether to invoke anti-trust law to break up large American companies even as gasoline and food prices soared—in the case of food, from 2020 when the pandemic enabled grocery stores to price-gouge, and in the case of gasoline, especially in 2026 when Iran was choking off the Strait of Hormuz. Those representatives as well as the media companies were silent on not only the need for market competition in consolidated industries, but also the excessive power of large corporations—even multi-national corporations, which are not loyal to any country—over elected representatives and their respective appointees. In too many cases, the companies being regulated actually write the law for Congressional committees—an obvious conflict of interest. Meanwhile, the American voters are typically titillated by superficial matters, essentially tricked, as if being oriented to symptoms were crucial to voting. The tricks can include ploys even by a sitting U.S. president to make the economy look better just before an election.

The full essay is at "U.S. President Trump Pressures the G7."

California and the Eleven Dwarfs Take on the Paramount-Warner Bros Merger

In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith foresees that capitalist industrialists could collude with government at the expense of labor. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that keeping laborers to a subsistence wage is necessary for capitalists to have enough wealth accumulated to invest in culture. Rather than being immoral, exploitation is simply part of life and thus the resulting economic inequality cannot be removed at its source. Low wages may simply be a feature of how labor supply typically relates to business demand for workers, whereas highly educated professionals are not so numerous and can demand higher compensation. Meanwhile, what about consumers as capitalist industrialists continue to accumulate capital in part by being able to pay large workforces subsistence wages and engage in mergers and acquisitions, such that competitive markets are turned into oligopolies and even, as in the case of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the 1870s, monopolies capable of extracting “monopoly rents”? In the U.S., the Sherman and Clayton Acts in the early 1900s were oriented to safeguarding competitive markets from being undermined by business titans, but enforcing those federal laws would seem to fly in the face of collusion between capitalists and their respective governments. As a case in point, the U.S. Justice Department gave the green light to Paramount’s take-over of Warner Brothers/Discovery even as President Trump had a financial interest in the deal going through. In the American federal system, the state governments could act as a check, and on July 13, 2026, the announcement came that California plus eleven other states, led by their respective attorneys general, filed a lawsuit challenging the merger on the basis that it would violate Section 7 of the Clayton Act. American consumers had reason to be thankful that they were still in a federal republic of republics, even though the growth of power at the federal level had nearly eclipsed the federalism, at least as it was originally intended—as enabling checks by the feds on the states and vice versa.

The full essay is at "California and the Eleven Dwarfs Take on the Paramount-Warner Bros Merger."

Political and Economic Elites

I submit that in virtually every political party, a distinction can be made between the “rank and file” and the political elite. Kamala Harris may have lost to Donald Trump in the 2024 U.S. federal-presidential race in part because Harris had not spoken out enough on economic issues amid soaring inflation on groceries and rents to gain traction with Democratic and Independent voters who had had enough of the “woke” ideological agenda, which includes, for example, moral pressure and even demands that people announce their “pronouns” before speaking. Although President Biden had initiated some anti-trust judicial action, the industry-oligopoly of meat producers, for example, was left untouched. So too were the mega-grocery-store chains. Kroger was later found to have spiked egg and milk prices above the increased costs with impunity, yet Harris did not suggest that the Sherman or Clayton anti-trust acts should be taken out of the garage for spin on the American judicial highways that connect the rank-and-file party-members to party elites mainly in New England, New York, and California. I contend that U.S. Senator Bernie Sander’s anti-oligopoly speeches in conservative Congressional districts gained such numbers in 2025 precisely because the Democratic Party’s elite had lost touch with the party’s “rank and file” voters on economic issues.[1]

The full essay is at "Political and Economic Elites."

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1. An oligopoly is an industry in which a few companies dominate. An oligopoly is between a monopoly and a competitive market. Prices on products can be higher than necessary, the surplus revenue going to profits. Sellers are price-takers rather than price-setters in a competitive market, whereas companies in an oligopolistic industry have sufficient market-power to set prices because consumers have few choices.

On the Merger of Comcast and NBC: A Structural Conflict of Interest

On January 18, 2011, Comcast received government approval to acquire NBC Universal. This followed a lengthy review, which mandated a list of conditions. The most important of them is aimed at preventing the new media conglomerate from thwarting competition in online video. However, even though regulators described their review as the most intense scrutiny ever for a planned media merger, Comcast managers said they believed their company faced few onerous restrictions from the review. “I don’t think any of the conditions are particularly restrictive,” said David L. Cohen, executive vice president of Comcast.[1] This statement ought to give readers some pause.

The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

1. Tim Arango and Brian Stelter, "Comcast Receives Approval for NBC Universal Merger," The New York Times, January 19, 2011.