We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism. ... We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe - and would benefit the vast majority - are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.

Trump walked into a media setting for which he was far better suited than the other contenders because he actually knows how to do reality TV and made them all look like pretenders. And I would argue that our news media has only gotten worse since Trump got in office. Trump is media crack. The ratings have never been higher. The reason CNN would run an hour of an empty podium waiting for him to show up during the campaign is because they were terrified if they turned away from Trump their rating would go down.

The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically - prices will not keep rising, nor will wages.

A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there's such a range of different kinds of market economies.

The fact that Trump's refused to divest from his labyrinth of business holdings, the fact that he's continuing to profit from his brand and indeed create all kinds of new opportunities to profit off the presidency is outrageous. The flip side is that he's left out a lot of levers through which to pressure him. You know, the reason you want a president to divest from his business holdings is that foreign governments can try to exert pressure on him by becoming customers of these hotels and inflating the value of how much they're willing to pay for a Trump brand.

I'm not talking about Trump's brand but rather the intimately connected brand called "make America great again" that he created to make all these promises to working Americans - is intensely vulnerable, if there is sustained scrutiny of the kind we've seen about Comey and Russia. He's appointed five Goldman Sachs former executives to his Cabinet, his commerce secretary is renegotiating NAFTA to make it far better for corporations and worse for workers, and they're talking about this right out in the open... I mean, how much news have you seen about that?

The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.