This week UNFTR Members received their monthly sticker packs in the mail along with the premium member exclusive Tuesday email. Included in this week’s email:
An article from News Beat’s Rashed Mian about a retired U.S. General admitting to the U.S. slaughter of civilians.
The Tuesday “Top Five” headlines and snippets of must read articles for the week.
Ryan Stanco’s “Not For Nothing” segment about Jerry Seinfeld, GPT-4o and celebrities getting punched in the face.
Notice of the upcoming Max & Friends Monthly Livestream.
Plus, more Max Notes.
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Max Notes
I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom lately. It’s just over two years since losing her and it somehow feels like both yesterday and a million years ago. She was an incredible listener. And there are moments, mostly when you’re at a crossroads, when you naturally seek the warm and objective counsel of someone with pure intentions and the ability to set you straight without malice.
Full disclosure, I’m in the midst of working through some of these thoughts as it pertains to the Unf*cking universe and writing this week’s Max Unfiltered. As of this email, I'm not even sure where I’ll land. There’s nothing so simultaneously daunting and exciting to me as a blank page.
Bottom line is that when I look ahead, all I see are crossroads.
I’m not sure who needs to hear this (*cough* Biden *cough* Powell) but this is the looming crisis in the United States. And it is the exact opposite of “bottom up, middle out.” More like “bottom down, hollow out.”
“Mortgage balances shown on consumer credit reports increased by $190 billion during the first quarter of 2024 and stood at $12.44 trillion at the end of March. Balances on home equity lines of credit (HELOC) increased by $16 billion, the eighth consecutive quarterly increase after 2022Q1, and there is now $376 billion in aggregate outstanding balances, $59 billion above the series low reached in the third quarter of 2021. Credit card balances, which are now at $1.12 trillion outstanding, decreased by $14 billion during the first quarter but remain 13.1% above the level a year ago. Auto loan balances increased by $9 billion, continuing the upward trajectory that has been in place since 2020Q2, and now stand at $1.62 trillion. Other balances, which include retail cards and other consumer loans, decreased by $11 billion. Student loan balances were effectively flat, with a $6 billion decrease, and stand at $1.6 trillion. In total, non-housing balances fell by $22 billion.”
Headlines
How Affordable Housing Is Financially Engineered
I continue to be impressed by the chops over at The Baffler. This publication is one of the few remaining outlets willing to spill ink to inform. When I was in the alternative press and writers would ask us about word count, we would say “a story should be as long as it takes to tell.” If you’re interested in the history of government sponsored affordable housing initiatives, this article is one of the more illuminating pieces of journalism I’ve read in a long time.
From the article:
“Over the past thirty-eight years, the public has spent billions on an inefficient and haphazard affordable housing system that has everything to do with corporate tax avoidance and the shadow of the Cold War and little to do with housing. Like other neoliberal policies, LIHTC creates a hierarchy that exposes the most vulnerable to the most risk: investors are protected from nearly all risk in a LIHTC deal, large for-profit developers carry some, while smaller community developers carry more.”
Okay, I did not know this Trudeau conspiracy. But I admit, it’s fun.
Canadians talk about Cuba a little differently than we do in the United States. Canadians have long enjoyed a relationship with the island nation, albeit to a limited financial degree because of U.S. prohibitions on investments and trade. Anyway, I was not familiar with the conspiracy that JT is Fidel’s kid. As stupid as this is (as the article points out using basic math) I always love a titillating conspiracy.
From the article:
“...the theory that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the illegitimate son of the late Cuban leader. This bizarre conspiracy theory has been refuted on several occasions. The physical impossibility—Margaret Trudeau did not meet Fidel Castro until Justin was five—seems to have been overlooked. Fox researchers supplied highly dubious ‘evidence’ that Fidel might have impregnated Margaret Trudeau on a visit to the Caribbean when she is said to have visited Cuba.”
Everything really is bigger in Texas. Including the asshole in charge.
Governor Abbott made yet another strong bid to dethrone Ron DeSantis as the biggest fucking asshole governor in the country. There are others in the race, but these two are the clear leaders. Abbott pardoned Daniel Perry who ran into a crowd of BLM protestors then gunned down Garrett Foster, an Air Force veteran in attendance at the protest. Prior to targeting the crowd, Perry had made racist comments online and even made premeditated threats like a text that read, “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”
From the article:
“Like Kyle Rittenhouse, Perry was exalted as a persecuted martyr standing up to progressive ‘anarcho-tyranny.’ In his own statement on the pardon, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton placed the shooting in the context of the ‘BLM riots [that] terrorized the nation in 2020.’ It’s worth reckoning with the ramifications of the self-defense argument here: The right to bear arms is so inviolable that you can carry a gun almost anywhere—but, also, if you see someone carrying a gun at a protest, you can shoot them justifiably. It’s hard to have a First Amendment when the Second Amendment looks like that. It doesn’t make for much of a Second Amendment either.”
I’m still catching my breath from the immigration series, slew of Phone A Friends and topical political stories these past couple of weeks. The upcoming episodes are all pretty exciting and intense so I decided to take a moment to have a family meeting with Unf*ckers in another “Max Unfiltered.”
Here’s a snippet from the pod:
MAX: “The highlight of the journey is arriving in a different place from where I started. But there’s a trapdoor in the process. When you fall into it and look around you’re suddenly confronted with your own assumptions and biases that have been cultivated through a lifetime of experience. You’re also confronted by your own ignorance and fear. And it can be an echo chamber. I know a lot of people who block out oppositional noise in favor of the comfort of confirmation. There are people who warn against reading the comment sections and listening to the trolls. And there’s merit to this in an artistic endeavor. But in the work we do, I think it’s important to get into the muck and tussle with the naysayers who are hardwired to resent your presence and disagree with your conclusions. All of us, every single one of us, is a bundle of fear and resentment, the sum total of our wins and losses, triumph and trauma. To discount someone’s opinion is to discount the whole of their lived experience. This is yet another gift this community has given me. Teaching without taunting. If ever we cross the rubicon of popularity and expand beyond our little universe, I’m confident the trolls and haters will come out of the woodwork. But in this comfortable moment when it’s still just us, I feel safe and supported.”
I’ve really been enjoying the curated lectures on Marxist Voice. Rather than pick a particular episode, give it a download and add it to your queue. It’s a cherry picking delight when you need a break from your routine listening habits.
“Marxist Voice is the podcast of Socialist Appeal, bringing you weekly episodes on Marxist theory, revolutionary history, and current events.”
“During the current Gaza protests and the BLM protests a handful of years ago the local protests were very civil and followed the prescribed strictures. Until, some small group of other folks showed up, changed the character of the protests. In the case of the Gaza protests a large-scale off campus fight started and needed to be broken up by police and in the case of the BLM protest several fires were set burning down local businesses and changing the local views of the protests from positive to negative. It’s very suspicious to me that there is always a group that shows up to make the right-wing narrative fit.”
After leading the historic “Stand Up Strike” against the Big Three Detroit automakers, the UAW president has emerged as a leading figure in the economic struggle against the billionaire class.
“We need a Democratic Party that fights for its voters, not big corporate donors. Our goal is to build a mission-driven caucus in Congress by electing more leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, who will represent our communities in Congress and fight for bold, progressive solutions to our current crises.”
