Thank you to all of our members and a hearty welcome to our newest (and some returning!) members:
jackassicorn
Dan H
It’s story Timm
Nathan S(irst)
r_pihlgren
Moved & Shook
occupyrachael
AggieJane
Weltschmerz Backpfeifengesicht
ICYMI
Our Member Only newsletter this week featured a blistering essay by News Beat’s Rashed Mian who wrote about Trump’s ethnic cleansing vision for the Gaza Strip. “The predatory concept of disaster capitalism, popularized by Naomi Klein, has never been so blatant: We help obliterate a region, crater it like the moon’s surface, displace its population, and move in with bulldozers and American flags, with master builders, architects, and construction crews following close behind.”
Max Notes
I’ve been thinking about something lately and wanted to share. It’s about how “they” see you. “They” being the politicians and the donor class.
For many years, a good friend of mine ran a holiday donation drive to deliver toys and food to underprivileged families with young children. He grew it over the years to include hundreds of deliveries. Every holiday season families would gather in a warehouse jammed with boxes of food and enormous bags filled with presents carefully marked with numbers that corresponded to our driver sheets. Before we all filled our cars and set out, he delivered the same speech.
He warned that some of us would be entering homes that looked like ours. There might be big screen televisions in the den, cars in the driveway and other outward signs that the recipients weren’t in distress. It was the classic, “don’t judge a book by its cover” speech. He would continue saying, “don’t expect a pat on the back from anyone. If that’s why you’re here, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.”
The point of this isn’t to virtue signal. The experiences we had over the years varied dramatically from house to house. Some people avoided eye contact. Others broke down in tears. Sometimes you fought the urge to pack the children you found in your own car. Other times things seemed pretty normal, if not pretty damn good. But each family was vetted prior by an organization who knew these families well and understood the trauma beneath the facades.
While you hold that thought, a bit about me. I live in an upper middle class neighborhood. I have a mortgage and a backyard. I have a wife, two kids and two dogs. The kids are in college and the dogs are eating us out of house and home. My wife has a great job and I’m a small business owner. We’re lucky in every respect, work hard for what we have and we’re buried in debt like pretty much everyone else. We’re the proverbial ducks gliding smoothly on the water while we paddle furiously below, seemingly getting nowhere.
We live in a part of New York with tremendous stratification. Our community has a significant immigrant population. It also has wealth that few can fathom. There is extreme poverty minutes away from 100 acre estates with service entrances. Being part of this community and being white, employed and stable means we walk effortlessly between these worlds. We’re like the Visa card—accepted everywhere.
Because of this access, I’m in a position to observe how the wealthy in our community view those who are less fortunate. They see the cars on the road, the cell phones in people’s hands and seats filled at local restaurants. What could there be to complain about? “I grew up poor and worked my ass off to get here,” is a refrain I’ve heard a thousand times, maybe more. “These people” have more than they ever did when they were on their way up so they don’t want to hear it.
So when I hear Republicans talk about cutting entitlements and defending tax cuts for the wealthy, I get them. When Democrats can barely muster the courage to speak out against cuts to poverty alleviation and disease prevention programs, I get them as well. I just wish they could hear my friend’s holiday speech.
You see, it’s not that they’re tired of hearing you gripe.
“Stubborn.” “Sticky.” “Hotter than expected.”
Ah, the dulcet tones of Wall Street speak. Purrs like a kitten, doesn’t it? I suppose it sounds better than “Bullshit”, “Screwed” and “Still fucked.”
Headlines
Hey! Mayor Adams? How’s that relationship with Trump working out?
The NYC Controller woke up to the sucking sound of $80 million being swept from the city’s bank account the other day. A federal judge had no issue with the administration freezing funds allocated to migrant shelters, but no one appears to know what to do with Musk’s move to just steal funds that were already sent to the city.
From the article:
“On Wednesday, FEMA went further than just freezing payments: The agency clawed back $80 million in federal funding from a New York City bank account, shocking local officials, who quickly questioned the legality of the move. City leaders said they noticed the missing money on Wednesday morning, with Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, saying that the city was exploring legal action to recoup the funds.”
This is a light introduction to the budget pretzel knot the GOP is tying to justify the proposed tax cuts for the wealthy. A billion here, a trillion there. The cuts are wide and they are deep. Except a few areas that absolutely will NOT surprise you. The guidance for the House GOP is to limit military spending increases to $100 billion, homeland security (not the same thing?) to $90 billion and the judiciary increase limit is $110 billion.
From the article:
“In parallel with the mayhem playing out in the Executive Branch, the House lawmakers aim to gut agencies Donald Trump disfavors, boost spending for those that align with his agenda, renew and extend the 2017 tax cuts that enriched America’s most affluent—his latest proposals all told, by one estimate, would raise taxes on all but the top 5 percent. They also pay lip service to the deficit even as their proposals will increase it significantly, perhaps as a way to build political consensus for cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare.”
Labor is really in a bind. There are more questions than answers in this piece but it sums up the predicament facing a labor movement in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. The NLRB was already an insufficient framework but at least it was something.
From the article:
“What the threats from Musk and DOGE should prompt labor to do, then, is not to hold out hope for a revamped Democratic Party but rather to seek out new forms of leverage and invest in new strategies for worker empowerment outside of the constraining boundaries of the NLRA. Where it’s possible to win NLRA-sanctioned union recognition and collective bargaining, a representation election is still the surest path to worker empowerment in the United States. But it is this path for such a small percentage of workers every year that it behooves the labor movement to find new forms of strategic and organizational leverage, even if only to make the NLRB election process a more viable one.”
Regardless of what happens next in the United States, the American experiment ends with Donald Trump. But Trump is a Trojan Horse. The real dismantling of our systems and norms is embodied by the man he ceded power to, the wealthiest person in the world. Elon Musk is the living avatar of the new corporate colonial era and there’s no going back to the way it was. This administration serves as the capstone to the neoliberal era, which itself was the professional culmination of previous social and political movements such as the John Birch Society and the Know Nothing Party. The only way to stave off economic, social and political collapse is for the left to mount a coordinated counteroffensive to the tech oligarchs who seek to consolidate all of the wealth and power in the world.
Here’s a snippet from the pod:
Max: “Neoliberalism was always a fetish; a white supremacist fantasy of American exceptionalism built on the image of the rugged individual. To wit, the whole conceit of neoliberalism is that America was at its pinnacle in the late 19th Century during the second industrial revolution exactly when the Know Nothings and Ku Klux Klan were having a cultural moment. However, by cloaking it in economic terms of the second industrial revolution they were able to wash off the stink of slavery and absolve themselves of America’s original sin. This was the time of industrialists, when innovation flourished and capitalism was pure. America was isolationist. The government was subordinate to industry”
Denmark wants to buy California. Who would you sell your state to?
PDXSquatch:
“There has been talk around here (Portland, Oregon) since TFG’s first term about Washington, Oregon, and California forming their own country/government. I’d go for that, but I don’t know that I would sell. Maybe to Canada if they asked politely.”
Arash: “No sale. We are one country and one people. Our strength through every difficulty over the last 250 years was in sticking together and convincing each other to invest back in our country and find solutions to our problems.”
WildEyed Bob: “The easy answer for Wisconsin would be Canada, but without a direct land border Minnesota would have to be in it as a package deal. Michigan might even be convinced which would make for a really nice looking map with all three joining to become a single province. Maybe called something like Minnecongan, or Wisotagan, but Michesotsin would have to be straight out. But, smart-ass Kanuuudsen has to say Jamaica.”
“In this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff delivers updates on the North Carolina union election at an Amazon warehouse, the deportation of immigrants, and the U.S. construction industry, a lesson in how capitalism installs new technology like A.I. and how it could be far better done. In the second half of this week’s episode, Professor Wolff interviews Serena Martin, a formerly incarcerated social activist and executive director of New Hour for Women and Children.”
Decided to go back to where it all started. I recently quoted John K. Galbraith who was lampooning Republicans who never read The Wealth of Nations. Studying passages and reading critiques is no substitute for the real thing so in an effort to retain authenticity, I’m digging into the original text. And loving it.
“First published in 1776, the year in which the American Revolution officially began, Smith’s Wealth of Nations sparked a revolution of its own. In it Smith analyzes the major elements of political economy, from market pricing and the division of labor to monetary, tax, trade, and other government policies that affect economic behavior. Throughout he offers seminal arguments for free trade, free markets, and limited government.”
‍“The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
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