Welcome to all of our new newsletter signups from YouTube! Great to have you here. Here’s what you can expect each week from the UNFTR team:
A preview of this week’s podcast.
Max Notes: Kind of like Max’s opening monologue. Max is the host and head writer of the show.
Chart of the week. A graphic glimpse into an economic topic with a little context.
Headlines: Must read stories from around the world with a brief summary and highlight from the article.
Unf*cker comment of the week.
Progressive Spotlight: Each week we highlight the accomplishments and contributions of an important progressive figure.
Book Love: A recommendation from the UNFTR team.
Pod Love: What Max is listening to this week.
We also produce a Tuesday newsletter for UNFTR members if you get hooked on the show and can’t get enough of us!
This week in our Members Only Newsletter you missed:
Max Notes predicting debate responses (and nailing it.)
The Tuesday Top Five news articles everyone should be reading.
An original essay from News Beat’s Rashed Mian on the killing of Turkish American Aysenur Ezgi Eygi in the West Bank.
And “Not for Nothing” on the NY Jets, James Earl Jones and Russian operative Tim Pool.
So I guess the question is…what are you waiting for? Sign up today to become a member and level up to unlock a slew of additional perks!
Max Notes
Wednesday morning quarterbacking the debate pulled me slightly off track with the piece I’ve been working on, so apologies for that. It happens when things are normal, but election season is a different animal. Back to the task at hand.
I’m working on a story about Libya. It’s something I teased a couple weeks ago but as it comes into focus I’m amazed by a few things. The first is how little we talk about this part of the world. On the southeast corner of Libya is Sudan, home to one of the biggest humanitarian crises on the planet right now. Throughout the continent the fingerprints of world superpowers, past and present, are all over and rarely in ways that have produced anything positive for its inhabitants. Libya is completely forgotten in western media, outside of the occasional mention of the attack on Benghazi, a city most Americans wouldn’t be able to locate on a map; but one that became a central right-wing talking point during the Obama years and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The story I’m working on involves every political intrigue imaginable. A charismatic, yet bizarre dictator. Sudden oil wealth. Imperial exploits. Broken promises and deadly uprisings. And an all-too-familiar tale of American imperialism that destroys everything it touches. At the center of this particular story is an engineering marvel the likes of which the world has never seen. And the tragedy of squandered potential and dreams deferred. Hopefully I do it justice and it’s worth the wait.
In the meantime, there’s much to discuss in our little corner of the world. So let’s get on with it.
Other things I’m obsessing over…
Dylan’s Burger. Pulled a clip from this ITYSL sketch in this week’s pod. Gets me every time.
The way we used to be together. I don’t mean lately, but before. It was real, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was. You bet it was. The scene that changed television.
It’s officially out and my daughter and I have a date to see it…Nothing better than an unhinged James McAvoy.
-Max
Chart of the Week
One of the better data sources we check in on periodically is the ISM World Manufacturing Report. It gives a clinical look at manufacturing activity in the United States, which is typically a leading indicator of economic activity. What you’ll notice in the report is that orders and production are contracting and inventories are growing. That’s usually a pretty good indication that we’re “late cycle,” meaning that we’re approaching some kind of downturn. It’s important to note that not all downturns are recessions; but every recession begins with these indicators.
Report Summary: The U.S. manufacturing sector contracted for the fifth consecutive month in August, as the Manufacturing PMI® registered 47.2 percent, up 0.4 percentage point compared to July’s reading of 46.8 percent. After breaking a 16-month streak of contraction by expanding in March, the manufacturing sector has contracted the last five months, but at a slower rate in August. Of the five subindexes that directly factor into the Manufacturing PMI®, only one (Supplier Deliveries) was in expansion territory, the same as in July.
Headlines
Blinken Is Bad at Math
SOS is becoming more than just an acronym for Antony Blinken these days. He literally needs a lifeline to help him navigate hard questions regarding Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. This week he was asked to answer for the death of Turkish American Aysenur Ezgi Eygi in the West Bank, when she was shot in the head by IDF forces. Blinken alluded to Eygi’s murder saying it was concerning because it was the second American death in the West Bank. It’s actually the third in the West Bank and the fifth in Palestinian territory since he took over as Secretary of State. Imagine...Seriously, just imagine if five Americans were murdered anywhere else on the planet by military forces.
From the article:
“In January, an Israeli settler and Israeli soldiers killed 17-year-old Tawfiq Ajaq, shooting him in the head while he was on his way to a barbecue in a local grove. Israeli military vehicles prevented an ambulance from reaching him for 15 minutes, and he was pronounced dead on arrival at a medical facility. Ajaq was born in Louisiana, and had only moved to the West Bank nine months prior. Then, just weeks later, Israeli forces killed Mohammad Khdour, shooting him in the head while he was driving to a hillside where people often held barbecues. Khdour was 17 years old and a senior in high school who hoped to return to the U.S. to study law when he graduated.”
A note to the newsletter newbies: Every few weeks we try to pull a Baffler article. We highly recommend subscribing to this publication because it’s a reminder that great writing still exists. Today we’re featuring an excerpt from the pub that highlights the battle to flip Arizona permanently blue as California did just a couple decades prior. But Arizona ain’t California. This piece is a great deep dive into the history of Arizona politics right through to what’s at stake in this election.
From the article:
“With the memory of Arpaio, Brewer, and Ducey so fresh, it is all too tempting to celebrate the current crop of Arizona Democrats in state and national office as saviors, the blue wave riders who will set things straight once and for all. After a few undistinguished terms in Congress, Ruben Gallego now stands as the only thing between Arizona and Kari Lake as senator. Her visage is so bone-chilling to most Arizonans that Gallego has skated by in this summer’s campaign by exclusively focusing on his biography: an immigrant son who made it to Harvard before enlisting in the Marines and serving in Iraq. When it comes to policy, though, he remains a cipher, with little congressional record to draw on and a platform cribbed from the DNC.”
The short answer is, “no.” Vance is part of a lawsuit that attempts to dismantle what’s left of campaign finance protections, which were largely destroyed by Citizens United. It makes sense, of course, since Vance isn’t a real boy and his puppeteer is billionaire Peter Thiel.
From the article:
“Experts say Vance’s lawsuit, as well as a new regulatory decision allowing a candidate to work hand in hand with a deep-pocketed outside election group, is part of a coordinated effort, decades in the making, to destroy the last vestiges of campaign finance laws designed to prevent the wealthy and the powerful from spending limitless amounts directly on candidates and demanding favors in return.”
Because it’s silly season, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming once again to provide blow-by-excruciating-blow coverage of the (apparently only) debate between Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump. While most observers called it a clear victory for Harris who was composed and on message, as opposed to a meanspirited and meandering Trump, the debate was more remarkable for the theatrical nature of the staging and the absence of pertinent questions that could reveal something (anything) of substance for the American people to grab onto.
Here’s a snippet from the pod:
Max: “Outside of the questions that really should have been cut, we got questions on tariffs, fracking, stopping the flow of migrants, Obamacare, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and a perfunctory closing question on climate change. And here’s the thing. In the minimal amount of space the candidates gave to actually provide answers and in the massive amount of evidence we have from both of their time in office, I can tell you that their answers are nearly identical. And that should scare the shit out of all of us.”
Editorial Note: If you’re one of the new subscribers who came our way from the Eric Schmidt video on YouTube, then this is a great episode for you. We frequently feature the Best of the Left Podcast because it was the only podcast that supported UNFTR in our early days. We’re huge fans of the BOTL team and are forever grateful to them for seeing something in us.
“We’ve been living through the modern equivalent of the oil boom, back when poking a hole in the ground would make one of the world’s most valuable substances, upon which entire economies would be built. But in our case, it’s not oil, it’s data. Now we are at a pivotal moment as the old unchallenged master of data, Google, has been found guilty of illegal anti-competitive behavior at the same time as generative AI companies are in a new desperate rush to stake claims on every last piece of data they can find.”
Book Love
“The Brothers explores hidden forces that shape the national psyche, from religious piety to Western movies-many of which are about a noble gunman who cleans up a lawless town by killing bad guys. This is how the Dulles brothers saw themselves, and how many Americans still see their country’s role in the world.”
“The New Jim Crow had a similar effect on me. When it was published I was working at a Christian bookstore, and one time at a conference where I was working with another person from the same company who normally worked in a southern state, he told me about his experience in prison ministry. He described how the criminal justice system railroaded young Black men into prison, in ways that made it virtually impossible to return to normal society. Then the convicts were used for labor. I was deeply shocked. Though I thought of myself as politically left, I was still working under the illusion that racism and white supremacy were all but eradicated by the civil rights movement. But when I heard those stories, I immediately thought that it sounded like Jim Crow never ended. Then within a few months I found The New Jim Crow, and everything I thought I knew about race was turned upside down - and I had to confront my own implicit racism.”
“The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is a labor union representing nearly 9000 workers across North America. Established in 1905, the IWW is known for its high standards of democracy, transparency, multinationalism, and active use of the right to strike. The IWW is a general union that is open to workers from all industries and companies, rather than just one organization or particular sector. The IWW promotes the creation of ‘One Big Union’ and contends that all workers should be united as a social class to supplant capitalism and wage labor with industrial democracy.”
