"This is where we draw the line!
People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
How dare you!"
"Right Here Right Now" Greta Thunberg remix by Fatboy Slim (2019)
On the one hand world history is an endless chronicle of growth, war and conquest, technological achievement and empire, a multi millennia long conspiracy of the rich against the poor, the strong preying on the weak. But it is also, simultaneously, if much less documented, many big and small resistances to tyranny, enslavement, and whatever rat race traps rule the day, resistance and especially the cooperation to endure and escape various forms of violent domination.
You might call the former, in terms of historiography, the stories we tell about history, the conservative materialist, empirical (always counting the money), Winners theory of history, with its preoccupation with the preservation of already-existing wealth accumulation and associated social advantages and the real and perceived threats to those advantages, and the latter resistance, a liberating Loser's theory of history, the secret history of the "Woke ideology" of whatever day, promising uplift, expanding civil rights, more community, more freedom and equality, rooted historically in the modern period in the American and French Revolutions at the end of the 18th century but also, both theories really, present in every Chinese peasant revolt and Protestant Reformation or any large human migration going back to Mesopotamia and Egypt (3500 BCE), at least.
Perhaps to the former we owe winning wars and military domination or empire. But to the latter, to which I am particularly partial as a working stiff, we owe our right to vote and our living wages, such as they are, what human rights protections we do enjoy, and the freakin' weekend, which I'm pretty sure is universally popular. Resistance is Sisyphean, endlessly contested and compromising, and no stupid dictatorship or AI automation will end this essentially negotiated and fought over perpetual feature of human societies.
Anyway, two historical takes on the Grump Era published last year that I've found perhaps weirdly unsettling and comfortin. Both include big picture perspectives and comparisons that resonate with today's political crisis. They've helped me and I thought might you too.
Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise To Power, by Timothy W. Ryback (2024): What rhymes? The way the business people don't really like Hitler but prefer him to the socialists and communists and think, with no little conceit, they can manage him. Also, Hitler's delusions of grandeur ring with Grump's; even if their class origins are very different: Hitler a patriot veteran and Grump the playboy business tycoon. Hitler's supremely confident with winning 37% of the popular vote because he reasons 37% is 75% of a simple majority; this kind of strategic delusional thinking seems Trumpian somehow. All of Hitler's people, Goebbels, Goring, Himmler, etc, by contrast, harbor constant fears the party is on the verge of collapse. By Hitler's logic Grump really did win a huge mandate, although he didn't even win a majority of the popular vote, beating Harris by only 1.5%, and recent reporting indicates he was the beneficiary of a bunch of voter suppression, which the red states and districts have been working diligently at since 2021. Also, the Night of the Long Knives of 1934 casts an ominous shadow over the present Blitzkrieg of illiberalism, to say the least.
When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz (2024): All the original founders of the social conservative elite panic known as the Contract with America are here. It's 1993. It's the same old song, really. From the Powell Memorandum of 1971 all the way to the "Flight 93 Election" theory of 2016, where have we heard this before: The Democrats have to be stopped, they're destroying the country, if they aren't stopped the country will be lost forever to socialist health care and sex scandals or whatever X bigot issue is riling up the illiberal mob in whatever given election. Much of it fueled by a slow burning desperation about demographic changes white supremacists can't stop, hence the desperation part. Actually, the "mixed" population on the census, which, mind you, is 70-80% white mixed with some other race/ethnicity category and is likely to remain a super-majority for the rest of the century, isn't supposed to surpass whites-only until 2044, but Maga are already wetting their pants and more people will be hurt because they feel like they're losing their country because the kid taking their order at the Burger King drive-thru speaks English with a difficult to follow accent. Ganz explores in molecular detail the conservative ferment triggered by these changes and the waning potential of the so-called Reagan Revolution in the 1992 election. Talk about fever swamps, like with Rick Perlstein I'm both awed and a little frightened by the insider baseball depths Ganz gets into rightwing spaces I have to heavily filter. But I'm also grateful, he's a very able guide, historically searching, tremendous attention to the details of the historical record, and a sly sense of humor. I still think culturally the best way to understand Grump is as a Frankenstein creation of the neoliberal yuppie greed-is-good '80s, the decade before Ganz's focus, but my Grump is a monster without a constituency or cult. What Ganz is really getting into here is the making of Grump's base and cult. And what a story it is! More clown show charlatans than you can shake a stick at: Ross Perot, Patrick Buchanan, Ruby Ridge (the event, not any one person), and all the rest.
Another oldie that seems worth posting as evidence of this conventionally downplayed data point.
The federal government provides a lot of support to U.S. citizens via Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; even poor states receive the full benefit of these programs. But poor states pay relatively little in federal taxes, which support these programs. So the result is huge federal aid to lower-income states. Here, for 2022, are federal spending and tax receipts from West Virginia (excluding Covid-related programs), as percentages of the state’s gross domestic product:
Rockefeller Institute, Bureau of Economic Analysis
In effect, the state received “foreign aid” from wealthier states of almost 12 percent of GDP, which is huge. Paul Krugman, NY Times
Or it's ok if Lusk manipulates social media messaging but not if China does?
Tik Tok and a Protectionist Internet
Matt Pearce
Notes-
One of the Great Power lessons of the internet is that whoever controls the infrastructure controls the content.
Internet infrastructure: platforms (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc?), Oracle (Austin) "cloud" memory electricity facilities and power needs, Lusk buying Twitter now looks so much bigger and even more sinister.... The gov is investing 500 billion in AI, much of which will probably go to building energy infrastructure to run all those cloud servers and super duper smart chips.
What is the problem with Tik Tok as is? First, that China could mass-harvest data about U.S. citizens for later strategic use. Second, that China could manipulate TikTok’s content moderation to push pro-China messaging to Americans or content that would exploit our sizable domestic divisions. What Musk, Zuckerber, Bezos, Google, etc, already do but they're at least Americans, a sovereignty issue repugs seem to totally ignore when it comes to Russia.
What the Act targets is the CCP/PRC’s ability to manipulate that content covertly.
Who controls the algorithms now? Lusk and Grump, presumably.
Anyway, Matt Pearce, another substack blogger. Cannot possibly keep up with anymore substackers, I'm always buried under a blizzard of unread substack emails already, but caught up with this fine post. Long time journalist, based in LA, takes a critical look at the news and media spaces. Over the last fifteen to twenty years, this century, anyway, the internet and social media have cannibalized legacy journalism and media, newspapers, magazines, transforming the public square in disturbing ways. How journalists can operate in this radically harsh and changing environment is Pearce's subject. Good stuff.
"A 2022 analysis of media coverage of crime in New York City paints a damning picture of how the news distorted people’s perceptions. Toward the end of the analysis, a graph compares two values: actual shootings in New York City and mentions of shootings in local media, from 2019 to the end of 2022. For most of the graph, the two are uncorrelated at best; spikes in shootings often produce no change in coverage, and coverage sometimes spikes even as shootings remain flat. In 2022, in the run-up to a crucial federal midterm election, however, the picture becomes much worse: Shootings themselves remain almost completely flat, but the coverage of them soars, hitting levels about three to four times higher than during previous periods with similar levels of gun violence. As Politico noted, these “blood and guts headlines” helped Republicans claim one open New York House seat and take three more from Democratic control."
First, there is a pattern here we've seen before. The favorite scaremongering topics of conservatives, crime, immigration, gender transitions (or queer stuff), regardless of the real underlying conditions of these issues, spike dramatically in news stories in the run-up to elections.
This is a criticism of Dems and liberals made by Ezra Klein: scolding people for hyperventilating about rising crime when the actual numbers, murder rates, for instance, are actually going down is alienating voters. People vote on vibes, not statistics or scientific measurements.
Klein's basic point, trying to give him his due, is Dems should take people's concerns about crime seriously and not condescendingly present them with contrary evidence suggesting their feelings aren't real. Note how much this resembles, though, a similar postmortem take about the economy. People were frustrated by inflation and the price of eggs and alienated or dismissive of journalists or academics condescendingly pointing out to them facts to the contrary.
Honor thy voter "vibes," is the cautionary tale. Okay, but it still comes back to electorate views. If Trump vs, really, Anybody, is nothing but a Humpty Dumpty 1.5% +/- choice about the price of eggs, paying no heed at all that he also promised a bunch of forced deportations and DEI purges and disregard for human rights and violent crackdown stunts, this could be some minimum threshold of civic education under which a democracy fails.
I mean, there was no red pill, blue pill mystery here. A lot of the postmortems read as desperate efforts by journalists to try to rationalize or justify electing Trump. Biden was too old. Harris abandoned the progressives. The Dems are always weak and in disarray.
So more bad Dem messaging to blame, say the pundits, but what can the Dems really do as a minority opposition? Oppose, I guess. Call out the crimes and abuses of the public trust, which the republicans of course will drape in a bunch of phony patriotism. Report the crimes and abuses until people hopefully figure out this crackdown fascist government thing is not a growth leader but a crypto bubble bust away from people wondering how anybody ever thought Grump or Lusk had some good economic ideas?!
But even such resistance as this feels rare and privileged. Many, myself to a degree for sure, have concluded already, reasonably, best to keep your head down, take care of business, say nothing, avoid contact with violent fascists.
Anyway, if Grump's assault on government workers-- again, like the police in Jan 6-- and now all civil servants destabilizes the economy I'm guessing we'll learn soon enough whether this is what his supporters voted for.
We know they voted for forced deportations (57% support, last I saw). Now we'll see how they feel when the collateral damage, legal citizens swept up in the profiling of "illegals," the stress of any forced deportation process at the scales they're boasting about, 10, 20 million, crazy scales like he's Mao Zedong dismissing the casualty rate of the Great Leap Forward. We'll see now how far they'll go.
But I don't know how far that will be. Reviving Guantanamo is not encouraging, to be sure. But, again, republican voters did by all indications vote for forced deportations. Regrettably but true. But they really didn't vote for this Project 2025 fascist purge of government workers and the Deep State, DEI, did they? Some probably would have, the cracked libertarian (and thin and tenuous, I've heard) thread connecting Steve Bannon to the Tech Billionaires. But Grump was campaigning against any association with it, obviously responding to his base with something more than empathy. And now, fuck it, 'I was always about the Project 2025, it's a blueprint of how to save our country from the radical leftists and the creeping socialism that would restrain the animal spirits vital to great success in business and celebrity and, well, really, in being a president, like me. Thank you very much."
I know, I'm making Grump sound like the last Elvis. The final horror, predator Elvis!
Anyway, the brazen audacity of trying to sell the country on a retro 19th century great powers imperialist struggle for global supremacy (that did clearly culminate in two gigantic and devastating world wars, by the way) with Big Tech leading the investment rich vanguard way in a 21st century global struggle based on in reality impoverished corrupt kleptocratic petrostates that only allow "fake news"/State propaganda like Hungary and Russia or Saudi Arabia or North Korea. Where's the South Park movie on this Big Lie?
Impossible to make-up and some day a Shakespeare's sister and/or a future Marlon James is going to write a hell of a Pynchon-like masterpiece novel about all this. Hope I get to read it.
"I don't want to be too precious about the rule of law issues here. We all know who Trump is; we also all know the extensive flaws that have undermined faith in the rule of law and justice institutions over the past several years and decades. Though the trial showcased the ways in which Trump presents a unique threat to the rule of law, it’s still hard for me to contemplate the damage he has done without almost reflexively thinking of all of the police killings that led to Black Lives Matter protests, or the failure of the Obama administration to try to hold any Wall Street executive criminally accountable after the financial crisis. It's hard to imagine an American billionaire seriously being threatened by a prosecution at this point. Now, I recognize that these are all different problems stemming from different causes. But they each contribute to the impression of a justice system that seems to have one standard for elites, and another for everyone else. Trump may be a convicted felon, but he will face no punishment. In ten days, he’ll be President."
Before the flood!
The letter from John Manley, a former minister in Canada's government, was published in The Globe & Mail, a major Canadian newspaper, but is behind a paywall. I found the full letter at Diane Ravitch's public education blog:
Manley loves Trump's idea of uniting Canada and the US, for one big reason, the way he sees it, Republicans would never again win the presidency!
"Dear Donald Trump,
My mentor and former boss, prime minister Jean Chrétien, has dismissed your suggestion that Canada and the U.S. merge.
Don’t despair. My point of view differs somewhat from his (sorry, Boss). I think we may be able to make this work if Canadians fully understand your proposal.
Imagine what the “United States of Canada” could be. We would marry American ingenuity and entrepreneurship to Canada’s natural resources, underdog toughness and culture of self-effacing politeness to create a powerful, world-dominating country.
We would be the largest land mass in the world. We would be self-reliant in every respect (food, energy, minerals, water). We would attract the world’s most talented people. We would truly be “the best country in the world,” to use Mr. Chrétien’s words, and would dominate international hockey competitions. Your idea is truly brilliant.
As you know from your corporate experience, for any successful merger, the devil is in the details, but I have some suggestions.
First, Canada could never simply be the 51st state. Canada consists of 10 states (we call them “provinces”) and three territories. Each of our provinces exists for historical reasons and citizens feel a deep loyalty to their province.
So we would need to be the 51st to 60th states. With two senators for each state, of course. Our 20 senators will no doubt bring fresh ideas to the institution that will help make the United States of Canada truly great!
Some issues that cause division and frustration in your country are considered settled by political parties of all stripes in Canada, so I suggest adopting Canadian consensus in the interest of making this deal work.
For example, there is no argument in Canada over women’s reproductive rights. There! That hot-button issue is resolved for you! (You can thank me later.)
All Canadian politicians support our single-payer health care system because no one is refused treatment for their inability to pay and no one goes broke because they suffer a catastrophic illness. In effect, all of our citizens have lifetime critical illness insurance provided by the government. And while it’s expensive, our system costs considerably less than yours, with 100 per cent of the population covered! Your citizens will love it, I promise.
I would also observe that Canadians have long preferred to live with many fewer firearms than are tolerated in the United States. The result is a drastically lower rate of deaths and injuries caused by gun violence in Canada. Our gun laws would make the country safer than it is, and safer is definitely greater!
We have some other innovations that you may wish to consider. Our Canada Pension Plan, equivalent to your Social Security, is fully funded and actuarially sound. This requires higher contributions, but it pays off with solvency. I believe your Social Security runs out of money in the near future. (That’s not great, is it?)....
I am so excited about this, Mr. Trump – I can already see the 60 little maple leaves on the flag with 13 stripes!”
"Indeed, some critics noted that because the undifferentiated genitalia that males and females share very early in fetal development are “phenotypically female”, you could argue he just made everyone legally female.
There are lots of factors that contribute to how we think about sex, including physical characteristics, hormone levels, gamete size (larger gametes are eggs while smaller gametes are sperm), sex chromosomes, etc. Trump’s executive order seems to tie sex to just gamete size at conception. This is despite the fact that a lot of academics have moved away from a sex-classification system based primarily on gametes because some people will never produce a gamete."
"In April 2024, candidate Donald Trump called on leaders of the fossil fuel industry to dig deep and contribute to his campaign. At this dinner at Mar-a-Lago, candidateTrump pledged to the oil, gas and coal executives that if elected, he would expand offshore drilling, weaken environmental rules, and scrap electric vehicle and wind policies and other regulations opposed by the industry groups. Trump vowed to reverse President Biden’s moratorium on new LNG gas terminals.
Present at the April 11th dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club were leaders of the American Petroleum Institute and executives from Chevron, ExxonMobil, Occidental, ConocoPhillips, and Continental Resources–along with fracking producers Cheniere Energy and EQT.According to several witnesses at the meeting, Trump told the assembled that the amount of money they would save in taxes and legal expenses after he repealed regulations would more than cover their billion-dollar contribution."
Climate Research Accountability Project
This dinner with Big Oil was in the news. I heard about it. I don't know how it was spinned on Fox or social media to get half the electorate to buy into full-bore "burn baby burn" in 2025, with the promise of cheap gas I'm assuming, but, alas, it was.
Democracies in history have always been vulnerable to internal factional struggles for power. Such factional disputes tore apart the Roman Republic. The people who wrote the Declaration of Independence and Constitution knew this. That's why they built in all the separation of powers stuff, to prevent one faction (or political party) from becoming too dominant, too hostile to other interests. It's worked, more or less (I mean, this isn't our first democratic failure), for nearly 250 years.
Historians like to euphemise the problem, the threats to democracy, as Special Interest Politics. But one risk with this view is it tends to flatten comparisons between interests groups, and so obscure the overwhelming influence of Big Biz and Billionaires as an interest group and their hostility to labor rights, environmental protections, health care rights, and generally community infrastructure of any kind beyond the police and military backup necessary to protect their private property and right to freely accumulate wealth.
"Burn baby burn" might reduce gas prices in the short run but it will not reduce the cost of the transition to electric cars, nor will it reduce the ravages of climate change on working people's lives, nor will it improve our global position economically but, in fact, is ceding dominance in the 21st century global economy and energy transition to China.
Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, maybe most important DJs to expanding 1970s disco era experience into '80s House music and dance club music beyond. I read somewhere they used to hang out together in the classic disco era at David Mancuso's Loft parties, enthralled but also able to share a joke about the hippie vibe on the Loft's dance floor. In light of such gossip let's call "The Whistle" Frankie's LGBTQ+ hippie loving ode to the Loft. It's like a perfect Quiet Storm easy listening jazz flute fantasia, sandwiched between some hooligan-friendly men's whistling choir, and on the bottom an undeniably skipping and softly booming House music smooth dance club tempo. "The Whistle Song" feels like a perfect gay disco homage to the Loft. Even if Frankie had no such intentions, Mancuso had to hear the sincere compliment. First ballot 20th Century Dance Music Hall of Fame.
"What I saw in him was an intuitive and enigmatic man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get in touch with," Kyle MacLachlan
Or not! But still an awed appreciation for his disjunctive dream and/or nightmare-like imagination, and, yes, sly humor. "Legendary auteur" is right too, in both a positive and negative sense: His cinematic vision is unmistakable but also sometimes indulgent and inscrutable and often disturbing. As an aging Boomer myself the familiar obits are coming faster than I can keep track of but Lynch was especially important to me or so as much as filmmakers go, so worth noting. I saw Kyle MacLachlan throw out a first pitch at an M's game this past summer. He was all grey. There was a goofy pacific northwest vibe, that MacLachlan personifies, that ran through much of Lynch's film work. And Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive were all moving, if not shattering, movie experiences for me. I saw Mulholland Drive alone three times when it first game out just trying to make sense of what I saw. I can't say I ever did figure it all out (other than it is a horror story about how Hollywood ruins innocent lives of aspiring actors) but each viewing increased my respect for Lynch's creativity and craft. Now I need to take another shot at his 2017 Twin Peaks reboot. David Lynch was a true artist and cinematic visionary. R.I.P.
Also, nice writeup in The Stranger by Megan Burbank:
"But Lynch depicts harm with the emotional intensity it requires. In the universe of Twin Peaks, the impact of Laura Palmer’s suffering is framed on a mythological scale. One teenage girl’s ongoing abuse is so incomprehensible and unacceptable that it requires a supernatural explanation. I have always considered this beautiful: Lesser directors would see Laura’s rape as a plot point, an edgy choice. For Lynch, it’s the end of all the good in the world."
"But hey! When they’re hungry or finding themselves without any health care, low-income Trump voters can take heart in knowing that they really stuck it to trans people, immigrants, and the concept of “woke” and definitely were not tricked into frothing at the mouth over these things in order to ensure they’d vote for people who would cut all of the programs they rely on in order to fund tax cuts for people too rich to even feel the impact of whatever small amount of taxes they won’t be paying anymore."
Grump voters and their relationship to Fox and conservative media is its own national dumpster fire all Americans, and the rest of the world influenced by our politics, will all now have to resist, dodge, and endure for the next four years. Pointing out the details of how republican voters, or other than the Billionaires, voted against their own interests is necessary but not new or surprising. Just like during the pandemic the redder the location the worse the health outcomes. If conservatives are not getting revenge against their avowed enemies, Dems, liberals, etc, they're cutting off their noses to spite their faces, usually both at the same time. This is how they roll, break stuff and then fall on their own sword. We've seen this movie before and, of course, the second installment is likely to be worse.
But what about everybody else? Apparently, more eligible voters didn't vote than voted for either Grump or Harris. What about women, minorities, Muslim-Americans, families with LGBTQ+ loved ones, young people with college loans, health care workers and/or people who depend on health care services, and, really, any working class wage worker that did not see a clear and present threat to their interests in the election from Grump and the republicans or concluded Grump can't be worse than Biden or America isn't ready for a woman potus or whatthefuckever is a level of civic imbecility bordering on Darwin Awards stuff. Sorry.
After all the postmortem allusions to the election results, and how various groups voted, I'm anxious to see the actual demographic breakdown, which I'm told should be out in February. I'm tired of the gloating about alleged 5-8% shifts in minority populations, women didn't show up, etc.
Anyway, wrapping up my lament, so many eligible voters unable to recognize any important stakes or choice in the election is a crisis in civic education. Or looking at it a different way: to survive democracies have to win popular support, that's it or absolutely requisite to democracies' survival anyway. And nearly 40% of the electorate decided democratic government wasn't worth their vote. What has democracy ever done for me, like that? Biden/Harris or Trump, what's the difference? I care about my community but national politics, Trump and all that, it's like a nightmare horror Hunger Games pro wrestling super grudge match. I'm not into the superhero stuff. Voting is just feeding the beast.
But then amongst engaged voters, trigger warning, Grump won 49.5% to 48.5% over Harris because, testifies a Trump supporter on TV, "Because he knows how to deal with the "illegals" and he's easier on the pocket book." I'm taking this as suggestion that I need to read some more Jonathan Swift.
New Order takes the synthpop plunge, never looks back. Synthpop, that is, with hopped up and punkish dance club tempos big in sweaty clubs.
"I found a lot to agree with in Jonathan Weisman’s big piece [in NY Times] on how Democrats lost the working class, although he barely mentions the extent to which Republicans have followed anti-worker policies, including attempts to privatize Social Security and kill the Affordable Care Act. Reagan, in particular, didn’t just do “trickle-down,” he did a lot to crush unions while cutting taxes on high incomes and raising them on most workers, and presided over trade deficits, deindustrialization and a huge surge in inequality.
Readers should know that the raw fact is that America didn’t have higher inflation than other advanced economies — yet Weisman not only doesn’t tell readers that, he slants the narrative by giving the last word to a Republican asserting that it was all Biden’s fault."
The key distinction to me in the Dems "lost the working class" debate (in as much as they actually have, also debatable), which really only refers to the white working class anyway, is they were lost for cultural reasons not economic reasons long ago.
When the voting rights act was passed in 1965, then potus LBJ is reported to have opined that the South would be lost to the Democrats for a generation. Turns out we're going on our third generation since the bigots began migrating to the Republican party and they're pretty much all there now, metastasizing into everywhere outside the major metropolitan areas.
The racist and mainstream perspective, spread by Fox and conservative media, dictates an economic outlook in which everything is zero sum: If immigrants get ahead, natives must be falling behind; If minority civil rights are expanded, the majority population's rights will suffer decline and restriction. It's always a vicious Hobbesian all-against-all tug-o-war for the profiteering spoils of society, which conveniently reinforces corporate rule's "free market" austerity economics and political-economy.
This take K describes as recent has been routine at the NY Times and WaPo pretty much since post-pandemic inflation first surged in 2021, and in a broader sense is much older. The media studiously keep the global and domestic inflation stories separate. They rarely mention that inflation after a disruption in global supply chains, a major war or global pandemic, is to be expected and to a degree inescapable. The more relevant question is how governing institutions respond to these economic pressures. And in the US, anyway, the Fed, and mainstream economics, responded by putting the onus for inflation entirely on common consumers, reflecting a blinding Wall Street and corporate rule bias in the Fed and mainstream economics. Larry Summers was blaming inflation on Biden for giving consumers too much spending money with his Covid relief bills before the universally expected major supply chain obstacles had even been identified, let alone addressed.
Throughout the whole ordeal mainstream press accounts also studiously ignored the contributions of corporate price gouging to inflation and the cost of living surge, even though Warren was regularly quoting on the floor of the Senate CEO's promising their shareholders price and profit increases based on the favorable, for them, "inflationary environment."
The goal in all this was to reduce the destabilizing extremes of inflation WITHOUT enabling any government interventions that might shift resources toward the laboring classes. Austerity economics, basically.
The republican slant in the media is recognition that they can blunt the real economic interests of the bottom 50% by appealing to their racist bigotry and culture war stupidity. And they just succeeded in the last election, even if narrowly, spectacularly. That Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg will, reportedly, sit on the podium behind Grump at the inauguration isn't just an unprecedented clown show display of corporate greed but a crowning display of the neoliberal order and the catastrophically poor judgment of our new economic overlords and Big Tech broligarchy.
Why "poor judgment" if they are only protecting their own class interests to freely accumulate capital and limit their labor costs? Isn't that what good capitalists are supposed to do? Because pursuing their own self-interests so single-mindedly increases poverty and homelessness, and more generally is always squeezing and lowballing the bottom 50% to inflate their margins, which is the Wall Street game pretty much running the economy.
At this point it's fairly clear the Wall Street position isn't in any clear sense pro-growth so much as pro-Billionaire wealth hoarding. But, worse, it is spectacularly poor judgment because they have turned the government, and the largest and most influential economy in the world, into culture war reality tv with the constant threat of humanitarian crimes the dramatic click bait, meanwhile abandoning global leadership in the energy transition away from heavy carbon emissions and fossil fuels, burn baby burn.
They are gambling that because fossil fuel energy won the 20th century it will win the 21st century. They are wrong but now we have to watch what terrible humiliations they will put the country through before some super majority surge in the electorate demands another course correction.
"Beruhrt Verfurht," ("touched seduced") Robert Gorl (1984) sounds like Alan Vega's (Suicide) German cousin. Mumbly, breathy, inscrutably emphatic, especially in Gorl's case because it's all in German, so no idea what he's on about until I looked it up. Although touching and seduction as subjects wouldn't have been too hard a guess. The girl singer sounds like a dry sassy Dietrich update. It's a nice '80s techno pop period tune.
But Gorl, more like Suicide's Martin Rev, I'm learning is really a pioneering maestro of creative synthpop tempos, goosestepping stomps, hopped up polka Oompahs, robotic Teutonic jamming with a minimalist's blunt appeal, and a widely revered pioneer of Techno music.
Here's Gorl showing off his instrumental chops and drollery on this 1984 failed solo stab at the charts:
And they are another secret treasure in the annals of postpunk music unearthed for me by Simon Reynolds postpunk book. Back in the day I'd admired DAF no further than "Der Mussolini" as a kind of punk era one-hit-wonder. But never searched any further until running into them again in Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again.
"Der Mussolini" (1981), an international hit and monster in the dance clubs, was my first DAF song. The electro punk edge was instantly grabbing, but I barely noticed the dancing to Mussolini, Hitler, Jesus Christ, Communism, and right/left rhetoric beyond punk provocation and sloganeering. The provocations struck me as mocking as the Sex Pistols.
Anyway, a deeper appreciation of their postpunk electronic synthesis now comes as exciting news. Their punk rock incubation phase is viscerally charged, to say the least. Check out this performance of "Ich und die Wirklichkeit" ("Me and Reality") (1981). Delgado on the mic, Gorl at the drums, but not sure about the New Romantic help on the electronics? But key! An electro charged punk rock fit.
Best translation I could find googling:
Me and I
In real life
Me and I
In reality
I feel so weird
I feel so weird
I feel so weird
I feel so weird
Me and I
In real, ha, life
The reality comes
Reality comes
Reality comes
Reality comes
I feel so weird.
Delgado is a hypnotically effective ranter, his tortured sarcasm comes through without much translation. This one standard issue existential punk rock angst but crucially with drums and electronics, no guitar.
"Sato-Sato" (translates from Japanese as "always active"?), DAF (WestBam Remix from 2017): Priceless original early '80s footage of punkers dancing to DAF's electronic punk montaged by contemporary mixmaster WestBam. Public service:
So of course the more fully up to date music people as opposed to a Mr. Magoo dilettante like me have been onto my DAF discovery for at least twenty years. Here's DAF dominating the Wire Festival in 2003 with another one of their Techno punk classics, "Alle Gegen Alle" ("All Against All") (1981). Flirting with violent fascist imagery via Hobbes, but again emphasizing the power over the hate-mongering.
There's more trigger warning talk online about DAF, about how they were out gays and their lyrics tended toward explicit sex and rough trade stuff. I can definitely see some of the gay leather thing in their album covers but until this late edition song I haven't encountered much explicit language. Again, not that I'd notice with the German, other than to observe a lot of German sounds like cursing to me, if not particularly sexual. But looking up a few translations of the DAF I'm sharing here this is the first song I've come upon with explicit language. So adult content warning but also an evolved example of their special combo of tricky beats and aggressive electronics and sarcastic humor.
"Ich glaub ich fick dich später" ("I Think I'll Fuck You Later") DAF/DOS (1996):
A lot more where this came from that I don't know but a previously unexplored synthpop fountainhead source of electronic music fans of the genre will want to know, I will insist. DAF are one of the key founders of postpunk electronic-based gothic dance music and if you like any one of those musical categories they are not to be missed. Invigorating.
"By the entrance to the building, there’s a model of an elderly Neanderthal leaning on a stick. He is smiling benignantly and resembles an unkempt Yogi Berra," Elizabeth Kolbert
"It’s only fully modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don’t see land. Part of that is technology, of course; you have to have ships to do it. But there is also, I like to think or say, some madness there. You know? How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it’s ridiculous. And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop,” [says evolutionary geneticist Svante Paabo]. If the defining characteristic of modern humans is this sort of Faustian restlessness, then, by Pääbo’s account, there must be some sort of Faustian gene. Several times, he told me that he thought it should be possible to identify the basis for this “madness” by comparing Neanderthal and human DNA."
Yeah, this crazy wired ambition and unfortunate tendency to driving other hominids and animals to extinction. Like Neanderthals. Obliteration. Or absorption. Humans!
I liked Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction. It's a grim subject, sure. Are we in or on the cusp of a sixth mass extinction event and this one caused by humans. A debate that devolves at times into obscure disputes about statistical significance of species loss in various global locations and cases. But Kolbert somehow manages to turn the science into interesting questions about human impacts on the natural world and eases her way into heartening humanizing portraits of scientists in the field studying species loss, trying to stop it, understand its causes, and they're all just well-meaning worker bees, albeit very important ones, trying to help out, increase understanding through science, which is exactly who we ought to want on the job trying to understand and head off extinction threats, or the way I figure. It was a winning popular science book about species extinction. Neat trick.
"Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues. When the children were given a hint about where to find a reward—someone pointing to or looking at the right container—they took it. The apes either didn’t understand that they were being offered help or couldn’t follow the cue. Similarly, when the children were shown how to obtain a reward, by, say, ripping open a box, they had no trouble grasping the point and imitating the behavior. The apes, once again, were flummoxed. Admittedly, the kids had a big advantage in the social realm, since the experimenters belonged to their own species. But, in general, apes seem to lack the impulse toward collective problem-solving that’s so central to human society."
Sorry, but the "collective problem-solving" skill is not looking good these days but maybe, again, hopeful that scientists are still finding some evidence of these human social skills for cooperation before it has been beat out of them. Although, I should note I saw way more of it in high school students classroom teaching in this century than I ever felt as a high school student in the last one, for sure, but no one to blame there but me. Keep hope alive!
I've read references to Goethe for ages (and still not sure how to pronounce his name correctly) but I don't think I've read more than quotes and only know second-hand the Faust story. A pact with the devil met at a crossroads promises unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Faustian means sacrificing spiritual values for power, knowledge, or selfish material gain until you grow sick of your ceaseless drives and pursuits. Faustian speaks of the tragedy of burning out on ambition.
Paleogenetics appears to be blowing away the single migration out of Africa theory asserted by genetics as recently as 2002, The Journey of Man, Spencer Wells, which I taught many times and, absolutely, because for one reason I liked Well's united colors of Benetton multicultural angle, but now in evolutionary archaeology they're adding multiple waves of migration, branching off in central Eurasia, some shooting off on their own and some doubling back and reconnecting with Neanderthals until modern humans are finally the last hominids standing. So still empirically multicultural but also evidently very hostile towards others, to put it mildly.
Humans are incredibly creative and productive and, Kolbert keeps reminding us, astonishingly destructive. These characteristics got us here but also might be pushing us toward extinction. Anyway, I like Kolbert on the case.
ElizabethKolbert @ The NY-er (Sorry, behind paywall. I've been giving up my mainstream subs, spitefully, frustrated by my vague sense they are all complicit in this disaster, but NY-er remains my favorite long-form journalism, and I know lots of people who don't have the patience for the long-form part. I don't keep up with but a fraction of it but always finding gold. Like Kolbert.)
“The income inequality in this country and cost-of-living is outrageous,” he [Matthew Livelsberger, Vegas Cybertruck Exploder] added, clearly unaware of who supports policies designed to combat those things. “The number of homeless on our street is embarrassing and disgusting. Have some pride and take care of this.”
I’m pretty sure the solution to this plan, as per those he would like to rally around, would be something along the lines of throwing them in prisons or bringing back workhouses.
“Stop obsessing over diversity,” he wrote, getting back on message. “We are all diverse and DEI is a cancer. Thankfully we rejected the DEI candidate and will have a real President instead of Weekend at Bernie’s.”
Well gee. Maybe we wouldn’t need things like DEI if people like this guy didn’t believe, despite all the easily available evidence to the contrary, that a white guy must be more qualified than a woman of color.
This guy is wacky, but he’s exemplary of something I’ve been saying for a long time now — and no, not just that the people who pull this kind of shit usually turn out to really hate women. It’s that there are so many people out there who have the economic policies of Republicans and Democrats completely switched around in their heads. Or maybe not that, exactly. It’s almost more that these people have convinced themselves that Republicans stand for everything they want and like, even when they are out here actively proposing the complete opposite."
Several steps removed from the 24/7 news avalanche by design, having to ration my intake for mental health reasons like most everybody else I know, even I noted how all the talk about Livelsberger, another untreated PTSD veteran turned violent berserker, went silent as soon as his communications and so real motivations surfaced. I'm assuming his "Weekend at Bernie's" reference refers to Biden but the rest of the same sentence clearly refers to Harris. So, yeah, the cybertruck guy was mixed up. I saw an election campaign sign in my affluent neighborhood (I live on the poor side of town, down by the railroad tracks, by the way) that read: "RFK- Make America Healthy Again." There is a gobsmacking upside-downland quality to our current social hysteria that is unnerving, to say the least. You could say such violent wingnuts as Livelsberger have always been part of America. True. But has there ever been so many of them and whatever their problems have they ever been so pervasive? Pennacchia's take rings true with me with this slight tweak: they, angry white men bent on deaths of despair, in the main identify with Grump Republicans as their party of angry white men and then fit everything else (any actual grievances or proposed solutions) to fit that identification.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The decision by Facebook’s parent company Meta to eliminate fact-checking was “long overdue,” the former congressman George Santos said on Wednesday.
“For far too long, Facebook has been a haven for people hell-bent on spreading facts,” said Santos, who said he was making his statement from the International Space Station.
“I commend Facebook’s decision, and I know that my fellow Beatles agree with me,” he added.
Praising Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg for “freeing Facebook from the tyranny of accuracy,” he declared, “I say this as a citizen, a patriot, and the NHL’s all-time scoring leader.”
"The demand that Costco abandon DEI came from some conservative “think tank” called the National Center for Public Policy Research, an anodyne name for a group that spends its time trying to get companies to pretend problems such as climate change and bigotry don’t actually exist. Which is about the level of intellectual robustness we would expect from an organization that puts a hack like Peter Schweizer, the nativist who wrote Clinton Cash and has worked on documentaries with Steve Bannon, on its board.
Costco’s board, to its credit, did not cave into this swill the way other companies have done in a never-ending quest to satisfy the perpetually unsatisfied dipshits of the Right. It’s worth quoting at length:
Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees, members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics:For our employees, these efforts are built around inclusion – having all of our employees feel valued and respected. Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company the importance of creating opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our capacity to attract and retain employees who will help our business succeed. This capacity is critical because we owe our success to our now over 300,000 employees around the globe.
God, yes. It is crazy how some anodyne corporate gobbledygook about respect and diversity can actually serve as an emotional release of sorts. But restating basic values of human dignity and respect is something so few people in power do anymore, and won’t happen very often in our emerging tech broligarchy."
Not that Clinton Cash or the Clinton Foundation aren't relatives of the massive shakedown operation Grump runs out of his role as POTUS. They are. But at least the Clinton's didn't mix their grift with white supremacy and fascist violence. It is an obvious and crucial difference.
"Today, Trump attacked Cheney and others who investigated the events of January 6, 2021, as 'dishonest Thugs.'
Cheney responded: 'Donald, this is not the Soviet Union. You can’t change the truth and you cannot silence us. Remember all your lies about the voting machines, the election workers, your countless allegations of fraud that never happened? Many of your lawyers have been sanctioned, disciplined or disbarred, the courts ruled against you, and dozens of your own White House, administration, and campaign aides testified against you. Remember how you sent a mob to our Capitol and then watched the violence on television and refused for hours to instruct the mob to leave? Remember how your former Vice President prevented you from overturning our Republic? We remember. And now, as you take office again, the American people need to reject your latest malicious falsehoods and stand as the guardrails of our Constitutional Republic—to protect the America we love from you.'"
Letters from an American Historian
The Donald! What a turn of events. Liz was one of the bad guys a short time ago. Her dad is an unapologizing public enemy in the republican party's slide into torture and unaccountable police violence and hostility to common sense gun controls over the last quarter century. And now Liz is one of the most direct and forceful voices of resistance to the kind of pol, above the law, targets his enemies with violent threats, her dad helped make possible. Not that I'm complaining. We need Never Trumpers, former republicans, rich people, anybody with some common sense and human compassion that will speak out against the lies and corruption. Diehard republicans might wish to counter that there's always lies and corruption in politics. Sure, but if you can't tell the difference you're not paying attention, or worse willing on the tyranny over truth. Dark speculation for the day: If looking back this period marks a significant turn away from democracy and public faith in the rule of law and legal justice the crucial date will be the SCOTUS decision last summer to "pardon" Grump for Jan 6. The miscarriage of justice in that decision is obvious already but we'll learn over the next four years how bad a miscalculation it was.
"Political violence is a curious and seductive thing. People routinely see aspects of intention and even valor in political violence notionally aimed at values they agree with, even when they don’t condone the violence itself. We can see this in the fanboying (and girling) around Luigi Mangione. And we can see it around the Jan 6th instigators. (No, I don’t think they’re comparable. You don’t see prominent elected officials cheering on Mangione.) My point here isn’t one of trying to figure out whose violence might be more justifiable. It’s that in cases of violence in the service of goals we might feel broadly aligned with we generally tend to see the violence in more linear and literal terms. The culprit believed very deeply in X or Y and was finally driven to violence because traditional means didn’t work. But it’s not necessarily like that. The train of causation and ideation can run in the opposite direction. You’re motivated toward violence and then you find an ideological framework to fit your hunger for violence into.
It’s this more general disinhibition that seems most relevant, a greater social hunger for violence that is worth taking stock of prior to the point it actualizes itself through one political narrative or another."
"Employers and even neighbors extract free labor or other favors of all sorts from undocumented immigrants in the United States, using the threat of deportation and the violence of ICE as a cudgel. Undocumented immigrants working here end up afraid to call the police when they’re the victims of, or witnesses to crimes.
Everybody loses except the employers, who have a cheap, pliable, easily-threatened source of labor that is afraid to talk back or report abuses.
It got this way in 1986, when Ronald Reagan decided to stop enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring undocumented people, and directed the government’s enforcement activities instead toward the least powerful and able to defend themselves: brown-skinned immigrants.
The result has been a labor market in the US that’s been distorted by undocumented workers creating a black-market for low-wage labor that many of America’s largest corporations enthusiastically support.
For example, prior to the Reagan administration two of the most heavily unionized industries in America were construction and meatpacking. These were tough jobs, but in both cases provided people who just had a high school education with a solid entry card into the American Dream. They were well-paid jobs that allowed construction and meatpacking workers to buy a home, take vacations, raise their kids and live a good, middle-class life with a pension for retirement.
Reagan and his Republican allies, with healthy campaign donations from both industries, wrote the 1986 Immigration Reform Act to make it harder to prosecute employers who invited undocumented workers into their workplaces.
As Brad Plumer noted in The Washington Post:
“[T]he bill’s sponsors ended up watering down the sanctions on employers to attract support from the business community, explains Wayne Cornelius of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at U.C. San Diego. ‘The end result was that they essentially gutted the employer sanctions,’ he says.”
So Reagan stopped enforcing our labor and immigration laws with respect to wealthy white employers, and the next 20 years saw a collapse of American citizens working in both the meatpacking and construction industries, among others."
Cannot be stressed enough. Employers claim Americans won't work whatever jobs, conveniently leaving out that they won't work these jobs at the shit wages employers want to pay. And dollars to donuts something like this goes on with H-1B immigrants as well, if under less austere conditions. Student interest in technology, math/science, and computer engineering swelled during the 2000s and hasn't let up since in the high school where I worked. I have a hard time believing we aren't turning out enough skilled computer engineers. More likely, H-1B tech workers are cheaper and easier to control.
