First, qualifying remark, this is like me marveling over hearing something kids say in the hallways. I really have no idea how any of this stuff works on social media. Other than by a little googling I figure out the first video, by one AGiftFromTodd, started it all on Tik Tok a few days back and remixes are blowing up across social media platforms. The second video, remix by one Vinny Marchi, is included in the Billboard blurb about its viral chart success on iTunes. And I had fun sampling some of the remixes showing up on youtube this afternoon; and share a couple more below. I'm pretty sure my 23 year-old pop culture nerd self would have flipped for this stuff. Even now, more please!
"The Inauguration," Jesse Wells (2025)
Andy Borowitz led me here. Another early Dylanesque troubadour; singer-songwriters with guitars labeled "This Machine Kills Fascists." I know that quote was Dylan's mentor, Woody Guthrie, but I think you get the idea. Anyway, too many have come and gone to recount but here is another one from Arkansas, been plugging away at the music game for at least a decade, making the occasional protest music. We need more protest music.
Herbie Hancock Group Funks It Up On Danish TV, 1976:
I'm no expert on solo projects related to Miles Davis' electric period; I've heard albums by Weather Report Mahavishnu Orchestra, Keith Jarrett, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Chick Korea, and Herbie Hancock but not even close to all of them. And what I've heard has their charms but most strikingly they always seem to back up my sense of how wildly out there and singularly awesome were those Miles electric records. None of the members of his electric albums on their own ever sound very much like any of those Miles records to me. If anything comes close it'd be some space rock patches on Herbie Hancock's Sextant (1973) or Thrust (1974), everything else by Hancock is way too pop funky for the dark heavy space rock explorations of Bitches Brew or Live Evil, etc. (BTW, where does that space rock sound on the electric Miles come from, anyway? Drugs maybe play a part but I think it's at least in part Miles' infatuation with Stockhausen inspired bleeping and atmospheric goofing on the keyboards.) Anyway, this longish Hancock live set appeared on Danish TV in 1976. It goes with the long instrumental passages in early Earth Wind & Fire or the Crusaders more than any Miles. But I'm still stanning for groove music like this, as its own reward, no lesser step child to free jazz or pop music with words; if, in this particular comparison, not as beloved to me as Miles' electric albums. Nonetheless, Hancock's jazz-funk is its own thing and I like it just fine. Sure, there are some smooth jazzercising genteel affectations to Herbie-- you ought to see him later in his tinted glasses and neck scarves (Jackie Chiles on Seinfeld, right?)-- but he charts in the classic funk period ("Chameleon," '74) and the early hiphop era ("Rockit," '83) and, again, in the acid jazz phase of the EDM explosion in England in the early '90s ("Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)"); that's three decades on the dance music charts. Feel the groove.
Libertarian Plutocrats on Anti-Government Rampage
Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. -Jamelle Bouie @ NY Times
Best distillation of the moment I've come across so far in the legacy press; that Leon wants to destroy, of course.
"This Isn't Reform. It's Sabotage
When the country encountered a rampaging novel disease, he [RFK jr.] told us very clearly, he would have preferred we all faced it naked and alone.
This should be disqualifying. Instead, it proved the opposite. In the name of reform and government overhaul, the new administration is approving and ushering in something much more like destruction, with the president imploring his new health secretary to “go wild” in the role. The admonition does not apply just to Kennedy and public health, or even just to Musk and his initiative. A new generation of libertarians is not letting the country’s crisis of confidence go to waste. On Tuesday, Ted Cruz declared, “Abolish the IRS.” Up first, apparently: the Department of Education."
David Wallace-Wells @ NY Times
My shaky memory of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine was that the IMF/WB and Chicago schoolers figure out it works out better to apply neoliberal shock therapy when countries have faced some kind of big disruption to normal times, perhaps like the "crisis in confidence" that might follow a global pandemic? In better times the extreme economic austerity, inflation, no jobs, or no living wage jobs freaks people out; they protest and the shock therapy is withdrawn or scaled back. How much damage has already been done may vary but there is always some. But the full fascist ordoliberal state is averted. If economic times are already really tough, however, many of the new austerity measures, slashing government services, might be overlooked, or swallowed as a necessary budget cutting measures during hard times. A small bump in unemployment might go unnoticed. The popularity of Grump will weigh heavy on whatever outcomes result here and surely his popularity will not survive blowing up the economy, or will it? If nothing else, indeed, we must conclude by now Grump is "a prime piece of political horseflesh"; his appeal, while not majoritarian, is undeniable. The only thing we can count on with this guy is that he'll over-estimate his own capacities and under-estimate his enemies and this blundering narcissism fucks stuff up and gets him in trouble with the law, which to date he has always uncannily managed to elude. And will continue to do so until the Law says enough is enough and super majorities or enough to overwhelm his stormtroopers rise up.
Anyway, these are some of the reasons why we can't have nice things.
"God Don't Like It," Kate & Blind Willie McTell (1935)
I know you don't like this song just because I speak my mind
But I'll sing this song a-just as much as I please because I don't drink shine
Now God don't like it and (I don't either)
Now God don't like it and (I don't either)
Now God don't like it and (I don't either)
It's scandalous and a shame
A little late for a temperance song but smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression liquor probably felt like medicine and a scourge to scuffling Black musicians in Atlanta. Or anywhere in the US, for that matter. Black unemployment was 50-70%; 25-30% in the overall economy. We call the economic bust between 2008 and 2011 a Great Recession when overall unemployment barely reached 10%. Just in the last couple of years Black unemployment has fallen below 6% for the first time ever. Before that Black unemployment had rarely ever been under 10% since slavery. Anyway, Blind Willie adds the black humor and Black pathos. He's now a generally recognized early country blues master; Dylan anointed him with a song. He played in a Piedmont blues style, nimble finger picking with syncopated bass counterpoints. There is a sort of stumble-bum, maybe tipsy, grace to his tempos that I find irresistible. He played twelve-strings and slide guitar too; which was rare. And he's got something in his voice that sets him apart, a sly and at times tearful blue yodeling trill. You know it's Blind Willie McTell as soon as you hear that trilling sound in the voice. Also like the way Kate and Willie play off each other. Kate sings the "Now God don't like it and" Willie adds the parenthetical "I don't either." And I don't like it either, the moonshine, I mean. I like Kate & Blind Willie McTell just fine.
Ukrainian Links to Western Europe Go Back Several Millennia
"You can meet with your friends... If you don't understand something you can raise your hand and ask... The teacher can make sure you understand… You can be together..."
Snyder asks some nine year-old Ukrainian students attending school twenty miles from the front in the war with Russia, learning in basement-bunker classrooms, why they preferred going to school in these circumstances as opposed to distant learning on computers. The above quote compiles some of their responses.
The funny part of this, amidst so many unfunny tragic sad parts, is a realization that kicked in for me teaching remotely in the spring of 2020. There are exceptions, maybe as high as 20 to 25% of kids that actually like the remote setup and got more done that way, and that got ignored in the illiberal spasm about remote learning in the aftermath of peak Covid, but for super majorities of students remote learning exposed the fact that a basic school motivation for most high school students was going to school to be together, in person, with their friends, classmates, and teacher. Zoom wasn't cutting it.
Here the rule seems to be holding up 20 miles from the front of a brutal war!
Some deep world history context on Ukraine's long-standing connections with western Europe:
"The Dnipro River itself has a Scythian name. The Scythians were a great power of antiquity, respected by Herodotus for having defeated the Persians. The military power of the Scythians, at its height, would have been greater than all of the contemporary Greek city-states put together. And Greeks and Scythians did fight; this is the source of our cultural memory of Amazons, who were, in reality, Scythian female warriors.
In Greek myth the great heroes encounter Amazons. In the Scythian side, the story seems to have been that Hercules had an encounter with their snake goddess (on Khortytsia) that founded the Scythian people.
That generative story suggests the mainstream of Scythian-Greek history. What we recall as classical Greek civilization existed in an economic and cultural synthesis with the Scythians, people who inhabited the lands north of the Black Sea, what is now Ukraine. Insofar as we see ancient Greece as part of our tradition, we should also see the Scythians, Khortytsia, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.
The Scythians were succeeded in the lands of Ukraine by the Goths, a Germanic people we associate with the fall of Rome. After centuries of apparent dominance and prosperity, they were driven west from what is now Ukraine by the Huns in AD 376. Soon thereafter however the Goths defeated a Roman force, killed a Roman emperor, and sacked Rome (although, St. Augustine tells us, they spared the churches).
Thereafter Goths founded and ruled states in what is now Italy, France, and most notably Spain. The state that the Spanish regard as foundational, that is, the state that Ferdinand and Isabella "reconquered" in 1492, was a Gothic kingdom, ruled by people whose descendants came from Ukraine.
[But]...as with the rise of Greece, so with the fall of Rome: the history of Europe and the world is incomprehensible without peoples from what is now Ukraine.
The main thrust of the Scandinavian exploration than began c. 700 AD was actually not the west but the east. For almost half a milennium Vikings raided and traded across a huge swatch of eastern Europe and western Asia. Perhaps their greatest achievement was the establishment of a state in Kyiv. Its most ambitious ruler was the also the greatest Viking warlord, Sveinald or Sviatoslav. He made war across a huge range of territory, from the Balkans to the Volga. He seems to have been killed, returning from the Balkans, trying to cross the cataracts that can be seen from Khortytsia.
Sviatoslav was the father of Valdamar, remembered by Ukrainians as Volodymyr. The history of Kyiv is thus an integral part of the history of Scandinavia as well as that of Ukraine.
Once again, though, the history is stronger than the memory. How many Danes know that their great medieval king, Valdamar I, was a direct descendant of Valdemar/Volodymyr of Kyiv? And it is not only history but story. The Norse myths, like the Greek ones, have much to do with these lands."
Timothy Snyder & Thinking About
In other words, why shouldn't Ukraine want closer security ties with NATO? Has NATO ever threatened Russia's territorial sovereignty? No. Has Russia threatened the independence of Ukraine and its other European neighbors? Yes. Multiple times. Why did Finland and Sweden move to join NATO as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine?
The great powers/great game global politics of the 19th century that Grump & Leon are trying to revive, military buildup, an arm's race, fighting over the spoils of global empire, led directly to two world wars in the early 20th century that killed at least 75-80 million people.
This is history we ignore at the world's peril.
"Cutting off your nose to spite your face" syndrome:
Seems worth putting a marker down for these statistics comparing vaccination and Covid death rates, which first appeared in 2023. A graphic example of the cutting-off-your-nose syndrome that has taken hold of Maga and in libertarian conservative circles.
US Abandons Post-WW2 Global Order of United Nations
"The stability of the U.S.-backed international rules-based order apparently meant that few politicians could imagine that order ending. When President Trump threatened to take the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a key guarantor of global security, Congress responded by passing a law in December 2023 that prohibits a president from withdrawing the U.S. from NATO without the approval of two thirds of the Senate or separate legislation passed by Congress. Then-senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) was a co-sponsor of the bill.
Now, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio overseeing the dismantling of U.S. support for our allies and a shift toward Russia, Republican senators appear to be discombobulated. As Joe Perticone reported Tuesday in The Bulwark, there appears to be consensus in Congress that “Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, NATO is critical to European and global security, and the United States has led the common defense. But Republicans just backed a presidential candidate and voted to confirm several key cabinet officials who do not accept those realities. Confronted with the consequences of their support for Trump and votes for his nominees, Perticone notes, Republican lawmakers are apparently shocked."
Letters from an American Historian
Hideous tragedy fueled by endless greed and massive delusions of grandeur and a terrible and sadistic vindictiveness. His tabloid mudslinging attacks on Zelensky; the shameful betrayal of Ukraine and NATO, for a murderous dictator who we know attacks our elections. All known quantities and predictable. And still he finds ways to top his awfulness with more stupid and potentially catastrophic humanitarian disasters. I thought he was supposed to be the anti-war isolationist? Now he's a flagrantly rapacious 19th century imperialist, carving up Ukraine and the Middle East like Europe carving up Africa in 1885. His nonchalant remarks about driving out the Palestinians and turning Gaza into a resort were monstrous. Republicans shrug. He shuts down consumer protection, fires IGs, cuts off medical research, and threatens drastic cuts to health care and social security. By the way-- everyone knows this, right?-- workers pay for social security through payroll taxes. It's retirement insurance. What's parasitic is slashing government services so you can have another tax cut; or profiting off over $20 billion in government subsidies and then trashing working people seeking health care or education and the basic public infrastructure that makes possible a decent life. And if there is only one key conceit in this tragedy it is the cultish thrall in which the electorate regards rich celebrities like these two buffoons, imagining because they have accumulated billions in business wealth they know how to govern the country best, when what they know best actually is how to get rich. That's it. They obviously have no idea how to make us all rich nor would if they could. And what happened to "draining the swamp," anyway? I thought there was a rule about voters not liking it when pols renege on or abandon their campaign promises? Is this another rule or norm he smashes? He's a King now; and you're a humorless drudge if you don't like that. I absolutely did not have "fascist dictatorship" on my America's future bingo card. And if asked to imagine one before 2016 I would have never guessed this orange Reality TV boss from hell; or the evil fascist Tony Stark on ketamine. I saw this news program about Hungary's Viktor Orban the other day. I don't agree with any of his blood and soil, Christian nationalist, paleo libertarian-conservative bullshit, but I saw better what a shrewd technocratic tyrant he is and how his illiberal movement is still on the rise in the EU. Now we have these two evil clowns trying to apply his playbook, Project 2025, to the US. Tip: They're not "saving" the country, they're destroying it for their own personal gain!
For now, I'll have to leave it to more understanding souls to try to talk supporters off the ledge. My dishonor roll for this monumental disaster: Grump, Leon, republicans, billionaires, petty dictators like Orban and Putin, social media, Fox, Christian nationalists, bigots, and economists and journalists who provide cover for all the neoliberal economic predations of the last half century.
My rant for this morning. Have a nice day.
Sorry, Leon, Al Gore Was Not The Original DOGE
"The effort started right after Clinton and Gore took office, in March 1993, with an almost relentlessly normal process called the “National Performance Review,” even though the abbreviation sometimes confused Car Talk fans. It was a six-month review that included both government agencies and input from the public, which resulted in a formal report that made some 400 recommendations for making the federal government more efficient, through things like computerizing many processes, possibly combining some agencies, and yes, cutting staff.
Clinton gradually implemented many of the report’s recommendations over time, with Gore serving as a kind of team lead to meet with Congress and speak to the public, taking care that government services wouldn’t be interrupted, which again reflects the fundamental difference between ReGo and Doge, which was that Team Clinton saw agencies and Congress and the public as partners in making things work better, not as enemies, perpetrators of fraud, or even “traitors” who must be rooted out to allow the co-emperors to rule without opposition. Heck, a lot of the ReGo recommendations became legislation that was passed by Congress, which is a hell of a lot different from Trump’s insistence that nothing can constrain his power."
Trigger warning, lots of snarky cursing and low humor, the kind that makes me cringe a little bit anymore; as if I were listening to the crude and awkward speech of someone it dawns on me is actually a close family relation. I associate my own first encounter with this style of journalism with city arts weeklies and, specifically, rock criticism and music zines in the 1970s and 1980s. And as a bumpkin with a appetite for big academic books the style from the first felt instantly right to me; readers/writers, like me, trying to hack stuffy formal language into something more legible and relatable. The way you might talk with some pals over a beer. The Stranger, the local news and arts bi-weekly, now quarterly, has turned this into their own signature LGBTQ+ friendly brand; bless them and hoping they can survive and thrive in the coming neolib austerity. (The Stranger's elections guides remain essential reading for me, and always good for a hoot or two. Highly recommended!) But now that I'm an old cuss myself, must admit, I find the style a bit distracting and eye-rolling at times. As I do with our author, Herr Doktor. At any rate, if this manner of journalism works best it might be in takedowns like this one: comparing Musk's "shock doctrine" Doge demolition of government services going on right now with Al Gore's cost-cutting commission, ReGo, from the 1990s. Zoom's comparison, beside the gonzo snark, is actually very instructive. Not that repugs want to hear it but this is semi-endearing shop talk about the preposterous gaslighting going on right now in the lawless Neo-Nazi public square over at Twitmo. We are one; viva la resistance.
The End to Democracy in America?
"At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.
Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation's people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.
Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.
After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”
Proving his point [it's all about owning and destroying the libs], on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”
Letters from an American Historian
Chilling, deeply shameful, incredibly short-sighted and narrow-minded, I keep saying this but I really did think we were settled on the violent Nazi thing. Not good; to be avoided. Germany gets it but Vance meeting with the banned fascists and refusing to meet with the current German chancellor: WTF? Maga's bigot militias are spoiling for street protests; or Grump is alerting them to standby ready anyway. The documentary about the street protests that shutdown the the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999 was called, This Is What Democracy Looks Like. This crackdown, Trump's fascist or "competitive authoritarianism" takeover, is what toxic masculinity as political ideology looks like. Democracy in America, or more or less, has lasted about 250 years; second only to the Roman Republic in longevity, as far as I know. What are the lifespan prospects for violent authoritarian regimes these days? Seems like the longer running ones, like China, try to keep the violent repression to a minimum and on the down-low; expanding prison systems and mass forced deportations and hostile takeovers and genocides are costly and difficult to sustain, naturally. I know it's my own ingrained arrogant American exceptionalism showing but isn't making Russia or Hungary our authoritarian models kind of pathetic and disgraceful? I'm still vainly hoping significant numbers of Trump voters eventually decide violent fascist dictatorship isn't really what they voted for before it's too late. But maybe it is too late already?
The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler
"Heil [Alfred] Hugenberg!": The Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk of the Third Reich:
"The bankers and industrialists who had once shunned the crass, divisive, right-wing extremist had gradually come to embrace him as a bulwark against the pro-union Social Democrats and the virulently anti-capitalist Communists."
Krupp, Farben, and Seimens: The Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg Oligarchs:
"Alfried Krupp reportedly never expressed remorse, at one point telling a war-crimes trial observer, “We Krupps never cared much about political ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business.”
Timothy W. Ryback @ The Atlantic
I've plugged Ryback's book from last year before, Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power, but the parallels with the present are stunning and worth repeating: above all, the alliance of the rich and bigots against real and perceived left, labor, expanding civil rights opposition.
There are three principle characteristics usually attributed to fascist regimes in a high school world history class: 1) They are fronted by charismatic leaders with big cults of personality; 2) In power they preach and promote violence against their political enemies; and 3) They foster nostalgia for some past time of glory and scapegoat some internal enemy, some 'other' group or groups, for threatening their national identity; the "glory" of the Roman Empire in the case of Italy and Holy Roman Empire (which wasn't very holy or much of an empire, according to Voltaire) in the case of Germany.
First, worth reminding people that the first two characteristics are hardly limited to the self-identifying fascist governments of Italy and German in the 1920s and 1930s. Think of Rome's emperor cults or China's Mandate of Heaven. Think of Stalin and Mao, communist dictators, leftists, two of the biggest authoritarian dictatorships of the 20th century, they were backed by cults of personality and brutally and catastrophically spread violence against their real and perceived political enemies. If anything, leadership based on a personality cult and the threat and use of violence against political opposition has been more or less standard operating procedure in monarchies around the world, far and away the most common form of political power in large States, going back three to five thousand years. Even scapegoating cultural 'others,' the third characteristic of fascism, is hardly anything new or even exclusive to fascist governments. Once in power, Stalin and Mao, within way larger countries than Germany or Italy, were responsible for authorizing staggering scales of political violence, nearly constantly scapegoating internal (again, real and perceived) political enemies, "counter revolutionaries," "bourgeoisie rightists," and "capitalist backsliders," etc, as enemies of their revolutions, and purging them violently or exiling them to "re-education" and/or prison camps. The difference is that Italy and Germany, the two big self-identifying fascist States of the early 20th c were a radical revanchist conservative reaction to the humiliation of Germany and Italy after WWI. The Dictatorships of the Proletariat in Russia and China in the main rejected traditional culture as impediments to modernization. The fascists were trying to revive a past before the humiliation of the war. They ultimately galvanize big business and the church and traditional institutions against their real and perceived internal enemies, Jews, homosexuals, communists, unions, and other stigmatized minorities, promising a return to a ethnonationalist purity. Sure, "fascists" are an analog to Russia's and China's leftist Dictatorship of the Proletariat; and they're all extreme examples of violent authoritarian Sates in the 20th century. But another difference, beyond the mesmerizing right-left binary, and maybe the most important, neither communist dictatorships, or any of the other self-identifying fascist regimes of the 20th century, for that matter, so calculatingly and brutally and swiftly industrialized their political violence into a genocide against Jewish people and homosexuals and Romani people and disabled people and any of the other non-German language speaking people they encountered in Poland and Ukraine between 1939 and 1945. Hitler, sadly, was not the only violent dictator of the 20th century but he was by most measures the worst.
This is one of the weirdest aspects of the present. For most of us, we thought Nazis and fascists and even Dictatorships of the Proletariat were all bad ideas, brutally inhumane, and terrible lessons of the 20th century and this was all settled historical thinking. Nazis and violent dictatorships are bad and to be avoided. But here we are again.
The War on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
“It has taken two hundred and thirty-two years and a hundred and fifteen prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. But we’ve made it. All of us,” she [Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson] said. “Our children are telling me that they see now more than ever that here in America anything is possible.”
But it is also true that the existence of these highly successful Black people has obscured the harsh fact that tens of millions of ordinary Black people suffer from high rates of poverty, homelessness, hunger, and other measures of deprivation. For example, though the U.S. is currently experiencing historic lows of unemployment, Black workers still face nearly twice the rate of unemployment of white workers. A 2021 study based on an experiment that sent out eighty-three thousand fictitious job applications with random characteristics to the hundred and eight largest employers in the United States found that “distinctively black names” reduced the “probability of employer contact.” According to the study, twenty-three of the employers were “found to discriminate against Black applicants.” In 2022, Wells Fargo was forced to pay eight million dollars to more than thirty thousand Black job applicants to settle a claim based on a Department of Labor lawsuit, which alleged that the bank interviewed Black applicants for jobs that had already been filled in order to fulfill diversity requirements. The United States is awash in racism even as some Black people have risen to the highest ranks within our country—including the Presidency."
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor @ NY-er
If living wage jobs get harder to find, and they have since at least 1980 because of anti-union gov policies, frozen minimum wages, outsourcing and neoliberal globalization, but at the same time government jobs are being filled disproportionately by Black people (as mentioned in the story) what is that going to look like to working class white people finding it increasingly difficult to find living wage work? But the living wage squeeze isn't because of gov DEI policies, Black unemployment still doubles that of whites, Taylor points out; it's because beginning with Reagan the gov gave up on supporting full-employment and working class living wages. And, really, race and ethnic divisions have always been a favorite tool of capital in dividing and conquering labor rights. P.S. Also, adding to the "cutting off your nose to spite your face" list we've been informally compiling about conservatives, turns out white women have been the biggest beneficiaries of DEI policies.
CFPB Union's Profile in Courage: On Evil Tony Stark's Hostile Takeover
Press release from the Union that represents workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:
On the evening of February 6, three minions of professional Twitter poster and Jeffrey Epstein confidant Elon Musk appeared in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) internal staff directory.
The three underlings are Chris Young, a lobbyist for Big Pharma and past field organizer for former Gov. Bobby Jindal, and Elon fanboys Nikhil Rajpal and Gavin Kliger. Rajpal led a libertarian students group at public land-grant university UC Berkeley, and worked at auto-lender Tesla and wannabe-payment-processor Twitter. Kliger interned at Twitter, claims he owns a Tesla, and graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020. When he's not stealing Americans' private information with DOGE, Kliger enjoys writing lengthy essays defending rapists and retweeting white supremacists. Kliger's lawyer daddy works at Experian which is the same company CFPB sued in January for covering up errors on credit reports with sham investigations. While alleged coder Kliger made between zero to three git commits in the last year, workers at the CFPB returned $1.3 billion to scammed Americans in that time.
The unelected Musk recently announced plans for a new payments platform run jointly by Visa and “X” (formerly Twitter). Now, he’s moved his power grab to the CFPB, in a clear attempt to attack union workers and defang the only agency that checks the greed of payment providers, as well as auto lenders like Tesla.
CFPB Union members welcome our newest colleagues and look forward to the smell of Axe Body Spray in our elevators. While Acting Director Bessent allows Musk's operatives to bypass cybersecurity policies and wreak havoc with their amateur code skills inside CFPB's once-secure systems, CFPB Union members fight to protect our jobs so we can continue protecting Americans from scammers with conflicts of interest like Musk.
###
The National Treasury Employees Union organizes federal employees to work together to ensure that every federal employee is treated with dignity and respect. CFPB Union NTEU Chapter 335 was chartered to represent employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). CFPB workers have returned over $20 billion to millions of American consumers who've been preyed upon by greedy hucksters like Musk.
CFPB Union NTEU 335
Billionaire Coup Continues as Resistance Scrambles into Action
"In an open call on X yesterday with Republican Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, apartheid billionaire Elon Musk — whose father says he was chauffeured to school in white-run South Africa in a Rolls Royce — lit into the regulations that created and protect the American middle class and our democracy:
“Regulations, basically, should be default gone. Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
In a child-like echo of Ayn Rand, Musk added:
“These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So, we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done. … If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”
We know this is crazy: Every state in the union has put into place an agency to regulate insurance companies because that very industry has a long, horrible history of ripping people off and refusing to pay claims unless the power of the state is invoked against them.
We regulate banks and brokerages for the same reason; when we deregulated them in the 1920s and the late 1990s the result was huge rip-offs that produced the Republican Great Depression and the Bush Crash of 2008.
We regulate automobile manufacturers because they have a history of putting profits over the lives of their customers (Ford Pinto 900 dead, GM trucks 2000 dead, etc.); refineries because their emissions cause cancer and asthma; drugs because unscrupulous manufacturers killed people in previous eras; workplace safety after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 young women; voting because corrupt politicians rigged elections.
We regulate traffic with signs and stoplights to keep order and reduce accidents; we regulate police to prevent them from abusing innocent people; we regulate building codes so peoples’ homes don’t collapse or catch on fire from faulty cheap wiring.
And we regulate agriculture and food production so that the groceries we buy at the store don't make us sick or kill us. We regulate pollution, industrial externalities, so that the water we drink or air we breathe doesn't poison or kill us. Etc.
America's captain of industry and icon of the future, the man who built the first popular electric car, actually thinks we get to some green sustainable future, without devastating wild fires in January, without increasing droughts and water shortages, without any regulations?! Or, if we inadvertently get rid of a necessary regulation, we'll just add it back later-- after how many people, or how many rich people, or how many rich white people die? Regulations, any regulations, all regulations, just get in the way of people getting stuff done, says Musk?!
Of course, there are useless, wasteful, out-dated regulations, undoubtably many. Those that obstruct people from getting stuff done, NIMBY zoning laws getting in the way of more housing, say, ought to be identified and removed through the democratic process. But wiping out all regulations or rules, it should be obvious to anyone, is a completely stupid and childish idea.
Oh, but anti-regulation sentiment is popular, 60-40, or whatever, so we can't win elections by opposing popular sentiment! How did we get to such a catastrophically stupid place as a country?
Getting frustrated with the democratic process or bureaucracy and gridlock and the difficulties of getting stuff done is everybody's experience and isn't new. So, again, identify some bad regulations and get your republican congress to remove them. Do the work. This is just moronic wishful thinking passing for leadership, and people mistaking destruction and breaking things for bold innovation.
Regulations or the law or the so-called Deep State getting in the way of some megalomaniac neo-nazi billionaire and his gang of tech bro acolytes wiping out all regulations or departments of government, or the ones they don't like anyway, is now not only a good thing, I mean the resistance in the system these fascists are targeting, but actually crucial to the survival of democracy and good government.
And you don't have to be pollyanna about any good government in our past to recognize that this is a massive power grab and assault on the human welfare of the general population. Can our checks and balances hold up under this democratically elected assault on government? We'll see but it's not looking good.
Possibly another data point related to the gamer-tech New Model Bro Army mob broligarchy "vibe shift" takeover thing:
"And if legalizing online sports books and wallpapering the lives of Americans with enticing advertisements for them strike you as a bad idea — or at least not especially thought-through — well, what does that imply about the country’s apparent shift toward risk-forward libertarianism rather than risk-shy paternalism in recent years?" - David Wallace-Wells, NY Times
Takeover: How to Destroy Trade Alliances and a Boom Economy
"Musk is unelected, and it appears that DOGE has no legal authority. As political scientist Seth Masket put it in tusk: “Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the President nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government. The ‘Department of Government Efficiency,’ announced by Trump in a January 20th executive order, is not truly any sort of government department or agency, and even the executive order uses quotes in the title. It’s perfectly fine to have a marketing gimmick like this, but DOGE does not have power over established government agencies, and Musk has no role in government. It does not matter that he is an ally of the President. Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices. That is not efficiency; that is a coup.”
Letters from an American Historian
"Move fast and break things." The Tech Bros, Bro culture, mob, and "Groypers" all big fans of "manly energies" and the "animal spirits" and "techno-optimism" love this stuff, right? It's like that "We're an empire now" quote from a Bush official, while the rest of us try to figure out WTF these insane office space jocks are doing they are history's imperial actors creating their own realities. And this is also hacker chic in its decadent imperialist phase, right? Makes Mr. Robot seem both overly serious and silly by comparison.
Now, of course, if we were a functioning democracy with laws and real law enforcement these reckless loons would be locked up and an investigations into their obstruction and security breaches begun immediately. But we don't so they won't be, is my cynical hunch.
Stephanie Kelton, the deficit myth economist, makes what's going on at Treasury semi-legible to me:
One, stopping payment on monies already authorized by congress is illegal; against an impoundment control law from 1974 (enacted after Nixon tried to pull something like this). Two, giving an unelected chaos monkey and his band of merry hackers access to the private information of citizens is reckless endangerment; giving it to the guy who just turned a major social media platform into a Neo-Nazi dumpster fire is a coup, an insurrection, an invasion of the basic rights of all Americans.
Call the cops! Call the feds! Freeze his meddling, impound his stolen files, investigate his security breach. SCOTUS did this, allowed this coup and constitutional crisis. They had accomplices and partisan support, sure, but they allowed the coup and constitutional crisis.
Oy! And then if this were not enough some of Grump's performative art-of-the-deal-making....
"Today Trump was clearer: he posted on social media that without U.S. trade—which Trump somehow thinks is a “massive subsidy”—“Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada—AND NO TARIFFS!”
Yeah, meanwhile, Justin Trudeau, Claudia Sheinbaum, Larry Summers, various industry and academic experts, and everybody on substack is trying guess and respond to the cracked logic of Grump's tariff scheme and, for Canada anyway, we now get the scoop: Canada's economy is completely dependent on our markets, Grump figures. (No one else wants their oil or maple syrup?) Grump figures Canada will have to pay whatever he charges them in trade tariffs. And if they don't want to pay tariffs then they can submit to annexation as the 51st state in the US.
The belligerent disregard for Canada's national independence is stunning, if again probably thrilling to the hardcore bully Bro culture mob on X/Twitter.
And there are actually some good reasons, it should be noted, for tariffs; for examples, to protect domestic industries important to national security or to protect the infant development of domestic industry from foreign competition. And all developed rich countries have used tariffs at one time or another, including the US, for these purposes. Economist Ha-Joon Chang argues tariffs are essential to developing economies, to protect them from the growth stunting impacts of large-scale dominating foreign competition, contrary to the insistence of neoliberal free traders. And, historically, to effectuate these goals tariff rates have reached as high as 50% or even 70%.
But none of these reasons, zero, apply to raising tariff rates on Canada or Mexico.
For Grump, none of these reasons for tariffs need apply. He's simply imposing them as a shakedown of our closest neighbors. This is "common sense" to super predator Grump; this is his win/lose domination-or-bust economic model. He reasons Canada and Mexico need US markets, this is his leverage, so screw them. Utterly belligerent monopoly imperialism, without really any discernible America First goals other than dictatorship and, one would think, economic crisis, which is the weirdest part in this whole game. Grump needs to deliver something on the economy (beyond tax cuts) and this is not likely to do it. Quite the contrary.
Tariffs won't increase trade but just make it more expensive for consumers. But his people love the tough-guy bluster, he's fighting for them, he says, they hope, and, well, we're all find out soon enough.
It's a big colossal clusterfuck of bad and what all the billionaires and bigots voted for, no getting around that. Fascism can happen here and is coming for your government services, probably many we never realized were so important until they are gone.
Romanticizing any of this as a risk-taking unleashing of the "animal spirits" for innovation and economic growth and expansion, Techno-Optimism, is pathetic. It's a Big Tech yuppie redux and I'm betting they won't even get that far before blowing everything up. Musk is guy whose biggest tech dream is colonizing Mars because he doesn't think human life on earth will last and now he's in charge of making our government more "efficient." He has no idea, obviously.
USAID is NOT a "criminal organization," which anyway sounds like an over-heated online troll twist on an Israel talking point. USAID provides aid to people around the world contending with impoverished crisis conditions; it makes up less than 1% of the US budget. Targeting it is beneath contempt, and back to their "cruelty is the point" thing.
One of my tired refrains of late, and feeling it again now, is that one about how the Republicans are always insisting the government doesn't work and then get elected and prove it.
Shock Doctrine in 21st Century: Superrich Profit from Economic Crises
From The Hartmann Report:
When Wall Street banks — exploiting Republican-demanded deregulation of banking and investment rules — crashed the American economy in 2007, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.
The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594.
While over 8 million Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent (and the Bush and Cheney families) saw it as a buying opportunity.
Working-class people were desperately unloading stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a collapsing labor market.
But the morbidly rich were doing great.
Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery really began, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.
As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.
Then they did it again 10 years later!
The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, for example, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.
Once again the market collapsed, this time under Republican Trump, and working people, now out of work, were selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food.
But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.
March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump, and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2007!
Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.
And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 4 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).
Just during that one single terrible “crash” year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, the world’s 2,365 billionaires saw their wealth increase by a full 54%, as U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.
And now it begins anew: Republicans are meeting at Trump’s Doral golf resort in Miami today to plan strategy.
Don’t expect them to argue that it would be a bad thing if his plans provoked an economic crisis: To the contrary, that may well be exactly what they — and their billionaire owners — are hoping for.
"No Escape," Caberet Voltaire (1979)
One of my favorite early electro punk singles; bleak, brooding, tribal, and punchy hammer down electronics. And I'm pretty sure burnishing their punk cred with a reworking of '60s protopunk garage classic, "Pushin' Too Hard," by the Seeds.
Punch-Drunk with the Coming Illiberal Disorder
“For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936
I thought it was "twiddling thumbs" but for FDR it can be "twirling," basically, a government that does nothing for working families and everything for the captains of industry, the kind of government FDR and the New Deal was breaking with. Biden could have, should have, said more or less the same in his campaign but in 2024 this wasn't a winning message because of inflation and immigration and people, or half the country anyway, wanting to let Grump and the richest asshole in the world take a wrecking ball to the government and unleash Jan 6 violence on anybody that tries to stop them.
Going on only three weeks in and it's overwhelming, as expected, as planned (Grump's "Flood the Zone" strategy, nothing new), so much so that most my meager energies are spent trying to figure out how to endure or cope with or pace myself through all the offensive police state dictatorship moves. It'd be good to call people in government and get on TV protesting this in big numbers but will that bring out Grump's violent militias?
Last Friday Grump fired all the IG's responsible for finding, investigating, and reducing corruption in government. Okay, so much for draining the swamp, we knew this was a farce anyway but what about his supporters? We're back to Susan Collins has concerns.
The way I've heard the story Fred Trump, Trump's dad, went from petty landlord to big time NYC real-estate developer, precisely, by figuring out how to buy off the necessary local government officials and bureaucrats. Grump is ready now to trash the federal government because they won't play along with his ambitions.
Sure, government administrations ought to be judged by how much they increase or decrease corruption in government. It's a super important criteria in a democracy, anyway. Too much corruption turns democracy into a sham. Consider that the number of legal indictments against Republicans going back to Nixon is over 300, with Trump doubling Reagan and even Tricky Dick. The Democrats have in the same period a record of three indictments, the recent third, hilariously, already calling out for help from Grump against the "weaponization" of the legal system. The partisan comparison preposterous; both-sides this one NY Times! The Repugs are and have been, indisputably, the party of corruption for going on three-quarters of a century and a sham democracy.
In the campaign Grump was the anti-globalization and anti-war, an isolationist. Now he's talking about conquest and expansion, taking over Panama or Greenland by force. I know, possibly a distraction, more owning the lib's bluster; a speciality. Maybe. But:
"Trump’s movement is filled with violent extremists and radicals. They have a demonstrated willingness and eagerness to commit acts of violence against their perceived partisan enemies (mostly Democrats, but also any obstacles to Trump’s will). “Stand back and stand by.” Trump is not simply incautious in his remarks about this fact. He actually mobilizes that propensity for violence as a political tool. It’s already distorting and degenerating American civic life," Josh Marshall, TPM
Grump disavowed Project 2025 in his campaign. Now, as many warned it appears to be in fact the radical anti-government blueprint for his administration.
"While a recent Wall Street Journal poll reveals that American voters want what they call “MAGA lite, rather than extra-strength MAGA.” More than 60% oppose Trump’s plan to replace nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists. More than 60% also oppose Trump’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education. Almost 75% of voters oppose his plans for sweeping deportation raids, wanting only those with criminal records to be removed from the country. More than two thirds oppose calls to take control of Greenland, and only 46% approve of his choices for cabinet positions."
Gulp, sorry American voters, too late!
“I have said this before and it bears repeating—the MAGA claims that ‘DEI’ stands for ‘Didn’t Earn It’ is truly remarkable because in reality, generating historic wealth through 2 billion acres of stolen land from Native Americans, enslaving Black people for 300 years, banning Asian immigration until 1965, and banning women from financial access til 1974—all without paying a single red cent in reparations or restitution—is the living breathing example of not earning it.”
My basic take on the DEI or multiculturalism question is that multiculturalism is less an aspiration than a basic fact of world history and human societies since at least 3500 BCE. The closer you look at any period in world history the more you will find multicultural division and complexity. Multicultural complexity is as basic a characteristic of civilization, cities and mass cultures, as patriarchy or organized religion. It is inescapable. DEI policies and measures are aspirational in that they are a social engineering attempt to turn our already-existing multicultural reality into a source of flourishing cooperation and growth, a source of strength and away from one of zero-sum competition and segregation and cold war stagnation.
So DEI measures may not always be effective, I've encountered a few misguided ones in public education, to be sure, but they are not the cause of the division and conflict and cultural incompetence they are intended to remedy. Blaming DEI is ridiculous and, frankly, pure racist bigot bullshit.
Anyway, I keep having this dream and/or daydream vision lately that is a hodgepodge of a scene in a TV movie about global nuclear destruction, The Day After (1983), and the cover of Chrome's 1977 album Alien Soundtracks and some half-remembered collages of 1950s British pop artist Richard Hamilton:
Through a big window in a suburban home you see a giant mushroom cloud and the flashing light of a nuclear blast. A father and a couple of kids are running around all hairs on fire trying to load up the family station wagon to getaway. The mother, however, in full June Cleaver/Leave It To Beaver uniform, wearing an apron, is standing over an unmade bed--again, with a prominent window in the background with flaming mushroom cloud-- standing over the bed and refusing to do anything else before she finishes making it. She appears stuck in place but standing strong. Very determined to keep something together. The dad and kids are begging her to leave with them but she won't budge.
Needless to say, I'm worried.
By the way, what is Grump saying here?
"After praising Elon Musk, he told the crowd “He was very effective. He knows those computers better than anybody. Those vote counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide. So it was pretty good…. Thank you to Elon.”
Further reading:
What's a libertarian? The Hartmann Report
Why is trust in vaccines waning?
"This is how it is. This is what kind of species we are: we are stupid, we are negligent, we are tardy. But on the other hand, we are adaptable, we are smart and even as things are falling apart, we are trying to stitch them together," -Vaclav Smils
Anyway, hang in there and try not to let the violent fascists get you down. Go for lots of walks; hug loved ones. It helps.
Mob Rule: On Social Media and the Universal Experience of Poverty
Hard to take stuff but also kind of brilliant and insightful: How social media is galvanizing a predatory rightwing constituency or "mob." This is where that 20% swing in male voters under thirty likely comes from; Bro culture, "manly energies" and animal spirits, sick of liberal pieties (democracy, rule of law), ready to take what they deserve by hustle and force. A big incel bully vibe on the make.
John Ganz, historian, author, blogger, profiling the social media "mob" or what the rest of us have been short-handing for awhile as Bro culture, I think:
"The angry, alienated men and their tribunes aren’t having it. That’s the same “bootstraps” bullshit they’ve heard from the liberals for all these years. They don’t believe in the empty myths of honest toil and upward mobility anymore. The American dream, as far as they are concerned is, dead. In the view of the mob, undeserving women and minorities are hoarding all the treasure and it has to be ripped away from them. Every “normal” possibility open to them is humiliating. Only the massive windfalls of gambling and speculation seem like an honorable alternative."
Including women now, or again, in the "undeserving" is a particularly creepy turn in this latest wave of toxic masculinity. Also, Ganz adds a nice encapsulation of the intersection of the mob and a business/merchant/bourgeoisie outlook, which may be converging on social media right now but actually goes back nearly half a millennia:
"It does not see the surrounding society as the positive condition for its wealth and power, but only as a hostile limitation upon the maintenance and growth of that wealth and power."
Compare to economic historian Mark Blyth's intellectual lineage of austerity economics and rich business attitudes towards the State and government going all the way back to 17th century England and the Enlightenment: "You can't live with it, you can't live without it, and no one wants to pay for it."
England goes through three or more civil wars and a bourgeoisie (merchants) revolution overthrowing the absolute monarchy and establishing a constitutional monarchy in the span of fifty years; 1640 to 1690. The rising merchant classes in England were fed up with tax burdens imposed by extravagant and poorly organized, bankruptcy-prone, monarchies (can't live with it), at the end of the period John Locke argues for making a central function of the rule of law and republican government the protection of private property (can't live without it), and in subsequent decades and centuries of the modern period rich businesses grow increasingly hostile to taxes and any government spending that doesn't hew closely to this goal (they don't want to pay for it).
Again, law enforcement and military are okay gov spending but the rising bourgeoisie of the 17th century and Billionaires and their "libertarian" mob now condemn gov spending for anything other than their priorities as wasteful, "government handouts," "entitlements," "freebies," you know the drill. It's telling of the times, the bourgeoisie revolution in 17th England and the birth of the modern age, that one of the first tasks of William Petty during this period, often cited as a foundational figure in the development of modern economics, was to conduct a geographical survey of Ireland for Cromwell's new government so as to extend tax collections to the lower orders, as a way to relieve the rebellious pressures taxes put on rich merchants.
So Ganz's "mob" is not without precedents but he's trying to identify a specific social movement on social media, the mob, Groypers, taking hold on X/Twitter and in rightwing conservative circles right now, and gaining prominence in the wake of Grump's victory last November. That we've seen this kind of market fundamentalist macho illiberality before doesn't do much to soften its blunt illiberal savagery. If anything, it reinforces how intractable and delusional are the self-interests of libertarian/bourgeoisie men and business elites and their popular followings.
Ganz's conclusion: "Social media creates a universe of angry suckers. But, as we’ve seen, the mob is quick to turn on its would-be masters and bite the hand that feeds. The mob does not believe in gratitude, it believes in deserts."
That's another reason it's hard to imagine the forced deportations and other spectacles of abuse and humanitarian crimes against immigrants, Trans people, and random liberals will be enough for the mob without any significant economic spoils to divvy up. Grump is going to generate some tax revenues from tariffs but that won't help consumers pay for the higher prices on imports. And I could be wrong but I can't see a Crypto or AI bubble satisfying the greed of the mob or maybe only the "mob" but not any significant proportion of the working classes and this could prove to be a big problem for Maga, especially if Grump's belligerent deal making triggers a recession.
Angus Deaton and Anne Case in recent important studies identify "deaths of despair" in the modern American life: declining life spans amongst non-college educated white working class men going back to the '90s, addictions, gambling, bankruptcies, violence. Ganz explores the revanchist cultural and social-psychological and political consequences of this phenomenon in social media; again, what he calls Groyperfication. There are now Neo-Nazis working in the white house, for an instance of the real alarm behind his inquiry. And it's all very scary, as the mob wants it to be.
P.S. I didn't mention the "Universal Experience of Poverty." It refers to the peer pressure aspect of poverty or the perception of relative "poverty," our sense of not keeping up with the neighbors, etc. Kind of like the incel thing isn't just about guys that can't get laid but about guys who think women need to know their place; i.e., subordinate to them. Okay but I don't like the suggestion poverty might be more a psychological malady than really existing impoverished conditions; working for less than living wages, out of reach health care and child care and education costs, food ghettoes, homelessness, drug addiction, etc. Poverty isn't just a zero-sum hangup of the male ego. Although it is that too.
Poverty isn't just petty envy, poverty is a real stresser and kills.
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