You Can't Make America Great Again By Wrecking The Government

"And what do the oligarchs want? Like all feudal lords, they want untrammeled power and insecure, obedient serfs—and for this, the vast social services operation that is the US federal government must be cut back, along with the professional classes who form the modern core of the Democratic Party. The words of Andrew Mellon (as recalled by Herbert Hoover) come to mind: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system.… enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” The problem the oligarchs face, and possibly do not understand, is that they cannot do this, any more now than then, without bringing the economy to ruin—from which recovery will be possible only with the competent government they are now working to destroy.

Over the longer term, it is hard for an old progressive, who fought against the forces of deindustrialization and financialization when they took control under Reagan in the early 1980s, not to sympathize with the stated vision of the old man now in charge. But it is one thing to yearn for a vanished past of superior American engineering, industrial strength and technological prowess—and quite another to create the conditions for revival. Handing the economy over to libertarians, monopolists, speculators, and rich reactionaries with big egos will not make America great again."

James K. Galbraith @ The Nation

From an economist who has been around the block a few times; and of illustrious academic lineage. Good stuff. But I'm a bit thrown off about his lamentation about the sorry outdated condition of the US military because 1) I thought cutting edge US military tech (Starlink, for instance) has been a big difference maker in Ukraine and Gaza, and 2) talk like this, when so much money is already being lavished on the military, will only intensify an arm's race collision course with China, which he fears could be "world ending." But then buried in this same section of his excoriating list is perhaps his most trenchant question: "Is this, perchance, the agenda of formerly free-trading oligarchs in the tech sector, suddenly faced with superior competition in their niche?" No doubt. But rather than learning some lessons from the Chinese experience and building up the developmental capacities of the US government and its relationships with trading allies they, Grump, Leon, Project 2025, are tearing the government down because they fear it threatens their own, Big Tech et al, private empires. Anyway, as Galbraith says, this is not likely to turn out a winning strategy in global geo-politics. And most likely, I'd add, will end up part of a historical epitaph explaining the transition from the American Century to Chinese Century. And maybe it has to go this way, and is mostly a matter of scale and inevitable technological global leveling, but instead of doing this collaboratively and peacefully, working towards a new public-private sustainable growth model, America is bound and determined, in this administration at any rate, to do this the hard way; which is to say the most destructive and violent way. Have mercy on us all. 

White Riot (2019) Directed by Rubika Shah

This is one of those I was alive at the time stories, late 1970s, thought I knew Rock Against Racism (RAR), and liked a lot of the music associated with the organization. But this 2019 documentary reveals I did not know really anything beyond a few music headlines. 

I did not know, for instance, RAR was crucial to a political movement against a racist National Front campaign in England gaining popularity at the time. RAR galvanizes elements of the punk and ska and reggae and new wave communities into a thriving social movement that culminated in an east London Woodstock-like event, drawing over 100,000, including on the bill over 40 bands, and contributing significantly to the defeat of the NF agenda in the general election of 1979.  

Nor did I know the intellectual force behind the NF movement came from Enoch Powell, infamous for his "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968, a prominent racist political figure in Britain from the 1960s to the 1990s, a classics scholar no less, maybe the British version of William F. Buckley jr., and staunchly hostile to immigration as a threat to the ethno-nationalist (read: racist white) identity of Great Britain. Powell spewed another version of the replacement theory ("In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man"), and inspired more conservative elite panic over post-WW2 migrations of imperial subjects of the British empire to the metropole, and called for forced deportation of immigrants. 

So another historical episode ringing a lot of bells with the illiberal extremes of now; including violent anti-immigrant hysteria and conservative elite panic over democratic reforms and formerly colonized and still discriminated against groups clamoring, justifiably, for more civil rights. 

Nor did I understand what a pivotal role classic rock played in inspiring the RAR movement. Both Eric Clapton ("The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans don’t belong here, we don’t want them here.") and Rod Stewart ("This country is over-crowded. The immigrants should be sent home.") made incendiary public statements in support of Powell's candidacy for Prime Minister in the late 1970s. Clapton's racist rant at a show in 1976 is credited with launching Rock Against Racism.* 

RAR's development centered around this "militant entertainment" fanzine called Temporary Hoarding (lots of cut and paste stark graphics and situationist like sloganeering; looked better than most zines) and, crucially, multiplying small cell groups of RAR music event organizers sprouting up all over Britain and Europe and eventually all around the world; building up over 200 local RAR groups between 1976 and 1982. They'd pull a few bands together, calling the shows "Carnivals Against Racism," and bring together antiracist and antifascist young people. 

All the talking heads behind RAR and Temporary Hoarding that appear in the documentary keep it simple. The story Red Saunders, a photographer and RAR founder, a kind of righteous John Belushi character in the '70s and Baby Gramps as an elderly talking head in the doc, is direct action simple: The NF was inspiring bullying parades of Union Jack-wearing white racists marching through West Indian and Pakistani neighborhoods and triggering increasing street violence against non-white people all over Great Britain. RAR didn't like the racist violence and figured they were not alone. They intrepidly organized antiracist and antifascist music fans, music fans opposed to the NF agenda, white and Black, West Indian, Pakistani, and other foreign immigrant groups, bringing them together to organize more RAR music events. They rallied bands and artists to play these events that opposed the violent racism of the NF: The Clash, Tom Robinson, X-Ray Spex, Steel Pulse, The Specials, The Jam, Dennis Bovell, Linton Kwesi Johnson, the Fall, Buzzcocks, Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Gang of Four, Mekons, Delta 5, Au Pairs, Misty in Roots, Aswad, etc. Impressive class of '77 list. And Pete Townshend of The Who showed up for the classic rockers. All these people come together in RAR shows, which raised public awareness that antiracists, standing together, unified, overwhelmingly outnumbered the violent racists.  

They didn't vanquish the racists for good, of course, but they contributed to a political defeat of anti-immigrant racism in Great Britain at its wolfish extremes. Powell loses to Thatcher, which brought its own set of reactionary politics but the NF agenda was pushed out of mainstream politics. In comparison with Hitler's Germany or the techno-fascism of Japan in the late '30s, and other catastrophic spasms of reactionary violence, here is a humble victory against racism and fascist violence in the modern culture wars organized, successfully, with music. Yay, our team!

Admittedly, as a pure musical document, even the most exciting moments, The Clash, X-Ray Spex, are little more than a tease. The musical performances are secondary to the RAR story I share above, naturally. Still, I found the coda of Tom Robinson's "Winter of '79" at the mammoth RAR event at Victoria Park touching. And the doc makes a case for the new waver band 999 being underrated. I'm not sure they're right but I like it as a revisionist proposition. Maybe they are? Now I gotta listen to some more 999, which is something music documentaries are supposed to do. 

So Rubika Shaw's documentary, White Riot, does that and tells a still relevant story about the culture wars, fascist violence against multicultural reality and protesting for peace in England in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Good story. 

*- This is also a time, 1976-1979, Powell on the rise, when David Bowie is quoted to have said, "I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader" and was accused of throwing a Nazi salute during a publicity event. But at the same time was talking in the press about how Britain needed some strict right wing conservatives to take over and clean up the moral mess liberals have generated, presumably including indulgent libertines like himself. Being provocative, transgressive, was the coin of Bowie's androgynous alien glam rock realm and so a bit of a red herring in this discussion. By the early 1980s he was renouncing all his former remarks glamorizing fascist authority as drug ravings and pointing out his lifelong apolitical multicultural anti-violence bonafides, plays with Nile Rodgers, etc. Not his best moments.   

*-Syd Shelton, photographer, put out a book about RAR in 2023. Haven't read it yet. 

Aging Pub Rock Eminence Nick Lowe at the Tractor Tavern on a Saturday Night

Went to Nick Lowe show at the Tractor the other night. Not sure if it was as good as a "Rollers Show" on a Saturday night for Lowe and his buddies back in the 1970s but perfect in its way for my first rock show since before the pandemic. 

Long hiatus, too long, but I've always been a little ambivalent about live music. I attended lots of shows in my 20s and 30s, witnessed many great ones, but overall have to admit the ratio of good shows to meh or even bad ones for me was always disappointing. And the bigger the venue the worse the ratio. I think I can count on one hand the number of good shows I've seen in an arena size venue (Springsteen, Prince, Neil Young, P-Funk, Roy Orbison, Everly Brothers)? Even less in a stadium; and all pre-Jumbotrons at that. And I never warmed much to outdoor music performances until I accepted them as a different beast altogether; a concert in a park on a sunny afternoon, the music more incidental, part of the background. Combine all that with an aging body, standing around for hours taking an increasing toll, and once I hit my 40s my live music attendance became far more picky. A small handful of shows in clubs or theaters in any given year was good for me. 

And then Covid hit. Never liked crowds either, or standing in line much, although a sweaty crowd in a hot club, the band into it and feeling the energy, was always a welcome exception. But the pandemic, with all its weird people reactions, YOLO, "masks are for sheep," and anti-vaxxer idiocy just blew my live music hesitations up into a No Way am I risking rubbing up against some superspreader moron to see some live music. Not necessary. I'll listen to my records; thank you very much. 

Now once vaccinated, and my super old parents survived a bout of Covid, I began to lighten up a little about crowds. I resumed attending some crowded sporting events; still found crowds a little creepy but I survived. And now Nick Lowe, nonetheless, is my first indoor live music event back in my preferred live music small club setting since January 2020; The Delines, and the Mekons a short time before that, as I recall. And I survived, again, and as has always been the case with good live music I feel a new positive energy for going to shows. That, right, will last at least until I attend a show that turns out meh or lousy. 

That won't be Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets, at any rate. LS are a crack outfit that perform in wrestling masks. One or two members go back to the Raybeats and NY Rocker days in the early 1980s but this particular configuration came together in Nashville in 1988. Superb musicians, playing driving surf music and classic pop instrumentals, they aren't Rockpile but they're the next best thing or here and there maybe even better. They can do post-Everly Brothers country rock, Rockpile's (Dave Edmunds, Billy Bremmer, and Terry William's) wheelhouse, but get most excited doing pop novelty stuff, New Wave, and Bubblegum pop. They encored Saturday's show with Shocking Blue's "Venus."  

Nick is obviously proud of the band and they him; and they play together like a loose mutual admiration society. Watching Lowe hold court like this it occurred to me what a pivotal role as an affable ambassador to the wider pop world Lowe must have played for all the oddballs and eccentrics at Stiff Records in the '70s punk/new wave England. He produced the first five Elvis Costello records (all 'A' albums, says me). He produced The Pretenders first hit single, a cover of the Kink's "Stop Your Sobbing." Also brilliant. And a whole bunch of other good punk rock or pub-rock-meets-new-wave records by The Damned and Graham Parker and Dr. Feelgood and Carlene Carter and Wreckless Eric and John Hiatt, etc. 

I was actually surprised to be reminded that Rockpile play on Lowe's first two solo albums, Pure Pop for Now People (1978; known as Jesus of Cool in UK) Labour of Lust (1979), because of how much those albums departed from the country rock model of previous Dave Edmunds and Brinsley Schwarz records that Lowe played on. Obviously, in retrospect, Nick with those two eponymous solo albums was trying to score with the New Wavers. But three Top 40 hits in the UK, one in the US ("Cruel to be Kind"), weren't enough commercial success, apparently, and after those he went back to production and eventually his true roots pop preoccupations, never abandoning the corny humor. Still, as far as peak 1978 to 1982 New Wave albums go, posterity might celebrate Nick's first two solo shots more than we did back then. They'd both rank high on any peak New Wave album list I could come up with, that is for sure; Talking Heads, Cars, Devo, B-52s, XTC, Parallel Lines, This Year's Model, Dare? Pure Pop and Labour of Lust were uptempo, jangly, and hooky classics. 

When I listened to Lowe's album from last year, Indoor Safari, his voice sounded diminished. Not surprising, as he's 75, for crissakes! But mediocre material on the album, "Trombone," for instance, comes to life in person with Los Straitjackets. And live, in person, Nick's old voice adds a fragile emotional power when he slows things down. I teared up as he milked every last drop of sentiment out of versions of "What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding" and, to end the show, an acoustic version all alone, to finally drive everybody out he jokes, of "Alison" or "My Aim is True."  

Nick's tall, thin, rakish in a shock of white hair and Clark Kent glasses. A charmer, he primes the crowd with stories about the wild going's on at the show the night before and wry cryptic references to the chaos outside. I associate a particular condition, an infatuation, say, with 20th century pop music, with a scene in the 1995 film 12 Monkeys. Bruce Willis, a crazed refugee from a future dystopia, drools over Fats Domino's 1956 version of "Blueberry Hill" playing on a car radio. A fetish for the 20th c pop music jukebox. Lowe is a product of this condition, as am I, and in Nick's specific case he loves everything rock & roll between 1954 and 1965 and distills it into ageless pure pop for, well,  honestly, yesterday's people, or surviving 20th c pop music loving people, but  hopefully, somewhere, some Now People too.    

Black Medal of Honor Recipient Disgraced by Department of Defense

 The US defense department webpage celebrating an army general who served in the Vietnam war and was awarded the country’s highest military decoration has been removed and the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address.

On Saturday, US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message. The URL was also changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.

Rogers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by then president Richard Nixon in 1970, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base.

According to the West Virginia military hall of fame, Rogers was the highest-ranking African American to receive the medal. After his death in 1990, Rogers’s remains were buried at the Arlington national cemetery in Washington DC, and in 1999 a bridge in Fayette county, where Rogers was born, was renamed the Charles C Rogers Bridge.

Maya Yang @ The Guardian

Remember just a few years back when Black republican senator Tim Scott was chastising Biden and the Dems for suggesting the US was a racist society? Well, it is shamefully racist what the Grump admin is doing with this anti-DEI stuff now. I can't believe this will sit well with veterans but Grump has insulted them before and I'm told he's still popular with the military and police, as if anybody should find that reassuring. I gather the neoliberal argument coming from the admin is that this "shock doctrine" stuff, shutting down government services, will hurt temporarily but once all the waste and deadwood is cleared away it's going to be back to boom times for the economy. And they seem to believe it but they sound increasingly like fascists and religious cult zealots; dismissive of any contradicting evidence. Musk may have some deep AI research tools but the cuts so far stand out for being arbitrary or prejudiced, some personal grievance of Musk's, and virtually nothing that could be reasonably called "waste." What it feels like to me is we're veering closer to general strike like conditions. The Dems will not or cannot stop the destruction. The courts are too slow and/or corrupt. This stuff is so insulting and degrading to so many: veterans, government workers, farmers, educators, scientists, foreign trade, industries that depend on immigrant labor, lawyers, consumers, protesters, etc. It's as if they were trying to alienate everyone but the billionaires and the most rabid Christian Nationalist bigots. How long will everyone else, super majorities of the country after all, put up with it? 

Environmental rule-shredding at the EPA will put lives at risk, ex-EPA heads say.

 Three former Environmental Protection Agency leaders sounded an alarm on Friday, saying rollbacks proposed by the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, endanger the lives of millions of Americans and abandon the agency’s dual mission to protect the environment and human health.

Zeldin said on Wednesday he planned to roll back 31 key environmental rules on everything from clean air to clean water and climate change. The former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy called Zeldin’s announcement “the most disastrous day in EPA history.”

“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives – ours, our children, our grandchildren,” added Christine Todd Whitman, who led the EPA under George W Bush. 

AP @ The Guardian 

This techno-feudal war lord stuff going on at the EPA sounds more like a prequel to the Road Warrior franchise than anything else. Grump wants to be King of Gastown! 

And, recall, the Associated Press is the long-standing news organization that is now banned from White House press conferences because they won't call the Gulf of Mexico what Grump is calling it now. So now the AP is part of the resistance. Bet me the Grump admin is strictly ordered to use Pocahontas when referring to Senator Warren. Like the first 2016-2020 edition, Grump is already inexplicably recruiting hard for the opposition and resistance. 

I still maintain that at least half of all this, Grump winning the election, stems from Big Biz resistance to government efforts to address climate change (and the other half due probably to Lina Khan's antitrust and minimum wage pressures and IRS reforms). Or to put it another way: these are the relevant economic factors for the 8 out of 10 billionaires that supported Grump. 

The problem is not just that markets have failed to confront climate change, a problem largely of their own making. But they have actively sabotaged and obstructed efforts by governments to protect the environment. Read Private Empire by Steve Coll for one big case example. Big Biz knows the coming energy transition means reducing the burning of fossil fuels, and in general will mean more regulations and taxes and government planning to incentivize the coming energy transition. This threatens their profit margins. And they also know their argument that environmental reforms and regulations are bad for the economy, a Chamber of Commerce staple for going on a half century, is losing its persuasive steam as it becomes increasingly clear that GNP growth in the neoliberal free market fundamentalist period of the last half century, 1980 to 2025, is nearly half what it was during the New Deal liberal period, 1935 to 1980. 

The tragic part is billionaires would rather support a fascist authoritarian state, a dictatorship, than accept any increased financial responsibility for climate change or face antitrust or living wage union pressures. They see government, other than securing and protecting private property, as extraneous to profit seeking efficiencies of building a business and making a fortune; something to be evaded or  minimized with austerity measures (cut gov spending, higher interest rates). Big Biz is essentially hostile to any democratic claims (taxes, regulations, living wages) on their business interests. I'm not saying it has to be this way, there are really existing social democracies (EU, Canada, Japan). But this has been more or less the posture of the merchant classes, capitalists, classical liberals, free marketeers, ordoliberals, neoliberals, and corporate rule, i.e., hostility towards democratic claims on private wealth, since the Bourgeoisie Revolution in England in the 17th century. 

And also bonus for the Christian Nationalist cause the billionaire that steps up is a Neo-Nazi and an extreme bigot asshole. Making all of this rhyme ominously with the way business interests in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s turned to fascist authoritarian state rule rather than compromise with labor unions and communists. 

And this failure of capital, business elites, the Mellons, the Hoovers, Laissez-faire, to compromise with labor, yes, to appease labor, Keynes believed, I might add, led to police-state crackdown regimes like fascism in Italy and Germany. 

Banned Words United for Multicultural Democracy (and the Gulf of Mexico)!

Psych professor puts Grump's banned words to good use on Diane Ravitch's blog: 

"Join me, activists and advocates, in the project of smashing barriers, interrupting oppression, searching out our own biases, respecting pronouns, increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, and fighting for social justice. Let us join in allyship and provide culturally responsive, identity-affirming care to marginalized, underserved, and/or vulnerable populations. We will think historically and systemically from an intersectional, feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial position. We will celebrate our diverse backgrounds and cultural differences. We will fight for accessible mental health care and embrace climate science. We will challenge institutional racism and call out hate speech. We will not tolerate discrimination against people, whether the discriminatory words or actions are based on race, ethnicity, citizenship, country of origin, sex, gender, sexual preference, (dis)ability, religious beliefs, socioeconomic status, or any other aspects of our cultural identities. We are a nation of indigenous people and immigrants. Harm to one of us is harm to all of us. WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED — especially in and around the Gulf of Mexico."

The Guardianas del Conchalito

David Byrne has a blog thingy, or is somehow behind a blog thingy, called Reasons to be Cheerful. I'm so buried under an avalanche of email reading now I haven't even got to reading one of their posts yet but I like the idea. Reasons to be cheerful with current events; we need more of those kind of reasons. Similarly, used to end regular reviews of politics with a walking friend with an effort to conjure "silver linings" out of the terrible morass of weekly news stories; purge all the horrific stuff in angry rants and then try to end, wind down, highlighting some silver linings in the news. Not always easy to find, by any stretch, but felt like a healthy ritual. In that spirit here's to the 

Guardianas del Conchalito.  

Neo-Nazi Privatization Scam Against DEI

 — Musk’s Trojan hounds: DOGE operatives penetrate Social Security & USPS in shocking power grab. Nobody elected this South African billionaire, Trump’s largest campaign donor, to do anything to America, but here he is with his chainsaw and his band of seemingly sociopathic barely-post-adolescent young men tearing our government apart. New reporting says of their invasion of Social Security’s offices, “This team appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.” Musk and his billionaire buddies must be drooling over the $2.5 trillion sitting in the Social Security trust fund; if they could privatize the institution and have the new banking operation he’s planning to connect to X distribute SS checks, just a tiny 1% skim off the top could make his money bin bulge obscenely. And then there’s the Post Office, the agency that Ben Franklin first led and is listed in our Constitution, that Louis DeJoy says he’s cut a deal with Musk to begin gutting, presumably with the ultimate goal of privatizing (both Musk and Trump have called for privatizing the mail service). To top it all off, in a post on his Nazi-infested social media site, Musk just listed other programs he alleges are being used as part of the Jewish-funded “Great Replacement” theory to give Black and Hispanic people jobs and lifestyles that should rightfully belong exclusively to white men. In response to a tweet from Senator Mazie Hirono which read, “Musk is spreading a lie that Dems use Social Security & Medicare to pay undocumented immigrants to come into the country” the Nazi-saluting billionaire posted: “Not just those programs! Democrats also use every other government money tool to attract and retain illegals, like unemployment insurance, disability insurance, tax rebates on nonexistent income, SBA loans, student loans, COVID payments, FEMA money for luxury hotels, etc., etc.” 

— Musk’s Hitler post sparks public-sector union fury: Billionaire blames public workers for the Nazi genocide! Musk is famous for his Hitler salutes and his propensity to post 14 little flags in his tweets, presumably representing the “14 words” that every white supremacist must memorize and recite: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” He’s also made wildly inappropriate jokes about the slaughter of Jews, retweeting: “Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that coming!” But this time he really stepped in it, although the almost complete lack of coverage of the story by the nation’s mainstream media is downright eerie. Musk just tweeted, “Hitler didn’t murder millions, public sector workers did,” arguing that it was German government employees who were responsible for the Holocaust, not Adolf Hitler and his senior leadership who planned the so-called Final Solution. This strategy probably is designed to justify his mass firing of federal public sector workers, and Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union, blasted back at him, writing: “America’s public service workers — our nurses, teachers, firefighters, librarians — chose making our communities safe, healthy and strong over getting rich. They are not, as the world’s richest man implies, genocidal murderers. Elon Musk and the billionaires in this administration have no idea what real people go through every day. That’s why he’s so willing to take a chainsaw to people’s jobs, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare.” 

The Hartmann Report 

Few bring the receipts like Hartmann; he's a progressive Dem media machine. 

We've always been a racist country, but racists in public life that go off on some racist rant usually get cancelled, or are at least marginalized, remember when ESPN dropped Rush Limbaugh? But I guess the racists never completely went away, of course. They were just closeted in segregated "white power" communities listening to Limbaugh on the radio. And we've never been post-racial, to be sure, but Obama was something, incremental progress; no gainsaying that, although people try. And we've been at least post-Jim Crow racist since, I don't know, let's say the Voting Rights Act of 1965? But the racists and extreme bigots are calling the shots again, trashing women, immigrants, and minority communities, and defending Hitler and the Nazis. And a bunch of my relatives and people without college educations and Bro Culture gamers, in short, billionaires and bigots, voted for this. It's a cryin' shame. 

Every time Leon opens his mouth, or at least every time he opens it to talk about government, or government waste, it is apparent-- OMG!-- he has no fucking idea what the gov does or doesn't do. He's enthralled with the business lobby's favorite zombie ideology: any governance (consumer protections, labor protections, environmental proections) that isn't protecting absolutist property rights is a libertarian threat to the freedom and independence of capital and so government waste. He's pumped up on ketamine and some neoliberal techno-optimist delusions of grandeur and now it comes out a proud Neo-Nazi. 

As some consolation he is now also more pariah than ever in the original Nazi homeland. Tesla sales have crashed in Germany and many other places around the world. If there is any justice and humanity this whole authoritarian scam will come crashing down around these monumental creeps but you know there will have to be terrible amounts of humanitarian destruction before that day will come. 

How Far Gone Are We?

"The framers were more than aware of the fragile and short-lived nature of republican government. “It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy,” Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist No. 9, voicing the conventional wisdom of many of his peers. “If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived contrast to the furious storms that are to succeed.”

Adams’s warnings about the consequences of a lack of virtue land especially hard in light of the rampant dishonesty that almost defines American politics at this moment in time. This isn’t the more ordinary fudging of truth that attends politics in most places and at most times; no, this is the kind of blatant and unapologetic lying that degrades public life itself. This is going before the American people and telling them things you know are not true to gain power, and then using that power to pursue your own interests against the public good.

We have a would-be despot in the White House. But even with a rotting Constitution on the verge of crisis, this is still a Republic, and the people are still sovereign. The task, then, is to make this clear to those in power who would like to pretend otherwise."

Jamelle Bouie @ NY Times 

Even "on the verge of crisis" seems a tad rose-tinted to me but Bouie, presumably, is trying to adhere to some rigorous constitutional red lines here. When Grump refuses to obey court orders then we will be in a "constitutional crisis," would appear to be his reasoning. When Grump lies, floods the zone, ignores, evades, slow walks, packs the court, or runs out the clock on legal efforts to hold him accountable, as he has successfully for going on a decade, that isn't, technically, a constitutional crisis. Got it? Comforted? And "the people are still sovereign," or independent; we're still, technically, a nation "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Or democratic. We voted, or 64% of eligible voters anyway, voted last November. Even though a hostile foreign power, and close ally to the winning candidate, has attacked our last three national elections. And potus has already, since being elected again, made two grateful references to Leon rigging the election for him. So the really-existing sovereignty of the people seems at this point debatable, at the very least. But it is not certain the American people are not sovereign and that's the thin reed we're holding onto here: that the sovereign people, the electorate, can figure out this government is bad for everyone, for them, for the US and for the world, and rise up and throw off the tyranny. Hope against hope. But please don't hold your breath. Breathe and do what you gotta do to stay strong. 

Grump Is Nero While Washington Burns

"What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago [post-ww2], in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations."

French Senator @The Atlantic

I like the dark urgency, sure, but especially the simple clarity of this French senator's analysis. 

I'll only add, again, the great powers and spheres of influence politics of the late 19th century that Putin and Grump, apparently, would like to return to did NOT turn out so well but led directly to two devastating world wars. During WW1, before the US got involved, the press once asked Wilson, 'Mr. President, What is this war in Europe about?' "England owns the world and Germany wants a bigger piece of it, Son," Wilson quips, or something like that anyway. (Yes, I'm making this up as I go.) The first principle of the post-WW2 UN mission was to prevent military aggression like the great powers bombing each other into rubble as they did a lot between 1914 to 1945, like Gaza now, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Grump's threats to take over Canada or Greenland or the Panama Canal. 

I've heard this positive spin building for this aggressive imperialist turn in US foreign policy as a "vibes shift," releasing the "animal spirits," you know they love using Keynes for their malign purposes, and releasing private industry from the bureaucratic slog of government regulations and taxes, boosting Big Tech to win the AI arms race with China, which by the way might require taking over Canada, etc. It's both cartoon ridiculous and so maybe more performative than anything else but then just so basically insulting and disrespectful of other nations and human rights, what can anybody do but say Hell No in every way possible?

I don't know where the bluster begins or ends with Grump but it feels to me inevitable that this will license more conflict and violence around the world. And, yeah, half the electorate voted for this; an obviously violent and fascist government won in a democratic election. This is who we are as a nation. Constitutional crisis doesn't seem to cover it any more. Josh is calling it an inter interregnum, or an interruption, a timeout, in the constitutional order. Most settle in dismay for "not normal." At any rate, the anti-DEI campaign is racist propaganda and hate speech; abducting the Palestinian protester is police state stuff, etc. 

I guess I also especially appreciate Claude Malhuret's, right of center pol perspective, former head of Doctors Without Borders, his confidence in American democracy to figure this out. I'm much shakier on that part. There's that Churchill line, when he was badgering FDR to join the fight against fascism in WW2 in Europe, "Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else." 

I guess we're still in one of those "everything else" phases and it doesn't seem to be working out but how bad will it have to get before his faithful give him up or the numbers turn against him in overwhelming super majorities? I don't know. But too long. 

  

One thing I do miss about Twitter, say, 2018-2020, the height of the Blue Wave, was the jokes. Up there with the golden age of political comedy of the Colbert Report and Daily Show for me. Any random tweet from some high profile Maga moron, say, Rep Jim Jordan or Sen. Marsha Blackburn, were hilarious roasts, with forty or fifty posts mocking their alternative facts and twisted logic. Excellent training, I imagine, for budding comics. But Leon took over the algorithms and ruined the party. 

Rock & Roll Showman: David Johansen, 1950-2025, R.I.P.

When I first read Robert Christgau's memoir, Going into the City (2015), I was disappointed to learn that his favorite album of all-time had changed to Television's Marquee Moon, and was no longer The Clash's debut album; US version, that came out in 1979, for me, original 1977 version for him. (Thanks for the edit.) I'd had the impression for years, decades, that The Clash album was his favorite and one of mine too; I liked that we shared that. Claiming Marquee Moon now, although a good album, struck me as a lame homer gesture. Somewhat understandable as something people do as they get older, things closer to us grow more dear, but too damn austere an album for an Xgau number one, by my lights. I might have expected his move would have soured me a bit on his Stranded (1978) Desert Island faves the New York Dolls but not at all. Actually, either one of the Dolls original classic albums from the early 1970s, New York Dolls (1973) or Too Much Too Soon (1974), would have made more sense to me as his all-time album favorite: NYC homers but undeniably, quintessentially, irrationally exuberant rock & roll music. Todd Rundgren gives the debut the glam rock power pop sheen of a big loud (if somewhat rickety) runaway subway train. "Personality Crisis" and "Jet Boy" should have been hits; "Frankenstein" is an epic hard rock masterpiece. The second album, TMTS, wasn't the song album of the debut but Shadow Morton's production might have sounded even better. The band turns covers of Sonny Boy Williamson, The Coasters, and Philly International, really, everything they touch, into a gloriously big and trashy burlesque of 1950s rock & roll. The Cramps, for one celebrated example, were born of such lustful irreverence. My enthusiasm for everything Dolls even carried over into all Johansen's early solo albums, even the often maligned In Style (1979), and up to 1982's live album Live It Up, which I saw at the Euphoria Tavern in Portland, OR. Great show; and Johansen was a great showman. NYC's proud idiosyncratic version of Mick Jagger. I lost interest with Johansen's Buster Poindexter persona, however; found "Hot Hot Hot" more annoying than anything else, but still liked that he had found a niche in the music industry. He played in the SNL house band for years. And then I fell back into the fold with their 2006 comeback album, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, and liked even a song or two on their subsequent last two studio albums, Cause I Sez So ('09) and Dancing Backwards in High Heels ('11); if overall each significantly less than the album previous to it. They were aging out of being able to play Dolls style rock & roll but deserve credit for still being able to do so convincingly for as long as they did. But I'll always think of Johansen lead style as going best with the sludgy feedback roar of Johnny Thunders' guitar; again, not unlike Jaggers and Richards. David Johansen was one of the great 1970s NYC rockers and, in the end, a consummate music biz pro, going from the lower east side all the way uptown and back. And represents some favorite music, inspired by his original Desert Island endorsement, I still share with Xgau. 

"Looking for a Kiss," peak period Dolls. Click on the youtube connection. 

She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything

"The rhetoric and logic of the abuse of power operates similarly at all scales, which is why I've found feminism such useful equipment for understanding authoritarians in public and political life. Because no matter what abusers take from their victims, they don't want to take the blame. And one of the prerogatives of power is to be in charge of blame, and abusers routinely exercise that power to make their own acts someone else's fault.

Let me start with where we used to hear "she made him do it" all the time--in sexual assault and gender violence. The logic was that somehow women were very powerful, which is why they got raped and beat up--their power consisted in making men to do things, which men were powerful enough in the sense of brute force to do but powerless in the sense of moral agency or self-control to resist doing. The idea that all this was a result of men losing control was always undermined by the fact that a person who truly has no self-control will act heedlessly, recklessly, and these acts were usually carried out covertly, in an effort to escape hostile witnesses and consequences.

Trump himself almost routinely accuses his opponents of intentions and crimes of which he himself is guilty, including efforts to steal elections. It's a well-known psychological phenomenon: "the unconscious defense mechanism that Freud called projection: the attribution of one’s own forbidden – and typically malevolent – motives, impulses, or emotions to others. When people project, what is true about oneself instead becomes true of others." Trump is specifically the most prolific, shameless, and public practitioner of a version of projection that Dr. Jennifer Frey dubbed DARVO in 1997. That's an acronym for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender, a frequent technique of abusers to shift blame to victims. Among his many DARVO moves, Trump has accused his rivals of trying to steal an election and Zelensky of being a dictator. [Ted] Cruz was engaging in it too, when he was making out Democrats as troublemakers for not being nicer about a violent coup attempt.

In mainstream discourse, it's become standard to blame the excesses of the right on liberals, the left, feminists, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmental protection, and BIPOC and LGBTQ people. It's a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right's behavior. It's also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages."

Rebecca Solnit 

DARVO, a favorite technique of abusers to shift blame onto their victims; deny, attack, reverse victim and offender (DARVO). Now that's a realm (and social pathology) in which Grump is truly a King. What a fantastic textbook case; scholars will be unpacking this one for decades: The DARVO POTUS. 

And a brilliant feminist caricature of patriarchy: "The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages." 

IOW, blaming the Dem's "woke mind virus," their "excessive liberalism," for armed mobs and forced deportations and Neo-Nazis and demolition of government services and whatever other illiberal republican extremes. The radical "defund the police" communist Dems shouldn't have pissed off Grump and Leon, who are now just trying to deliver the democratic will of the people, according to our two-party dysfunctional marriage.  

Albert O. Hirschman in his book, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), cites the three pillars of reactionary rhetoric in the modern period: "perversity," "futility," and "jeopardy." In a way, Solnit's she-made-him-do-it theory traces back to all three pillars of reactionary thought: Helping victims of sexual abuse, perversely, will increase the claims of abuse, government help is futile when more government is the problem, and helping victims of abuse jeopardizes the authority of men in positions of power. 

Blaming women, the poor, and minorities for oppressive conservative extremes is a time honored, if a shamefully abusive, tradition. 

Techno-Fascism Comes to America

"Accelerationism emerged from Karl Marx’s idea that, if the contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will inspire proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will emerge. But [Andrea] Molle [poli-sci prof at Chapman] identifies what he calls Muskian “techno-accelerationism” as having a different end: destroying the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top. Musk “has to completely break any kind of preëxisting government architecture to impose his own,” Molle said. He added that a government thoroughly overhauled by Musk might run a bit like the wireless system that operates Teslas, enabling the company to theoretically update how your car works at any moment: “You’re allowed some agency, but they are still in control, and they can still intervene if the course is not going in the direction that it is supposed to go to maximize efficiency.”

Kyle Chayka @ NYer

We're taught capitalism and communism are irreconcilable binaries but in an important sense they are not. I remember trying to explain this to colleague once and they shot back with, 'right, we're a mixed economy,' like what I was saying was obvious and of useless value. But I still think it's useful to remind ourselves of this now and then because when we talk about economic issues this way, which is still the way they are almost without exception discussed in politics, as these abstract, hypothetical, antagonistic binaries, we obscure understanding the really existing economy. Bezos harrumphing this past week that the editorial writing in WaPo, from now on, will be restricted to "personal liberties and free markets," as if the subject of "free" and "unfree" markets in the real economy were clear and obvious to everyone, is a perfect case in point.  

My contention is that it isn't clear-- Bezos' "free markets" may protect his freedom to accumulate wealth but do they increase the freedom of workers to find living wage work? or the freedom to live in a healthy environment? Most importantly, thinking about markets in this strict binary fashion muddles public understanding of economic issues, fostering ideas like all taxes and regulations are bad, when really any large scale market over time is absolutely dependent on rules and regulations and taxes to build the infrastructure that make any really existing large-scale market function and work. Still, living in the antagonistic Cold War binary over the economy we get the random destruction of Leon and his hacker gang rampaging through the government right now, immiserating many and, if not stopped before it's too late, probably crashing the economy. And even then, if the Great Recession is any guide, before the government has even finished bailing out the economy and putting it back together, the free market dogmatists will be blaming the crash on the government. 

But let's back up a little and try to explain how I came to this way of thinking.  

Heterodox economic historian Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) argues both free market capitalism and Marxism are post-Enlightenment utopian schemes. Both rationalizing political-economic orders, claiming to be natural orders and universalizing systems, that in theory put an end to political conflict and class struggle, their carrot, by, in the case of the free marketeers, maximizing market freedoms and human productivity, independent of government intervention (Laissez-faire), or politics, and in the case of communism, by transferring the ownership of the means of production from a few super rich capitalists to all labor as a collective body politic, thereby allowing eventually the withering away of  the state, or politics, again, and everyone fishes in the morning and reads in the afternoons and goes out to shows in the evenings. Utopia! The problem, according to Polanyi, is when put into practice by political power, enforced by governments and the rule of law, these utopian schemes, capitalism or communism, become dystopic, corrosive to human society, principally because they are, in the case of market fundamentalists (and neoliberals), hostile to any democratic claims outside the bottom line economic maximizing profit seeking priorities of big capitalists, like taxes or regulations or living wages, and in the case of communists, or Dictatorships of the Proletariat in communist command societies, they are hostile to political dissent of any kind or any human right that threatens communist party authority. 

It doesn't make it any less threatening or potentially destructive but totalitarian technocratic engineering fantasies like the Muskian one above, which is really just another neoliberal market fantasy, are not entirely a new thing, by any stretch. Musk's grandfather was something of an antisemitic technocracy nut back in the 1950s. I'm sure Leon sees himself as a great world builder and he's gifting society with his fully-automated manufacturing surveillance world geared to escaping the earth and colonizing Mars. But what jumps out at me in his "techno-accelerationist" fantasy, not to mention his efficiencies rampage through the federal government right now, is the reckless contempt for workers, for labor, for others, for the human rights or individual freedoms of anybody but himself. He thinks any part of government that doesn't serve him (28 billion in contracts, or something like that, from what I've heard) is government waste; helping the poor, cancer research, social security, all wasteful inefficiencies. So, again, in the Polanyian sense, another utopian ends up a dystopian; and in this case, even a Neo-Nazi. 

There is that saying about how societal collapses develop slowly in dribs and drabs until everything falls apart all at once. We're in this terribly precarious place where it feels like it is the resiliency of the separation of powers in our system, and the democratic will of the people within that system, by definition procedural and lumberingly disorganized forces, respectively, versus a fascist corporate state ("move fast and break things") for billionaires and bigots backed by state and non-state actor violence. Ack! 

Anyway, if it's any comfort there are no lack of wildly rhyming historical precedents to our troubled tabloid times and they keep coming. I've been pounding on the Nazi parallels, because of Ryback's Takeover. And Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction, which I maybe haven't mentioned as much. Lessons from that book I think worth mentioning here: Don't believe the Nazi economic miracle hype; Albert Speer was a propagandist, foremost. The technocracy in Germany was at odds with the Nazis by 1935 and everything after that, economically, was maximizing total war production and extreme austerity for working people. And the Nazi economists knew by 1937, latest, Germany would not be able to develop anything like parity in military productive strength with the collective force of their enemies before 1945-1950 or later. When Hitler launched Barbarossa, his invasion of Russia in 1941, logistics support was provided by horse drawn carts. In other words, fascist Germany was less an economic miracle than an industrializing state war machine; and one of brutally violent consequence to Jews and gays and communists and Gypsies and disabled people and, really, any non-German speaking people in Poland and Ukraine. Fascist Germany is often credited for its technocratic achievements but what stands out in Tooze's account is how Hitler's racist delusions actually catastrophically undermine Germany's modernizing growth and security. 

Historian Janis Mimuru, as reported by Kyle Chayka in the NY-er, thinks, additionally, the techno-fascist takeover in Japan in the 1930s, in part inspired by German fascism, resembles in ways the hostile government takeover going on now by Leon and his hacker Dogers. Led by engineering and industrial elites, high on their own stash of flattering history books, great world builders in their own minds, Japanese engineers in the 1930s and Tech Bros now think they've got all the technocratic solutions, anything in their way, laws, workers, humans, democratic pressures of any kind are waste, inefficiencies, engineering problems and must be suppressed or "fed into the wood chipper," so to speak; enemies of the people, woke mind virus, etc.  

All of which is to say perhaps some healthy skepticism about the AI/crypto, "animals spirits," "vibes shift" boom hype going on these days might be in order. By one admin account, as related by Ezra Klein on a recent podcast about AGI (artificial general intelligence), Leon is stripping the government down to the studs so as to make way for the AI takeover, for efficiencies' sake of course. Please, note again, the lure here is the fantasy of automating away politics or any democratic claims on capital. The coming austerity with which we will pay for this hype, at any rate, will likely result in many excess deaths and considerable loss of wealth and security for anybody that is not a billionaire oligarch. 

What else strikes me about these comparisons, the Nazis and Imperial Japan, as well, and which is kind of obvious but feels right now like worth repeating, and underlining, is how the Nazis and Imperial Japan were both ultimately desperately doomed examples of national planning. They aren't paragons of rationalizing technocratic achievement. In the end they defy technocratic reason, convinced their cultural survival is at stake, their world beating technocratic arrogance crashes their countries in terrible military crackups.   

But no way Grump & Leon go there, right? I said historical comparisons can be comforting but they aren't always. They can also be grave warnings.   

Detroit Techno Meets Krautrock: Carl Craig and Manuel Gottsching (1994)

Carl Craig is second wave Detroit Techno. I really don't know the first wave much beyond Derrick May and Juan Atkins; or the Bellevue Three. But second wave means after Cybotron, Big Fun, and above all "Strings of Life," the first wave peak of 1989-90. The second wave takes off in '91 and maybe peaks here in 1994. Craig tops most second wave lists, anyway; and doubles down on Detroit techno's hardcore tradition of spacey abstracted instrumentals. Here Craig remixes Manuel Gottsching's 1984 classic "E2-E4." Gottsching was one of '70s Krautrock's most celebrated guitarists, behind the group Ash Ra Tempel and playing a vanguard intersection of Krautrock and experimental minimalism. Mesmerizing repetition unspooling like a bullet train traversing an urban grid; a quasi spiritual quest after extended moments of flashing lights and melodic ASMR zen. Or ambient techno; noir disco; death disco without the dread. Blacktronica. Detroit Techno meets Krautrock. 

Bonus track: Juan Atkins "Session 4" off The Berlin Sessions (2005). More ambient techno in the Detroit style. 

"Why Aren't We In The Streets?"

"Why Aren't We In The Streets?" asks the headline of Susan Glasser's column in the NY-er this past week. The "we" part was particularly striking coming from someone who I can't say I've ever taken to be much of an advocate for street protest. Needless to say, the new republican admin is a concern for a lot of folks on the side of American democracy and rule of law and other old stuffy "woke mind virus" ideas like that. 

But when I saw that Glasser headline something else occurred to me that I haven't seen in any of these discussions so far. If the bulk share of people who typically turnout for street protests first come from the young, the 18 to 34 demographic, maybe they are slow or hesitant to hit the streets because of the way they were treated by the Dem establishment last time they did so, not very long ago, over Israel bombing Gaza into an uninhabitable pile of rubble? Shutting out entirely the street protest voice over Gaza from the DNC last summer, in particular, seems in retrospect inexplicable and poor judgement, at the very least. 

Street protesters had the good sense to not show up for Grump's Jan 6 coup attempt. They could see the setup. Grump already had plans to impose martial law when street protesters clashed with his violent angry mob. But Antifa stayed home. Now, Grump is "commander in chief" again, he's pardoned all his Jan 6 thugs, and the Dems of late haven't shown much interest in backing up street protesters. 

This situation seems to call for local Blue legal institutions, state and city governments, to not just speak up for protecting immigrants, which they do appear to be doing some, but also speak up for First Amendment street protester rights and clarify for the public how they will protect peaceful protest from Grump's brownshirts. 

Other random notes on the rolling disaster: 

James Carville, former Clinton campaign guru, got killed this past week for suggesting Dems not protest but let the destruction of Trump's "malevolent incompetence" play out on its own. Let Repubs own all of the disaster coming, Carville reasons. In his defense, something I've seldom felt like doing as he's another anti-woke bigot from what I've gathered, I will point out that for many of the rightwing base any opposition at all is just another excuse for Grump: 'He wants to fix everything but the damn liberals and Democrats won't let him do the job,' they reason. 

But doing nothing isn't opposition and opposing this rolling disaster, experts are already estimating the consequence of shutting down USAID could result in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, screams out for humanitarian attention. In any way and every way possible: in the courts, yelling at reps at town halls, and/or big numbers of the opposition being counted, all important and necessary. This is an all hands on deck situation; they're selling off the government for parts. Slashing government workers that provide essential services. Sure, there's "waste" in government but reducing waste by contracting a private, unelected, Billionaire to do it, and one who thinks anything that doesn't add to his empire of private wealth is waste, is not the way; and, in fact, not even pro economic growth.  

Another bag of gripes going around is that Dem reps in congress aren't doing enough opposition and reps are whining in return that they're doing all they can and don't have the votes to do anything more. My two cents: Dem reps ought to be going on every media platform available and shouting out alarm bells and explaining as patiently and clearly as possible the lawbreaking and destruction and betrayal going on. 24/7! Pete Buttigieg ought to crash the Joe Rogan show. Meme wars on Instagram and Tik Tok, everything. 

But whether speaking out like this is being maximized I don't know and don't have enough perspective to definitively judge. This is all happening too fast and, as I've gathered it is for many, it's overwhelming. I feel like an old geezer standing in his front yard shaking his fist at speeding cars. But I will say a bazillion fundraising appeals, a financial arms race with corporate elites, and bi-weekly press conferences by well-meaning Dems in congress are unlikely to build an effective opposition. 

Anyway, Grumper's voted for forced deportations and reducing the price of eggs. We know this. Bad and dumb stuff but the democratic will of the people (such as it is); and by only 1.5%, mind you, not a"mandate." But they didn't vote for Musk or Project 2025 or treason with Putin. There are super majorities out there that no way want what these developments will bring, even if they don't realize this yet. So, yeah, how to reach and organize these voters into an opposition is an important question. 

I guess my hot take on this dilemma is that there is no one answer or solution, the courts, calling reps, street protest, online social media and underground organization, everything and anything by any means necessary. It's more an all of the above and more situation, than any one silver bullet solution. And Dem influencers grousing about the lack of street protests in recent weeks feels to me a little churlish.