Whenever I see one of these headlines, I think of this:
«But that diagnosis completely misses the life-threatening illness America is really struggling with: a billionaire-captured system that doesn’t work for most people, and justifiable disaffection and anger at this system. Americans are fed up, and people are perpetually in the mood to throw the bums out, whoever the bums in charge are.»
In the context of a major media outlet allowing some rich guy to post some pile of garbage labelled “opinion”…
I can tell said plutocrat is lying because I see his lips moving, so the real question is: why? What is said plutocrat hoping to accomplish?
«Trump, while campaigning in California in October, vowed to take care of farmers’ “water situation” by threatening to withhold disaster aid in the state.»
Go get ‘im, HuffPo!
«Tech billionaire Elon Musk said Wednesday that his budget-cutting effort on behalf of President-elect Donald Trump would most likely not find $2 trillion in savings, backtracking on a goal he set earlier as co-head of a new advisory body, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Musk told political strategist Mark Penn in an interview broadcast on X that the $2 trillion figure was a “best-case outcome” and that he thought there was only a “good shot” at cutting half that.»
*Gasp!* Goal cut in half! (At least.) Who could possibly have expected *this*???!!1!1
(Any particular idiot who’s paying attention would know there ain’t no trillion dollars to cut from the budget, especially after basically decades of Republicans trying to cut to the bone already. https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/ )
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/01/07/china-salt-typhoon-hack-threat-panic-washington/
«There is little that infuriates politicians more than the idea of foreign intrusion into private lives, especially their own.»
*snerk*
«Countries with a recent experience of dictatorship, like South Korea, tend to be a lot more sensible about what to do when a would-be dictator attempts to seize power, and as a result their institutions are a lot stronger.»
I’m not so sure this part is true.
The rest – yeah, institutionalism for its own sake is not serving us well right now.
https://wapo.st/3W9ZceT (gift)
Weee shall seeee.
https://popular.info/p/10-corporations-that-kept-their-promises
Lyft for the win (and a handful of others, like AirBnB, Whirlpool, Farmer’s Insurance, General Mills).
Now I want to go watch some old Farmer’s ads.
https://www.ft.com/content/b7694d70-2c5a-4531-b8d0-446ee12a489a
«Watch this space carefully. The fight between Republicans and Democrats for the working class is going to be the defining political battle of the next four years and beyond.
Second, while I find myself amazed to write this, Trump himself actually has a policy idea that could help bolster the number of Americans qualified for good tech jobs. He has proposed creating a free online university called the American Academy, which would offer high-level courses and accept transfer credits from other colleges and universities, helping to push back against rising tuition costs and student debt. The left-leaning Washington Monthly magazine recently praised the idea.
This sort of online education, along with programmes that graduate high-school students with a two-year college degree, is an obvious way to train up more tech workers quickly. My one caveat — please put someone other than Musk or Loomer in charge.»
Left the word “white” out of the phrase “white working class.” Unless it was simply implied, and I missed it. Trump and MAGA couldn’t care less about non-white people in this country.
But I can actually imagine something like this program taking shape and then a Democratic administration later doing what it can* to ensure (truly) equal access at some point in the future rather than dismantling it.
\* Unless there’s also a Democratic Congress. Imagine that. Then there’s no “doing what it can,” but simply acting (ensuring, in this case).
On a side note: I can never tell when an FT article is going to be paywalled. It’s a crapshoot.
A really long article that’s still worth a read:
https://www.weekendreading.net/p/how-trump-won
«This is the one-two punch that knocked out Harris’s chances this year: disaffection with Democrats, combined with incredulity at the idea that Trump might actually implement the worst parts of the MAGA agenda.»
His conclusion:
«When we use the wrong tools, we might not just fail to diagnose an illness – we might misdiagnose it, and prescribe a treatment that is actively harmful to the patient. When Flatland analysts argue that America “moved right,” the prescription tends to be that Democrats should also move right, or at least play nice with Trump to avoid alienating the Americans who supposedly granted him a decisive mandate. The same prescription will be dispensed to civil society and the media.
But that diagnosis completely misses the life-threatening illness America is really struggling with: a billionaire-captured system that doesn’t work for most people, and justifiable disaffection and anger at this system. Americans are fed up, and people are perpetually in the mood to throw the bums out, whoever the bums in charge are. But with only two parties to realistically choose from – plus a democratically illegitimate Electoral College that makes most Americans’ presidential votes all but irrelevant – all of these “change elections” add up to little more than a seesaw that most Americans don’t want to ride in the first place.
And so, nearly 250 years after putting forth the then-revolutionary aspiration for governments “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” we deploy election procedures that can claim no more legitimacy than the seething resignation of the governed.»
So. I disagree with the (implied?) statement that the problem is the two-party system (there’s an earlier post about that), but I think the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact plus ranked-choice voting would go a very long way to addressing the current illness.
Plus re-apportioning the House of Representatives.
Here, Read This 