It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Fredric Jameson I am writing on the last day of 2025, a year that has been truly breathtaking, in its pace of social and political upheaval. The sheer breadth of offenses churned out by Donald Trump and his Project 2025 ghouls is staggering, leaving libs, Dems, and the American populace … Continue reading Is Democratic Socialism Even Enough?
If change is to come, it will have to come from the margins. Wendell Berry You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller Before we get into what could be called a “rural strategy” for de-Trumping our non-urban areas in America, let’s do a quick recap of the overall scheme … Continue reading De-Trumping Rural America
Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. Dick Cheney Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country. Donald Trump In Part 1, we looked at UBI as the new primary purpose of government, the only way out of the immediate predicaments of underemployment, collapsing labor value, and the political explosiveness generated by the resulting economic deprivation. Then in Part 2, we explored … Continue reading Last Chance Moonshot – Part 3: Modern Money Theory
You are captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. I think there are many among you who would be glad to release the world from captivity. This is what prevents them: they are unable to find the bars of the cage. Daniel Quinn The child who is not embraced by the … Continue reading Last Chance Moonshot – Part 2: Bigger Home Bases
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967) The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide … Continue reading Last Chance Moonshot – Part 1: Basic Income
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. H.L. Mencken In (what feels like) the thousand years since the election, the postmortems have been coming fast and furious, including one on this very blog. The theories for the Democratic debacle are many, from the perseverance of systemic racism and sexism, to the global turn to strongman leaders in times of … Continue reading Where Do Dems Go From Here? The Chimera of Appealing to the Working Class
Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future…Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in … Continue reading Election 2024: The Aftermath
Last time, we looked at how bad things are from an ecological perspective, and how a universal cognitive dissonance has emerged, coming from the lack of congruity between the pending collapse we all sense and the various delusional stories we are being told about possible paths to the future. This creeping sense of disoriented dread is exacerbated by the lack of any workable points of … Continue reading The Cheat Code for Preventing and/or Surviving The Coming Collapse (Part 2)
Dreams of individual accomplishment and desires to contribute to the common good become firmly attached to waged work, where they can be hijacked to rather different ends: to produce neither individual riches nor social wealth, but privately appropriately surplus value. Kathi Weeks, “The Problem with Work” Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds, insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing … Continue reading Morality & the Meaning of Money
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. John Maynard Keynes New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been engaged in talks with the White House over the past couple weeks, in an effort to prevent the US government from ‘defaulting’ on its debt later this year. As has happened many times over the last few decades, the … Continue reading Does the Debt Ceiling Matter? Yes and No (and probably not the way you’re thinking)
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