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Rachel
OD
ICYMI
Our Member Only newsletter this week featured another essay by News Beat’s Rashed Mian on Bernie taking his one man show and message on the road. “Contrast Sanders’ line of attack with Democratic leadership, who’ve been caught sleep-walking through the first few weeks of the Trump presidency. What’s worse, Democrats’ response to the growing criticism has only underscored how feckless and out-of-touch the party is.”
Max Notes
I’m trying to work something out in my head. Bear with me if it’s convoluted.
Most of Trump’s high profile appointments are idiots. Some are anything but. The idiots serve to distract from the smart ones who are doing the work. This much I’m pretty solid on.
That’s not to say the idiots can’t do a lot of damage. Hegseth, Patel, McMahon. They’re morons but we’ve had dim bulbs in charge of agencies and departments before. What’s different this time is that they have direction from the smart ones who are in the process of stripping away checks and balances that previously prevented the dim bulbs from turning the lights off completely. (See: Betsy DeVos.)
Here’s what I can’t square. The smart ones in Treasury, OMB and Trade (Bessent, Vought and Greer-pending) have plans that will unequivocally dismantle the U.S. economy.
In the Headlines section of the newsletter I link to a Jacobin interview with economist Sean Starrs who argues that the U.S. economy is far bigger than GDP suggests. If we take Starrs’ research as sound, then it reveals the extent to which the global economy truly rides on the coattails of the U.S. economy. By the same logic it shows how interdependent we are on our “partners.” Translation: We’ve been building a global capitalist system that plunders every nation on the planet and fills our coffers.
Starrs demonstrates how it goes beyond labor and natural resources and includes shareholder wealth through the financialization of the global economy. And that’s what has me scratching my head. We’re already winning. Big time. We take it all. We drink everyone’s milkshake. We run the table. By taking an isolationist stance on international affairs, dismantling economic alliances, implementing punitive tariffs, flooding the market with oil and gas and pulling critical aid from the most fragile economies, we’re threatening to upend the very capitalist system we designed.
It just doesn’t make any sense.
Other things I’m obsessing over…
Jack Reacher is simply the worst television. Formulaic. Poorly acted. Predictable. And I’m here for all of it.
Chris Kluwe!! Need more of this guy. Lots of coverage on this one but we’ll give the link love to Emma Vigeland.
I was sooooo rooting for my homeland in this one. “Sorry.”
This is one to keep an eye on, assuming DOGE doesn’t dismantle every federal reporting agency under the Fed. Credit Card delinquencies hit 3.08% at the end of 2024. Inflation and interest rates are both “sticky” as they say and it’s unclear if Trump is going to make good on his credit card interest rate cap promise. The fate of the CFPB is also unknown, so this will be one of the best ways to gauge the financial health of the consumer.
Headlines
Protect the Children! No, Not Those Children.
Much of the funding from the maligned USAID goes toward agencies with “boots on the ground” in distressed parts of the world. Over the years, funding toward soft “governance” initiatives has been fairly controversial with many accusing the organization of ironically contributing to instability or only assisting efforts that serve U.S. interests at the expense of local populations. But much of the time, USAID is simply facilitating the distribution of food and life-saving medicine for children.
From the article:
“After the Trump administration issued its stop-work order, an international nonprofit whose work was partly supported by U.S.A.I.D. began running out of ready-to-use therapeutic food for severely malnourished children in three states, according to a senior humanitarian coordinator at the U.S.-based organization. For weeks, the official said, the food sat in a warehouse that was waiting for permission from Washington to reopen its doors. Once that permission came through, staff members who would normally distribute the food were unavailable because their employer did not have the funding or permission to let them work.”
Friend of the show Alexa O’Brien is no stranger to digital surveillance. She was caught up in a corruption probe during the Obama administration that showed the government attempting to frame her and her organization. She co-authored a piece this week in Wired that speaks to the level of insecurity and concern among government employees, some of whom are being directly targeted in frightening ways. The result is a culture of fear and “chilled” communication.
From the article:
“But activity that some workers perceive as signs of increased surveillance has prompted them to take precautions. Bernier, who works as a civil engineer for the Army Corps based in Hanover, New Hampshire, says the messages he received spooked him enough that he asked local police to keep an eye on his home, removed the battery from his work-issued laptop, and kept his work phone on airplane mode while traveling to a nonwork conference last week. ‘There are things I don’t control but actions I can take to protect myself and my family,’ he says.”
No One Will Like This Interview. That’s Why It’s Vital To Understand.
I have to do a much longer piece on Sean Starrs and what he’s revealing in this Jacobin article. And kudos, by the way, to the Jacobin for running this sans commentary because Starrs’ conclusions upend left and right economic narratives. Self proclaimed “love-child of globalization, being born in Vancouver to a British father, Japanese mother and having also lived in the United States, Denmark, Japan, New Zealand, and Hong Kong,” Starrs was referred to by Noam Chomsky as one of the most important political economists today. I’m going to let this passage and article speak for itself and dedicate myself to unpacking it further in a future episode.
From the article:
“I have already mentioned the capacity of the US state to cut China off from advanced technology in a way that the US was not able to do to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, because of China’s dependent integration with the United States. Let me give another example: as long as countries are integrated into this form of global capitalism and want to drive their economic growth via exports (whether China, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and so on), then they are structurally bound to give the US free money. That is because the US has ensured that its currency remains the de facto world transactions currency. As central banks around the world accumulate US dollars from their nation’s exporters, these central banks must park their cash in the world’s safe-haven asset, the US Treasury Bill, thereby continuously pumping free dollars into the United States.”
Election Integrity: Getting Money Out of Politics.
Non-Negotiable #4.
The movement to get money out of politics will take a very long time. I know people don’t want to hear that. My guess is, in the best case scenario, we’re looking at 20 years. Best case. If it makes you feel any better, the movement to get money into politics took 181 years so by that measure, two decades to unravel what took 181 to build isn’t all that bad. Either we’re committed to playing the long game or not. The assholes that got us here were.
Here’s a snippet from the pod:
Max: “The only way to change this is to fundamentally reshape modern American politics. Every attempt at reform will fail because the highest court in the land has determined that corporations are people and campaign cash is free speech. Game, set, match. Every suit that challenges expenditures, fundraising or both will be struck down on this judicial precedent. And if you think that changing the composition of the court is the winning strategy then you really better buckle up for the long haul. The average tenure of a Supreme Court Justice since 1993 is now 28 years. If Trump coerces Samuel Alito into retirement and Harlan Crow coerces Clarence Thomas, then Trump will have the ability to appoint two more justices to the court, which will actuarially guarantee a conservative court for the next 25 years.”
DaveFromHoldFast: “The people and the music in my life. I am fortunate that, as fucked as everything is, the daily rhythms of my life haven’t been affected yet. But I am trying to order my thoughts and my steps to be prepared for when that is no longer true...”
“Danny and Derek are joined by Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, and Aslı Bâli, professor of law at Yale Law School and nonresident fellow at Quincy, to talk about the Institute’s Better Order Project, a collaboration between over 130 people from more than 40 countries creating proposals for a stable, multipolar world. They talk about the vision of moving beyond the current ‘rules-based’ order in favor of an inclusive, global one rooted in international law, the major variables around which the project’s proposals and reforms are organized, how to address great powers prioritizing short-term, political thinking, the atmosphere in the worlds of think tanks, nonprofits, and elite law as we begin Trump 2.0, how these communities have been reckoning with the US policy on Gaza, and more.”
You can keep Wealth of Nations in this spot for the next, oh I don’t know, 30 weeks? Good lord. Next up is a 2019 book by Katharina Pistor that is highly regarded. I’ve been putting it off but am committing myself to dig more into legal texts this year.
“The Code of Capital explores the various ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are selectively coded to protect and reproduce private wealth. This provocative book paints a troubling portrait of the pervasive global nature of the code, the people who shape it, and the governments that enforce it.”
From @1Kent “Dunning-kruger moved into the DNC and took over. Watching Hakeem Jeffries wave the proverbial White Flag when he said: ‘what can we do, our hands are tied’ was absolutely appalling.”
“The Climate Disobedience Center exists to support a growing community of climate dissidents who take the risk of action, grounded in love, commensurate with the scale and urgency of the crisis.”
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