From Hero to Zero

Poor Graham Platner is headed back to oysters and he must be wondering why the Groper In Chief gets away with it and he doesn't. Damn those double standards! And why wouldn't a candidate with lots of skeletons in the closet be able to represent his constituency? Headline in Wall Street Journal: World’s largest meat group JBS scraps a key climate goal. Like all the big investor groups and Fortune 500 companies. A piece in the Times titled How American Socialism Changed never mentions the labor movement or unions. Nor does it mention class. This new socialism wants a little redistribution of wealth (call it "progressive") but nor property. A bridge too far. EJ Dion argues that conflating socialism with social democracy is a good thing and we should all stop arguing about ownership of the means of production. Black and brown folk are upset about these mostly whiite, young socialist interlopers in their neighborhoods but as I've argued, they have themselves to blame. From todays Times : "Just five years ago, Eric Adams’s victory in a hotly contested Democratic mayoral primary seemed to signal a high-water mark for Black political power. Mr. Adams would become only the city’s second Black mayor; Alvin Bragg was to become the Manhattan district attorney; Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn congressman, was on a path to become the House minority leader." The lesson here is clear folks. Your centrist politics suck. To wrap up, here is more liberal faith in a "sane" world with "rational" politics. Bill Mc Kibben talks to Ezra Klein and holds out hope in the price of renewables, in enlightened politicians, in fewer bureaucratic regulations. The only concern is climate change. Nobody has to sacrifice anything (maybe the evil fossil fuel majors) and technology will come to the rescue. in other words, same old same old. Like me , Bill is getting old but still writes books advocating a common sense approach. In classic contradictory fashion ( disavowal) he recommends Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's new book yet maintains that totally discredited liberal faith in "democratic" capitalism.

Alan Greenspan's Ghost

Too bad Alan Greenspan didn't live long enough to see the election victory of the Democratic Socialists. The obituaries all mentioned the fact that Alan, as chairman of the Fed, admitted his "mistake" to Congress; he assummed Markets worked, that they factored in risk perfectly. Oops. The obits wanted us to believe that this error only applied to the 2007-8 financial meltdown but of course Markets still aren't pricing in the risk posed by ecological collapse. Economists believe they can calculate "the social cost of carbon" but it is a wildly random estimate with a huge range. And that's just carbon- no one is calculating the cost of crossing all the other planetary boundaries. That would crush the fantasy. Instead they keep talking about the price of oil and about raising interest rates and AI IPO's blah blah blah. Good luck with that. Speaking of hyperscalers and super intelligence, they plan to focus on putting their energy-gobbling data centers in the rural south, where intelligence is a rare commodity. This could replace the tobacco and textile industries. The Wall Street Journal has a quiz you can take to find out what class you belong to. "See what your lifestyle says about your economic class" and we are given these categories: upper, upper middle middle, working and lower. This is the thing Marxists like Vivek Chibber have so much trouble accepting; conciousness has been traded for identity. Consumption won. Do you shop at Nordstroms or K Mart? With a large enough line of credit you can join the upper class for a few hours, even days. Till the bill shows up anyway. I'm not sure if working or middle classes shop at Wal Mart or who it is that has an REI membership. Does the upper-middle go on Princess Cruises but have their own hot tub? Who gets to fly first class? Then there is the all-inclusive approach, from a member of DSA New York: "Mr. Custodio, a 28-year-old investment researcher, has a ready reply. “If you’re someone who has to work for a living, and you’re not living off a trust fund, you are part of the working class,” he says. There goes the Proffessional Managerial Class. Now a bank president or CEO is as much "working class" as a plumber with investments. But will they join the revolution?