All of this is true,all benefits the working class, blue and white collar, so what accounts for MAGA and the Republican base of farmers, and middle class;.
Question was rhetorical. Answer is the culture war, racism, sexism, patriarchalism, ignorance and cocommitent self acknowledgement which takes form in "owning the libs"
All Rupert did was give them a voice, and a hallelujah chorus. Rupert didn't create them, they have been there all of the time, since the lst Great awakening in the 18th Century,. Every so often along comes something that enables them, gives them the courage to come out of the closet.
For instance the Civil War, the rise of the KKK and America first in the 1920's and 1930's, which was in some way a reaction to WWI.
In fact we are still living in a world, created by WWI. The bullshit in the MidEast, Communism, WWII, to cell phones, men on the moon, exploratio of Mars, all of it and more a consequence of WWI, the good and the bad.
This article forcefully articulates the reasons so many are fed up with neolib Democratic “leadership”, and why said leadership is so desperately hanging on. Getting money out of politics is critically important, but an underpaid, ill-educated populace is more than reluctant to fund the heart of campaign finance reform, and the Supreme Fascists are more than happy to maintain the roadblocks. The DSA’s time has come. Corporate Democrats know it, Repugnicans know it. It increasingly appears the serfs have figured it out, as witness the repeated failure of both to destroy the candidates of the opposition.
The DSA would be poised for growth, if not for opposition from the DNC. For a brief moment the DNC was the liberal side of the Dem party, with Clinton's DLC the conservative, corporate, money-grubbing right wing of the party. But the DNC is now just the DLC all grown up.
One of the curious aspects of the evaporation of union influence is, until recently, the evaporation of citizen action to demand change from its politicians. Too often since Reagan, people have volunteered in my presence that "Oh, I don't pay much attention to politics. What's the point?" It is hard not to view such remarks as resignation (if not assignation) to the status quo - or likely an expression of feeling powerless. I have often repeated that our culture seems to have accepted that rich people know best - that if you are not super rich, then you do not deserve to tell me what to do, where to live, how much to get paid, etc.
-----------
It is hard for me not to think of PATCO as the last act of defiance to the wealthy political elites of our era. Ironic, I was asked to manage a new lab at FAA to try to help it get back on its post-PATCO-strike feet. After 9 years, FAA was back on its feet according to my annual employee surveys, but then along came Trump 2.0 and the chainsaw of the smartest man in the world. Now aviation crashes and near misses are becoming common again. Oh, and government employee surveys are now dead unless conducted by Trump toadies.
The FAA has never really gotten "back on its feet." In 1981 there were 17,500 air traffic controllers, 13,000 of which were PATCO members and 11, 375 who were fired. Today there are about 11,000 certified controllers and 4,000 trainees. They have not had many major disasters largely because of improved radar and other technological enhancements which, ironically, was the major contract demand that PATCO was fighting for and which the Carter administration was slow-walking.
"Public support for unions is at its highest since 1965, with 67% of Americans approving and 75% of those under 35"
"Generational shift: Younger workers show less loyalty to employers and more willingness to challenge poor conditions"
This is very much a part of the Democratic Socialist movement. We need to disengage health care from the workplace---time for single payer. Mental health in this country must be a priority as well, and the youth of this nation know that too. Crazy people are running the world. Let's get healthy; unions help us fight back. See you in the street.
Part of the problem is that many people view politics as dirty, and don't want to get involved; I used to feel that way, but now, increasingly, every day, realize that somebody has got to take charge of our government and how it treats us. For that job, it takes someone with passion and a thick skin, because there will always be special interests trying to get their share - and maybe more.
I cleaned downtown streets at night when I was in college. Now, there was a dirty job - but someone had to do it. Thinking back on that experience made a connection for me.
I did not vote from 1968 to 2016, because I saw that the two parties were merely the obverse and reverse of the same coin., events since Jan 2025 have reinforced that opinion, not at the voter level, but at the "leadership" level
In 1971, as a teenager, I made a union supermarket hourly wage of $7.48 as a part-time cash department head while friends in construction were making $2.00 per hour. I don't know what that wage would translate to in today's dollars, but it has to be a great amount. Unions made a great difference and Ray-gun screwed us all in his dementias terms in office.
An earlier version of the PRO ACT was the Employee Free Choice Act, which Obama promised to push through when campaigning for his first term. Unfortunately it was left on the back burner and never promoted by the Obama administration as it sought bipartisan support for the various draft versions of what became the Affordable Care Act. We wasted Democratic control of both houses while seeking bi-partisan support, got a watered down healthcare act that didn't even include the public option component and unions got no administration support for the Employee Free Choice Act. In the end the Republicans voted against the watered down Affordable Care Act anyway.
All true, Thom. But unless something I don't see happens, it won't matter. The people who need to read what your write will not. If they do, they will not care about the facts, irrefutable though they are. They vote their guts, large, overfull with unhealthy food and booze. Their addled brains are garbage cans of insecurity, bigotry, arrogant ignorance, a totally undeserved sense of entitlement, a hatred of all who by dint of talent or hard work have done better in life than they have.
They will continue as MAGAts until we are a corpse with no fetid flesh remaining for them to feast upon. Which is why we need to provide a life force strong enough to marginalize them, starting in November, which cannot get here soon enough for me, whatever the outcome. Because that outcome will have a major impact on what I, and I suspect millions of others, will do next. I hope our options will be positive. If not, we are looking at a black hole.
$$$ Control Politics Until It Doesn’t: French Revolution 2.0 American Style
It's time for a new Progressive Era, and WE the People need to get real about who our elected officials actually represent as exposed by This Will Hold substack(bit.ly/3TAilZ1).
In 2014, researchers Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University published a landmark study analyzing 1,779 U.S. policy decisions made between 1981 and 2002. Their findings should have woken up the country if we had a functioning MSM.
The researchers found that the policy preferences of American citizens had statistically near-zero independent impact on whether legislation was adopted. Instead, the preferences of economic elites and corporate business interests were most strongly associated with policy outcomes.
Everyone else benefited when their interests happened to coincide with those of the wealthy. Considering the impact Citizens United has had on the political landscape, if those researchers were to repeat their analysis using data from 2003 to the present, one might expect the influence of wealthy individuals and corporate interests to be even more pronounced than in the original study.
Cheeto didn’t win the election in 2016 or 2024. He was put in office by billionaires and foreign interests seeking to capitalize on his willingness to destroy the country for their mutual benefit while avoiding Epstein-related investigations and potential prison sentences.
And yet we still call ourselves a “representative” democracy. Representing $$$ not WE the People. The progressive movement is gaining steam and Tuesday when progressive El-Sayed wins after AIPAC put $30M on a Stevens bet, there will be a wake-up call to the political parties that it’s not business as usual. And AIPAC’s role becomes even more insidious when it’s reported by a whistleblower that Israel is implicated in manipulating the 2024 election results.
De-centralization is paramount to the success of the current acceleration of ending our democracy. We arrive here by lack of education, lack of healthcare , lack of affordable housing, and a populace consumed by social media...
The NO Kings rallies make little impact as the oligarchs bombard the populace with anti social changes all the while the "people" continue to become more anti-social at an alarming rate.
SO.... what to do ? FOCUS and BRAND on just three things. (Remember love, peace, and flowers?) We need LEADERS to gather together and tell us the "message". Keep it simple and only THREE THINGS. Then ORGANIZE your local community around the message. Only then can we have a 5 million march in one direction, in one place, and at one time that is meaningful. (sounds like union-fication to me!).
Ari,agree people becoming more anti-social at an alarming rate. It is evident every day. The Fascists have accomplished exactly what they have wanted to.Make everyone angry @ each other,maybe someday we'll wake up and discover we're being manipulated.
Well, "Down with the oligarchs," and all. But lately a kind of nagging question has been demanding room in my brain. Sure, we have seen the looting and pillaging of the middle class, and Reagan officiated over this. Bbut also, I can't stop wondering why Americans have allowed this to happen. We are powerless? Wat a minute. We are the workers, the ones who built the labor unions in the first place. They weren't handed to us. The captains of industry fought against union organization tooth and nail. Eventually, we had unionization shoved down their throats, but they never accepted it. So, why did we just sit by watching Sunday night football and let our hard won decent standard of living get eviscerated? Why didn't we, at the time, fight to preserve what is rightfully ours.? I have some theories about why, but for now, I am just going to propose that question and let it hang there. I wish people would contribute their ideas. Shea Foote @ Substack.com
"So, when Heritage issued its Project 2025-like “Mandate for Leadership” action plan for the Reagan administration in 1981, it carried an extensive section on how Reagan and Republicans across the nation could cripple the union movement."
So - intimations of Project 2025 go back as far as 1981 - Am I reading that correctly?
That's as far back as the D's had notice that something malignant was going to happen to the unionized workers of America. And they let it happen? WTF? Couldn't read any farther.
My father was a union man and his pension was whittled it away to less than barely livable half of what he thought by having it traded away with acquisitions and mergers. At the time I had no idea that this was a legal maneuver to sweeten the pot. We were sideswiped!
While the Republican party has been anti-union from its inception as the Northern party of industrialists, ironically as an anti-slavery coalition, the Dem party has been lukewarm, at best, on unions since at least the 70s. While unions were one of the main funders of Carter's candidacy in 1976, he was not a union supporter. With a Dem president and Dem control of both houses of Congress in 1979, a major bill to help unions and support organizing went down to ignominious defeat, with no help from Carter. And while it was Reagan who fired the air traffic controllers (despite PATCO being one of only two union shops to endorse him), it was Carter who ended negotiatons in 1980 and started setting up a plan to bust the union. Reagan simply carried out Carter's plan.
The anti slavery position of the industrialists wasn't ironic. It was based on pure self interest.
Southern textile manufactures and other industries had lower labor costs,or so they though, than those in the north.
Actually slavery is more expensive thanhiring workers at market wages.
Karl Marx chastised the editors of southern papers. He would write, free the slaves and hire them back at market wages.
The problem was that his partner FrederickEngels, had inherited a textile mill and southern cotton was too expensive, and he couldn't compete. thus he had to buy the cheaper and inferior Egyptian Cotton.
Marx was not intimately familiar with the southern psyche especially after the Nat Turner Rebellion, which resulted in black slave owning planters being re enslaved. South Carolina and Louisiana had planty of black slave owning planters.
All of this is true,all benefits the working class, blue and white collar, so what accounts for MAGA and the Republican base of farmers, and middle class;.
Question was rhetorical. Answer is the culture war, racism, sexism, patriarchalism, ignorance and cocommitent self acknowledgement which takes form in "owning the libs"
Because they are propagandized by and addicted to Faux Snooze - owned by one of the worst oligarchs.
All Rupert did was give them a voice, and a hallelujah chorus. Rupert didn't create them, they have been there all of the time, since the lst Great awakening in the 18th Century,. Every so often along comes something that enables them, gives them the courage to come out of the closet.
For instance the Civil War, the rise of the KKK and America first in the 1920's and 1930's, which was in some way a reaction to WWI.
In fact we are still living in a world, created by WWI. The bullshit in the MidEast, Communism, WWII, to cell phones, men on the moon, exploratio of Mars, all of it and more a consequence of WWI, the good and the bad.
William,you've got it.
This article forcefully articulates the reasons so many are fed up with neolib Democratic “leadership”, and why said leadership is so desperately hanging on. Getting money out of politics is critically important, but an underpaid, ill-educated populace is more than reluctant to fund the heart of campaign finance reform, and the Supreme Fascists are more than happy to maintain the roadblocks. The DSA’s time has come. Corporate Democrats know it, Repugnicans know it. It increasingly appears the serfs have figured it out, as witness the repeated failure of both to destroy the candidates of the opposition.
The DSA would be poised for growth, if not for opposition from the DNC. For a brief moment the DNC was the liberal side of the Dem party, with Clinton's DLC the conservative, corporate, money-grubbing right wing of the party. But the DNC is now just the DLC all grown up.
One of the curious aspects of the evaporation of union influence is, until recently, the evaporation of citizen action to demand change from its politicians. Too often since Reagan, people have volunteered in my presence that "Oh, I don't pay much attention to politics. What's the point?" It is hard not to view such remarks as resignation (if not assignation) to the status quo - or likely an expression of feeling powerless. I have often repeated that our culture seems to have accepted that rich people know best - that if you are not super rich, then you do not deserve to tell me what to do, where to live, how much to get paid, etc.
-----------
It is hard for me not to think of PATCO as the last act of defiance to the wealthy political elites of our era. Ironic, I was asked to manage a new lab at FAA to try to help it get back on its post-PATCO-strike feet. After 9 years, FAA was back on its feet according to my annual employee surveys, but then along came Trump 2.0 and the chainsaw of the smartest man in the world. Now aviation crashes and near misses are becoming common again. Oh, and government employee surveys are now dead unless conducted by Trump toadies.
The FAA has never really gotten "back on its feet." In 1981 there were 17,500 air traffic controllers, 13,000 of which were PATCO members and 11, 375 who were fired. Today there are about 11,000 certified controllers and 4,000 trainees. They have not had many major disasters largely because of improved radar and other technological enhancements which, ironically, was the major contract demand that PATCO was fighting for and which the Carter administration was slow-walking.
Air Traffic Controller is the most stressful job in the world, in a busy airport, it is a miracle that there aren't aluminum rain showers daily.
Tru dat.
Two things from Copilot Search make sense to me:
"Public support for unions is at its highest since 1965, with 67% of Americans approving and 75% of those under 35"
"Generational shift: Younger workers show less loyalty to employers and more willingness to challenge poor conditions"
This is very much a part of the Democratic Socialist movement. We need to disengage health care from the workplace---time for single payer. Mental health in this country must be a priority as well, and the youth of this nation know that too. Crazy people are running the world. Let's get healthy; unions help us fight back. See you in the street.
Part of the problem is that many people view politics as dirty, and don't want to get involved; I used to feel that way, but now, increasingly, every day, realize that somebody has got to take charge of our government and how it treats us. For that job, it takes someone with passion and a thick skin, because there will always be special interests trying to get their share - and maybe more.
I cleaned downtown streets at night when I was in college. Now, there was a dirty job - but someone had to do it. Thinking back on that experience made a connection for me.
So at least you have some public service experience. Unlike many of the top admins in the tRump mafia.
I did not vote from 1968 to 2016, because I saw that the two parties were merely the obverse and reverse of the same coin., events since Jan 2025 have reinforced that opinion, not at the voter level, but at the "leadership" level
Great report. We have to keep hammering on rebuilding the union movement!
In 1971, as a teenager, I made a union supermarket hourly wage of $7.48 as a part-time cash department head while friends in construction were making $2.00 per hour. I don't know what that wage would translate to in today's dollars, but it has to be a great amount. Unions made a great difference and Ray-gun screwed us all in his dementias terms in office.
Proud union member here for over 45 years - the American Guild of Musical Artists, affiliated with the AFL-CIO.
An earlier version of the PRO ACT was the Employee Free Choice Act, which Obama promised to push through when campaigning for his first term. Unfortunately it was left on the back burner and never promoted by the Obama administration as it sought bipartisan support for the various draft versions of what became the Affordable Care Act. We wasted Democratic control of both houses while seeking bi-partisan support, got a watered down healthcare act that didn't even include the public option component and unions got no administration support for the Employee Free Choice Act. In the end the Republicans voted against the watered down Affordable Care Act anyway.
All true, Thom. But unless something I don't see happens, it won't matter. The people who need to read what your write will not. If they do, they will not care about the facts, irrefutable though they are. They vote their guts, large, overfull with unhealthy food and booze. Their addled brains are garbage cans of insecurity, bigotry, arrogant ignorance, a totally undeserved sense of entitlement, a hatred of all who by dint of talent or hard work have done better in life than they have.
They will continue as MAGAts until we are a corpse with no fetid flesh remaining for them to feast upon. Which is why we need to provide a life force strong enough to marginalize them, starting in November, which cannot get here soon enough for me, whatever the outcome. Because that outcome will have a major impact on what I, and I suspect millions of others, will do next. I hope our options will be positive. If not, we are looking at a black hole.
$$$ Control Politics Until It Doesn’t: French Revolution 2.0 American Style
It's time for a new Progressive Era, and WE the People need to get real about who our elected officials actually represent as exposed by This Will Hold substack(bit.ly/3TAilZ1).
In 2014, researchers Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University published a landmark study analyzing 1,779 U.S. policy decisions made between 1981 and 2002. Their findings should have woken up the country if we had a functioning MSM.
The researchers found that the policy preferences of American citizens had statistically near-zero independent impact on whether legislation was adopted. Instead, the preferences of economic elites and corporate business interests were most strongly associated with policy outcomes.
Everyone else benefited when their interests happened to coincide with those of the wealthy. Considering the impact Citizens United has had on the political landscape, if those researchers were to repeat their analysis using data from 2003 to the present, one might expect the influence of wealthy individuals and corporate interests to be even more pronounced than in the original study.
Cheeto didn’t win the election in 2016 or 2024. He was put in office by billionaires and foreign interests seeking to capitalize on his willingness to destroy the country for their mutual benefit while avoiding Epstein-related investigations and potential prison sentences.
And yet we still call ourselves a “representative” democracy. Representing $$$ not WE the People. The progressive movement is gaining steam and Tuesday when progressive El-Sayed wins after AIPAC put $30M on a Stevens bet, there will be a wake-up call to the political parties that it’s not business as usual. And AIPAC’s role becomes even more insidious when it’s reported by a whistleblower that Israel is implicated in manipulating the 2024 election results.
I wish more people read the Gilens book.
De-centralization is paramount to the success of the current acceleration of ending our democracy. We arrive here by lack of education, lack of healthcare , lack of affordable housing, and a populace consumed by social media...
The NO Kings rallies make little impact as the oligarchs bombard the populace with anti social changes all the while the "people" continue to become more anti-social at an alarming rate.
SO.... what to do ? FOCUS and BRAND on just three things. (Remember love, peace, and flowers?) We need LEADERS to gather together and tell us the "message". Keep it simple and only THREE THINGS. Then ORGANIZE your local community around the message. Only then can we have a 5 million march in one direction, in one place, and at one time that is meaningful. (sounds like union-fication to me!).
Ari,agree people becoming more anti-social at an alarming rate. It is evident every day. The Fascists have accomplished exactly what they have wanted to.Make everyone angry @ each other,maybe someday we'll wake up and discover we're being manipulated.
Well, "Down with the oligarchs," and all. But lately a kind of nagging question has been demanding room in my brain. Sure, we have seen the looting and pillaging of the middle class, and Reagan officiated over this. Bbut also, I can't stop wondering why Americans have allowed this to happen. We are powerless? Wat a minute. We are the workers, the ones who built the labor unions in the first place. They weren't handed to us. The captains of industry fought against union organization tooth and nail. Eventually, we had unionization shoved down their throats, but they never accepted it. So, why did we just sit by watching Sunday night football and let our hard won decent standard of living get eviscerated? Why didn't we, at the time, fight to preserve what is rightfully ours.? I have some theories about why, but for now, I am just going to propose that question and let it hang there. I wish people would contribute their ideas. Shea Foote @ Substack.com
"So, when Heritage issued its Project 2025-like “Mandate for Leadership” action plan for the Reagan administration in 1981, it carried an extensive section on how Reagan and Republicans across the nation could cripple the union movement."
So - intimations of Project 2025 go back as far as 1981 - Am I reading that correctly?
That's as far back as the D's had notice that something malignant was going to happen to the unionized workers of America. And they let it happen? WTF? Couldn't read any farther.
My father was a union man and his pension was whittled it away to less than barely livable half of what he thought by having it traded away with acquisitions and mergers. At the time I had no idea that this was a legal maneuver to sweeten the pot. We were sideswiped!
While the Republican party has been anti-union from its inception as the Northern party of industrialists, ironically as an anti-slavery coalition, the Dem party has been lukewarm, at best, on unions since at least the 70s. While unions were one of the main funders of Carter's candidacy in 1976, he was not a union supporter. With a Dem president and Dem control of both houses of Congress in 1979, a major bill to help unions and support organizing went down to ignominious defeat, with no help from Carter. And while it was Reagan who fired the air traffic controllers (despite PATCO being one of only two union shops to endorse him), it was Carter who ended negotiatons in 1980 and started setting up a plan to bust the union. Reagan simply carried out Carter's plan.
The anti slavery position of the industrialists wasn't ironic. It was based on pure self interest.
Southern textile manufactures and other industries had lower labor costs,or so they though, than those in the north.
Actually slavery is more expensive thanhiring workers at market wages.
Karl Marx chastised the editors of southern papers. He would write, free the slaves and hire them back at market wages.
The problem was that his partner FrederickEngels, had inherited a textile mill and southern cotton was too expensive, and he couldn't compete. thus he had to buy the cheaper and inferior Egyptian Cotton.
Marx was not intimately familiar with the southern psyche especially after the Nat Turner Rebellion, which resulted in black slave owning planters being re enslaved. South Carolina and Louisiana had planty of black slave owning planters.