Donald Trump's pecuniary presidency

In what amounts to a lament about the apparent shallowness of the California gubernatorial campaign, former Obama functionary Ben Rhodes reminds that the constitutional authors predicted our current national predicament.  

Benjamin Franklin portrait

The closing argument at the Constitutional Convention came from Benjamin Franklin. His speech defended the virtue of compromise itself. In it, he implored the delegates to rally behind an imperfect document as the best possible result. 

He also offered a warning. The new government “can only end in Despotism, as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

That hits awfully close to home. Old Ben had our number. We find ourselves confronted by a choice between accepting the flamboyant thievery of Donald Trump's regime or showing the character to seize the reins of power to construck something closer to opportunity and justice for us all.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has wise words to describe our predicament.

... what manner of presidency has Trump devised for himself?

You could call it the pecuniary presidency, a presidency not devoted to the public good or to the preservation of the Union or even to some narrow ideological crusade, but to the quest for personal enrichment. A presidency devoted to the aggrandizement of a single person, not to satisfy a grand design for the nation but to squeeze a few million here and a few billion there out of the public coffers for your own benefit.

This isn’t the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement. It is petty theft. It’s stealing from the Treasury and using your authority, enhanced by the baroque theories of your allies on the Supreme Court, to make yourself unaccountable. It is government as protection racket and the president as mob boss (a role that Trump has clearly embraced).

The pecuniary presidency is a new frontier in the history of the office, the culmination of all that was dangerous about the vast concentration of power in a singular executive — “in all governments in which there is sown the seed of the rule of one man, no checks, no bars can prevent its growing into a monarchy or a despotism if the empire is extensive,” warned “a Maryland farmer” in the spring of 1788, on the eve of ratification — and the particular project of a particular man whose lust for gold rivals that of Cortés. ...

The founding generation knew that greed for gold might overthrow their handiwork. The country has seen this again and again, as when the great wealth of Southern planters provided a justification for human slavery and the great wealth of industrial capitalists undergirded the immiseration of working people for profit. Again and again, the mass of people had fought back, insisting we can be better than this. 

Donald is just an ordinary crook, robbing us every which way. The challenge of the moment is whether the majority of us can find the civic virtue to reform a system which makes rule by such a con man possible?

Donald Trump's travel posters

I thought you might be interested in one of the things the Trump Department of Homeland Security is doing with the $170 billion of our taxes a moribund Republican Congress has forked over to Trump's immigration thugs.

 

DHS wants their prey -- undocumented migrants but really anyone who has not jumped all the hoops to achieve citizenship -- to know that, if they come in voluntarily, they can get shipped away and get $2600.

 

I don't know if they actually pay what they promise. Nor do I suspect these tourist scenes are much like where folks come from, but what do I know?

These are just ordinary people, doing their best

If you follow the suggestion I am about to make and read what some of the people I've just encountered have to say for themselves, you may not immediately warm to them. But you might find the experience instructive, as I did. The country is in such straits under the Trump regime, it's important to learn we can become unlikely allies and maybe friends.

Rich Logis left MAGA and he created a community with others to share their experiences of detaching from the Trump cult. He calls it Leaving MAGA. Here are a couple of testimonies from among dozens:

Michael Sirback: I was born and raised in a small, Republican town in Ohio; I still live there today. I had a pretty good childhood. When it came to politics, my parents didn’t really talk about it much as I was growing up in the 90s.

My family started discussing politics in 2015, when I was in my early 20s. My parents had voted for Barack Obama, but they were drawn to Donald Trump on cultural issues. They saw him as a guy who was going to end gay marriage and transgender rights.

... Still, I just wasn’t interested in politics. I didn’t even register to vote in 2016, although I was hoping Trump would win. After he became president, I started paying a bit more attention. 

... My feelings started to seriously change around the beginning of 2024, thanks in large part to the fact that I am dating Shey, a woman from the Philippines. My relationship with her opened my eyes to how much damage Trump is doing when it comes to immigrants. When Trump ran for president this time, his campaign was nothing but non-stop fear-mongering and hatred towards immigrants, with all its rhetoric about them being rapists, murderers, and the like. ...

... With Trump, only White Christian Nationalists will get treated with decency. That really worries me.

I now believe the Jan. 6 attack was completely unacceptable, a big attack on our democracy. I’m still hoping Trump is held accountable for it, but I have a hard time believing he will be.

Looking back, I see how much disinformation there was about the pandemic. I’ve evolved with regards to women’s rights, as well. I was always pro-life to the core, but now I believe that a woman should make her own decisions, that it’s not my place to tell a woman what to do with her body.

Watching Trump lie about hurricane disaster relief money going to undocumented immigrants, and lying about Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, just reinforced my feelings. I now know that he would much rather tell a lie than admit to being wrong about anything. ...

• • •

PattyAnn Giles: I was born and raised in Connellsville, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was the 1960s; my parents were JFK Democrats: pro-life, culturally conservative. My dad was a big union guy; he worked for West Penn Power. My mom was an administrative secretary for a local hospital. ...

I started paying attention to politics when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980. I liked his message, and my dad and I got into it a couple of times over Reagan. I remember asking my dad, “Can you explain to me how you’re pro-life and you support the Democratic Party?” He said, “Well, the Democrats aren’t forcing women to abort. I’m personally against abortion and I would try to talk someone out of it, but I’m not going to be a single-issue voter.”

... A huge influence on my politics came through my becoming a born-again Pentecostal Christian when I was 17. I had a friend in that branch of the church, and she told me Catholics aren’t real Christians. ...

That evangelical message coordinated very well with Reaganism. It became a spiritual journey for me. It reinforced for me that I needed to support the Republican Party, because I saw the Democratic Party as amoral, too secular. I thought if the country were more in line with Christian values, we’d be better off.

I would go to Republican rallies and it would feel like an old-time tent revival. I felt a real fervor; it was very exciting.

I got married in 1988 and moved to northern Virginia. I became a Licensed Practical Nurse. I was still a conservative evangelical, and I got involved with some local Republican groups. I was a delegate in 1994 to the state GOP convention in Richmond as a supporter of Oliver North for US Senate. I was a member of the Republican Women’s Committee, and I worked on some local campaigns. 

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, I thought, “How could anybody support this guy? He’s slimy. He cheats on his wife.” I thought he was a sexual predator, and so wasn’t morally fit to serve as president.

... Around 2003, when I got divorced, I found myself moving away from the evangelical movement. I still had those basic values, but I was noticing things going on in the church that made me uncomfortable. I started hearing about sexual abuse. ...

The next important chapter in my political development came around 2012. My kids were coming of age, and I had friends whose kids were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and terrible injuries.  ...

I started to think, like a lot of leftists, that the wars were just to enrich the weapons industry, and that the Iraq invasion was just the result of a Bush family vendetta against Saddam Hussein. I soured on the hawkish, neocon wing of the Republican party.

You can see how this tracks logically. By this point I’m saying to myself, “Both parties suck. They’re elitist, they’re working for their millionaire donors, they’re giving us a load of crap.”

Then in 2015 Trump came along. He had an anti-establishment message, and I was mad at the establishment. He wasn’t my first pick, but after he won the Republican primary I got behind him. He struck me as kind of creepy, crass, with a lot of bluster. ...

... I got more and more excited about Trump. I liked that he wasn’t beholden to big donors. He was paying for his own campaign. I liked that he talked tough, that he said patriotic things. I liked his America First anti-war message, that we needed to get out of all these expensive wars. I liked that he was saying, “I’m a rich guy, I have access, I know who the crooks are in DC, I’m going to expose them, we’re going to get rid of them, we’re going to hold them accountable, we’re going to be more transparent.” ...

... Over the next months, I didn’t like that he was playing footsie with dictators and autocrats. I thought, “What is going on here? You act like you want to date them. You said you were going to be tough on this kind of stuff. Where’s this coming from?” So my balloon started to deflate a little.

More credible information emerged in 2017 and 2018 about Trump molesting women, how he talked creepily about his daughter, and walked in on beauty pageant contestants while they were getting dressed. I’m a victim of rape; it seriously traumatized me. And it traumatizes me to hear how powerful men get away with this kind of stuff. 

I was still within the tolerable spectrum in terms of my support for Trump and MAGA, but I was starting to get a bad taste in my mouth. 

... Trump’s whole “stop the steal” campaign, his nonsense about the election being stolen because of widespread voter fraud, the January 6 coup attempt, and subsequent reports about how there was a coordinated plan to overturn the election, were the final nail in the coffin for me. I officially walked away from MAGA in 2021.

Then I asked myself, “In what other ways have I been lied to?” I started digging deeper, and I started to learn a lot. ...

The site provides dozens more of these stories of MAGAs who changed their minds. They are us, coming from different lives.

Never give up!

Ruth López committed no crime: she has been imprisoned for an entire year for exposing corruption in El Salvador without any kind of legal process. Her friends at Cristosal ask that we ensure she is remembered -- that the Bukele regime cannot simply disappear this champion for justice. 

Pass it on: We continue demanding #FreedomForRuth and a #PublicTrialForRuth.  #FreeRuth

Marching for hope and a future

Yesterday thousands of Alabamians and friends from all over marched in Selma in support of a "National Day of Action for Voting Rights - All Roads to Lead to the South." The Supreme Court has decreed that racist white politicians can rig elections so NO Black politicians can have chance to represent their communities anywhere that white Republicans control state legislatures. That's just fine, say the infamous black robed six. No more Voting Rights Act in practice. No, this is not fine. Too many people have fought and died for the right to a meaningful vote.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson recounts the struggle to win voting rights for all people in 1960s which culminated in Alabama.

Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

... Selma voting rights activist Amelia Boynton invited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to draw national attention to its struggle, and he and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965. For seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.

 Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

On March 15, President Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

Under the protection of federal troops, the Selma marchers completed their trip to Montgomery on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

A bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 77–19 in the Senate and 333–85 in the House. Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6....

Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

The photos included here come from a wonderful photo gallery at the Tuscaloosa AL news site. It's well worth your time.

• • • 

I'm old enough so that the deadly SNCC Mississippi Summer project the year before, the Alabama voting rights campaign, and the Selma march over the bridge are part of my personal memories. A white teenager in a GOP household in Buffalo, NY, could follow the civil rights struggle in newspapers and short TV news broadcasts. I remember being mesmerized by the righteousness and bravery of the marchers.

And I was not as alone in that, as many white teenagers might be today. The private girls high school I attended had never had any Black students until my senior year; I bet the powers that be looked far and wide for the one shy girl who integrated that culturally rigid white place. She was enough younger that I never got a sense of how it turned out for her. 

But I do know that my graduating class were moved by the events of our time. It was the custom that each graduating class collect a sum of money to donate to the school toward something we thought would make the place better. We took a vote, all sixty-some of us, and made a plan. I was part of a delegation that went to the head of the school to present our plan: we wanted our class gift to begin to fund a scholarship fund for Black students. We more or less thought the school was a good place and we should share it.

As I remember, the principal seemed aghast. He was probably correct, even then, that there were legal impediments to such a racially conscious fund. I don't remember what we ended up doing for a class gift.

But in the mid-60s, it was possible for white teenagers to feel something in the wind, to identify with changing times. Can we again find that hope for a better, more just, more equitable country? There's nothing else to do ...

A war in which everyone loses

From 1996 until 2005, Christopher de Bellaigue was a foreign correspondent for The Economist, first in Turkey and then in Iran. He draws on his experience of living under the Iranian mullahs' regime and his continuing connections in the country to try to put the current US and Israeli war in perspective in the New York Review of Books: Iran's New Winter. [gift link]. 

The result is pensive and sobering. This seems a war in which everyone loses, most especially ordinary citizens of Iran.

... Iran gained prestige around the world by defying its exponentially more powerful foes and not merely surviving the assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other military and civilian leaders but using them to inspire loyalists.…

As long as the country remains on high alert and public discourse is dominated by warnings of spies, sabotage, and treachery, the opposition will struggle to reemerge. War breeds tyrants.

I can't help wondering whether that conclusion might also hold true for the USofA.

In an email from the NYRB introducing de Bellaigue's piece, the author reflects:

... I think one should pull back from the minutiae of what’s happening day-to-day and consider the balance of forces in the longer term. The Iranian regime was, if not on the ropes, then in very serious trouble as recently as January, when, amid a terrible economic situation with an eviscerated middle class, a large proportion of the population—disgruntled, unhappy, insurrectionary, revolutionary—came out to protest on the streets. 

The regime’s reflexive exercise of force was a big message: we’re ready to kill thousands of our own citizens. In fact, we don’t really regard them as our own citizens but, essentially, enemy combatants in our midst. They killed thousands of Iranians and left tens of thousands more bereft, which in the end cost them even more credibility, in particular among Iranians who had otherwise been unsure where they stood on the question of regime change. There was a crisis of ever-straitening economic circumstances, terrible violence, and an ever-more unhappy population. 

Back in January it seemed there was only one way this was going to go: disaster for the regime and possibly for the populace. 

But then the war started, and it returned to the regime a lot of the legitimacy it had lost. The very government that had slaughtered its citizens in the streets was now, it seemed, heroically defending the country against the most powerful militaries in the world, and with very little in the way of advanced military hardware. And they were doing so with extraordinary bravery, dedication, and ingenuity. 

There have been two important moments in the war so far. The first was when Ayatollah Khamenei was killed. Many Iranians were pleased with that; they had wanted him to be taken out in part because they thought the regime, once decapitated, couldn’t survive. 

But then almost exactly at the same time, American bombs obliterated a girls’ school. Trump blustered and lied and displayed himself in the worst possible light ...

Iranian citizens certainly could not feel that anyone was coming to rescue them.

So the moral argument that the United States and Israel were making for regime change is dubious at best. Iranians who had wanted regime change at any cost now came to see how horrible the cost could be. They don’t want insecurity, and they no longer want, for example, the police to be disbanded because, during wartime, some force needs to prevent looting and rioting and chaos. 

The other surprising outcome was how little Khamenei’s death mattered. I lived in Iran for years, and have been writing about it even longer, and I was sure that after Khamenei’s death, power would be up for grabs. But in fact, the regime has rallied, and whatever complexities there are in the decision-making system that is now in place—and we really don’t know much about it—it has been functioning. ...

The Middle East is in a state of great flux. That sense of imperviousness and safety that the principalities and sheikhdoms on the southern coast of the Persian Gulf enjoyed for many, many years—and that they employed to offer themselves as safe havens for investment—is now in doubt. From that perspective, Iran is in a strong position. 

Where Iran remains weak is that the economy is getting worse, so dissatisfaction will return. How that will manifest is difficult to say because it is now comprehensively a security state. There is zero tolerance for political disobedience.

I just spoke to someone in Iran today—I got a call from an Italian number, which is the convoluted way Iranians have to make international calls now, through VPNs and rerouting and such workarounds. Anyway, it was an elderly woman calling to express her condolences because my father recently died. This is a typically Iranian thing to do in a time of extraordinary stress: to think of other people, to think about their moment of loss. 

But then she said to me, Everything’s been worse since Mr. Khamenei died. And this was someone who’d been praying for the end of the Islamic Republic and for the demise of Khamanei. Now that he’s dead, people are wondering if he was in fact a restraining influence on the regime. ... 

Americans are perhaps less confused than Iranians at the strange moment. Fully seventy percent of us view this as Donald Trump's war of choice, foolish, deadly, even evil, all at once. And now the Orange Toddler can't figure how to back out of it and we all live with the consequences.

Generational transition now!

Well, here's one way it happens: 

Since the start of the [current] 119th Congress, five members of the House—four Democrats and one Republican—have died. Several others have missed significant periods of work because of illnesses that either remain mysterious or have been revealed by the president as being quite serious.

In recent history, the deadliest session of Congress was the 117th, which took place in 2021–2023, when seven lawmakers died. With five deaths among the ranks, the 119th Congress is among the deadliest since then; the 115th Congress also had five deaths during its two-year span.

According to an analysis from Slate, 16 lawmakers have died in office in the past decade, which is greater than any stretch of three consecutive Congresses since the new millennium.

Replacement by mortality seems an extreme way to achieve generational transition. 

Congress is old. The nation is in general not young; our median age is about 40, half younger, half older. Perhaps that's why we seem to have an enduring tolerance for politicians who have long reached their sell-by date. 

Congresscritters of both parties take extended absences for health reasons. Republican Tom Kean Jr. who apparently has been absent for months is only 57. Maybe he's got a good excuse, but he's not saying. Meanwhile "Representative Frederica S. Wilson, 83, a Florida Democrat, has been absent from the Capitol for over a month." Apparently she had an eye ailment and apparently she is running for reelection.  Despite Florida redistricting which favors Republicans, her Miami district remains a safe D seat, so expect her to be around for awhile.

Re-electing an 83 year old doesn't suggest dynamism. I'm grateful my Congresscritter Nancy Pelosi, 86, has decided to hang it up. Over her many years in office, I'd describe her as growing in wisdom. 

Despite the impression one gets that Congress is stuffed with old people, the tilt toward the old has very slightly moderated in the last four years.  The Pew Research Center reports:

The median age of voting members of the House of Representatives is now 57.5 years. That’s down from 57.9 at the start of the 118th Congress (2023-25), 58.9 in the 117th Congress (2021-23), 58.0 in the 116th (2019-21) and 58.4 in the 115th (2017-19).

The Senate, following the death or retirement of some of its oldest members, has reversed its aging trend. The new Senate’s median age is 64.7 years, down from 65.3 at the start of the previous Congress. The median age of the Senate had previously risen for three Congresses in a row: from 62.4 (115th) to 63.6 (116th), to 64.8 (117th) and to 65.3 (118th).

I'm a boomer, but I'm well aware that the time for the political dominance of my generation is so over. Last year New York Times Opinion published this delicious jeremiad against our monopolization of the power and wealth. I can't figure out how to embed the video here, but click this link for an experience. 

Enjoy.

All hands out for democracy!

The Movement Voter Project passes along this graphic which illustrates a blunt truth: if you really want to help a candidate or campaign by donating money, the earlier you give, the more your contribution helps. 

Our money, even tiny sums, does much more for candidates and causes we support when we give in June than when we join the last minute rush in October. 

Oh, they'll keep asking all the way until election day in November. But, once primary elections are completed, this is the time when our cash enables campaigns to turn a trickle of interest into a torrent of support.  

If you are going to give any candidate cash for their campaign, do it now!

And then, when we get to the fall, do more later. Those of us whose small donations may feel like nothing can help campaigns directly with voter contact, whether in person or on phones. 

Democracy is not a spectator sport. 

• • •

Here's an assessment of where US democracy stands since the Supremes did their bit to break the coming elections. From Democratic Party stalwart Simon Rosenberg:

... what the Rs have found is a way to steal more Congressional seats, giving them a brief respite from the unrelenting bad news and terrible polling data; but the overall political landscape has gotten far worse for them in recent weeks. 

Trump’s war has failed, and he and America are far weaker today; his tariffs were declared illegal (again); the new inflation data was much worse than expected, and the chance of inflation returning to a comfortable place before the election has become very, very unlikely; the damage from their health care cuts are starting to be felt far more acutely; their close, vital ally Orban fell, and Magyar has become a new potent global symbol of democracy; like Trump’s war Putin’s war is failing too, further weakening the Putin-Trump-MAGA political project...

Trump’s poll numbers keep dropping, we keep winning elections and overperforming everywhere; and we could very well flip two Supreme Court seats in Georgia on Tuesday, something that will be rightly seen as a powerful rebuke of the corruption of the courts by Trump, Roberts and their allies.

It is also critical that we see the right’s spasm of racist gerrymandering as a sign of weakness, desperation, and fear, not strength and confidence. They are scared of the American people and of us.

As they should be, for these MAGAs have done more harm to the country and to our democracy than perhaps any other political leaders in our history, and the American people are right to be pissed, highly motivated to vote and throw them out of office.

Despite their illicit gaming of our electoral system Democrats are still favored to win the House, perhaps by not the same margins, and the Senate is still very much in play.

 We knew taking power away from Trump and the Rs this year would be hard so what is happening now is nothing new. We must stay resolute and determined, and keep working as hard as we can. 

This remains a year of extraordinary opportunity for us, one where we can expand our maps and win in red places and red states where we have not been regularly competitive in many, many years….

My emphasis. I think this is more than spin, though watching southern racist whites crow about getting rid of the Black members in Congress is rage inducing. It's  on all of us to work harder. We know we can have a better country if we make it.

Robber barons better look out

Karen Attiah is done with being anyone's good girl. The journalist from Texas was something of a rising star at the Washington Post, before Jeff Bezos decided to rein in "his" writers. She led the newspaper's Global Opinions section. She wrote her own opinion pieces about race, gender, culture, human rights -- the stuff that disquiets billionaire boys. She was fired for, perhaps among other causes, not being properly respectful about the murder of right wing agitator Charlie Kirk, condemning the crime, but posting on BlueSky: "Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence." Seems merely accurate to me, but apparently too much for her boss. There are lawsuits ...

The Met Gala was one of her beats -- beautiful people performing varieties of beauty for charity and ego gratification. On her Substack, she lets loose on that scene, now sponsored by Bezos.

... Beauty is necessary for evil. Art has always been a way for extraordinary wealth and destructive power to justify their existence. 

When we marvel at the riches of Europe, the wealth in its museums, the jewels in castles and the Vatican, that beauty could not have existed without the ruthless exploitation of the poor, and of Europe’s colonies abroad. The beauty of many lifesaving medical treatments and scientific achievements emerged from the exploitation of wars, of grotesque medical experiments on prisoners and colonized peoples.

In many ways, today’s tech titans are no different from the colonial masters of the past. Wealth and power romanticized and fetishized the cultures they have ruthlessly extracted from, while destroying the people. 

We’d like to think that the old colonial ways of enslavement and invading territories for natural resources were in the past. 

No, the ugliness of extraction has just evolved— under the sparkle of “innovation”. In just 30 or so years, our new tech colonial masters have learned how to mine our desires, personal data, thoughts, messages, and creativity. They are trying their hardest to replace humans with AI or robots, and calling that progress. 

Their exploitation has expanded from those we deem to be of the lower class, and has expanded to forcing their soullessness on journalism, on fashion, and on art. Soulless tech money is now not just dirty, robber baron money in no small part because their technology is an existential threat to (relatively) privileged writers and thinkers like me.

But unlike the colonial masters of the past, these tech titans have the power to manipulate our digital realities through elegantly coded changes to the algorithm. American power means we prefer frictionless ease and the convenience of consumption. But ultimately, we are the ones being consumed.

What these male tech architects are designing is far more potent than haute couture. They have taken our data, our thoughts, our attention, our creativity, and the most finite of resources, our earthly time. With these precious elements, they are redesigning our habits, our work culture, our relationships, our incomes—and yes, our psychological reality itself.

A future in which many of us become digital sharecroppers is something to fear. There are very few legal mechanisms for accountability for algorithmic harm. There is no universal basic income to support those who are being forced out of work by unimaginative bosses who wish to impose AI to replace jobs.

We are headed to a future in which it will be a privilege to work with humans. ...

 Now there's a terrifying picture of the future, one which is not the only way to envision where we are going, but certainly a possible way. I am grateful for Attiah's incisive courage. I am grateful for her rage.

A call to action, especially to white Americans

Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill's newsletter makes a clear call to us all. Republicans seek to drive the diverse majority which we are on the way to becoming out of public life. That's what the current redistricting push to make southern congressional delegations all white amounts to. Voters will lose their options and their power. It all starts with disenfranchising Black Americans, as it always has.

When Trump decided to name his movement “Make America Great Again,” many of us immediately understood the nature of the appeal. White supremacy in this country has always been a nostalgic ideology built on the premise of a great past when Black people knew their place, when white people were assured the guarantee of prominence in public life, and could count on being the beneficiaries of the spoils of government policies and programs. 

What white supremacy promises its adherents is a life without challenge - the right to be free of competition and judgment, the right to be shielded from new ways of thinking, to be insulated from diverse cultural practices that challenge their hegemony. White supremacy offers the false narrative of superiority. You see it in every facial tick, every desperate boast and sad outburst of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose fast-talking insults and tirades are designed to distract from his incompetence. His purge of Black and women leaders in the military is a textbook white supremacy move. The field of competition must be artificially restricted to keep competition narrow and culturally constrained, so that whiteness itself can become proof of competence. 

The myth of white supremacy can only flourish when Black achievement is out of sight and out of mind. ... 

But the deal offered by white supremacy has always been at the cost of democracy in this country. 

... No democracy can survive if tens of millions of its citizens refuse to fight to protect it because they “don’t do politics.” 

If you think that the Republican plan to strip Black voters in the South of congressional representation is not your problem because you are white, or because you don’t live in the South, then you have accepted the end of democracy in this country. Are you really prepared to watch as your fellow citizens are disenfranchised in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama? 

... Whatever (non-violent) actions you can undertake, now is the time to engage. This is not happening to someone else, to some other community, to some other Americans. This is happening ot all of us. They have made their goals clear. Now it’s time for us to be as clear and unequivocal about ours while we still can. 

Read the whole thing.  And vote. And let's harass our electeds to make whatever structural reforms to the system that are required to make democracy work for all of us ...