Doom Report (Week 43: Atlas Shrugged ... Then He Went Ahead and Paid His Damn Taxes)

If there was ever any question that the Democratic Party could take any amount of headway, no matter how huge, and still manage to shoot themselves in the dick, the Democrats in the Senate answered it definitively this week.  Eight Democratic senators (well, 7 plus Independent Angus King) voted to roll over and show their bellies to the Trump regime, which promptly kicked them in the guts.  They gave the Repubs everything they wanted and got nothing in return.  Now, by amazing coincidence, every single one of these 8 senators are either not up for re-election next year or are flat-out retiring.  Totally weird how it just happened to turn out that way.  Meanwhile, supposed minority “leader” Chuck Shumer got to claim that he was totally opposed to the whole thing; he’s also not up for re-election next year, but he likely needs the cover to hold on to his leadership position.  I’m not sure that’s gonna work, but I’ve moved well beyond expecting anything but failure from the majority of the current Dems.

Probably the best evaulation of this debacle was from Even More News’s Tuesday episode, including the assesment that Shumer is either in on it (and therefore lying) or too incompetent to do his job: either way, he needs to get gone.  For a shorter take, Adam Kinzinger opines on whether or not the Democrats caved (spoiler alert: yes.  yes, they did).  If you want to know how I feel about it, as a progressive who is definitely not a Democrat, I think this week’s Armageddon Update sums it up better than I ever could.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Another pretty good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• Strict Scrutiny tells us why it won’t mean much if the Supreme Court finally says “no” to Trump on tariffs.

• Some More News examines Trump’s weird meme war, as well as exposing the whole “antifa” ridiculousness.

• On the Daily Show, Josh Johnson examines the depths of Trump’s current fumblings, from 50-year mortgages to $2,000 tariff rebates to attempts to end the affordability crisis by putting his fingers in his ears and yelling “LA LA LA!” at the top of his lungs.

• In another brilliant “In My Opinion” appearnace on The Daily Show, Nick Offerman explains how Trump hates farmers.  Offerman is quickly emerging as the greatest “In My Opinion” contributor outside Charlamagne tha God (and may even be giving him a run for his money).

• I didn’t much mention the whole Epstein files thing, because I refuse to believe anything will stick to ol’ Teflon Don, but, if you need a decent breakdown, Devon over at Legal Eagle has got you covered.

This week’s bright spot, in my opinion, was Jon Stewart interviewing Lina Khan on The Weekly Show.  Khan, who is one of the smartest people in the progressive movement today, gained fame as Biden’s head of the FTC, and is now going to be part of Mamdani’s transition team.  Always a great interview, she and Jon play off each other well and have some great moments.  The only place I disagreed with Jon was when he was asking about how real the threat that all the billionaires would move out of New York was, and he said this:

... because we all know capital can travel; labor can’t.  It’s one of the advantages capital has, and we saw that with globalization.

Now, this is a super common argument: if you tax rich people, they’ll just leave—it’s the entire plot of Atlas Shrugged.  Of course, the majority of these arguments are coming from the rich people themselves, which makes them a bit suspect.  Gary Stevenson has debunked this fallacy several times; here’s a particularly articulate example:

And this is relevant to the idea of “if you tax them they’ll leave,” because, if you try and tax a working person, like a doctor or a lawyer or a Youtuber, then that person can very often move to Dubai or move to Singapore, and they can do their job in the other country; they can pay tax in the other country, which might be at a lower rate: they can avoid the tax.  If we’re talking about taxing billionaires, billionaires, they don’t make their money from their work: they get their money from owning assets.  And assets means property, assets means land, assets means natural resources, assets means government debt, it means your mortgage, it means businesses that sell to the West.  These guys they own largely property and debt—I think one way to think about it is, if I have an asset, I get a passive income: where does that income come from?  So, if I own British businesses, it comes from British consumers.  If I own British debt, it comes from British mortgagees, people have mortgages.  If I own British government debt, it comes from the British taxpayer.  If I own British property, it comes from British renters—you know, and the same is true all over the West.  So if I own a ton of British assets, and I tried to move to Dubai, I’m still taking an enormous amount of cash flow from British people when they pay that passive income.  So wealth holders can be taxed even if they leave.

To make it more concrete, if you’ve got ten billion dollars, and one billion of that is just in a bank account somewhere, then, sure: you can just leave.  Move from New York to Floria, move to Canada, move to the Caiman Islands, move to Dubai (as Gary suggests).  But, if your one billion dollars is in waterfront property, you can’t really take that with you, now can you?  What if your billion dollars is in the form of the local sports stadium?  What’re you gonna do: pick it up with a crane and put it on a truck and ship it to Florida?  Now, if your billion dollars is in the form of the local sports team, then you could theoretically move the team (to Florida, at least; probably not to Dubai).  But how much is that going to cost you?  As Mamdani famously said about one of the billionaires funding the opposition to his candidacy: “he spent more on trying to keep me from getting elected than I was planning to tax him.”  And you’ll see people do that sometimes.  But, for the most part, if it costs $20 million to stay (the vast majority of proposed wealth taxes are 2%; 2% of one billion is twenty million) and $200 million to move the team (likely a conservative estimate), the billionaire may threaten to move, but they’re not going to do it.  Rich people who routinely spend 10x what they need to just to make a point don’t typically stay rich for long.

But, that nitpick aside, I thought Lina made some excellent points in the interview, and it’s people like her that give me hope that we might be smart enough to come out of this cesspool in the long run.  And, as far as the billionaires all leaving, Jon’s producer Gillian Spear put it this way:

I don’t see it happening.  Like, New York City isn’t cool because you’re here; you’re here because it’s cool.  So I’d like to see you try and leave.

Mic.  Dropped.

Doom Report (Week 42: Politics Is Something We Do)

This week, the MAGA crowd all seemed utterly shocked that people were upset with them.  I mean, all they did was take away food from hungry children—globally, let’s not forget—steal money for research into children’s cancer, cause millions of Americans’ health insurance premiums to more than double, make everyone’s grocery bills higher, and used that money to create a combined $60 billion tax break for the top 0.1%.  Why would people be pissed off at them?  They seem to have forgotten the attitude of “we don’t care whether we’re popular or not” and now are scrambling to justify, ignore, or doomcry (depending on the individual) the fact that Democrats beat the pants off them in this week’s elections.  I mean, they whupped their hides real good, to quote John Cleese in A Fish Called Wanda: the NYC mayoral and VA and NJ gubernatorial elections have gotten all the press, but there were gains all over the country.  In Georgia, Dems broke up the Republican monopoly of the Public Service Commission (if you need more info on why that’s important, Hank Green did a great video on it before the election), which is the first time Dems have won a state government seat in nearly a decade; Colorado voted to fund free meals in public schools; Maine voted down proposed voter suppression measures; and, in the New York county that’s home to Syracuse, a 12-5 Repub legislature just became a 10-7 Dem one (including one winner from the Working Families Party), an event which a headline on syracuse.com described thusly: “Onondaga County GOP seeks answers after stunning losses. The consensus: Trump is a problem”.  Hell, the Dems even won in Mississippi, where they broke a 13-year Republican supermajority in the state Senate (hey: progress, not perfection).  Even more telling, the margins by which some of these candidates won is pretty amazing: 13 points for Spanberger in VA, nearly 14 points for Sherrill in NJ, and, despite what some Cuomo supporters seem to think, Mamdani beat Cuomo so badly that even getting all of Sliwa’s votes wouldn’t have made any difference.  Now, for sure, I’m worried that Dems only came out ahead because the MAGA crowd didn’t think they needed to bother cheating, and I absolutely don’t think next year’s elections will go that smoothly, but I’m willing to just stop a bit and bask in the MAGA tears for a bit.

Although possibly the most interesting interview this week had nothing to do with the elections: Jordan Klepper interviewed Scott Galloway on The Daily Show on Wednesday.  Galloway is an author, professor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, but, most importantly for his new book Notes on Being a Man, a father to two boys.  With how much ink has been spilled—and YouTube commentary has been spewed—on how young men voted, and how they’re being radicalized by assholes like Andrew Tate, and how they’re avoiding intimacy and living with their parents and etc ad nauseum, I think Galloway’s book could not come at a better time.  It’s been challenging for us to admit that young men—they of the class who have traditionally had all the adantages in our society—are today struggling.  Some seem to think we’re negating or disavowing discrimination against women by admitting that young men have problems.  But, as Scott puts it:

We can absolutely acknowledge the huge challenges that women still face while acknowledging that. if you go into a morgue right now and there’s five people who’ve died by suicide, four are men.  And I would offer up, Jordan, that if any group was killing themselves at four times the rate of the control group, we would move in with programs.  But because my generation registered so much unfair prosperity, we are holding young men accountable.  And it’s resulting in a country that’s not going to continue to flourish.

You really should listen to the whole thing.  But, if you only listen to one part, make it this one:

People under the age of 40 are 24% less wealthy.  People my age are 72% wealthier.  Because we figured out—old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more money.  And when Congress is a cross between the Land of the Dead and the Golden Girls, you have a $40-billion child tax credit gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill, but the $120-billion cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security flies right through.  We need a more progressive tax structure.  You know what would be the biggest help to men, to young men—would be universal child care.  Because when men are most vulnerable, in terms of self-harm, is the year after they get divorced.  And why do young people get divorced?  It’s not a lack of shared values.  It’s not infidelity.  The most common reason for divorce is economic strain.  And we keep transferring money from young people to old people.

But really do watch the whole thing.  Galloway is spitting fire in this one.

This weirdly ties into another interview, if a much longer one: British YouTuber Jimmy the Giant interviews Gary Stevenson, who I’ve mentioned a few times.  Jimmy I’ve never mentioned before; I’ve only ever even seen him on YouTube once before, and that was back in January on Pod Save the UK, when he told the story of how he got sucked into the alt-right scene, and then, as Nish Kumar put it, “de-radicalized” himself.  While I was mainly watching for Gary, whose opinions I always find informative, Jimmy dropped this bomb:

Sometimes people will look at these lot, like the far right lot, and they won’t give them the same grace that they might give, say, gang members.  And I do sometimes notice that on the left, where I would say it’s quite easy for, I don’t know, a lot of us to look at someone who is in a gang or something and be like, the reason they’re in a gang is because of various scenarios, they’re not evil in their heart, they’re just a person that has fallen into this kind of lifestyle, blah blah blah.  But then you’ll look at, maybe the far-right rally, and there will be comments like “these are disgusting gammons, these are like gross blah blah blah.”  And I’m like sort of thinking, you know, we understand the reasons why people do bad.  The same for like al-Qaeda.  Like, I can understand how that movement formed.  I can say it’s evil, awful, but I can understand how it formed, how it took power, and how it controls people’s lives and forces people to do awful stuff.  But some people don’t extend—I don’t know if this is widely held, but I do notice it sometimes—they don’t extend that same generosity and compassion to the far right.  Because, again: it’s always the same thing.  These people have fallen into these movements because of a lack of something in their life, usually material, or their culture feels like it’s been eroded because, I don’t know, their fucking high street has two shops left and they’re a vape shop and a betting shop.  And, it’s like, you understand, you gotta remember, these are people that are not perhaps deeply into politics, or deeply well-read, or deeply understand these movements, they just feel fucked, they feel like their life sucks, and some guy’s coming along giving them some smooth talk.  And you don’t, I guess, judge the person who gets swindled for a car for a smooth talking salesman.  You don’t judge them.  You’re like “the salesman was a dickhead.”

And I will admit that I’m sometimes guilty of this myself, despite the fact that I used this exact analogy in my pre-election post about what Kamala should have said in her Bret Baier interview.  But, upon reflection, I think Jimmy is really onto something here.  When these young men get red-pilled, we probably shouldn’t be blaming them or assuming they’re just racist and/or misogynist shitheads.  As Nish once said on a different Pod Save the UK episode (and I quoted back in week 10), “We have no scope in our hearts to have a conversation that white men could also be radicalized.”  Yep, I think he might be onto something.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Another pretty good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.  I disagree with his take on the air traffic controllers, but I’m not going out of my way to defend Sean Duffy, so I’ll let it slide.

• Hank Green talks about the government shutdown and people losing SNAP benefits.

• SNL’s take on the press conference where a man fainted was, typically, amusing.

• Cristian Farias is back on Legal Eagle, this time covering the contrast between circuit court judges and the Supreme Court.  There’s some inspiring stories in there.

• The Weekly Show explores how the Dems will fuck up their gains, with Chris Hayes and David Plouffe.

If you need even more hope than I’ve already given you, just go listen to Mamdani’s victory speech.  I honestly don’t know if he’s going to be able to do all this shit he’s claiming to be able to do, but, damn: it sure sounds good. 

I’ll give you some highlights, but you really should listen to him say it.  He’s a brilliant speaker.

Years from now, may our only regret be that this day took so long to come.

And yet, if tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back.  We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price.  Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party.  And too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind.

As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour.  They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long broken system.  We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game any more.  They can play by the same rules as the rest of us.

In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another.  In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light.  Here, we believe in standing up for those we love.  Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall.  Your struggle is ours, too.  And we will build a city hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of anti-semitism where the more than 1 million Muslims know that they belong.  Not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.  No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.

And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us.  Now it is something that
we do.

Hell.  Yes.

Doom Report (Week 41: Further Reflections on Kamala)

This week on The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Kamala Harris.  She’s been making the rounds, pimping her new book 107 Days, which seems to be framed as an excuse.  Although, as I’ve noted before, it’s more than twice as long as Kier Starmer had over in the UK, and he won handily.  But whatever.  In this interview, she says a lot of things I liked ... and quite a few that made me scream at my monitor.  Worst among them was when Jon asked her if her affection for Biden had prevented her from making her case as to what she wanted to accomplish, separate from Biden, for fear of offending him.  To which she responded:

I felt that the distinction between he and I was pretty clear.

The epithet that came out of my mouth when I heard her say this was very unflattering, and I won’t repeat it here, but I couldn’t help but remember what she said on The View a little under a month before the election:

Sunny Hostin: Well, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?
Kamala: There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact ...

So the distinction was “pretty clear” and yet you couldn’t come up with a single fucking thing when asked about it point blank?  (To be fair to Kamala, she probably gave a better answer in her recent reappearance on The View.  It’s basically the same answer, but at least it’s more complete.  But she also fails to identify that moment as the turning point for her campaign, which I feel is foolish on her part.)

Now, look: I haven’t been shy about saying that I mostly like Kamala.  The first time I spoke about her was on my original blog, way back in August of 2020, shortly after she and Biden won the Democratic nomination.  I noted that I was “a bit more” heartened over the choice of her than Joe—which is a bit of damning with faint praise, I’ll admit, but still.  In November of 2020, I mentioned her again, in the context that Biden retiring at some point (how foolish I was to imagine such a thing back then) might actually work out pretty well for us, as she seemed better poised to accomplish big things than he.  But note that I also wrote that:

The Democrats are exactly half of what’s wrong with the American political system, and I have very little faith in their desire to effect real change, much less their ability to do so.

Which is almost prophetic enough to make up for that whole “imagine Biden stepping down” delusion.  I also noted, before the election, that I was not only going to vote for her for President, but that I had voted for her for Senator, and before that for Attorney General.  I am not anti-Kamala by any stretch.  But, in the first time I brought up the topic of Kamala in these Doom Reports, I pointed out that this moment on The View is not only the point where I think Kamala lost the election, but it’s also the moment that James Carville called out, Chris Christie also mentioned it in week 2, and, indeed, it was one of the main points raised by my Trump-voting friend (who, you may recall, was the impetus for this whole series).  (To be fair, it’s really one of two points where I think Kamala lost: the other being listening to her brother-in-law when he advised her to stop going after corporate price gouging.)  So the fact that Kamala apparently still can’t accept the full weight of that faux pas—other than some weasel words about how she “didn’t understand” how important it was to “other people”—it makes me crazy.

But also let’s not downplay that other reason, which in the preceding paragraph I relegated to a parenthetical.  It didn’t seem to come up much in the conversation with Jon Stewart, so I’m unclear if Kamala recognizes what a misstep it was to back off going after the big corporations.  I understand wanting to listen to a trusted family member (Tony West is married to Kamala’s sister), and I understand wanting to get the perspective of a proper businessperson when you have no business experience yourself (Kamala is a lifelong prosecutor and politician; West is the chief legal officer of Über).  But there is a point where the buck stops with you.  She claims she could understand that people were hurting, she claims she had plans to address corporate price gouging and other malevolent business practices, but yet she made the choice to downplay that stance.

And, not that it has anything to do with the Kamala interview—or then again maybe it does—but Charlamagne tha God appears to agree with me; he appeared this week on The Daily Show’s “In My Opinion” segment, slamming corporate Democrats.  He trenchantly zeroes in on the heart of the problem when he says:

And that—that brings me to the real problem.  Democratic leaders never support candidates who might disrupt the capitalist system.  But guess what? the current system isn’t working.  Americans want it remodeled the way Trump is “remodeling” the East Wing, all right?  Dems act like they’ll get a cookie for being the most rational people in the room.  No one cares.  You’re trying to win voters, not get a signed headshot from Ezra Klein.

The shot at Ezra Klein aside (I still think Klein and the hard progressives are saying more things in common than either side realizes), Charlamagne is dead right.  When Bernie ran in 2016, the Democratic leaders disavowed him—and it cost them the election.  When Mamdani blew Cuomo out of the water in the primary for NYC mayor, leaders either ignored him or outright attacked him ... though it seems like, if polls are to be believed, they’ll end up on the wrong side of history.  Again and again, they ignore what the people want in favor of what their rich donors tell them to do. 

As I say, this exact issue didn’t really come up in the Weekly Show interview, but here’s another thing Kamala said there that irked me:

But, also, we’ve gotta understand that we cannot just be focused on Donald Trump.  We need to not only be against something, but also, we need to be understanding of how we got here, and that it’s a bigger apparatus, and not just the one guy.  But the second point that is equally important, which we’re not emphasizing, is what we stand for.

How in the hell does a politician—and, let’s not mince words: she is a politician: has been for 15 years, and normally is a pretty good one—so how does a politician say “we need to not only be against something” and not immediately follow that with “we need to be for something”?  Not to finally wend her way to that point some 40 words later ... no shit you’re not emphasizing it!  When exactly did you plan to start?

I’m picking on her a bit here; the interview overall is pretty good, and you should watch the whole thing.  But also watch the after-show conversation, where Jon’s producers (all women, as it happens) express their own reservations.

Other things you need to know this week:

• On this week’s Strict Scrutiny, we get an excellent run-down of the ongoing trials, and an exquisite summary of the insane Lindsey Halligan text chain.

• And, speaking of the Lindsey Halligan text chain (did I mention it was insane?), the person on the other side of that chain, Anna Bower, happens to work for Legal Eagle, which means that we got a video of Anna herself telling the whole story.  To say that the incompetence is legendary would be underselling it; this one is a must-watch.

• And, speaking of Legal Eagle, Liz Dye has an excellent breakdown of the naked illegality of the DOJ payout that Trump seems poised to receive (if he hasn’t already gotten it).

• Legal Eagle was really killing it this week: on yet another video, guest legal journalist Cristian Farias explains how ICE got to be above the law.

• During one of this week’s episodes, the Even More News crew talks about the Trump regime’s plans to send “election monitors” to California.  (Although, for the most part, joke’s on him: everyone here in Cali gets mail-in ballots, so likely their efforts to intimidate people into not voting will be entirely moot, as Prop 50 will probably have already passed before they even get here.)  While talking about how Trump has constantly complained about people rigging the elections, Cody notes that “And they’ve done it for a long time.  It’s what he did from the start, of saying like, well, they’re going to they’re going to steal this and steal this.  And then when we say it—because he’s doing it—then we sound like we’re being alarmist or hypocritical ...”  This is exactly how I feel about just about everything Trump complains about.  Whenever Trump accuses someone of doing a thing, you can lay money on the fact that that’s exactly what Trump himself is doing.

• And, on yet another episode of Even More News, the crew talk about Kat Abugazaleh being indicted by the Trump regime, and also expose the lie of the “ceasefire” in Gaza.

• This week’s Coffee Klatch features special guest W. Kamau Bell, who’s always a delight to hear from.

• And, as usual, Adam Kinzinger gives another great (and short) week in review.

If there’s any message of hope this week, it’s that Democrats who buck the corporate donor system are starting to break through.  And there’s no greater symbol of that than Zohran Mamdani.  Robert Reich produced another great Substack article this week focussed on Mamdani taking on corporate Democrats, and, as I mentioned above, the polls are looking pretty good for him.  Perhaps my favorite Mamdani moment of the week was his Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart.  Here are some of my favorite quotes.

In response to Jon pointing out that, if he can’t deliver, the New Yorkers who love him now will be his most vocal critics:

You know, it’s often framed as a burden or as an obligation.  But frankly, I think it’s an opportunity.  It’s an opportunity to actually show that this whole campaign where we’ve talked about freezing the rent, making buses faster, free delivering universal childcare—these are not just slogans.  These are commitments.  And when we deliver them here in New York City, it will be also the delivery of a politics that can actually aspire for more than what you’re living through.  And for so many people across the city, politics has just become synonymous with an argument of celebrate the little you have or lose that.  And it can’t be that.

In response to Jon saying that public disorder could be a challenge for him:

I mean, look, public safety is the prerequisite for an affordability agenda.  Right?  People have to be safe.  And we also know that safety is something that you not only deliver with the NYPD; it’s also something that you deliver by ensuring that there are actually jobs that can pay people enough to stay in this city.  All of these things are integrated.

On Hakim Jeffries’ half-hearted (and very late) endorsement of him:

And I think what we showed in many ways was that the days of endorsements deciding elections, those days have come to an end.  It’s the people that build up a campaign.

Finally, on how the current Democratic Party thinks about young voters:

After the presidential election, there were all of these obituaries written about the Democratic Party’s ability to motivate young voters.  And there’s just this condescension in the language that we use about young people.  And I can just tell you that what we found in this campaign is that young people have been at the heart of believing that something could be more than this.  And I would say throughout the primary, this quote from Ed Koch: “if you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me; 12 out of 12, see a psychiatrist.”  And I’m in Washington Square Park.  I’m filming a video with David Hogg.  And this young guy comes up to me and goes, “12 out of 12, baby: send me away!”

And, look: I know he told that story mainly because it’s an amusing anecdote, and he’s very good at that, and he was speaking while on Comedy Central.  And, don’t get me wrong: it is funny.  But it’s also, maybe just a little bit, inspiring.  Is Hakim Jeffries getting that kind of response from young voters?  Is Chuck Schumer?  Somehow I think not.  But the mere fact that someone is ... that gives me a bit more hope than I had last week.