This week, there was yet another No Kings rally. The Trump regime—supported by his sycophantic pet Congresspeople—desperately tried to characterize it as a “Hate America” rally, or some violent protest organized by “Antifa,” an organization which can’t atually organize anything, since it doesn’t actually exist. This doesn’t seem to have worked (partially because of pushback from many folks online; try Christopher Titus for an example, if you don’t mind the profanity), and early reports suggest that this may be the biggest protest in American history. There were some impressive speeches given: Brian Tyler Cohen’s was good; Bill Nye the Science Guy’s was better; and Mehdi Hasan’s was thunderously excellent. Hopefully this is a good sign that the tide is turning.
Other things you need to know this week:
- For a really good summary on Marjorie Taylor Greene, news orgs (including Fox “News”!) finally putting their foot down, and just how racist (and how old) the “Young” Republicans are, the Even More News crew has you covered.
I’m a little late reporting on this one, but Zack Polanski (leader of the UK Greens) interviewed Gary Stevenson (from Garys Economics) on his podcast Bold Politics. Politics in the UK is very interesting, in my opinion, and it also has a lot of things to teach us here in the US about our own politics. The Reform Party (that’s sort of the UK version of MAGA) is set to swallow the Conservatives (their version of the Republicans), and Labour (their version of the Democrats) is struggling to remain popular and relevant, but losing because they refuse to jettison their reliance on billionaire donors. Sound familiar? The difference, of course, is that, in the US, we’re stuck with two parties, so the MAGA movement had to literally eat the Repubs from the inside out, and the Dems are not much threatened by the diaspora of progressive enclaves that have nowhere else to go. Whereas, in the UK, Reform is an entirely new party, and the Conservatives aren’t really going anywhere; they’re just being gradually made irrelevant. And, likewise, there are more left-leaning parties in the UK that can threaten the long-established domincance of Labour. There are the Liberal Democrats—called the Lib Dems, for short—and there are the Greens. Both these parties have gained in popularity and power lately, similar to Reform, but the Greens are the clear winners between the two. (There’s also a neotonous new party that’s trying to birth itself, but it’s yet unclear if that will actually pan out.) With the new attention came a new election for head of the Greens, and Zack Polanski was the winner. He’s charismatic and agressively pro-worker; we think of the Greens as being focussed on the environment, and the UK Greens certainly are that, but not to the exclusion of all else. So Polanski is an interesting figure.
Stevenson is as well. You may recall I pointed you at a video of his last week; he’s a working class guy who grew up poor, got a Bachelor’s at the London School of Economics, became a millionaire being a trader for Citibank, got a Master’s at Oxford, and now just spends his time hammering home a single message: tax wealth, not work. He says he’s run the numbers, and there is just no way to keep the economy afloat without taxing the rich.
The entire interview is well worth watching: the two don’t always agree, but they’re always civil, and it’s obvious they have a tremendous amount of respect for each other. But it’s a long video, so I’ll mention a few highlights for the impatient.
On the topic of people complaining that figuring out how to tax wealth is too hard, he paints this analogy:
I am the guy who has been to the bottom floor of the Titanic, and seen the massive hole in the bottom of the ship and the water flooding in, and I am going up to the top and saying, “There’s water flooding into the bottom of the Titanic.” And I have people saying to me, “Oh, but fixing the bottom of the Titanic is difficult.” You know what I mean? And there’s people saying to me, you know, maybe we should do other things, other than fix the bottom of the Titanic. You know, and then a lot of people frustratedly say to me, why don’t you fix the bottom of the Titanic?
... because I understand, and have understood, one single thing, which is that inequality of wealth is rapidly increasing and it will accelerate because that’s what compound interest does. And if nothing is done, in 20 years the 0.1% will own everything. That’s not—and I’ve made millions of pounds betting on that one thing. ... I’m not claiming to be an expert on everything. I’m telling you one simple thing. If you don’t do anything about rapidly increasing inequality of wealth, then in the relatively near-term future—10, 20 years—the 1% will own absolutely everything. And that will make everything unaffordable. That will make living standards collapse. It will make England look like India, look like South Africa, look like Brazil. That’s the truth.
Now, I don’t know about you, but, when put that way, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.
I’ll leave with this, another long quote from Gary. For this quote, what you need to know is that Nigel Farage is sort of the UK version of Trump, if it had taken Trump much longer to get himself elected. For a long time, Farage drove a lot of news cycles (primarily just by having incendiary views) without ever being elected to anything. But he finally got into Parliament last year, and many (including Gary) think he’s on track to be Prime Minister once Labour finally collapses. Here, Gary is telling us what needs to happen for things to change:
So then what you have, then, is a vacuum, because what has been the accepted status quo, and still is the accepted status quo from these kind of elite economists and politicians, is become totally valueless. So then suddenly there’s a vacuum for ideas and, really, then, whoever has the loudest idea in that new vacuum will win the day. And I think it’s pretty obvious what the loudest idea is at the moment, not just in this country, but across the world, which is, you know: Farage, Reform, the Far Right, the Alt-Right, whatever you want to call them, they’re entering that vacuum. And at the moment the centre—and to a degree the left, you know (present company excepted)—have not really been able to craft a story of “we recognize the country is broken and we are going to offer you a way out of it.” So there there’s this absence of a story. What you have, really, is the centre is, like, stubbornly refusing to accept this story is dead, which means the centre is dead until it accepts that. The right has a story, and the left is—there’s a lot of they haven’t really figured themselves out yet, you know what I mean, and I think the story on which the left can win—and you know I will continue to try to convince the centre that the centre can win on this as well—is inequality. It’s inequality. It’s fixing a taxation system which is patently unfair, where billionaires pay lower rates than cleaners. You know what I mean? It’s an obviously unfair tax system. ... It’s a massive opportunity. Because the truth is, you know, I think Farage looks like he’s going to win the next election, ... There’s 66 million people in this country. There’s, I don’t know, 45 million people who can vote, and they’ll win it on 7, 8 million votes. And that is because there is just an absence of an alternative story. And what an opportunity. What an opportunity.
Will there be anyone in the UK who can capitalize on this opportunity? will there be anyone in the US who can do the same? I honestly don’t know. But the fact that there are still peopl
e—like Stevenson, like Robert Reic
h—who can still see these dark times as an opportunity for positive change, that we might emerge from this cesspool as a stronger society ... that gives me just a touch of hope. And hopefully it does you as well.
