Doom Report (Week 47: Democracy Is Messy)

This week, FIFA—yes, the sports organization—invented a peace prize so that they could give it to Trump.  Which they did, while Trump tried to convince everyone that he had no idea he would win it.  The prize itself

has been described as everything from zombie hands pulling the world down into hell to a tangle of fingers reaching up to tickle a hanging ball.  Not that either one is particularly appetizing.  But, as many pointed out this week, the party that has ridiculed liberals for decades for giving children participation trophies just invented a fake prize to give to their 80-year-old man-baby to keep him from whining about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize.  Maybe this will stop the whining.  But I’m not holding my breath.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger keeps his streak going with another great week in review.

• Even More News has probably the best coverage of Trump’s “participation peace prize,” although Seth Meyers did a pretty good job as well.

• Another pretty good cold open from SNL this week, featuring one of Trump’s planeside press conferences.

• Zohran Mamdani gives us a very short, but beautifully explained, breakdown of your rights when ICE comes around.

• Robert Reich asks the question that the rest of the media is studiously ignoring: is Trump okay?

• A surprisingly detailed breakdown of the competing takeover deals for Warner Brothers (and what it means for us) comes from an unlikely source: Jim Biederman, one of the producers of the US Have I Got News for You, explains it to fellow producer Jodi Lennon, co-host Michael Ian Black, and guest Faith Salie (perennial guest on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me) on this week’s Have I Got News for Your Ears.

• Seth Meyers comments on Trump’s giving himself an “A+++++” on the economy.

• The Weekly Show gives us a year-end wrap-up with guests Jon Favreau (from Pod Save America) and Tim Millier (from The Bulwark).  It’s entertaining and fairly well-balanced (Favreau, of course, is a former speechwriter for Obama, while Miller is the former communications director for Jeb Bush).  Well worth watching.

• The Coffee Klatch also has a year-end wrap-up.  Not quite as good as Jon Stewart’s, but Robert Reich and company do a nice job of putting as good a spin as possible on the current events.

• I love it when More Perfect Union completely ignores the hellscape created by the Trump regime and highlights instead the hellscape created by corporate greed.  Wondering why grocery prices are all over the place, and definitely not lining up with what your neighbors are paying?  This video explains it.

Speaking of More Perfect Union, there’s another brilliant video this week, again featuring John Russell.  This time he’s touring Italy, discovering how Italian co-ops work.  Unlike those in America, co-ops in Italy produce food and car parts, power infrastructure, and even run municipal sanitation services.  They step in when big corporations fail, turning struggling businesses into successful ones.  The workers become voting members who get to elect their own boss.  Russell’s point here is that this strategy could work here in America, particularly in rural communities, where corporate America is uninterested in doing anything beyond raping the land for its natural resources.  So, if you believe that our national experiment in fascism is a temporary one, and yet you despair that there’s no way to fix our systemic problems, it can be quite encouraging to know that many of our biggest issues are solved problems, if we just look to other parts of the world.  Especially when you learn that Italy’s laws which enshrine the rights of co-ops in the country’s constitution are a direct result of the defeat of fascism there, the parallels are practically inspirational.  As John says at one point:

Democracy is hard.  It’s messy.  But people choose it again and again, for a reason.

And that’s the best hope I can offer you this week.