Doom Report (Week 49: Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000?)

During the holiday season, many people like to watch It’s a Wonderful Life.  I don’t care for it personally—too sappy for my tastes—but I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum.  Although I’d like to note that critics at the time agreed with me—the story of how it became a beloved Christmas classic is a fascinating one.  But certainly Robert Reich really likes it, as he’s noted many times in various videos and on the Coffee Klatch.  And, this year, he’s offering us a video where he uses the Frank Capra classic to illustrate the problems with wealth inequalities.  He focuses on a scene where George (played by Jimmy Stewart) challenges the assumptions of the greedy Mr. Potter, who views the ordinary citizens of Bedford Falls as resources to be exploited.  And Reich, turned black-and-white and digitally inserted into the scene, interrupts to make comments such as this one:

George is right.  When working people get a shot at a decent life and at better jobs with higher wages, they have more money to spend.  That spending grows the economy and helps businesses thrive, creating more jobs.  It’s a virtuous cycle.

and this one:

Here’s the point that Mr. Potter never understood.  Even wealthy people like him do better with a smaller share of an economy growing rapidly because everyone is doing better, than with a bigger share of an economy growing slowly because so many are barely making it.

Geez.  No wonder that, as the story of the film I linked above notes:

... the FBI and Senator McCarthy’s paranoid House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) even investigated It’s a Wonderful Life for allegedly having communist leanings.  They viewed the film’s protagonist George Bailey’s story to be rife with subversive tendencies such as demonising capitalist bankers, and including subtle attempts to magnify the problems of the ‘common man’ in society.

I guess McCarthy would be pretty damned happy with our situation today.  (Certainly, he would have been a Trump fan, what with Trump having been mentored by McCarthy’s old buddy Roy Cohn.)  The capitalist bankers are still occasionally demonized, I suppose, but that doesn’t matter, since they can make as much money as they like, crash the economy with no consequences, break the law without facing any accountability, and receive government bailouts that they use to pay executive bonuses.  And the problems of the common man?  Why, even the Democrats seem to be stuck in a mode of trying to convince the common man that they just don’t understand how good they got it.

And, look, I’d actually love to blame this all on the greed of the billionaire class, but I don’t think it’s that simple.  I think a big part of it is something I just heard from Gary Stevenson this week, even though it’s from an interview he did earlier in the year.  The channel he did it on decided to repost it as an end-of-year treat, and I’m so glad they did: Gary’s plain-spoken way of breaking down the complexities of our economic situation never fails to enlighten.  And, in this interview, right near the beginning, he points out that a big part of the problem is that economists are all from wealthy backgrounds.

So, what kind of people go into that world?  If you actually look, economics PhD is the least social-class-representative PhD in the whole country.  And it’s obvious why, because if you’re poor and you’ve got a very good economics degree, you’d be kind of mad to do a PhD, because you can make so much more money in the city, right?  And then the end result is—it drives me mad—I did this two-year masters at Oxford; you know, it’s like a hundred posh people in a building talking about how’s the economy working while inequality is going like that, which means that their lives are becoming unbelievably richer, poor people are struggling to eat, and they’re just saying everything’s fine.

Not saying that excuses the behavior, of course, but at least maybe it helps explain it.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has a whole slew of really great videos this week.  He discusses Trump’s successful takeover of 60 Minutes, he explains why the regime dropped most of the Epstein files on the day before Christmas Eve, and of course the usual excellent week in review.

• Jimmy Kimmel did a holiday message for Channel 4 in the UK.  I thought it was quite lovely.

• Josh Johnson has an extremely hilarious take on the recent Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles.

This wasn’t technically last week, but I just got around to watching the episode of Alive with Steve Burns where he interviews Daryl Davis, a black man who’s made something of a career of sitting down and talking with KKK members.  Now, Steve’s new podcast (which I’ve mentioned before, back in weeks 35 and 36) has had some great guests, and the conversation is always interesting, but this one is just incredible.  I had never heard of Davis before, but trust me when I tell you that his story is insane, fascinating, and inspirational all in one.  Apparently he’s on a mission to deconvert the entire Klan, one member at a time, and he’s making a serious dent.  Here’s how he explains how he does it:

So, you you’ve heard the saying “one’s perception is one’s reality.”  Okay, so, that’s true.  Whatever somebody perceives becomes their reality.  Even if it’s not real, it’s their reality.  Keep in mind you cannot change anyone’s reality.  All right?  What is real to them is real to them: you you cannot change it.  And if you try to change somebody’s reality, you’re going to get resistance, because they believe whatever it is they think is real and you’re going to get pushback, okay?  What you do is, you offer them a different perception, or perceptions, plural.  If they resonate with one of those perceptions, then they will change their own reality because their perception becomes their reality.

And if a black man convincing over 200 Klansmen to hang up their robes isn’t a message of hope, then I don’t know what is.  Happy holidays.

Doom Report (Week 48: An Alcoholic's Personality)

This week, Trump gave a rather unhinged “emergency” speech, wherein he lied so often that, as Seth Meyers noted, the poor CNN fact-checker was out-of-breath trying to address them all.  It spurred Christopher Titus to release an extra Armageddon Update which not only addresses that, but also contains a rather touching tribute to Rob Reiner.  Because, you know, another thing Trump did this week was to act like a stereotypical psychopath by pretending other people aren’t real, and/or like a stereotypical old man by ranting in public without really caring who he offends, by claiming that Reiner was murdered because of his “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.  Which is only not victim-blaming because of the technicality of the fact that Reiner wasn’t killed by a fan of Trump.  I mean, I don’t think Reiner’s son is a fan of Trump, although he may want to consider joining up, since he would no doubt get a pardon that way.

And don’t even get me started on the ridiculous “release” of the Epstein Files on Friday.

Other things you need to know this week:

• I’m not sure Adam Kinzinger’s week in review is quite as good as usual, but I’d still recommend you watch it.  It’s only about 10 minutes and has a pretty good summary of most of the week’s news.

• If you want good coverage of the insane Susie Wiles’ Vanity Fair interview, I recommend the Pod Save America video on the topic.  Or, for a quicker, punchier take, try Seth’s “A Closer Look” segment.

• More Perfect Union has a brilliant video on Sam Altman’s “just trust me bro” strategy towards AI (and his other ventures as well).

• If you want to see our fucked up situation through some foreign eyes, I recommend the year-end wrap up of the UK Have I Got News For You.  The best bits of British politics include several amusing digs at our bloviated commander-in-Cheetos.

• Along those lines, Pod Save the UK also has a year-end wrap-up.  This one is less of a clip show and more of a look back on the year’s events.  Less US stuff, but, if you have an interest in the parallel slide into autocracy in the UK, this is a good one to watch.

This week’s SNL cold open was pretty good: as recreations of deranged Trump speeches go, it’s tough to beat James Austin Johnson.  Few others can capture the madcap leaping from subject to subject like he can, and he gives his most unhinged performance to date, to match Trump’s most unhinged speech.  But honestly this week’s “Weekend Update” segment is probably the better one; it’s a sad state of affairs when even SNL is giving us better news that the so-called “traditional” media, but, with CBS already captured and CNN soon to follow, that’s the world we live in.

So it’s tough to feel hopeful at this point in the cycle.  Texas will move forward with its gerrymander, because that’s the Supreme Court we have.  Of course, one possible outcome there is that the Repubs overestimate their recent gains with Latine voters and end up creating a dummymander.  After all, Latines might not be as eager as last time to vote for the party that keeps rounding up all their relatives and disappearing them.  Honestly, the most hopeful development I’ve seen lately is that Miami elected a Democratic mayor for the first time in nearly 30 years, and she (also Miami’s first female mayor ever) won by nearly 20 points.  The hold the Repubs have on the system is fragile, and growing more so by the week.  I don’t expect they’ll go down without a fight, but hopefully it’s a fight we’re all willing to participate in.

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.

Doom Report (Week 46: Fill the Damn Plate)

This week, Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan eulogizes his late father.  His words are touching, but they also serve to remind us of what we should be striving for every day; the quote that jumped out at me was this one:

When I remember my late father, I don’t remember a man defined by a single place or nationality or tradition.  I remember a man whose life was lived across continents, who saw himself as a bridge between worlds and made no apology for that.  He was a man who happily defied the lazy questions thrown around these days by politicians and pundits: are you British or are you Indian? are you Western or are you Eastern? are you secular or are you Muslim?  He was all of the above.  He was proof positive that our identities are not settled, not static, not singular.  You can be a European, British, Indian, Hyderabadi, Shia, Muslim Londoner, as my father was.  You don’t have to choose in a truly multicultural Britain.

This rather forcefully reminds me of a Daily Show interview that Trevor Noah did many years ago with Dominican-born American writer Junot Diaz.  Trevor notes that he came to America at 6, and became a citizen at 20.  “Like, how did you find that balance,” he asks, “between going ‘I’m from the Dominican Republic, but I’m also American’?”  To which Diaz responds:

What really helps is to think of it not as some weird, bizarre buffet where you only get one damn choice.  That’s, like, a sinister, sadistic buffet.  How ‘bout: you get to choose more than one thing? that you could literally be Dominican, and from New Jersey, and there’s no conflict.  Fill the damn plate, yo.  Fill the plate.

I think of that metaphor sometimes when I look at the people currently in charge of our country.  Trump and his MAGA crowd are like people who only put one thing on their plates, or, if they get daring and put two or three, they’re not allowed to touch.  And I remember that quote from Junot Diaz, and I think: what a sad, sinister, sadistic buffet.  They don’t even know how much they’re missing out.  They’ve always eaten the same thing, for every meal, every day, for their whole lives, and we’ll never be able to convince them that there’s other foods out there, other experiences, other simple pleasures.  And we mustn’t let them make us forget the variety and diversity that is what made them so mad in the first place.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Another excellent week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• Legal Eagle’s military contributor, Spencer the Scowl Owl (a former Marine and JAG officer) had two important videos this week, both talking to Senator Mark Kelly: in the first, he talks about Trump’s threats against the Senator, and the second covers the illegal boat strikes.

• Adam Kinzinger also weighed in on what’s all the fuss about murdering “drug dealers”.
• Heck, even SNL got in on the action, with this week’s cold open seeing a pretty good Hegseth impression from Colin Jost, as well as some references to Trump’s increasing tendency to drift off to sleep on camera.

• Speaking of which, the Even More News crew has some even more pointed thoughts on Sleepy Don.

• In an emergency update, the ladies of Strict Scrutiny deliver a blistering rebuke of the latest Supreme Court debacle.  Personally, I was utterly unsurprised by the decision: this court has proved several times over that they can justify any travesty of justice thrown at them, as long as it serves Trump’s agenda.

This week’s Weekly Show was an interview with two historians, Joanne Freeman of Yale and Allen C. Guelzo from the University of Florida.  And it’s an excellent discussion about immigration, and who has been considered white (or not) throughout our history, and you should totally watch the whole thing.  But I think my favorite part comes (as it often does) during the producer segment at the end.  Often the zinger is delivered by producer and fact-checker Gillian Spear, but occasionally Jon himself gets in a good one.  This week, when Gillian points out that Trump keeps claiming that he doesn’t know who he’s pardoned, Jon responds:

By the way: what a six-year-old he is.  Whenever he gets confronted, his responses are either, “I don’t know,” or “you’re stupid!”  I have children.  I’m very familiar with these dodges.

So your note of hope for this week is to remember that, as scary as these people are, they’re basically just toddlers playing at fascism.  Those of us who have had toddlers know what terrifying tyrants they can be, but I think we can stand up to toddlers.  Hopefully.