Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 1, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Why Are They Trying to Kill Us?
Conor Gallagher, May 28, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
For all the talk of how incompetent our elites are, there’s one area where they show remarkable skill and determination: relentlessly creating conditions to shorten the lifespans of the disabled, poor, and working class.
Let’s look at just a few of the many examples before examining potential reasons it’s becoming so much more brazen.In the US, policies to hurt the working poor and disabled are nothing new, but they’ve exploded in scope in recent years. Elites have collectively memory-holed an ongoing pandemic that has thus far officially killed more than 1.2 million (although that number is likely much higher), disabled many more, and fallen disproportionately on the working class and disabled….
The US official line is now openly that such weak people simply aren’t worth the investment….
In the telling of RFK Jr. and friends, public healthcare coddles the weak, which is real soft Nazi stuff. As Derek Beres puts it:
By avoiding discussion of education, employment, social support networks, economic status and geographic location – the social determinants that public health experts agree influence health outcomes – Kennedy, in lockstep with top wellness influencers, is practicing soft eugenics.
But let’s not forget that the Biden administration was in some cases outdoing the current one….
The cuts to disability benefits will decimate quality of life, erode services, and lead to earlier deaths, but that appears to be the point. Again, though, this is nothing new. A report published last year by the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, finds that between 2011 and 2019, 1,062,334 premature deaths were recorded among individuals living outside the wealthiest 10% of areas in England mostly due to poverty and austerity measures….
What is central to all these Western countries? Neoliberalism. Is it surprising that an ideology that says markets are more important than people would completely hand over social policy to the wealthiest and embrace eugenics?….
Republican Senator to Medicaid Cuts Protesters — ‘We’re All Going to Die’
[Newsweek, May 30, 2025]
During a tense exchange with protesters at a town hall, Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa responded to concerns over potential Medicaid cuts by declaring, “Well, we are all going to die.”
GOP’s Latest Pitch for Gutting Medicaid and Food Aid? ‘Well, We All Are Going to Die’
Jake Johnson, May 30, 2025 [CommonDreams]
“We’re at the point where a U.S. senator is saying healthcare and hunger don’t matter because we all die eventually.”
Musk’s Legacy of Death vs the Rising Movement for Life
William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, May 30, 2025 [Our Moral Moment w/ Bishop William Barber & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove]
…DOGE is a scam, but its consequences are real. According to research at Boston University, more than 300,000 people have died because of the careless cuts Musk made to the USAID program, decimating US investment in fighting hunger and disease around the world….
… we know every lie has its limits in a universe that is held together by truth. No lie can live forever, just as no tyrant can abuse power without eventually facing consequences. People can be deceived. We can be distracted. We can even be self-absorbed. But when death draws near enough to touch us, people also have an innate instinct to live.
This is what we see: life is rising up in people to cry out for life.
That’s what we hear in the graduation speeches that are calling young people to stand for truth and in the judicial decisions that are making clear that Trump’s abuse of power is illegal. Life is rising up to cry for life in protests and direct actions, in legal motions and in petitions to members of Congress. At Moral Mondays in DC, which will continue this coming Monday, June 2nd, we’ve witnessed life welling up in people who refuse to accept the unnecessary death.
How do we stop the lie? This is the question we hear most these days. It’s at the center of our prayers. This is what we know: we stop the lie by standing with the people who are most directly harmed by it….
According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s Robert P. Jones, who publishes on Substack at White Too Long, “If you look at the population as a whole, only 30% of American adults cast a vote for Trump in 2024. There’s no legitimate way to read this election as a blank check for the destructive attacks on our nation’s basic values and institutions.”….
This dashboard visualizes the human impact of funding changes for aid and support organizations.
[impactcounter.com, via Our Moral Moment]
Deaths caused by Funding Discontinuation
99,639 Adult Deaths
207,911 Child Deaths
Deaths Per Hour 103
A Storm in the West: The Liberal Intellectual Paradigm Is Broken
A. Crooke [Conference paper, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2025]
…The real action in the US is not happening in seminars at Brookings or in op-eds in the New York Times. It is happening backstage, out of sight; beyond the reach of polite society, and mostly off-script. America is undergoing a transformation more akin to what befell Rome in the age of Augustus. Which is to say, the main happening is the collapse of a paralytic élite order, and the consequent unfolding of new political projects….
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
By Calling More Than Half the Country ‘Scum,’ Trump Is Raising a Bright Red Flag
Thom Hartmann, May 27, 2025 [Common Dreams]
When political leaders use dehumanizing language to vilify their opponents, they’re in actuality laying the groundwork for authoritarianism, repression, and violence.
Fumbling in the dark: The winding tale of A.A.R.P. v. Trump
Adam Unikowsky, May 28, 2025 [via Talking Points Memo]
[David Kurtz: “In one of the best pieces I’ve read in a while, Adam Unikowsky unpacks the Alien Enemies Act case out of Texas that the Supreme Court has already weighed in on and which appears to be a likely vehicle for the big decisions it will make on the AEA.”
Men DOGEbags at Work
THE RIGHT UNDERSTANDS THAT ALL GOVERNANCE IS DATA GOVERNANCE
[LPE Project, via Naked Capitalism 05-27-2025]
…To understand the authoritarian threat presented by Trump 2.0, we need to understand how the Silicon Valley contingent of his administration prioritizes and uses informational power. For whatever their limitations and ignorance about how agencies operate, Elon Musk and the DOGE minions understand the importance of control over data flows to modern governance. Indeed, though DOGE has been publicly pitched as an effort at achieving monetary efficiency (a laughable claim as they’re saving only a fraction of what they originally promised and potentially costing much more), this was never their true goal.
Instead, DOGE is hard at work producing (or attempting to produce) another kind of efficiency — the centralized information architecture needed for DOGE’s worker-free, AI-first vision of public administration….
U.S. Spy Agencies Are Getting a One-Stop Shop to Buy Your Most Sensitive Personal Data
Sam Biddle, May 22 2025 [The Intercept]
DOGE Has Achieved Its Final Form
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 05-27-2025]
WIRED Talked to a Fired DOGE Staffer About Who Was Really in Charge
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 05-30-2025]
Musk is gone. But DOGE staffers are still trying to cut through agencies.
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 05-30-2025]
Tracking the Harm of DOGE Cuts
[CLASP — The Center for Law and Social Policy]
The DOGE Tracker, CLASP’s interactive data tool, is designed to help users explore and document the proposed reductions to federal programs under review by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This sortable, filterable spreadsheet compiles program-level information on funding changes—either proposed or enacted—during the current administration….
Elon Musk’s Reign of Terror Is Only Just Beginning
Alex Shephard, June 1, 2025 [The New Republic]
…The real reason that he’s “leaving” (or “quiet quitting”) is that he has spent the last four months as a “special government employee,” a distinction with a 130-day time limit. Were he to continue working in the same capacity, he would be required by federal law to fill out certain financial and ethical disclosures that he is currently exempted from as an SGE. Given his vast fortune (and lack of ethics), Musk does not want to do this and therefore has no choice but to “step back.” It’s undoubtedly true that he has taken more of a backseat in recent weeks, particularly as his popularity has plummeted, but there’s no reason to believe that he’s cutting all ties with Trump. DOGE, meanwhile, is very much still ticking. Musk is, as Trump said, just “gonna be back and forth.”….
Is This The End Of DOGE? (podcast)
The Lever, May 28, 2025
…David Sirota talks to Michael Scherer, a reporter for The Atlantic who has the inside scoop on what happened to Musk and what kinds of ticking time bombs he and DOGE may have left inside the federal government.
Heather Cox Richardson, May 31, 2025 [Letters from an American]
[TW: Richardson’s entire post is an excellent summary.]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
A Message of Hope: “We Wrestle Not Against Flesh and Blood, but Against Crackheads in High Places”
Dougald Lamont, May 30, 2025
A New York Times Exposé about Elon Musk’s Manic Behaviour and Chemical Intake Shows the Trump Administration for What it is: Drug-Addled Low-Rent Gangsters….
…one of the clearest insights into the relentless corruption and lawless criminality of the Trump Administration: they are basically low-rent neighbourhood gangsters who are high on their own supply, trying to shake everyone down….
So every one should keep that in mind. Trump, and Vance and Musk and the tech bros can all be taken down through peaceful and legal means.
The MAGA Revolution in real, and it is lawless. A successful counterrevolution entails enforcing the law.
The problem is corruption, including corruption in the administration of justice.
People are either breaking the law or the want to legalize crimes and make it impossible to prosecute.
That is what is happening in the US and it is what formerly conservative parties have now all become. They are anarchists and crypto fascists – crypto in both senses of the word, because they want to be able to plunder without opposition.
Meet the GOP scumbags that corrupt Trump just Pardoned
Dean Obeidallah, May 29, 2025
Garrett Graff, May 28, 2025 [Doomsday Scenario]
Global power shift
[Military Watch, via Naked Capitalism 05-27-2025]
BERTRAND: ASEAN, GCC countries and China come together, forming the world’s largest economic bloc
[Intellinews, via Naked Capitalism 05-30-2025]
Larry Wilkerson & Chas Freeman: Why America’s Missing Grand Strategy Could Be a Global Disaster [YouTube video]
[Dialogue Works, via Naked Capitalism 05-31-2025]
[Yves Smith: “A must listen.”]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
“‘Indiscriminate, Unrestrained, Brutal’: Former Israeli PM Calls Gaza Assault ‘War Crimes’
[msn.com]
[Avedon, May 30, 2025: Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he now believes his country’s relentless assault on the Palestinian people amounts to ‘war crimes’ and must be stopped. Addressing the people of Israel in an article written in Hebrew and published by Haaretz on Thursday, Olmert, who served from 2006 to 2009, condemned current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for ‘waging a pointless war, without a clear goal or plan, and with no chance of success,’ according to Google’s translation of the piece.”]
Col. Larry Wilkerson: Russia Launches Massive New Offensive — The Battle to Win It All!
[Dialogue Works, via Naked Capitalism 05-28-2025]
[Yves Smith: “although the entire talk is worthwhile, the important part comes later, on Israel, starting at 35:25. Wilkerson says he has it on good authority that Israel has strike packages v. Iran ready. He further argues that Israel is quite capable of staging a false flag attack, say against Israelis in the US, to justify an attack.”]
Trump Says New Iran Deal Must Allow US To ‘Blow Up Whatever We Want’
[Antiwar.com, via Naked Capitalism 05-31-2025]
President Donald Trump argued that any revived nuclear accord with Iran should permit the United States to destroy the country’s nuclear infrastructure and send inspectors to Iranian facilities at any time….
“I want it very strong – where we can go in with inspectors, we can take whatever we want, we can blow up whatever we want, but [with] nobody getting killed,” he told reporters. “We can blow up a lab, but nobody is gonna be in the lab, as opposed to everybody being in the lab and blowing it up.”
Oligarchy
The Billionaire Hoarders: How the Wealthy Became Our Biggest Threat
Thom Hartmann, May 30, 2025 [The New Republic]
It happens every few generations. It’s what drove the fascist oligarchs of the Confederacy to reach out and try to conquer the entire United States in the 1860s. It caused the robber barons to murder union organizers and ultimately crash America into the Republican Great Depression in the early decades of the twentieth century. And it’s why wages have been stagnant while billionaires’ wealth has exploded in the years since the Reagan revolution.
What I’m talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness: what’s either a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder or a defect in impulse control called “hoarding syndrome.” ….
As historian and political scientist Michael Parenti notes:
Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for still more fortune. There is no end to the amount of money one might wish to accumulate, driven onward by the auri sacra fames, the cursed hunger for gold.
So the money addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration.
It blots out their concern for their fellow humans. It blots out their willingness to take climate science seriously. It blots out their ability to see the damage they’re doing to their own country and its democratic institutions….
$1 Trillion of Wealth Was Created for the 19 Richest U.S. Households Last Year
[Wall Street Journal, via God’s Spies, May 30, 2025]
[ZZ’s Blog, via Naked Capitalism 05-27-2025]
…Discussed in some detail in an article by Juliet Chung, appearing in the Thursday, April 24 Wall Street Journal, Zucman’s most recent findings draw little attention from the other corporate media.
Zucman claims that the wealth of 19 households in the US grew by one trillion dollars in 2024, more than the GDP of Switzerland. That top 0.00001% of households accounted in 2024 for 1.81% of all the wealth accumulated in the US– nearly 2% of all US wealth is held by those 19 households….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
“Infinite Contempt For Working People Is Not an Acceptable Default Position
Hamilton Nolan, May 27, 2025 [How Things Work]
Why do I cast the average corporation—employers! Bestowers of life-giving healthcare coverage!—in such harsh terms? Because, as someone who writes about labor issues, I have become aware of the fact that we accept from these companies a sort of hostile, mean behavior towards their own employees that we would never tolerate if companies were, in fact, people, as the legal fiction claims. Major corporations spend huge sums of money on advertising and public relations to give themselves the warm halo of entities that have human personalities, and yet they act towards their own workers—their valued team members, who are their highest priority, etcetera!—in a bestial way that is a rejection of the most basic form of shared humanity. The ability to convince the general public that the standards of common decency that we all expect from one another do not apply to the entire field of business is one of the greatest tricks capitalism ever pulled.”
Trumpillnomics
David Dayen, May 27, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…The first Trump administration didn’t pay much attention to white-collar civil and criminal enforcement, but this term is off the charts. Investigations into any business executive with even a passing relationship to Trump have been scotched, with beneficiaries ranging from the richest man in the world to the husband of the education secretary. Over 100 active enforcement actions have been either paused or dropped across the executive branch. In March, Trump donor Trevor Milton was pardoned after being sentenced for lying to investors; in April, Trump issued a corporate pardon to BitMEX, a crypto exchange that had pled guilty to failing to prevent money laundering.
Entire areas of the law, from prohibitions on U.S. companies bribing foreign countries to crackdowns on public corruption to bans on workplace discrimination, have essentially vanished. An orgy of deregulation, mainly benefiting corporate activities, is being planned. About $50 million in donations for Trump’s inauguration festivities came from companies under active federal investigation or lawsuits, and it’s hard to believe that any of those cases will see the light of a courtroom, or that any of those executives will be held accountable.
Most importantly, anyone who buys a product or secures a loan has been abandoned by their government. The consumer protection unit and (literally) the kleptocracy unit of the Justice Department will both be disbanded; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been defanged (even if 1,500 of its workers have been temporarily saved by court orders); and two Democratic commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission were illegally fired.
Busting up the safeguards against rapaciousness and greed means that the bad money will drive out the good. Trump’s second term has sent up a giant flashing signal to every miscreant, thief, and bad actor in America that their moment is now….
Predatory Lenders in the Operating Room
Bryce Covert May 28, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Medical credit cards have gone mainstream, preying on sick people at their most vulnerable.
Monopoly Round-Up: Trump Antitrust Enforcers Kick Small Business In the Teeth
Matt Stoller [via Naked Capitalism 05-28-2025]
Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2025]
Donald Trump is many things: a racist, an authoritarian, a rapist… but what he is, and has always been, above all and from the very start, is a scammer:
The election of Donald Trump feeds many needs in the right wing coalition: the libidinal pleasure of seeing trans people, migrants, and anyone who isn’t white getting terrorized by masked thugs and swivel-eyed loons; massive tax cuts for the oligarch class, especially those who (like Trump) inherit their wealth; the gutting of public education and the destruction of the barrier between church and state.
But the most important, best-served constituency in the Trump coalition is scammers. This has been his promise since his first campaign, when he boasted on national television that he cheated on his taxes because “that makes me smart”:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth
Trump – who has run multiple pyramid schemes – is gutting enforcement against Ponzi scammers:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway
Trump – who has repeatedly lied to investors and customers about his business plans – has elevated the 21st century’s most notorious defrauder of investors and customers and put him in charge of restructuring the US government:
https://www.wired.com/story/theres-a-very-simple-pattern-to-elon-musks-broken-promises/
Predatory finance
It’s 3 a.m. and Private Equity is Extending an Invitation to “The Big Club”
[Racket News, via Naked Capitalism 05-30-2025]
Restoring balance to the economy
Reclaiming the Courts from Corporate Capture
[The Economic Populist, via Naked Capitalism 05-30-2025]
The civil jury trial is one of America’s oldest and most democratic institutions. Enshrined in the Bill of Rights, it was designed as a check against the abuses of the British monarchy and wealthy merchants. Yet, today, it is dying. Last year, less than 1% of federal civil lawsuits actually went to trial, and courts are dismissing civil cases at earlier stages and more often. Those that do make it to discovery are bogged down by higher costs and endless delays, so cases can drag on for nearly a decade or longer.
This throttling of litigation is no accident. The Seventh Amendment right to a civil jury trial is under assault. The assailant? Corporations who want to avoid accountability and maintain their stranglehold on our economy. They are using their power and influence to both slow the legal process down and convince courts that most lawsuits are frivolous, harmful, and just too expensive, allowing them to avoid accountability by keeping their misdeeds out of the public eye and away from citizen juries….
Howie Klein, May 29, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…In Progress and Poverty, George had written that when growing wealth creates more inequality and corruption, civilizations collapse from within. The barbarians who sacked Rome in 410 AD met little resistance. George warned that the same could soon happen here— and might have happened but for the powerful reform movement he inspired. “Whence shall come the new barbarians?” George demanded. “Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes. How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges.” Today’s new barbarians smashed their way into the US Capitol. The book burners weren’t far behind….
On Tuesday, The Atlantic ran an essay by Adam Serwer, The New Dark Age. “The warlords who sacked Rome,” he wrote, ominously, “did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking— a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall… The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power. By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.”
Henry George’s Ahead-Of-Its-Time 1879 Suggestion That We Tax Wealth, Not Work— Part II
Howie Klein, May 29, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…George’s remedy was straightforward and popular: shift taxes onto unearned wealth and use the revenues for public benefit. Today’s version would mean taxing capital gains like wages, implementing wealth taxes on fortunes over $50 million, and closing the carried interest loophole that lets private equity vultures pay lower rates than teachers and firefighters.…
Did you catch how Norquist framed higher taxes on millionaires as an “attack on the small-business community?”….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
AI Models Show Signs of Falling Apart as They Ingest More AI-Generated Data
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 05-31-2025]
…In a new essay for The Register, veteran tech columnist Steven Vaughn-Nichols warns that even attempts to head off so-called “model collapse” — which occurs when large language models (LLMs) are fed synthetic, AI-generated data and consequently go off the rails — are another kind of nightmare.
As Futurism and countless other outlets have reported over the last few years, the AI industry has continuously barreled toward the moment at which all available authentic training data — that is, information that was produced by humans and not AI — will be exhausted. Some pundits, including Elon Musk, believe we’re already there.
Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry
[The Verge, via Naked Capitalism 05-27-2025]
Meta’s former head of global affairs said asking for permission from rights owners to train models would “basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”
Medicare Scams: Experts Share How to Protect Yourself From Fraud
[Woman’s World, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2025]
Democrats’ political malpractice
Does “Abundance” Beat America’s Culture-Warrior-In-Chief?
David Sirota, May 28, 2025 [Racket News]
President Donald Trump is often perceived as an ideological paradox — at once populist and plutocratic, pro-working-class and anti-labor, pro-growth and anti-trade, maverick conservative and Old Guard Republican. But for all of what looks like impulsive zig-zagging, there is a consistent throughline: He’s always focused on finding, spotlighting, and exacerbating the country’s most divisive cultural flashpoints.
So far, the strategy is working. Polls show Trump is historically unpopular, but still more popular than his Democratic opponents….
… Democrats have … toggled between berating their enraged rank-and-file voters, purging critics from their party, eschewing blame for the 2024 campaign — and now invoking TED Talk buzzwords like “abundance” to repackage their tepid agenda that keeps losing elections.
…But Democrats still haven’t capitalized because their dominant faction still wants nothing to fundamentally change. So far, their political strategy appears to be:
• Shrieking the word “democracy,” while crushing it inside their own party; reelecting their congressional leadership; and trying to conjure a “liberal Joe Rogan” by throwing cash at TikTokers and YouTubers.
• Voting for Trump’s nominees, courting Trump’s Silicon Valley cabal, and feigning ignorance about Biden’s cognitive impairment.
• Presenting Gotham supervillain (and Trump pal) Andrew Cuomo as a presidential contender; repackaging Chicago’s human personification of revolving–door corruption Rahm Emanuel as their party’s anti-corruption crusader; and trotting out former CIA analyst-turned-Bush White House official Elissa Slotkin to flip off Bernie Sanders and offer up some forced profanity and odes to patriotism — as if this is still the 2004 election with John Kerry reporting for duty….
…Democratic elites [are] now onto an allegedly new “Ezra Klein-pilled” policy agenda — one championing the billionaire-financed “abundance” movement amplified by the New York Times’ liberal whisperer in his book of the same name.
That movement essentially argues that environmental, city planning, clean air, and tech regulations pushed by an allegedly all-powerful American Left are the primary obstacle to prosperity. Recently, this faction demonized the idea of requiring real estate moguls to guarantee breathable air in their rental properties and pushed Republican congressional legislation preempting state limits on artificial intelligence, even when it is being used to fleece renters and deny medical claims.
In absolving robber barons from blame for this new Gilded Age, the supply-side messaging is exquisitely crafted for Democratic politicians, operatives, think tankers, and influencers whose careers have relied on finding an ever-narrower path between the demands of their big donors and the rage of their party’s voters….
The Abundance Agenda— Neoliberalism Dressed Down In A Hoodie
Howie Klein, May 26, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…The Abundance Agenda talks a big game about building more stuff—but says almost nothing about who controls it, who profits, who pays the price… and nothing at all about class analysis…. The purveyors of the Abundance Agenda want us to believe that the main obstacle to progress is not capital, but red tape. That the villains aren’t bosses and billionaires, but overly cautious planners and environmental lawyers….
Democrats fight about polls and language
[Semafor, May 30, 2025]
Centrist Democrats will gather in DC next week for their second “WelcomeFest,” where pollsters, moderate members of Congress, and a co-author of Abundance will discuss how to “regain voters’ trust” before an audience of around 600 progressives. Unlike last year, when progressives largely ignored the group, they are taking heat from the party’s left. And they welcome their hatred.
“Progressives have done a good job building an esprit de corps, a sense of community, and a sense of superiority,” said WelcomePAC co-founder Liam Kerr. “They’re trying to enforce middle school cliques, and we’re trying to be grown-ups.”
The success of Abundance, and the authors’ multiple invitations to speak to Democrats, has irritated progressives who see the project as a way to undermine them and move the party to the right. A quick read about the need for progressives to de-regulate and make it easier to build homes is seen, in these circles, as a railgun aimed at the left.
Earlier this week, the left-leaning group Demand Progress released polling that tested a “populist” message that identified “big corporations” as the “big problem,” against an “abundance” message that identified “bottlenecks that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges.” Among Democrats, 72% said they’d be more likely to support a candidate with the first message, versus 33% who were excited by the second.
“What these voters want is clear: a populist agenda that takes on corporate power and corruption,” said Emily Peterson-Cassin, Demand Progress’s corporate power director, in the poll release….
The Real Original Sins: What do Democrats need to do to win back voters’ trust?
Stanley B. Greenberg, May 29, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Earlier this month on State of the Union, Jake Tapper challenged Democrats to get their house in order. “The stunning election result traced back to the original sin of the 2024 election, President Biden’s decision to run for re-election,” despite years of serious decline of his mental abilities, Tapper said. With his co-author Alex Thompson, Tapper conducted 300 interviews for the book Original Sin that surely proved that….
But you must be living in a bubble if you believe this “cover-up” is the main reason for the disastrous election last November.
At least two-thirds of voters were desperate for change in the election, and nothing was more important than their desperation about the sustained high prices for everything important to their family. In Democracy Corps’s survey right after the election, fully two-thirds choose “inflation and the cost of living” as their top worry. That number stood out almost 20 points above the next problem, “immigration and the border.” And those are the actual “original sins” that drive the distrust of Democrats.
Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain understood that the president had to address the cost of living as prices spiked after the pandemic. To achieve that, he allowed me to edit the “Prep Version” of President Biden’s remarks to the AFL-CIO Constitutional Convention on June 14, 2022. I made a few edits in track changes to the president’s version to show his new priorities.
I deleted “The fact is my plan is working for working Americans.” I replaced it with “The fact is my plan has made working families more resilient in the face of spiking inflation and gas prices hitting them now.”
I cut “we are now living through the strongest—fastest—most widespread and equitable recovery in American history” and substituted new text about helping working families “faced with post-pandemic global inflation.”
But the president rejected those edits to this critical speech to the AFL-CIO….
Some have suggested Democrats apologize for Biden getting the economy wrong. But you first must answer this: Why aren’t Democrats more critical of an economy that has failed so many people? Why do so many economists and commentators describe the economy as “the envy of the world”?….
Measuring the Income Gap from 1975 to 2023: Extending Previous Work
Carter C. Price, February 17, 2025 [RAND]
The author extends prior work to estimate the gap between what workers earned in 2023 and what they would have earned with a more even growth rate from 1975 to 2023. The bottom 90 percent of workers would have earned $3.9 trillion more with the more even growth rates that would amount to the cumulative amount of $79 trillion. These numbers differ from the prior estimates because of inflation, growth in inequality, and a longer time frame.
THE COMING DEMOCRATIC CIVIL WAR
Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic. Commentary:
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2025]
Jonathan Chait in the Atlantic saying the quiet part out loud — just stating explicitly that yes, abundance is about defeating progressives and remaking the Democratic Party as a libertarian, Never Trump Republican Party. Great, can we stop pretending it’s anything but that?
Rahm Emanuel Helped Ruin FDR’s Party— Now He’s Back From Japan To Do Even Worse Damage
Howie Klein, May 26, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…As Rahm Emanuel, a Wall Street whore and genocide-supporter, gears up for an Illinois Senate run, he’s openly making noise about pushing the party even further right.
John McCormick, a media patsy, profiled Emanuel and discussed what he’s up to in today’s Wall Street Journal, although he sympathetically calls it pushing the party to the center….
As he contemplates his political future, Emanuel has returned to an industry where he has made millions. He is a senior adviser at Centerview Partners, the same investment bank where he spent two years after leaving the mayor’s office in 2019, earning more than $12 million. An earlier investment-bank windfall of at least $16 million at Wasserstein Perella & Co. came after Emanuel served as Bill Clinton’s White House political director [shoving NAFTA down the throats of Democratic congress members] and later as a senior adviser.” He’s talking up a presidential race even as he lays the groundwork to replace Dick Durbin in the Senate, even though voters in Chicago hate him and he left office before he could be run out of town on a rail….
The Democratic Party elite may be working for a rightward shift as a tactical necessity, but the data tells a different story: the Democratic Party’s long-term hemorrhaging of working-class support is not due to it being too progressive, but not progressive enough on material issues. Decades of triangulation, Emaanuel’s and Clinton’s NAFTA-style trade deals, privatization, and union-busting have left millions of Americans rightly skeptical of the party’s commitment to their economic well-being. Now combine that with the party’s reliance on corporate donors and consultants who view class-based appeals as gauche or outdated, and you have a recipe for the hollow technocratic liberalism that alienates the very people Democrats claim to represent.
Howie Klein, May 31, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…Gutiérrez isn’t conservative; he’s just an establishment shill. And he will be extravagantly financed by Chicago billionaires, Rahm’s anti-progressive machine and, oddly, by the genocide-coalition. In 2022, when the same bunch ran Chicago Alderman Gil Villegas in the primary, Ramirez trounced him nearly three to one. For all that billionaire and pro-genocide backing, Villegas only managed to get 23.7% of the vote. The super-reactionary Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) spent over $157,000 on the race and they are also involved with recruiting Gutiérrez. The Charter Schools Action Fund and the National Association of Realtors also helped finance Villegas, who was also backed by, Reid Hoffman, the Democratic Party’s most reactionary sugar daddy, who, I might add, personally sabotaged Kamala Harris’ race by putting strings on his contributions that forced her to back away from pro-working class positions and embrace corporate priorities.
Ramirez, who was running aggressively on Medicare-for-All and the Green New Deal was supported by the Working Families Party, Indivisible, AOC, Bernie, Pramila and Chuy García from the district next door….
Jake Tapper’s Biden Book is Hilarious and Insane
Matt Taibbi, May 28, 2025 [Racket News]
Trump’s transactional regime
David Frum [The Atlantic, via msn.com]
During his first presidency, Donald Trump collected millions of dollars of other people’s money. He charged the taxpayer nearly $2 million to protect him during the hundreds of times he visited his own properties. He accepted millions of dollars of campaign-related funds from Republican candidates who sought his favor. His businesses collected at least $13 million from foreign governments over his first term in office.When it was all over, Trump apparently decided he had been thinking too small. In his first term, he made improper millions. In his second term, he is reaching for billions: a $2 billion investment by a United Arab Emirates state-owned enterprise in the Binance crypto exchange using the Trump family’s stablecoin asset. An unknown number of billions placed by Qatar in a Trump-family real-estate development in that emirate, topped by the gift of a 747 luxury jet for the president’s personal use in office and afterward. Government-approved support for a Trump golf course in Vietnam while its leaders were negotiating with the United States for relief from Trump tariffs. Last week, Trump hosted more than 200 purchasers of his meme coin, many of them apparently foreign nationals, for a private dinner, with no disclosure of the names of those who had paid into his pocket for access to the president’s time and favor….
So here’s everything, all at once, together, in no special order. The scope is mind blowing, and tragic:
- CBS lawsuit – I put this one first because I sense it’s flying under the radar. Trump is demanding $25 million and an apology to settle his private lawsuit against Paramount over a 60 Minutes Kamala Harris interview he considered unfairly edited during the 2024 campaign. Paramount, which owns CBS News, offered $15 million, which Trump rejected this week….
World Liberty Financial – Trump and the Trump Org. are 60% partners in this crypto-brokerage business. Early on in their investment, Justin Sun, a Chinese national under an SEC fraud investigation, poured $30 million in token purchases into World Liberty, an estimated $18 million of which went directly to the Trump family, and the president. The SEC, which answers to Trump, then suspended its investigation. Sun’s total investment has since been upped to around $75 million. World Liberty was also the place where a UAE-backed fund purchased $2 billion in stablecoins to invest in Binance….
- $TRUMP – Donald Trump launched his personal memecoin just before taking office. It’s not clear how much he owns. Last month the group the runs the coin offered a private dinner with the president to top 220 holders. The top 25 got a VIP White House tour. Attendees spent a total of $148 million to attend the dinner, hosted at Trump’s private club in Virginia. Incidentally, Justin Sun, who had been avoiding travel to the US for fear of arrest, bought $20 million worth of the $TRUMP memecoin and showed up without fear to attend the dinner.
- $MELANIA – First Lady Melania Trump has her own memecoin, with a current market cap of $203 million. And speaking of the First Lady…
- Amazon – Disney bid $14 million for the rights to Melania’s autobiographical documentary film. Then Jeff Bezos’ Amazon swooped in an paid $40 million. Melania nets an estimated $28 million from the deal….
[TW: Zwillich details seven more categories of Trump’s corruption.]
Resistance
Howie Klein, May 24, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
The current backlash against Trump is exactly the outcome we’d expect to see if my long-standing argument is true: that America has an anti-MAGA majority, but not necessarily a pro-Democratic one. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the reality of American politics today is not a “realignment,” wherein the views and values of most ordinary Americans have become fundamentally more aligned with the views of MAGA Republicans. Rather it’s been a “dealignment” from both parties. Voters, increasingly distrustful of institutions and clamoring for substantial change that neither party is delivering, have punished incumbent parties in nine of the past ten elections—a D-R-D-R presidential alternation pattern unseen in over a century.
… lots and lots of things are not being said or reported because people are afraid to say them. “Afraid” may be too strong a word in some cases, though the fuzzy, murky spectrum separating “fear” from something more like calculation is a key feature of what is happening. I’m far from the first to note this. But when people do note it it doesn’t get a lot of attention because there’s not a clear empirical basis for it. What’s your basis for noting, at a society-wide level, what people aren’t saying? How do you prove — or, perhaps better to say, illustrate — that reality? And yet it is happening and it’s not difficult to see it observationally if you look closely in any one place….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
‘This Is What Autocrats Do’: Concern Grows Over Single Paragraph Buried Deep in GOP Bill
Jon Queally, May 31, 2025 [CommonDreams]
The provision would force those challenging Trump “to pay up in the form of a posted bond—something many people can’t afford to do. That means only the wealthy will be able to even attempt to challenge the most powerful man in the country.”
Jeff Stein, May 24, 2025 [SpyTalk, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2025]
Michael Ledeen, the controversial national security journalist, scholar and schemer who died at age 83 on May 17 from complications following a stroke, played a significant covert role leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as other productions of false intelligence for political ends….
It was hardly Ledeen’s first foray into skullduggery. In 1980, according to an investigation five years later by the Wall Street Journal, he was involved in a “disinformation campaign” to discredit President Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy to the benefit of Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. He also published discredited theories that Soviet Bulgaria was behind the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. “With Ronald Reagan newly installed in the White House,” journalist Craig Unger wrote in Vanity Fair, “the so-called Bulgarian Connection made perfect Cold War propaganda. Michael Ledeen was one of its most vocal proponents, promoting it on TV and in newspapers all over the world.”….
Jeet Heer, May 30, 2025 [The Nation]
Conservatives on Trump: Don’t Blame Us!
Harold Meyerson, May 30, 2025 [The American Prospect]
In a tour de force of sophistry, George Will says Trump is really one of those god-awful progressives.…
This past Wednesday, Will delivered the Summa Theologica of the paleocon case against Trump, in a column sure to be remembered as a tour de force of blinkered argumentation. Will termed Trump’s administration “the most progressive in U.S. history,” not merely enumerating Trump’s various heresies, but also ascribing them to progressivism run amok and thereby exonerating conservatism from any responsibility for Trump’s tin-pot presidency.
The Will bill of progressive particulars included Trump’s belief in “government’s ability to anticipate and control the consequences of broad interventions in modern society’s complexities”; “presidential supremacy ensured by using executive orders to marginalize Congress”; and “constructing coalitions of government-dependent factions, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal did with the elderly (Social Security, 1935), labor (the 1935 National Labor Relations Act favoring unions) and farmers (the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act).” He further classifies as progressivism-gone-wild Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center and his attempts to dictate university curricula….
…to depict Trump’s use of them as comparable to FDR’s fails on quantitative as well as qualitative grounds. Roosevelt signed nearly 80 congressionally passed bills during his first hundred days, thereby following the Constitution in creating the New Deal; Trump signed just five bills during his first hundred days, preferring instead to personalize power as Roosevelt did not. FDR was a Madisonian progressive, while Trump is the president against whom Madison warned us and sought to forestall with the Constitution’s separation of powers…..
Usury in the Water: There’s never been a better time to be a loan shark for small businesses.
Maureen Tkacik, May 30, 2025 [The American Prospect]
[TW: begins with details of the checkered history of Mike Lindell’s business borrowing.]
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
The Federalist Society claims it’s just a debating club. Now it risks becoming one.
Henry Farrell, May 31, 2025 [Programmable Mutter]
…The political economy of the Federalist Society is poorly understood, but very important to modern American politics. For decades, the Federalist Society has shaped conservative legal discourse, providing the Republican party with a way to vet judges and political appointees for appropriate conservative values. Its then head, Leonard Leo, effectively took charge of recommending judges in the first Trump administration.
Now that’s changing. Two days ago, Trump expressed his disappointment in the Federalist Society for recommending unreliable judges, and denounced Leo as a “sleazebag” who “probably hates America.” Stephen Miller has said that the Federalist Society won’t be making judicial nominations any more.
The immediate reason for all this is that Trump is mad that judges he appointed are ruling against him….
The draft first chapter of Amanda Hollis-Brusky’s book on the Federalist Society, Ideas with Consequences, is extremely helpful. She describes the Federalist Society as “an interconnected network of experts with policy relevant knowledge who share certain beliefs and work to actively transmit and translate those beliefs into policy.” In contrast to scientists, whose beliefs rest on causal claims, the Federalist Society’s experts work with beliefs that are “strategic and instrumental rather than sincere and objectively grounded.” At the same time, they work within a legal system that places a emphasizes giving reasons for decisions.
Unlike legislators who simply vote according to their policy preferences, judges and Justices are required to issue written opinions explaining, supporting, and defending their decisions in the language of the law. In order to persuade an audience of similarly educated and trained lawyers and politicians that their decisions are legitimate, these opinions must situate the given decision within a line of established precedent – i.e., within an accepted constitutional framework – or, alternatively, they must provide a convincing argument for why that framework should either be ignored, altered, or reconstructed entirely … Thus, the importance of the persuasive function of the court is heightened in cases where the Supreme Court is altering or reconstructing existing constitutional frames; cases where doctrinal distance is greatest.
In plain language, the Federalist Society is an ideological machine for taking conservative ideas, kicking the tyres to make sure they’ll do what they’re supposed to, and justifying them in ways that make sense for lawyers. This is especially important for justifying constitutional decisions, where conservatives on the Supreme Court needs external support for shifting the binding interpretation of the Constitution from one set of claims to another….
Civic republicanism
What Is a Constitution? Our next constitution waits, dressed and made up, ready to take the stage
Thomas Neuburger, May 28, 2025 [God’s Spies]
My contentions are these:
- That the American constitution has gone through three major revisions, each spurred by crisis to correct flaws in the previous one.
- That the current constitution has so far drifted from the previous public agreement (the FDR or New Deal constitution) as to be almost unrecognizable — which makes us due for a fourth.
Our third (New Deal) constitution was in place from its 1937 confirmation by the Supreme Court through roughly 1980. It is now 2025 and much of that aggregate agreement, that constitution, has been completely or partly degraded, repealed in practice.
For example, there’s no more Fourth Amendment; the right to be free of “unreasonable searches and seizures” is gone completely, surrendered to the security state. The same with much of the Thirteenth (prison labor is slave labor), most of the Fourteenth (equal rights and due process are disappearing fast, except for corporate “persons”), and all of the Fifteenth (the right to vote is no longer guaranteed).
In addition, the New Deal constitution’s control of the economy as a way to “promote the general welfare” has been reversed; governmental control of the economy now helps the wealthy impoverish the people, the opposite of its original goal….
Harold Meyerson, May 27, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Law’s Republic [pdf]
Frank Michelman [The Yale Law Journal, Volume 97, Number 8, July 1988]
[TW: The 1988 Yale Law Journal issue was devoted to republicanism (Volume 97, Number 8, July 1988, online at https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/ylj/vol97/iss8/1/). In the lead article of Harvard Law Professor Frank Michelman explained how republicanism is superior to democracy because republicanism demands a regard for inclusivity and pluralism. It is not guaranteed that democracy will have the same regard, because what democracy demands is only what the mobilized active majority — whether ruled by reason or panicked by passion — demands. Yet, ironically, it is exactly the workings of democracy that direct the development of Constitutional law to strive toward a “more perfect union” through what Michelman calls juris-generative politics. Michelman quotes another legal scholar to lay the interpretative corner stone: “It is the very purpose of our Constitution … to declare certain values transcendent, beyond the reach of temporary political majorities.” [p1499]
[Michelman uses the famous Brown v, Board of Education decision to illustrate his argument: “the Brown Court spoke in the accents of invention, not of convention; it spoke for the future, criticizing the past; it spoke for law, creating authority; it engaged in political argument. [p1525] ….the pursuit of political freedom through law depends on “our” constant reach for inclusion of the other, of the hitherto excluded—which in practice means bringing to legal-doctrinal presence the hitherto absent voices of emergently self-conscious social groups. [p1529]
[Michelman paints a compelling picture of how the republic renews itself through the constant struggle “to form a more perfect union.”]
“It is the very purpose of our Constitution … to declare certain values transcendent, beyond the reach of temporary political majorities.”)… One possible way of making sense of this is by conceiving of politics as a process in which private-regarding “men” become public-regarding citizens and thus members of a people. It would be by virtue of that people-making quality that the process would confer upon its law-like issue the character of law binding upon all as self-given….
…republicanism [is] not optional … belief in juris-generative politics that it seems must play a role in any explanation of how the constitutionalist principles of self-rule and law-rule might coincide.
Yet republican thought is no less committed to the idea of the people acting politically as the sole source of law and guarantor of rights, than it is to the idea of law, including rights, as the precondition of good politics. Republican thought thus demands some way of understanding how laws and rights can be both the free creations of citizens and, at the same time, the normative givens that constitute and underwrite a polity….
The Court helps protect the republican state—that is, the citizens politically engaged—from lapsing into a politics of self-denial. It challenges “the people’s” self-enclosing tendency to assume their own moral completion as they now are and thus to deny to themselves the plurality on which their capacity for transformative self-renewal depends.
The Dead End of Checks and Balances — The U.S. constitutional system is driving our democratic decline
Lisa L. Miller, May 21, 2025 [Boston Review]
…Far from serving our republic well, America’s unusual system of checks and balances has paralyzed it—contributing to the very authoritarianism we now face rather than protecting us from it. However well-meaning these venerable invocations, doubling down on America’s alleged constitutional virtues at this moment will only entrench the dysfunction that got us here. If our aim is to safeguard democracy, these dangerous times call for a long-overdue reckoning with the system’s deep vices—and a clear vision for overcoming them.
Indeed, urging a return to normal misses the point that the normal order is widely perceived as a problem. Majorities of Americans across the political spectrum have long understood that their system of government doesn’t serve them well. Institutional obstacles at all levels empower elite minorities to safeguard their own interests and block popular policies that would broadly serve the American people, from universal health care to a higher minimum wage. Of course, Trump’s attacks on political institutions have little to do with constraining the power of elites or advancing such policies; on the contrary, with Elon Musk at the head of DOGE, they are advancing rank corruption and kleptocracy for the benefit of the ultrawealthy and extreme ideologues. But Trump does tap into the sentiment that our institutions are broken. Acknowledging the flaws in our system does not mean endorsing his, or any president’s, unlimited power. Nor does it mean there is no form of checks and balances that can serve American democracy. Rather, it clarifies the necessity and urgency of reforming government so it responds better to the needs of ordinary people.
To advance this goal, we need a frank assessment of how our system of so-called checks and balances works as a real-world set of democratic institutions. The conventional wisdom says that checks and balances forestall the abuse of power. But our particular system constrains the public far more than it constrains elites….
different clue
@Tony Wikrent,
I finally figured out the oh-so-clear ground-level basic answer to the question posed over at Naked Capitalism. I have written it out as a question-answer riddle.
Question: ” Why are they trying to kill us?”
Answer: “Because they have decided that we are not dying off fast enough on our
own.”
Our mission, should we decide to accept it, is to die off as slowly as we can while figuring out how to kill as many of “Them” as fast as possible. That second part would require a movement too big to legislate against or enforce against.
different clue
Here is a micro-video from the “oddly-satisfying” subreddit. At first glance, it would appear to have zero economic implications. It is called ” peeling the ivy from a brick home”. Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1l0pbke/peeling_ivy_from_brick_home/
The ivy comes off as a solid sheet. The first economic-implications thought that comes to my mind is . . . how much evapo-transpiration can that solid wall of ivy perform? How much heat can it suck through the wall from the house itself? How much cooling does that much ivy give the house that air-conditioning therefor does not have to provide? I guess the homeowner is about to find out.
Why would anyone want to pull a living green wall of ivy off the wall of a house? Does ivy destroy the surface of whatever wall it has attached itself too? If so, why not provide a sacrificial surface layer to the wall for the ivy to attach to and destroy, thereby leaving the real wall beneath the sacrificial surface layer totally unaffected?
That’s what i would look into if I had a real house of my very own.
Mark Level
Jonathan Chait has been legally brain-dead and a complete putz wrong about everything for decades, one could even call him a Tard. He fronts for the worst hypocrites in the world (they are as bad in what they actually do as the Trumpies, who aren’t hypocrites and tell you they’re about to rape and steal from you, so Suck it Peasant!) Chait accidentally admits the latter point when he addresses the Bidet Admin’s general collapse.
That piece gave me many laughs. Perhaps the best one was when he excoriated stupid “Progressives” for the “unpopular” opposition to private healthcare. What a “man of the people” Chait is– the people at Bohemian Grove, the Libs who attend Davos, etc. No wonder a Vampire Imperialist rag like the Atlantic prints his drivel endlessly.
different clue
Sometimes I do the random walk and stumble around You Tube Videoland. I have just stumbled upon a political videographer named Reese Waters who is an American Black American. I have been watching the most entertaining video called: ” Latinos UNLOAD on Trump loving Cubans facing deportation”. It features various non-Venezuelan/non-Cuban Latinos noting that they preDICTed how the Leopards of Trump would eat the faces of Latinos for Trump, and tried to warn them not to support the Leopards of Trump. But Venezuelans and Cubans supported Trump anyway, and now non-Venezuelan and non-Cuban Latinos are all like . . . ” Face, meet Leopard.”
Here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ph7Zl_Hx7A
Purple Library Guy
I keep seeing pieces about the rise of inequality and the “stagnation” of working class wages and about wages failing to keep up with productivity increases. They’re all so damn weak. So here’s the thing–every so often an article will give the game away, by saying something like “wage increases have failed to keep pace with the rising cost of living”. Wait, what? If wage “increases” haven’t kept pace with the cost of living, that means WAGES HAVE DECLINED.
And it means that if you get charts showing inflation-adjusted median wages growing slowly, they must be based on wrongly calculated inflation.
And that seems to be the real-world experience. More and more people have no money, more and more people are more and more deeply in debt, more and more people can’t afford decent homes, or homes at all. This is not “stagnating” wages. This is not wages going up but by less than productivity goes up. This is wages GOING DOWN. Why isn’t anyone on the left doing the analysis needed to get past the cheery statistics and show the reality of income DECLINE?!
Like & Subscribe
For Soredemos and others considering AI should be an ongoing and continuing discussion, all things considered. Here’s AI, or one iteration of it, responding to whether it’s over-hyped or not. I had to chuckle at the caveat at the end about it making mistakes. Note how AI avoids the greatest fear being hyped which is AI extinguishing the human species. Is that a “mistake” or a purposeful oversight? At this point no doubt the former but according to the “Godfather” of AI, or one of them, not the former for long as it learns and grows and ultimately creates and builds itself without human intervention and coddling.
Yes, artificial intelligence (AI) has been the subject of considerable hype, with some arguing it’s being overhyped, while others believe it’s underestimated in the long run. While AI offers numerous benefits like improved efficiency and automation, it also raises concerns about job displacement and ethical issues.
Arguments for AI being overhyped:
Short-term vs. long-term impact: Some experts argue that the short-term impact of AI is often overestimated, while its long-term potential is underestimated.
“AI washing”: Companies may exaggerate AI’s role in driving innovation to boost stock prices or attract investment, even if the technology isn’t fully integrated or delivering on its promises.
Misrepresentation of AI capabilities: Some AI tools are being presented as having more capabilities than they actually do, leading to unrealistic expectations.
Job displacement fears: While AI can automate tasks and increase efficiency, there are concerns that it could lead to widespread job displacement in various sectors.
Lack of social awareness: Despite advances in AI, some argue that it’s not yet socially aware or reliable enough to replace humans in all aspects of work, especially in fields requiring empathy and nuanced understanding.
Ethical concerns: AI raises ethical issues related to bias, data privacy, and the potential for misuse, requiring careful consideration and regulation.
Arguments for AI being underestimated:
Long-term transformative potential: Others believe that the long-term impact of AI will be significantly larger than what’s currently predicted, potentially leading to major societal and economic changes.
Accelerating growth: Unlike previous tech booms, the AI revolution is characterized by accelerating, transformative growth, rather than a dramatic boom and bust cycle.
AI’s ability to solve complex problems: AI can be used to tackle complex challenges in various fields, including healthcare, climate change, and scientific research.
AI as a tool for human augmentation: AI can augment human capabilities, making it easier for people to perform tasks and innovate.
AI’s potential for new industries and jobs: AI may create new industries and job roles, especially in fields related to AI development, implementation, and ethical oversight.
The need for AI to address complex global challenges: AI is seen as essential for tackling global challenges like climate change, disease, and poverty.
In conclusion: The debate around AI being overhyped or underestimated highlights the complexity of the technology and its potential impact on society. While there’s clearly a degree of hype surrounding AI, it also holds immense potential for positive change. The key lies in managing expectations, addressing ethical concerns, and focusing on the responsible use of AI to benefit society.
AI responses may include mistakes.
Like & Subscribe
This is why I just can’t. Reagan Republicans, many of them log cabin Republicans apparently, are the new left. Tim Miller worked on Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, if you could call it that, in 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfPMNdzQ5Sc
He and the genocidal war criminal yuck it up in the interview and in the process do their duty in normalizing Donald Trump.
The messaging from Blinken is Trump is ultimately doing the right things but for the wrong reasons and the wrong way, “We Democrats would achieve the same goal but for the right reasons and the right way meaning, we would support Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza just sans the Trump resorts.”
Curt Kastens
From Operation, The T bone is connected to the Funny Bone, a game for 6 years and up.
A link from Neutrality Studies A youtube Channel produced by a Swiss Citizen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_vVPQ6PZY8