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Opinion
Cheap Living, Costly Politics
When Mamdani meets Trump on affordability, capitalism gets cheaper without becoming less exploitative.
Nov 25, 2025
In the press conference following their meeting, President Donald Trump and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani presented what has widely been read as an unexpected moment of political harmony. The men appeared relaxed, even complimentary toward one another. Trump congratulated Mamdani on his victory and repeated, "The better you do, the happier I am,” all while shielding Mandani from the press’s often hostile questioning. At one point, when a reporter asked Mamdani whether he still believed Trump was a fascist, Trump humorously cut in to deflect the question, telling him he could simply say, “Yes”and move on. Coverage highlighted the ease of their interaction and the shared focus on lowering costs for New Yorkers, including joint criticism of high energy costs.
Many interpreted the friendliness as a shocking departure from expectations. A democratic socialist known for championing tenant power, free transit, and critiques of the United States’ complicity in genocide appeared congenial beside a reactionary politician who has spent years fueling racist, authoritarian movements. Yet what appeared surprising to many was in fact a predictable meeting of compatible political logics. Both appeal to popular material demands while leaving intact the deeper structures of power that require inequality, extraction, and coercion to function.
Popularity and the Politics of Cheap Relief
Trump has always treated popularity as the foundation of legitimacy. He mobilizes mass admiration, celebrity status, and populist rhetoric not to democratize power but to justify domination by a figure with immense wealth and personal legal vulnerability. The admiration he extends to Mamdani serves as validation by association. Aligning himself with a youthful, newly elected figure who commands broad public support strengthens his claim to represent the people, even as his agenda remains focused on legal survival, personal enrichment, and elite power.
Mamdani’s strategy rests on a different calculus that converges with Trump at the surface. The politics of affordability resonates because it speaks directly to lived capitalist crisis. Housing, groceries, utilities, and transportation devour household budgets while wages stagnate. The cost of simply existing in a city like New York has grown unbearable. Mamdani’s platform identifies that pain as the entry point to socialist reform. He connects his administration’s mandate to policies like rent freezes, fare free buses, and municipal ownership of basic goods. The focus on lowering costs mainstreams socialist policy by shaping it as pragmatic relief rather than ideological transformation.
This strategy carries value. It can anchor left politics in material need and build popular support for public services. But affordability also carries risk. If reducing prices becomes the central horizon rather than a bridge to systemic change, the political project risks evolving into a more humane version of the same order. Or even worse, it creates the conditions for an even more repressive and inhuman form of fascism in our time. Life becomes cheaper without becoming freer.
Cozying up to Trump, may seem like a good political tactic, but it ultimately plays into an attempt to make authoritarianism seem not only acceptable but even progressive.
This reflects a deeper contradiction in contemporary capitalism. Liberal democracy and market institutions are no longer accepted as inherently legitimate. Their worth is increasingly measured by whether they can deliver immediate material improvement. That shift creates openings for radical change because it breaks the old belief that the system deserves loyalty simply for existing. Yet it also gives the system new ways to protect itself. Popular leaders can step in to offer short-term relief that restores confidence in existing institutions while leaving the forces that create crisis untouched. Affordability becomes a pressure valve rather than a pathway to transformation. And it also limits the demands of the left to a universalized middle-class desire for a less expensive capitalist existence, regardless of its exploitative impact on the rest of society.
The cordial meeting did not signal an ideological unity between democratic socialism and right-wing populism. It showed how both now operate in a political landscape where legitimacy rests on delivering short-term economic gains to supposedly all New Yorkers rather than on the principles they claim to represent. The question is what must be surrendered to secure those gains.
How Affordability Buys Consent
Cozying up to Trump, may seem like a good political tactic, but it ultimately plays into an attempt to make authoritarianism seem not only acceptable but even progressive. In wealthy capitalist states, a long-standing, but too often conveniently ignored, political bargain is being updated. People can receive short-term economic improvements, subsidized public services, and relief from acute cost pressures in exchange for accepting the continued existence of imperial violence abroad and racialized coercion at home. In the present era, this “old” bargain carries the heightened risk of helping to usher in fascism.
The working populations of imperial centers are granted better access to goods while wealth continues to be extracted from workers in colonized, sanctioned, or militarized regions. Domestically the same bargain allows inequality to deepen as long as its effects are managed through policing, welfare targeting, and selective investment.
This arrangement relies on economic relief as a tool for preserving the broader system. Rather than confronting the structures that create poverty, states manage discontent by making survival marginally less difficult. Political institutions become custodians of a society where inequality is expected and stability is achieved through regulated compromise rather than emancipation.
This bargain is increasingly reinforced by what can be understood as an authoritarian financial complex. Contemporary capitalism is stabilized through a fusion of financial power, corporate control, and coercive institutions that contain unrest when inequality becomes volatile. Policing, surveillance, carcerality, and militarized foreign policy do not simply uphold order; they function as profitable sectors that expand precisely because inequality persists. In this context affordability works to preserve the system by easing everyday pressures while leaving intact the industries that rely on repression at home and abroad for growth.
Within this context affordability becomes a pacifying tool—especially for working class New Yorkers who are demanding real systemic change. Cheaper transit and lower utility bills offer real improvements, but they can also function as incentives to accept a political order responsible for global extraction and domestic repression. The issue is not whether material relief has value; it is that such relief can substitute for structural transformation rather than build toward it.
This framework clarifies what is at stake in New York. Mamdani’s focus on affordability could lead to transformative public ownership and a challenge to capital. It could also become a mechanism through which New Yorkers receive lower prices while the underlying machinery of exploitation remains in place. The reported decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, outlined in coverage of Mamdani’s choice to keep Tisch in place, highlights this tension because it signals continuity with a policing regime that has historically prioritized property protection, broken-windows enforcement, and surveillance over structural justice. If these institutions remain in place, affordability risks functioning as cover for a system that deepens inequality while appearing to relieve it. Or more precisely, it creates new acceptable forms of repression, inequity, and exploitation—expanding more widely the unethical desires of an aspiring middle class who ignore the oppression of others so that they can live comfortably.
This pattern already exists internationally. European welfare systems were largely built on colonial resource extraction. United States prosperity relied on global dominance, military power, dollar hegemony, and dispossession. Cheap goods do not emerge from nowhere. They are subsidized by unseen human costs. A left project that seeks to lower the price of living without confronting those global and racialized foundations risks reproducing a moral economy where the comfort of the metropole is purchased through others’ subjugation.
Beyond Cheaper Survival
The shift in public consciousness that enabled Mamdani’s victory should not be underestimated. People are no longer persuaded by justifications that capitalism or liberal democracy are inherently legitimate. Legitimacy is now measured by whether institutions deliver tangible improvement. That shift makes sense in an era of crisis. It erodes ideological loyalty and opens space for radical alternatives grounded in meeting basic needs. Crucially, just as Mamdani uses the discourse of “affordability” to make his brand of liberal socialism seem more politically acceptable, so too is Trump using these desires for his own project of fascism.
This transformation creates an opening for socialist politics. If people demand material improvement then the left can demonstrate that market-based systems cannot provide it reliably. Success requires more than lowering prices. It demands democratizing control over production, land, energy, transit, and finance. It demands replacing private ownership with social ownership and treating housing, transport, food, and utilities as public rights rather than profit sources.
Affordability can accelerate this transition if it is framed as a step toward decommodification. Free buses point toward collective transit. Rent freezes point toward social housing and community land trusts. Lower energy bills point toward democratically owned utilities. However, it can also distract attention from more radical demands such as for a living wage and the socialization of the economy.
The meeting showed how easily a left project that prioritizes cost of living can be absorbed into the political logic of the system it aims to confront.
But without such grounding affordability can consolidate the system instead. A state that lowers prices without challenging ownership leaves profit structures intact and relies on subsidies, taxation, or temporary regulatory pressure rather than structural change. When that occurs the governing project becomes managing capitalism responsibly rather than ending it. Even more concerning, it creates the condition for the far-right to claim the demand for “affordability” as their own.
This risk is amplified by electoral politics. Winning office creates pressure to compromise with existing institutions. Mayors must navigate financial markets, credit ratings, property tax structures, policing unions, federal funding constraints, and real estate interests. Under those pressures affordability becomes a technocratic tool to pacify the public without challenging the interests that make the city unaffordable. It provide the very legitimacy for both “progressive” and far-right authoritarian elites to justify their own power and rule.
A socialist movement must therefore build power outside electoral institutions. Tenant unions, worker cooperatives, public banking campaigns, fare strikes, climate blockades, and mass organizations can exert pressure that elected officials alone cannot.
A Crossroads for the Left
The Trump-Mamdani meeting symbolized a potential broader turning point. The crisis of capitalism has eroded ideological certainty. People demand results. Political actors from different factions will compete to supply them. Some will promise affordability without freedom. Others will promise belonging and national cohesion without justice. The real radical left must offer something different.
The stakes are not small reforms or ideological purity. Instead, they are whether a politics rooted in affordability may become a transitional stage toward democratic control of society or, more likely, a permanent settlement that normalizes exploitation in exchange for a comfortable life. One path leads to public ownership, internationalist solidarity, abolition of punitive institutions, and dismantling of capitalist extraction. The other path stabilizes oppression by making it less painful.
The meeting showed how easily a left project that prioritizes cost of living can be absorbed into the political logic of the system it aims to confront. Trump gained legitimacy through proximity to a socialist victor. Mamdani gained access and cooperation through cordial tone. Both walked away stronger, and the system stayed exactly where it was.
The moment demands strategic clarity. Affordability must not replace emancipation. The goal cannot be cheaper survival; it must be a society where survival is no longer determined by market forces or secured through imperial violence.
There is a chance to move beyond comfort into collective power. The task is to seize it and build socialism from below.
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Warfare Over Healthcare: My Premium Skyrockets to $2600 Per Month
For the first time in my adult life, I will be uninsured, joining the millions who have navigated this risky reality for years. And for what? Multi-trillion-dollar wars and endless tax breaks for the wealthy.
Nov 25, 2025
Next year, an estimated 5 million people will be priced out of health insurance in the United States. I am one of them. When I went to renew my family’s policy, I was shocked to discover my premium had gone up to $2,600 per month, a price my household of four simply cannot afford. For the first time in my adult life, I will be uninsured, joining the millions who have navigated this risky reality for years. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially when health insurance already makes access to healthcare costly with extremely unrealistic deductibles and high out-of-pocket costs. Yet, as a woman in my 40s with a family history of breast cancer, going without coverage is a gamble with my life.
After some number-crunching, we concluded that we could afford to carry insurance for only 2 of the 4 of us. This left us with an inhuman choice: to decide whose lives we value more. This is not just an abstract dilemma that many households are facing; it is necropolitics in action, the state-sanctioned power to decide who lives and dies. This crisis is a direct result of political choices made by those elected to serve the people and their needs. By allowing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies to expire, our elected officials are acting as death panels, comfortable with making a decision that will kill off tens of thousands of their own constituents. This is not hyperbole; studies show that over 40,000 people in the US die annually due to a lack of healthcare.
However, these domestic necropolitics are merely a symptom of the US’ larger death wish: a war economy that serves weapons manufacturers whose job is to create machines of death and destruction. As a nation, we manage to muster up trillions each year to fund global conflict and destruction while claiming the price of keeping our own alive is too much. Our government’s priorities could not be any clearer. For example, in the recent government shutdown, the National Priorities Project reported that the Senate managed to find bipartisan unity to approve a $32 billion increase for the Pentagon as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passing it with an overwhelming 77-20 vote. Yet, they refused to extend the healthcare subsidies for even a single year, a measure that would have cost roughly $35 billion, a well-worth sum that would keep millions, including myself, from losing their health insurance.
This is not a one-off, though. Congress passes an ever-growing Pentagon budget every year, now set to exceed a trillion dollars. The 2026 NDAA will be voted on in mid-December. Around the same time, there are whispers of a vote on the healthcare subsidies that could save millions of families from our nightmare. However, only one of these bills is certain to pass with little debate, and it is not the one that will save lives.
We live in a system that values war and conflict over the protection of life, and every day they decide that it is okay for more and more of us to die.
To understand the deadly consequences of these priorities, consider that the annual cost of continuing the ACA subsidies is about $30 billion, or roughly $82 million per day. The daily cost of operating a single US aircraft carrier is approximately $8 million. This means that the cost of one carrier for a single day is equivalent to about 10% of the daily cost of providing healthcare subsidies for the entire nation. In other words, the funds spent on one warship for just one day could instead ensure a day of healthcare access for hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The math makes it clear that the US government is not in the business of serving the people and their needs. Instead, our elected officials sit in high places, callously deciding who they are willing to kill off in order protect their personal vested interest, whether it be Palestinians in Gaza, children in Sudan, boaters in Venezuela, migrants seeking a better life, or hard-working families desperately trying to make ends meet in an economy that only serves a few rather than the many. We live in a system that values war and conflict over the protection of life, and every day they decide that it is okay for more and more of us to die. It is necropolitics, all the way down, and we are all on the chopping block. Unless…
To learn more about how to fund the people's needs over war manufacturers' greed, please visit our Cut The Pentagon website for more ways to take action.
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Does Anyone Even Remember Trump Once Favored Medicare for All?
Who's going to pay for covering everybody, including the currently uninsured? "The government's going to pay for it," Trump said in a 2015 interview.
Nov 25, 2025
When asked what they like most about Trump, fervent supporters often say, “He says what he thinks.” Well, not always. Donald Trump has long supported government-run universal healthcare—well before he had to deal with a crazed Congressional GOP in his first term. The controlling Republicans repealed Obamacare dozens of times in the House of Representatives (repeal was blocked in the Senate)—without offering any alternative.
President Trump also denounced Obamacare in vitriolic expletives, but he offers no alternatives.
However, let’s look back at a time when Trump, before his first term, was not tongue-tied about Medicare for All.
In a little-noticed Washington Post article (May 5, 2017), headlined “Trump’s forbidden love: Single-payer health care,” Aaron Blake reports that “in his heart of hearts, [Trump] wants single-payer health care. Indeed, it seems to be his forbidden fruit.”
Blake goes back to 2000 when “he [Trump] advocated for it as both a potential Reform Party presidential candidate and in his book, “The America We Deserve,” to wit:
“We must have universal health care. Just imagine the improved quality of life for our society as a whole,” he wrote, adding: “The Canadian-style, single-payer system in which all payments for medical care are made to a single agency (as opposed to the large number of HMOs and insurance companies with their diverse rules, claim forms, and deductibles)…helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans…Just before the 2016 campaign, Trump appeared on David Letterman’s show and held up Scotland’s socialist system as the ideal.”
Then, in April 2017, a law professor argued in the New York Post that Trump should just go for it. Universal Healthcare would be great for the Republican Party, as it would challenge the Democrats’ claim that it is the compassionate party. Moreover, Trump’s supporters would actually like better, less costly healthcare.
“A friend of mine was in Scotland recently. He got very, very sick. They took him by ambulance and he was there for four days. He was really in trouble, and they released him and he said, ‘Where do I pay?’ And they said, ‘There’s no charge,’” Trump said. “Not only that, he said it was like great doctors, great care. I mean, we could have a great system in this country.”
Then, early in the 2016 campaign, he again praised the single-payer systems in Scotland and Canada—while also arguing that the United States needed to have a private system.
Asked on “Morning Joe” whether he supported single-payer, he said: “No, but it’s certainly something that in certain countries works. It actually works incredibly well in Scotland. Some people think it really works in Canada. But not here, I don’t think it would work as well here.”
He said two days later at a GOP debate: “As far as single-payer, it works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland. It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you’re talking about here.”
Later on, Trump would repeatedly push for universal health care without specifically subscribing to the words “single-payer.”
“Everybody’s got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say,” Trump said in a September 2015 “60 Minutes” interview. “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”
He added when asked who is going to pay for it: “The government’s gonna pay for it.”
[…]
Law professor F.H. Buckley argued in the New York Post last month that, in the face of defeat for the Republican health-care bill, Trump should just go for it. He argued that it would be a great thing for the Republican Party because it would eliminate Democrats’ claim to being the party of compassion and that Trump’s supporters would actually like it.
“Leave behind all the people who hated you, who curse when you succeed,” Buckley wrote. “Reach out to the people who voted for you. Challenge the Democrats by offering them what they’ve always said they wanted.”
Fast forward, and Buckley’s words are even more timely. In a few weeks, the Republicans have promised a vote on extending the Obamacare subsidies to 22 million Americans. The Grand Old Plutocrats are in a bind. If they reject these subsidies, they give the Democrats a huge and decisive winning campaign issue for the 2026 elections. If they accede and keep the prices from skyrocketing, they hand a victory to the Democrats in defiance of their past rejections of universal healthcare and look weak.
My sister Claire Nader suggests that this is a great opportunity for Trump’s sense of grandiosity. Knowing the Congressional Republicans’ bind and disarray, he can announce his single-payer universal health care—everybody in, nobody out—and cite how much more efficient such a system is in Scotland, Canada, Australia, and other countries.
Then Trump could tout the political advantages—sweeping aside all the media coverage coming about the loss of Medicaid coverage by tens of millions of Americans, including Trump voters. Gone would be the huge inflationary price increases, continued inscrutable bills, with their overcharges and fraud. Getting healthcare would be far less aggravating than today. Imagine no more giant health insurance companies with their denials of benefits, rip-offs, suffocating fine print, and prior authorization requirements that enrage physicians. All people would need to show is their Medicare card.
Trump could pluck H.R. 676 out of its obscurity (about 140 House Democrats signed on in 2019). He would get support for this bill from all the Democrats plus a hefty slice of GOP lawmakers, especially those running for re-election in 2026.
Trump is running out of distractions, and running out of the gas that kept his opponents in shock and awe. His polls are dropping. A recession is on the horizon. Inflation is here. His campaign promises are papier-mache. Government health insurance for all, with private (and some public, as with the VA) delivery of health care, comes close to the Canadian healthcare system that has worked for some 50 years, with better health outcomes.
As Claire wryly reminded me, Trump could become the Tommy Douglas of the United States. Douglas started Canadian Medicare in Saskatchewan in 1962 and is a hero in Canada.
Any Democrats holding back support for “Medicare for All” for fear of making Trump look good should think of the tens of millions of Americans who would feel good in so many ways, shorn of the anxiety, dread, and fear produced by our current broken, gouging healthcare system.
Trump’s past, present, and future will still give the Dems plenty of fodder for their loathing of the president’s policies and actions.
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When the AI Bubble Bursts, Working Families Will Pay the Price
When the housing bubble burst, approximately 10 million Americans lost their homes. What will we lose this time?
Nov 25, 2025
When the AI bubble pops, who’s going to be left holding the bag? Mainstream economists, tech oligarchs, and industry insiders are starting to sound the alarm: the current AI investment cycle is the most dangerous speculative surge in a generation. The question isn’t whether it will burst, but who will pay when it does. History tells us exactly where to look. When this bubble pops, low-income Black and Latine families will be left holding the bag—once again covering the costs of a boom that never included them.
In 2008, when the housing market crashed, it wasn’t the banks that paid the price. They were “too big to fail,” bailed out by the very taxpayers whose lives they ruined. Black and Latine families lost nearly half their collective wealth in a few short years. Entire neighborhoods were hollowed out by foreclosures, predatory refinancing, and austerity that gutted local city and municipal budgets.
We are dangerously close to repeating history. Big Tech is pouring trillions into inflating the AI bubble, venture capital poured nearly $200 billion into AI just this year, and data-center construction has exploded since 2022. Strip those investments out and the US economy would have grown just 0.1 percent in the first half of 2025. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently revised last year’s job growth downward by more than 900,000 (the largest correction since the great recession), and holiday hiring is projected to be the lowest since 2009. In 2008, we bet America’s future on the strength of toxic mortgages and a handful of big banks holding their value. The American people lost, and now we’re going back to the table with tech companies convinced that a technology already underperforming expectations will someday soon deliver profits and prosperity.
When the housing bubble burst, approximately 10 million Americans lost their homes. This time, they could lose the lights. The AI boom is driving a surge in electricity demand, and utilities are scrambling to expand grids and build new plants to power data centers that each consume as much energy as a small city. Residential power bills have already risen by double, sometimes triple digits in states with large data center projects. For low-income families, especially Black and Latine households that already spend a disproportionate share of their income on utilities, that hit is devastating. Studies show data centers are far more likely to be built in low-income and majority-Black areas, with one recent study finding that nine of the ten counties bearing the brunt of new data center expansion are low-income communities with predominantly Black populations. In other words, the communities least able to afford higher bills are subsidizing the boom that threatens to hurt them most.
The communities least able to afford higher bills are subsidizing the boom that threatens to hurt them most.
The same extraction is happening through public budgets. Cities and counties–many in majority-Black or Latine regions–are issuing bonds, upgrading grids, and extending tax breaks to attract data centers they’re told will create jobs and stability. Utilities are planning massive fossil-fuel power plant and pipeline expansions. When the bubble pops and those projects stall, debts won’t vanish. They’ll sit on the books, forcing cuts to schools, transit, and local services that residents rely on every day. It’s the same shell game as 2008, just in a new form: profits are privatized, risk is socialized, and communities already living on the margins are once again left to clean up the wreckage.
It’s not just utility bills and budgets at risk. Pension funds—retirement systems tied to teachers, municipal workers, and public-sector unions—may be the quietest and perhaps most dangerous fault line in the coming crisis. Black and Latine families hold a disproportionate share of their wealth in public pensions, and those funds are now heavily invested in tech and AI equities, chasing short-term gains just as the bubble swells. In 2008, state and local pension funds lost a half-trillion dollars as markets collapsed, forcing governments to cut benefits and services. Pain from the AI crash won’t be felt by venture capitalists. It will be felt by bus drivers in Atlanta, nurses in Detroit, and teachers in Los Angeles – the people our cities and communities rely on every day.
When the crash comes, as it inevitably will, we need to recognize it not as an accident or market correction but as the predictable result of corporate greed without guardrails.
Like many other progressives and economic scholars, I was no fan of how the Obama administration handled the last financial crisis. He bailed out the big banks, shielded Wall Street executives from accountability, and let millions of homeowners fend for themselves. When this bubble pops, Trump will likely do the same by protecting the interests of the folks sitting behind him at his inauguration—the same tech oligarchs responsible for AI’s rise—rather than the Black and Latine communities he's declared war on.
We can still prevent that outcome. We need local action demanding regulators require tech firms to pay the full cost of their energy and infrastructure demands instead of letting them hide behind public utilities. States and cities should build firewalls—clauses that protect local budgets from stranded assets and pension funds from the AI-market crash. And any jurisdiction approving new data-center projects should require binding community benefits: direct bill credits, hiring guarantees, and revenue-sharing with the neighborhoods that bear the brunt of rising costs.
But policy alone won’t be enough. When the crash comes, as it inevitably will, we need to recognize it not as an accident or market correction but as the predictable result of corporate greed without guardrails. And we need to fight like hell to make sure the richest people in the world aren’t rescued yet again while the rest of us are left to clean up their mess.
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