SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
union now
2,315 Meters Under the Sea, Greenpeace Stages Deepest Protest in World History
“By safeguarding these deep-sea ecosystems within a global network of ocean sanctuaries and establishing a moratorium on deep sea mining, we can create a resilient safety net for marine life, and protect the health of our global oceans for generations to come."
May 27, 2026
Aided by a sophisticated underwater submersible, activists with Greenpeace on Wednesday set a world record for the deepest protest ever by displaying a banner 1.4 miles beneath the surface of the Arctic Ocean to oppose industrial deep-sea mining and urging protection of the world's oceans.
According to the international environmental group, the message "LISTEN TO THE SCIENCE!" was displayed 2,315 meters below sea level using a remotely operated vehicle called ‘ROV Holly.’
Executed during a deep-water survey expedition between Iceland and the island of Svalbard, the robotic hand of the submersible held up the sign in front of a hydrothermal vent field known as Loki’s Castle, which is located along the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge that separates the Arctic Ocean's Greenland Sea from the Norwegian Sea.
"This marks the deepest banner protest in history, to speak for ecosystems that have no voice of their own," said Dr. Sandra Schöttner, chief scientist for the Deep Arctic Expedition at Greenpeace International. "World leaders have already promised to protect 30 percent of the oceans, now they must listen to the science and actually do it. We cannot meet our global goals if we also allow industrial exploitation of unexplored and vulnerable ecosystems in the deep sea. It is high time that leaders keep their promises and give the oceans a chance to recover.”
The Arctic Mid Ocean Arctic Ridge—which the group characterized as "one of Earth's least known wildernesses"—goes down to depths of up to 3000 meters. The expedition and historic protest is part of a Greenpeace campaign that is calling for the deep-sea world of hydrothermal vents like Loki's Castle and others, as well as seamounts and the "extraordinary creatures" that live in such ecosystems to be protected with the establishment of a network of marine sanctuaries.
“By safeguarding these deep-sea ecosystems within a global network of ocean sanctuaries and establishing a moratorium on deep sea mining," said Dr. Schöttner, "we can create a resilient safety net for marine life, and protect the health of our global oceans for generations to come."
Efforts to ban deep-sea mining by environmentalists, ocean stewards, and conservationists were stymied in the US with an executive order last year issued by President Donald Trump which seeks to bolster and expand the practice by the mining industry.
Trump was condemned for the move, which Greenpeace at the time called "an insult to multilateralism" due to its sidestepping of a UN-backed process designed to protect the oceans, and "a slap in the face to all the countries and millions of people around the world who oppose this dangerous industry.”
Trump's failures, however, have been counteracted at some level by other nations who have paused or put stronger protections in place when it comes to deep-sea mining. In December, Norway paused controversial plans to issue a fresh round of drilling and mining license beneath undersea areas it controls.
As part of its ongoing campaign to curb the destructive practice, Greenpeace is calling on world leaders to honor existing global climate targets, implement the UN Ocean Treaty to protect 30% of the global ocean by 2030, and establish an immediate moratorium on deep-sea mining.
“There is no version of seabed mining that is sustainable or safe,” Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigner Juressa Lee said last year. “Alongside our allies who want to protect the ocean for future generations, we will continue to say a loud and bold no to miners who want to strip the seafloor for their profit.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Sportswriting and the Decline of the US Empire
Reading about sports is another way of understanding where our world is heading.
May 27, 2026
When Chinese leaders claim that the American empire is in decline, I immediately assume their analysts are decoding dispatches from ESPN, The Athletic, and columnist Shams Charania. After all, it’s in sportswriting, I’ve come to think, that the songs of the canary in the all-American coal mine couldn’t be clearer. If the games we play and watch reflect our past and present lives, then the coverage and commentary about them may help predict our future.
American sportswriters have been cheerleaders for empire since the early 20th century, when Bat Masterson decided that shooting people in Dodge City wasn’t fulfilling enough for a man of his talent and ambition. Yes, that Bat Masterson. He came East and, as a boxing columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph, became a new sheriff in the emerging industry I’ve come to call SportsWorld.
Opinionated and self-righteous, he was an early singer of those canary songs that, for the next hundred years, would both forecast and reflect Jock Culture’s impact on American life. The words might change, but the melody remained. The billionaires who now own and run sports were the robber barons of Bat’s time, and the gambling that helped fuel his Gilded Age is now institutionalized as the proud partner of all the major leagues (whatever the sport may be).
Writing this in the twilight of my own sportswriting career, I find it remarkably easy to trace a path from those early oligarchs to the robber barons who now run American sports, and from the early sports bettors who fixed the 1919 World Series to the FanDuel and DraftKings proposition bettors who are changing the climate of our games—and even perhaps to the Kalshi and Polymarket prediction market gamblers whose wagers on wars may someday (if they haven’t already) help start them.
If my Chinese spies are any good, they understand that more than 100 years after Bat Masterson died writing about boxing, the clues extracted from sportswriting also pertain to the games our government is playing.
The major sports of Bat’s era were fiercely segregated expressions of the Jim Crow backlash that continued to fight a version of the Civil War. Keep in mind, for instance, that baseball, the anointed national pastime, was Whites Only until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Most white sportswriters had then stayed silent on the issue and so supported the racism of the owners who ran their clubs like plantations and of the white players who didn’t want any job competition from Negro Leaguers.
Black newspaper sportswriters and Lester “Red” Rodney, who wrote for the Communist Daily Worker and died in 2009 at the age of 98, were then counterpoints to the mainstream. He was one of the most outspoken advocates of racial desegregation in major league baseball. Early in his life, the focus on sports integration had been boxing, a sport that had gone to great lengths to ensure that a Black boxer would never become the world heavyweight champion (then considered a symbol of all-American manhood). When Jack Johnson took that crown in 1908, sportswriters, including such luminaries as novelist Jack London, called for “white hopes” to reclaim it. If Chinese spies had been on the job then, they would have noted this country’s overwhelming racism.
White (and Black) Positions
The National Football League’s color barrier was breached in 1946, but it was replaced by pro football’s version of Jim Crow, or “positional segregation.” Again, sportswriters tended to go along with the establishment dictum that roles like quarterback and center were for leaders and thinking men, and so reserved for whites only. This delayed the appearance of the first starting Black quarterback until 1968. Meanwhile, Blacks were considered more fitted for the “natural” or “athletic” roles of defensive back and running back. Coaching, of course, is still a white man’s prerogative in a league whose rosters are now about 70% Black.
Sportswriters bring this up from time to time, but never in a sustained enough way to effect real change. And while sportswriters and players might seem like natural allies, they have generally been willing to go along to get along on their separate tracks, especially in shaky times. Sports journalists, of course, tend to work for the corporate media, often the broadcasters of sports events (if not for the media outlets of various sports leagues). Historically, pointing out discrimination is no road to success, since all the owners of sports teams belong to the same white billionaires’ club, ready to boycott activists. Athletes, with their typically short shelf lives, are wary of antagonizing the people who pay their salaries and might help employ them after their games are over.
All of that was pretty much set in the days of creation. Bat Masterson’s peers and spawn, the scriveners of the Roaring 20s, were rewarded for “godding up” athletes as commercial celebrities in the booming new sports markets, particularly college football and the Olympic Games. The most famous of the early mythmakers was sports columnist Grantland Rice. In print, on radio, and by newsreel, he gilded the likes of home-run king Babe Ruth, boxer Jack Dempsey (also known as “the Manassa Mauler“), golfer Bobby Jones, and Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, who ironically died in a 1931 plane crash on his way to work on a Hollywood movie.
While they erected a predominantly white male pantheon, those sportswriters insisted on proclaiming the righteousness, meritocracy, and character-building nature of their subject. Even the skeptics who snidely mocked the demigods when they failed did so in a way that maintained their importance as signifiers of the best in the best of all worlds.
When it came to the post-World War II generation of sportswriters, two spirited tabloid journalists, Jimmy Cannon and Dick Young, dominated. Cannon dubbed the Black heavyweight champion Joe Louis “a credit to his race, the human race” when that seemingly quaint phrase actually meant something in a Jim Crow world. He also mocked his fellow sportswriters as “the vaudevillians of journalism.”
Dick Young led those vaudevillians from the Olympus of the press box, where he and his companions dispensed lofty punditry all the way down to the sweaty locker rooms where they began to buttonhole athletes and coaches for quotes. Young also ran blind items in his gossipy New York Daily News columns that alluded to jock shenanigans on and off the field.
His cracking of the sports curtain presaged a 1950s and 1960s sports reporting populism that proved to be a turning point in Jock Culture, inspiring the “Chipmunks” (so labelled by Cannon for their constant press box chatter), a new breed of smart, more progressive young men (and they were still mostly men) who saw themselves as real journalists capable of being fair-minded, clear-eyed, humorous, and honest. Chief among them were Leonard Shecter and Larry Merchant of the New York Post, and Stan Isaacs of Newsday.
Business Models
That was about when I arrived on the scene in New York in 1957, during what came to be known as the Great Betrayal. Two of the three New York baseball teams, the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, moved to California. That decision proved smart economically and it did finally make the national pastime truly national, but it also woke fans to the realization that, while sports might be sacred rites to them, they were businesses to their ever-wealthier owners.
At the time, sportswriters (except for those in New York who lost jobs because of the move) were not particularly emotionally disrupted by those moves because they knew that sports was, above all, a business, even if that was their own little secret—and a surprisingly corrupt business at that. After all, unmarked brown envelopes stuffed with cash were regularly handed out to sportswriters (along with free tickets to games and expensive Christmas presents).
I was lucky then to be working for The New York Times, which paid all my expenses. Most sportswriters, however, got their travel money and meal money from the teams or the promoters of the events they were covering—and an honest reportorial job could be considered an ungrateful act to be punished with loss of access (and cash).
If the reactions of most sportswriters to the activism of athletes were all too often unsupportive, their reaction to their more daring colleagues was disgracefully weak.
In those days, players and reporters usually stayed at the same hotels on the road while traveling together on trains (and later chartered planes). Sportswriters often drank and night-owled with the players and coaches, but that easy access came with a price. We were all supposed to be on the same team. “Sports of the Times” columnist Arthur Daley referred to his newspaper colleagues all too accurately as “lodge brothers.” They were all male, all white, and (with the exception of a few athletic and journalistic superstars) pretty much in the same financial class. There was a community of interest, and the fans were the rubes at the carnival.
When I first began covering the Yankees in the 1960s, Manager Ralph Houk took me aside to ask if I was going to be “a booster or a ripper.” He was not satisfied with my lame promise to be “fair-minded.” He coldly said, “We’re all in this together.”
But the expulsion of the scribes from that sweaty Eden had already begun. In 1958, it was reported that Houk, then a coach, had scuffled with pitcher Ryne Duren on the train coming back from winning the American League pennant. Such family squabbles, drunkenness, or screwing around had, in the past, rarely been reported. And even the New York Post‘s Leonard Shecter, like other reporters, initially turned a blind eye to what had happened. But a hint of the story by a cityside reporter on another paper made that position unsustainable. So, Shecter told his editors what he knew—that Duren, probably drunk, had gotten rowdy. Houk, while subduing him, had accidentally cut him over the eye with his World Series ring. The Post editors then blew the story into a wild melee with front-page and back-page headlines.
“With one dispatch,” wrote Alan Schwarz, 50 years later in The New York Times, “Shecter had violated a sacred code that had existed in the 100 years of newspaper coverage of baseball.”
A dozen years later, Shecter would do it again, although more mindfully. He had become a beacon of hard-nosed honesty, the curmudgeonly scourge of entitled jocks and sycophantic sportswriters. He persuaded a bright, politically progressive Yankee pitcher, Jim Bouton, to write an honest account of his life in the big leagues, which included a scene of Yankee star outfielder Mickey Mantle leading his teammates in “beaver-shooting” (hotel expeditions in search of naked female guests).
Bouton’s 1970 bestseller Ball Four would prove to be his valentine to baseball. It would enrage sportswriters because it exposed their Faustian bargain of silence for access as well as baseball officials because it broke open the world they thought they controlled. It fueled the coming decades of adversarial relations between sportswriters and their subjects and an internal rift between rippers and boosters.
Enter Ali
At the same time, television was, for the first time, giving athletes direct contact with their fans. They were no longer dependent on the pencil press as intermediaries. No athlete took greater advantage of that than boxing champion Muhammad Ali, perhaps the first athlete to take control of his own narrative.
Most of the senior scribes of the 1960s attacked Ali, first for his breezy lack of respect for their eminence, then for his pugilistic unorthodoxy (particularly the way he leaned back from punches rather than “slipped” them over his shoulders), and finally for his politics, especially for declaring himself a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. While younger sportswriters (like me) were besotted by the early Ali, our elders like Cannon and “Red” Smith attacked him as unpatriotic and ungrateful for the opportunity to become rich and famous that America had offered a poor Black boy.
And that would prove to be a running theme (however subtly expressed) of the disapproval of all too many establishment sportswriters for those athletes labelled rebels—from Ali to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who protested and demonstrated with Black power salutes at the 1968 Olympics, to Curt Flood’s failed attempt to unlock baseball’s reserve clause on player contracts, to San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick taking a knee against racism and police brutality during a game.
If the reactions of most sportswriters to the activism of athletes were all too often unsupportive, their reaction to their more daring colleagues was disgracefully weak, particularly when an emerging cohort of women sportswriters tried to gain equal access to locker rooms for post-game interviews. It took a 1978 lawsuit by Sports Illustrated‘s Melissa Ludtke to begin to truly open the doors that were already so open to their male equivalents.
It’s not even as if the boys had been too busy breaking two of the biggest stories of the late 20th century, sports or non-sports, the use of performance-enhancing drugs and the epidemic of brain damage among football players. Actually, the boys were too busy yet again reinventing their craft, this time by using the internet to imitate Bill Simmons, who taught them that sportswriting was not so much about covering games as expressing one’s own emotional reaction to those games.
I suspect my Chinese intelligence analysts were already moving beyond all of this to concentrate on the most consistent obsession of establishment sportswriters (as well as of the establishment itself): Follow the money (and yes, we’re indeed talking about millions or even billions of dollars). After all, stories about the recent bonanza of endorsement money for college athletes and the scandals linked to the explosion of sports gambling sites proliferated and a new breed of “transactional” sportswriters like Shams Charania of ESPN, whom you met at the beginning of this ramble, were prepared to cover such things in our present billionaire world of sports (and, of course, nonsports).
Shams is himself one of the country’s highest-paid sportswriters because he can beat the opposition, sometimes by minutes, in reporting trades, salary disputes, and coaching changes. While he specializes in the National Basketball Association, he’s a model for the “analysts” and “insiders” throughout sports journalism today. Pumping their popularity is the insatiable need of gamblers for fresh information.
If my Chinese spies are any good, they understand that more than 100 years after Bat Masterson died writing about boxing, the clues extracted from sportswriting also pertain to the games our government is playing, and reading about sports is another way of understanding where our world is heading. The clues are no longer within the games, the players, or even the roar of the crowd. They are in the clubhouses of the billionaires who recently traveled with President Donald Trump to China to grease the wheels for transactions to come, not to mention those who actually own the teams.
In Trump’s ballpark, it’s all in the deal.
Keep ReadingShow Less
It's Time for Ultra-Wealthy Private Jet Owners to Pay Their Fair Share
The Stop Subsidizing Private Jets Act of 2026 would end loopholes allowing billionaires to deduct private planes as business expenses.
May 27, 2026
One of the great injustices of our current tax system is that working people often end up subsidizing the luxury consumption of the billionaire class.
One example of this phenomena can be found in the world of private jets, one of the most ecologically indefensible forms of transformation. The private jet lobby has worked for years to secure tax breaks for aircraft purchases and fuel—and shift their costs on to taxpayers and the commercial flying public.
The lobby scored a big win when a 100% bonus depreciation for business assets including private planes was included in the 2017 Trump tax cut. That provision was renewed in 2025’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
With that provision in place, if a billionaire buys a $170 million luxury jet, they can deduct the entire purchase as a business expense in the year they buy it, greatly reducing their tax bill. Most business expenses are deducted to reflect their depreciation over multiple years. A purchase of a truck or vehicle, for example, is typically depreciated over five years.
Every day commercial flyers are taxed more heavily for their tickets compared to private jet travelers who are only taxed on their jet fuel.
Current tax loopholes give the ultra wealthy—including both private citizens and businesses—millions in tax write-offs for their luxurious travel, including the costs of planes themselves and related expenditures like private pilots and fuel.
The Private Jet Accountability Project (PJAP) at the Institute for Policy Studies has been working with members of Congress to rollback these subsidies. US Reps. Eugene Vindman (D-Va.), Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-Mich.), and Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) recently introduced the Stop Subsidizing Private Jets Act of 2026.
“Right now, the tax code allows those buying private jets worth tens of millions of dollars to receive enormous write-offs, while middle-class families do not get deductions for basics like gas or groceries. That is wrong,” Vindman said in a statement. “My bill is a commonsense fix that ends these unfair giveaways while protecting farmers, small businesses, and emergency responders who depend on aviation for real business and community needs.”
Today, private jets, even those valued at $100 million or more, are not considered a luxury vehicle, which means the full value can be a business expense write-off. Expenses such as fuel, pilots, decor, and in-flight services are also a write-off. It is estimated that the owner of a $100 million jet can get a $21 million tax benefit.
This legislation will end these loopholes while protecting “exemptions for aircraft, primarily used to transport property, as well as planes used for agriculture, firefighting, emergency medical services, flight instruction, sky diving operations, and certain commercial flights available to the public” as described in the bill.
These are funds we cannot afford to lose. An Institute for Policy Studies report found that private air travel is a significant portion of air traffic, with a ratio of 1 private jet per 6 commercial planes. Despite this, private jet travel only contributes 2% of the taxes that go to fund the Federal Aviation Administration. At the same time, people flying commercial pay a 7.5% federal excise tax on tickets to fund the FAA’s Airport and Airway Trust Fund. Every day commercial flyers are taxed more heavily for their tickets compared with private jet travelers who are only taxed on their jet fuel.
“It’s ridiculous and unfair that the ultra wealthy get million-dollar tax breaks for their private jets while working families are seeing their healthcare and food assistance cut,” said Rep. McDonald Rivet. “We need to get rid of this insane loophole, because if you can afford a private jet, you can afford to pay your fair share in taxes.”
“The fact that our tax dollars are still funding tax breaks for someone’s private jet is insane,” Rep. Landsman added. “We have to fix the tax code so the super wealthy stop getting special treatment, and our small businesses and farmers can actually get ahead.”
In the face of the jet fuel crisis, European lawmakers are exploring banning certain kinds of private jet operations. Here in the US, all we are asking is that private jets pay their fair share.
Luxury travel that isn’t taxed appropriately epitomizes the inequality that exists in the tax and travel systems. Why should everyday Americans foot the bill for the ultra-wealthy’s private air travel and the air travel infrastructure we all use?
The passage of the Stop Subsidizing Private Jets Act of 2026 is an important step in correcting the imbalance of wealth and power in our democracy.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Electile Dysfunction—Why Can’t the Dems Get Their Polls Up?
The Democratic Party cannot afford to attend to the material needs of its traditional popular base because it is terrified of offending its donor class.
May 27, 2026
“The Republicans go for the jugular; the Democrats go for the capillaries,”—Kevin Phillips
With the recent release of the long-withheld, but little anticipated Democratic National Committee “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential electoral loss, we’re back to the perennial questions of which issues should receive priority; how should messaging and narrative around those issues be crafted; which wing(s) of the party should be amputated before their rot infects the entire organism, suburban soccer moms or inner city youth; and on and on. All good questions, but ultimately, in present circumstances, unanswerable except in the most platitudinous, hand-waving ways. The most fundamental dilemma resides in the Faustian bargain the party entered beginning in the 1970s, and the result of that bargain is neatly captured in Sheldon Wolin’s 2010 coinage “the inauthentic opposition”:
While the transformed Republican Party reveals what a “party of government” might look like under inverted totalitarianism, the Democrats reveal the fate of opposition politics under inverted totalitarianism. The Democrats’ politics might be described as inauthentic opposition in the era of Superpower [i.e., the US after the fall of the Soviet Union]. Having fended off its reformist elements and disclaimed the label of liberal, it is trapped by new rules of the game which dictate that a party exists to win elections rather than to promote a vision of the good society… Accordingly, the party competes for an apolitical segment of the electorate, “the undecided,” and puzzles how best to woo religious zealots. Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society. [This point is exquisitely exemplified by the first couple of years of the Obama administration, when they held the federal trifecta and still managed to privilege the kleptocratic banksters of the housing crisis and the war criminal gangsters of the W. Bush regime.] The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf.
The origins of this current malaise date back to the mid 1970s, and followed the actions taken by business class elites responding to the exhortations contained in the now-famous Powell Memorandum. This was a secret 1971 memo from then-corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to the Secretary of the US Chamber of Commerce. The memo wasn’t revealed to the public until well after Powell had been appointed to the Supreme Court, where he continued to wage his ideological battle in defense of capitalism and corporate power (including, of course, free speech rights articulated in cash). In the memo Powell argued that:
The US Chamber of Commerce should lead an assault upon the major institutions, universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts, in order to change how individuals think about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual.
US businesses, Powell suggested, did not lack the resources for such an effort, particularly if they were pooled. That is, if people started to think together as a class rather than as individual firms and corporations. The US Chamber of Commerce took up this challenge in a very dramatic way. It expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to about a quarter of a million just a decade later. Other elite organizational forms also began to coalesce around this core following the advice of the memo. These included think tanks (e.g., the Heritage Foundation, established 1973 by Adolph Coors), as well as corporate money pumps to operationalize the memo’s chief objectives.
One of the most prominent of these organizations was the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972, and comprising CEOs whose corporations at the time accounted for about half of the US gross national product. During this period, through political action committees, the Roundtable was spending about $900 million annually on political matters, a very significant sum at the time. These newly emerging entities provided a mechanism for corporations to contribute substantial funds to political campaigns and candidates, authorized in large measure through a number of Supreme Court rulings, several written by Powell himself.
These PACs, which were just beginning to have a political presence (there were 89 PACs in 1974, and around 1,500 by 1982) gave to both parties largely in equal measure in the 70s, but began leaning heavily toward the Republicans, who had little difficulty aligning their platforms with capital corporate interests. This was also the moment that the traditional political base of the Republican Party began to merge with the Christian Right and with white working classes, who were persuaded that they had been left behind by affirmative action and other “illegitimate” policies (now, of course, cloaked as DEI and “wokeness”).
The problem for anyone struggling to get by, as this alliance portrayed it, was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of the society and economy. The real problem was liberals, who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups. The prevalent narrative, more pertinent now than ever, was the idea of unworthy “others” cutting in line ahead of worthy citizens: “You've worked hard. You've played by the rules. You're not getting ahead. Well, it's not that the system is stacked against you. It's that these people, who are undeserving, are getting more advantages than you get.” The Republican political base (and now most particularly MAGAnites) could be energized through positive mobilizations of things like religion and cultural nationalism, but it could also be turned out through very negative, though coded, though I would say increasingly less coded if not blatant, racism (e.g., President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”), xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-feminism.
Democrats, seemingly, were more conflicted, at least at that time, between support for their base and the need to pursue big money. That ambivalence, at least within the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment in its current manifestation, has now all but disappeared and constitutes the irreconcilable contradiction that plagues the party now. To return for a moment to Wolin:
By ignoring dissent and by assuming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.
According to critical geographer David Harvey, the structure that emerged out of this political realignment was as simple as it was predictable and durable. The Republican Party could, and still can, marshal massive financial resources and mobilize its popular base to vote against its own material interests on cultural or religious grounds, while simultaneously advancing the capital accumulation policies (ongoing war and arms sales, lowered taxation, massive deregulation, privatization of public goods and services) of their elite masters.
The Democratic Party, conversely, could not, and still cannot, afford to attend to the material needs (e.g., a national healthcare system, affordable housing, environmental and consumer protection, financial and anti-trust regulation, a peace dividend) of its traditional popular base because it was and is terrified of offending its donor class. Given the asymmetry, the political hegemony of the Republican Party became more sure over this period, and has relegated the Democrats, even when in power, to their current position of inauthenticity. If and until this most fundamental contradiction can be resolved, the policies and messaging will remain flaccid, impotent, and unsatisfying. Under these circumstances we can aptly paraphrase Phillips, to wit: So now the Democrats also go for the jugular. Unfortunately, it’s too often their own.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular