Matt - I appreciate what you are doing here. But, many of us (at least those like me who came to you from the left) flocked to Racket because we are well aware of the mind-numbing, factually-challenged Democrat partisanship that people like David peddle. We came becaue we read "Hate, Inc" and despised and despaired of the picture of medi…
Matt - I appreciate what you are doing here. But, many of us (at least those like me who came to you from the left) flocked to Racket because we are well aware of the mind-numbing, factually-challenged Democrat partisanship that people like David peddle. We came becaue we read "Hate, Inc" and despised and despaired of the picture of media it painted. Your readers aren't in the bubble, but beyond it. You are injecting bubble-dom into Racket where it did not previously exist by having people like David contribute.
Ah c'mon, let a hundred flowers bloom. We Racket readers can survive dissent, our minds will not be hijacked by David Sirota. I agree with Matt's critique. He is magnanimous in publishing Sirota's essay, three cheers.
Sure, but your monthly subscription fee likely contributed to this drivel. I have no objection whatsoever to the marketplace of ideas. I would never advocate for the censorship of David or his viewpoints. But it's a waste of time and Racket readers' money to invite him to write here.
You could get what Sirota was selling for free by turning on MSNBC. Sirota wrote that Trump's approval ratings are historically low where did he get that from.
I don't know . . . we gotta understand what these people think. How they move. This guy Sirota is probably the perfect representative of a certain kind of highly intelligent well-meaning person who is unable to wrest himself from the tribal indoctrination that has similarly fallen upon so many Democrats.
Eh, then maybe Matt should pick someone who is a serious analyst and not a regurgitator of partisan talking points. I’ve respected Ruy Teixeira for being a critical voice on the left in the Trump era and a serious analyst to boot.
What about the old adage,"Time is Money"? Luckily I was able to discern the BS quickly as not to waste mine, but feel for those that respect Taibbi enough to read through the whole article.
Anyone concerned about saving vs. wasting time should immediately throw their iPhone under a steamroller. After that, they'll never worry about time again, because they'll have hours and hours per day.
I've read dozens of comments calling Sirota's take "drivel" and what not... and yet no one ever explains what exactly it is that they disagree with (except that they can't bear to have Trump criticized even a little).
The top comment on this post is a substantive critique of the higher education issue. I made several comments about issues with David’s erroneous description of Trump’s approval rating, and the superficiality of his criticism vis a vis misinformation. Those are two easy examples. This must be a reading comprehension issue on your part.
"Substantive"? He just says "Harvard is a breeding ground for assholes." Profound!
I really don't care much about popularity polls one way or the other. As for your own analysis, all you did is call Sirota's opinions "drivel" and "regurgitation", which is par for the course when Trumpkins are confronted with a dissenting opinion.
The idea that Trump uses "culture war" as a distraction no less so than the Democrats do appears to be pretty sound to me. I certainly don't notice any improvement in our standard of living since the Queen was elected. (Unless seeing people dragged into vans is your preferred entertainment.)
Very poor reading comprehension again if you actually attempted to decipher the thread about Harvard. I don’t have discussions with petulant partisans. I’m also not a “Trumpkin”. Don’t really like the guy and never have.
"Very poor reading comprehension"? I don't waste time deciphering sentences like "Harvard is a breeding ground for assholes!" for hidden pearls of wisdom.
So, you don't like Trump, you don't like Sirota... do you even have a point of view?
The reaction here is hardly surprising. Sirota's article, though it mentions disaffected independents in passing, actually targets centrist Dems, who have become disaffected with their party.
The Democratic party is polling terribly with its own members. Can't really blame them after Biden and Harris. But after two runs by Sanders, the party has fortified itself against its own populist wing. I suspect that Sirota's hope is in vain and the Democratic elite will cling to power as long as they can-- even if it means losing elections.
They're going to struggle to unwind two decades of integrating the HR ladies into the apparatus of the Democratic party. It's not just a voter problem, it's that so much of the party infrastructure would fall apart if liberal progressive white women weren't donating their own money, working the phone banks, doorknocking, etc. In exchange for doing so much of the legwork for Democrats, they expect their voices to dominate the party agenda, and boy they sure do.
These aren't women who are sympathetic to the actual working-class, and certainly not to working-class men. If the party worked hard to cater to working-class people and working-class men, they'd quickly discover massive internal resistance from a legion of coldly hostile (mostly white) women afraid that their pet grievance issues weren't going to be the party's number one priority.
Amen. You must live here in California. I see it every day. They wear it on their sleeve, and wind their hatred of DJT into completely unrelated discussions, just because they're so amped up. Yes, it will take a LONG time for this crop of what Schlicter calls the leftist wine women to either chill out or go away. And guess what? Leftist CA families and indoctrination centers, er, schools are still churning out new ones every day.
I don't live in California, but I often interact with colleagues and vendors from California. Been to a few conferences in San Fran, although the last one was about five years ago. I took walks around the city and saw firsthand the situation with the junkies and homeless.
I work in marketing, so I have to hide my opinions, because my profession is dominated by leftist wine women and girlbosses. It would be career suicide to let them know I had zero interest in voting for morons with no accomplishments who offered me, a straight married white guy with two boys, absolutely nothing.
I dunno. He seems to be at the Kübler-Ross "bargaining" stage. He may just get over the party. I'd even say that the future of our country depends on people like Sirota getting there.
But it's such a piece of crap article, and for Matt to treat it as "a meaningful contribution to bringing down the temperature on both sides, blah, blah, blah..." is aggravating. Especially where Sirota treats AOC and Bernie as the voices of an authentic, working class populism. They've spent their lives theorizing about the working class from their penthouses and lake houses, and neither would know an honest day's work if it came up and bit them on the ass.
I didn't come from the left, I consider myself left. Progressives listen to David Sirota and here he sounds more like Bernie than ever. Unwilling to complete sever with the oligarchy because he knows someday he will need them. Matt's comments are really deep criticisms IMO and a warning to any progressives who might be believing this crap. We will know a "real alternative" when we see it because it will tone down the culture war and focus on building consensus to get progressive policies in place that people actually want. Only until that happens will we see trust building back up. David says there are alternatives. Where TF are they?
Kudos. I'm pretty conservative (now) but still harbor strong positive feelings for "JFK-style liberalism".
I'm open for new ideas. Not slurs or personal attacks but good-faith, honestly contributed ideas. Bring 'em on!
As you note well, "Where TF are they?"
My own feeling is that the left is best served by opening up the private sector at the "lower levels". I don't claim to know how to do this but small business has been the job creation engine forever.
While I think Marx was grossly out of his depth in prescribing economic structures and policies, he was a brilliant historian and analyst and the societal manifestation of "alienation" seems all around us.
My opinion is that Marx's economic prescriptions have been used by totalitarians-in-disguise who see the dictatorship of the proletariat as a convenient means to their desired ends (i.e., their gaining control over society). They claim to be Marxists but just use it as camouflage.
And, yes, I'll go a step further than you and say that Bernie/AOC going on a private-jet tour while lamenting "oligarchs" is priceless self-parody.
Small businesses have represented less and less of the US GDP since 1971 - and every year since the working class and the middle class and the government have all gone deeper in debt while the top 1% has gotten wealthier beyond belief. I think it was almost 10 years ago when big corporations finally overtook small business as the "number one economic engine". Nice idea, too late. And before you attack Marx, you better start with corporations taking over the country when their power and rights were legally enshrined to be more important than citizens. We live in a fascist state - the perfect merger of government and corporations. Marx would laugh his ass off at any criticisms of him right now. He was trying to avoid this and was pretty clairvoyant about it. Who cares if he was wrong or right about how to fix it during his time - we got all new problems today.
Actually, I wasn't attacking Marx, I was "attacking" the people who call themselves Marxist. That is, I was noting that Marxism has, in my opinion, largely been used as a tool by people who were really interested in totalitarian control.
Viz: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
That is, they claim to be Marxist but just somehow never got past that whole "dictatorship" part.
I freely admit I have not read "Das Kapital". I find brevity to be a useful and remarkably accurate predictor.
The Bill of Rights takes up maybe two pages, double-spaced. All that brilliance could be conveyed so simply.
I'll also admit that I haven't read (all of) the "Federalist Papers" but would like to do so.
The bits of "Das Kapital" I've looked at are, in humble opinion, a pretty turgid slog.
Not that Marx was wrong in identifying problems, both extant and possible, I just don't "get" what he was proposing.
You are correct that there have been numerous hegemonic incursions in our economic system, both in terms of monetary and fiscal policy.
The creation of corporations as "entities" has a lot of positive aspects (I'm essentially a one-man corporation though it's not worth much...yet :-)
However, that being said, the legal changes in 1913 and 1917 in the creation of the Federal Reserve, corporate non-profits (the predecessors of NGOs) and the explosion of the financial industry post-1980 are cause for concern. I believe it was in the late 1980s that the earlier gains of the middle class were erased and massive concentration of wealth became its greatest since prior to the Great Depression.
The off-shoring of industry has been a sore point for many people, myself included, for many years.
How prophetic Ross Perot now seems when he spoke of the "giant sucking sound" when warning about NAFTA in 1992.
Most people are probably not going to be entrepreneurs, and that's okay. But that's also why we need(ed) a solid jobs and industrial base to keep people occupied. Even if there is a bit of "alienation" in industrial jobs. My first job after high school was in a small factory. I think a lot of people there were remarkably connected to their work even though they might just be forming or fabricating one part, welding one type of connector, etc.
Certainly, it is absolutely critical that we discuss these issues!
I've had productive discussions with my accountants over the years about providing a free corporate filing for every American as part of an "anti-corporation" campaign (one of the reasons I prefer that term to anti-oligarchy is because all of these pro-corporation dems like Sanders and Sirota seen to be ok with billionaires who play nice with progressives and somehow that shields them from being called an oligarch). Corporations are the primary economic tool used to shield the individual exploiters profiting on the exploitation and it is corporate law and corporate accountability that needs to be overhauled. Not pie in the sky talk about oligarchs.
I read it while taking History of Economic Thought in graduate school in the spring of 1976, I think. The professor, William L Breit, also lectured for about 3 weeks on Marx.
I had tried to read Marx in high school 10 years earlier, and some of his stuff before in graduate school, but kept falling asleep. Breit’s lectures and Freedman’s book, which largely consists of excerpts of Marx with a simplified summary, opened up his ideas to me. Be that as it may, what is the most widely misunderstood idea about Marx is the belief that he thought labor was paid less than its value. According to Marx capitalists pay labor its value.
The funniest thing about Marxists is that you cannot really catch them in a contradiction. Their reply is always, “ of course, it is the dialective.” The was extensive debates about contradictions in Marx’s ideas in the late 19th century with Engels providing the main defense usually coming up with a tautological argument to defend Marx.
Like I told some liberals who tried to jump on Bernie and AOC for flying private:
You tell me how one gets from SLC to Bakersfield to Folsom to Boise in one day, including travel to and from airports and venues and the time to spend at the venues while flying commercial. Good luck with that.
That is a valid point. I should have been more specific.
To that end, a question: what is the need for Bernie and AOC to do this? What exactly are they trying to prove?
If it's that Trump is much more tied with "oligarchs" than the Democrats (the party of AOC), that strikes me as profoundly disingenuous.
In fact, I'm not sure exactly what they're claiming.
Is it that somehow "oligarchs" are taking advantage of the system? My sense is that DOGE's work has been to reveal waste and fraud, just as claimed. I am confident we could reduce the budget significantly by identifying and eliminating that waste and fraud. Now, whether or not "we" have the fortitude to do so even after it's been identified...that's another question.
I've never been a fan of Bernie. Spent too much time around universities to go for the college coffeeshop radical stuff.
Specifically, the "everything is a right" (yes, I'm being unfair and generalizing) is a ploy to lure in the unaware and the "uncritical thinking".
I've never gotten much of a sense that either Bernie or AOC have any sensible alternatives or proposals.
But your point is definitely true, air travel today (which I vigorously avoid) sounds horrible.
I view this stupid Oligarchy Tour as a means for enraged Trump-hating grouches to get together and enjoy a group orgasm of rage. It's just a slightly refined version of Two Minutes Hate, in which Trump substitutes for Emmanuel Goldstein.
I travelled too much for business, to too many different places. After 9/11, it all went to shit. I used to hate only American Airlines, now I hate them all (except Singapore Airlines). And what's with airports? Did the city fathers of every city that ever built an airport insist on unique (read: confusing) architecture? Denver and Atlanta are similar, and everything else is different. Retirement road trips much better.
Yes, @Paul Thronson, what "progressive policies" actually have been implemented and performed well for the genuine greater good, without compromising our Constitutional rights of individual sovereignty and sidelining the poor? Please, expound on that!
I still am amused by the 2009 town hall Rep. Barney Frank did to discuss Obamacare with constituents. An elderly lady stood up and shouted "keep your government hands off my Medicare!" Took a while for Barney to explain to her how earth really worked.
Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that is doomed to fail -- unless you like the idea of 1 or 2 young workers being forced to support each retiree.
It is in desperate need of reform, but no politicians have the courage to fix it, because any mention of such a task elicits hysterical shrieks that "They're trying to kill grammy!"
Bwahahaha! The SS as Ponzi scheme meme has been so thoroughly debunked so many times, it’s always a treat to see it bought out of the ideological slime every now and then.
It is unsustainable, its “trust fund” has been repeatedly raided by Congress Critters, but whatever. . .
Younger workers would be better off being required to start private retirement accounts by age 21, with minimum annual contributions. (As a small “l” libertarian, it pains me to suggest this, but I really think it would be cheaper in the long run.) People would retire with much more money.
Ah, the private requirement account. Jamie Dimon, is that you?
So in a low-wage economy, you want minimum annual contributions from those who can barely, if at all, afford food/rent/health care, and that is gonna be a retirement nest egg?
You’ll get no argument from me about Congress critters and government inefficiency, when it is run by supply-side fools.
But there are things the private sector is equally inept at when it comes to the general welfare, because it is profit centric, as opposed to we the people writ large, and it cherry picks winners and losers to that end.
As you note, politicians don’t have courage to fix it, not because they care about Grammy, but because they are owned by Wall Street. That’s why they refuse to vote for the simplest reform - raising the taxable income payroll tax level.
But raising the taxable income payment level just continues the same system.
We need to try something different.
If workers are no longer having FICA withdrawals from their earnings, they’d be better able to invest in their own retirement accounts. Maybe the required minimum contributions could start low & eventually go up. I don’t know. I just know that what we’re doing now is not working, and is doomed to fail.
I would love to see some politician tackle this issue, but it won’t happen.
Politicians, in the current paradigm, will never tackle any issue which threatens the interests of capital, because, by and large, most are bought and paid for by monied interest donors, corporate and private.
You want to try something different? So do I. But most different things that would work require, more, not less, of government involvement/subsidy, which is an anathema to your libertarian cohorts as well as the tax cut and spend steroid debt supply-siders.
Gradually cut the Pentagon budget by 50%, have comprehensive single-payer health care, institute a federal jobs guarantee to put people to work providing affordable housing until the homeless population is zero, and training workers for jobs to provide cutting edge infrastructure, from transit to broadband to renewable energy.
Pay for it with a return to the 1960 tax code, for both individuals and corporations, and with the MMT philosophy of spending with eyes on inflation rather than debt.
I’m as frustrated as you are. I think we are headed for a hard fall, and absent radical change that is based on empirical evidence about what works and what doesn’t (see Portugal and the Drug War, etc), in about twenty-five years what is left of humanity will be back to rubbing sticks together to make fire.
We went from hearing that DOGE would soon be visiting the Pentagon, to hearing, "Well, the Pentagon will handle its own cuts," to Trump bragging about a TRILLION DOLLAR defense budget -- to this week, when I just read that DOGE has, in fact, made some recommendations that Hegseth likes.
I still don't have high hopes for this, though. They can't pass an audit, and nobody in DC really seems to care.
What are policies people want done? Popular policies would be better and cheaper healthcare, better education, lower taxes, cheaper housing ... can you think of any on your own?
The policies that make things cheaper tend to come from libertarian economists, not Democrats. Most Dem policies lead to price increases, either by restricting supply or causing inflation.
So? I guess if your mission is to paint "blue man bad" "red mad gud" congrats. But the truth is that there are major differences between the people in those parties and the people elected from those parties. Not sure your point.
No. The point is that the people that promise "cheaper" stuff, have no clue on how to make things cheaper - because they are vehemently opposed to the biggest force in promoting price reduction - the law of supply and demand.
Planned economies always fail. Subsidizing electric vehicles or college tuition may feel like it makes something cost less - but all it does is push the price up for everyone. Capping retail pricing leads to shortages. Taxing unwanted behaviors are regressive to the max.
That we are in the year 2025, and idiots like Mamdani in NYC and others think that "rent freezes" and "government stores" are solutions to high cost of living is astoundingly stupid.
I appreciate reading sirota if for no other reason than to be reminded of the empty husk these people choose to be. And it is a choice. Unwilling to question any assumptions or to open their eyes to see that the people they believe in betray the very values guys like sirota think guys like Bernie and AOC represent. Remarkable self delusion.
Matt, your intro to his article is a lot more coherent than his whole article. I’m not going to repeat the comment I already made on David’s article, but it’s pretty much garbage. Your intro does a good enough job of laying to waste his total misdiagnosis, and I will add that if he thinks the solution is a new anti-oligarchy movement headed by Bernie and AOC, he is clueless and delusional.
Sure, Sirota's not even left, but were/are you? Not enough "leftists" ask themselves. Actual left is not afraid of class politics or of being openly anti-capitalist.
This is far from the first time that Matt's seemed more concerned with subscriber count than subscriber souls. He's sometimes really funny. I read him.
Matt - I appreciate what you are doing here. But, many of us (at least those like me who came to you from the left) flocked to Racket because we are well aware of the mind-numbing, factually-challenged Democrat partisanship that people like David peddle. We came becaue we read "Hate, Inc" and despised and despaired of the picture of media it painted. Your readers aren't in the bubble, but beyond it. You are injecting bubble-dom into Racket where it did not previously exist by having people like David contribute.
Ah c'mon, let a hundred flowers bloom. We Racket readers can survive dissent, our minds will not be hijacked by David Sirota. I agree with Matt's critique. He is magnanimous in publishing Sirota's essay, three cheers.
Sure, but your monthly subscription fee likely contributed to this drivel. I have no objection whatsoever to the marketplace of ideas. I would never advocate for the censorship of David or his viewpoints. But it's a waste of time and Racket readers' money to invite him to write here.
You could get what Sirota was selling for free by turning on MSNBC. Sirota wrote that Trump's approval ratings are historically low where did he get that from.
Like a lot of politicos, they like to make shit up.
Yes. This is egregious misinformation that should on its own disqualify David as a serious source and reveal him as a partisan hack. Just look up the RCP average to see that Trump is as popular as he has ever been: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/approval-rating#
MSNBC is not free.
If you think it is, you've missed their monetization model.
I think he means when compared to previous presidents.
I don't know . . . we gotta understand what these people think. How they move. This guy Sirota is probably the perfect representative of a certain kind of highly intelligent well-meaning person who is unable to wrest himself from the tribal indoctrination that has similarly fallen upon so many Democrats.
Intelligent and well-meaning could include most of us, across the political spectrum. We also tend to clan up.
Your point???
Matt didn't raise prices, so he's not wasting any of my or your money to expand the offerings.
Plenty of Matt's readers are still in a bubble. One of two bubbles. You should spend more time in comments.
Eh, then maybe Matt should pick someone who is a serious analyst and not a regurgitator of partisan talking points. I’ve respected Ruy Teixeira for being a critical voice on the left in the Trump era and a serious analyst to boot.
What about the old adage,"Time is Money"? Luckily I was able to discern the BS quickly as not to waste mine, but feel for those that respect Taibbi enough to read through the whole article.
Anyone concerned about saving vs. wasting time should immediately throw their iPhone under a steamroller. After that, they'll never worry about time again, because they'll have hours and hours per day.
Or they will vote Joe Biden for a second term.
Ignorance is bliss?
You're assuming the absence of an iPhone renders one ignorant.
All of human history before 2007 says otherwise.
Smartphones turn children into retards and adults into galactic assholes.
And you don't own one? Or, you're just the exception to the (your own) rule?
I own one. I make phone calls with it. The occasional text. It doesn’t spend the night on my nightstand, nor its day in my hand.
So, it is possible for "(s)martphones NOT TO turn children into retards and adults into galactic assholes." You apparently, are living proof. Got it.
I've read dozens of comments calling Sirota's take "drivel" and what not... and yet no one ever explains what exactly it is that they disagree with (except that they can't bear to have Trump criticized even a little).
Absolutely! Taibbi is a center left voice, yet attracts a disproportionate number of Trumpets. Go figure
The top comment on this post is a substantive critique of the higher education issue. I made several comments about issues with David’s erroneous description of Trump’s approval rating, and the superficiality of his criticism vis a vis misinformation. Those are two easy examples. This must be a reading comprehension issue on your part.
"Substantive"? He just says "Harvard is a breeding ground for assholes." Profound!
I really don't care much about popularity polls one way or the other. As for your own analysis, all you did is call Sirota's opinions "drivel" and "regurgitation", which is par for the course when Trumpkins are confronted with a dissenting opinion.
The idea that Trump uses "culture war" as a distraction no less so than the Democrats do appears to be pretty sound to me. I certainly don't notice any improvement in our standard of living since the Queen was elected. (Unless seeing people dragged into vans is your preferred entertainment.)
Very poor reading comprehension again if you actually attempted to decipher the thread about Harvard. I don’t have discussions with petulant partisans. I’m also not a “Trumpkin”. Don’t really like the guy and never have.
"Very poor reading comprehension"? I don't waste time deciphering sentences like "Harvard is a breeding ground for assholes!" for hidden pearls of wisdom.
So, you don't like Trump, you don't like Sirota... do you even have a point of view?
That seems to me a fair question, which I hope Matt will be transparent and answer: Did Sirota receive any payment for this piece?
The reaction here is hardly surprising. Sirota's article, though it mentions disaffected independents in passing, actually targets centrist Dems, who have become disaffected with their party.
The Democratic party is polling terribly with its own members. Can't really blame them after Biden and Harris. But after two runs by Sanders, the party has fortified itself against its own populist wing. I suspect that Sirota's hope is in vain and the Democratic elite will cling to power as long as they can-- even if it means losing elections.
They're going to struggle to unwind two decades of integrating the HR ladies into the apparatus of the Democratic party. It's not just a voter problem, it's that so much of the party infrastructure would fall apart if liberal progressive white women weren't donating their own money, working the phone banks, doorknocking, etc. In exchange for doing so much of the legwork for Democrats, they expect their voices to dominate the party agenda, and boy they sure do.
These aren't women who are sympathetic to the actual working-class, and certainly not to working-class men. If the party worked hard to cater to working-class people and working-class men, they'd quickly discover massive internal resistance from a legion of coldly hostile (mostly white) women afraid that their pet grievance issues weren't going to be the party's number one priority.
Amen. You must live here in California. I see it every day. They wear it on their sleeve, and wind their hatred of DJT into completely unrelated discussions, just because they're so amped up. Yes, it will take a LONG time for this crop of what Schlicter calls the leftist wine women to either chill out or go away. And guess what? Leftist CA families and indoctrination centers, er, schools are still churning out new ones every day.
I don't live in California, but I often interact with colleagues and vendors from California. Been to a few conferences in San Fran, although the last one was about five years ago. I took walks around the city and saw firsthand the situation with the junkies and homeless.
I work in marketing, so I have to hide my opinions, because my profession is dominated by leftist wine women and girlbosses. It would be career suicide to let them know I had zero interest in voting for morons with no accomplishments who offered me, a straight married white guy with two boys, absolutely nothing.
Agree 100% that this is a battle between the HR Ladies and normal people. May the Normals win!
Cat ladies, HR women, and the laptop class.
Well, men want to lead, women want to control. At least that's my experience in the corporate world.
I hope so. I want two political parties that aren't full of nutjobs and grifters.
I know, I know, I'm an idealist dreamer, unmoored from reality.
And folks like Sirota will cling to the sinking ship like barnacles.....
I dunno. He seems to be at the Kübler-Ross "bargaining" stage. He may just get over the party. I'd even say that the future of our country depends on people like Sirota getting there.
Hmmm. Interesting. Also accurate
Let a hundred flowers bloom. That turned out so well.
But it's such a piece of crap article, and for Matt to treat it as "a meaningful contribution to bringing down the temperature on both sides, blah, blah, blah..." is aggravating. Especially where Sirota treats AOC and Bernie as the voices of an authentic, working class populism. They've spent their lives theorizing about the working class from their penthouses and lake houses, and neither would know an honest day's work if it came up and bit them on the ass.
I didn't come from the left, I consider myself left. Progressives listen to David Sirota and here he sounds more like Bernie than ever. Unwilling to complete sever with the oligarchy because he knows someday he will need them. Matt's comments are really deep criticisms IMO and a warning to any progressives who might be believing this crap. We will know a "real alternative" when we see it because it will tone down the culture war and focus on building consensus to get progressive policies in place that people actually want. Only until that happens will we see trust building back up. David says there are alternatives. Where TF are they?
Kudos. I'm pretty conservative (now) but still harbor strong positive feelings for "JFK-style liberalism".
I'm open for new ideas. Not slurs or personal attacks but good-faith, honestly contributed ideas. Bring 'em on!
As you note well, "Where TF are they?"
My own feeling is that the left is best served by opening up the private sector at the "lower levels". I don't claim to know how to do this but small business has been the job creation engine forever.
While I think Marx was grossly out of his depth in prescribing economic structures and policies, he was a brilliant historian and analyst and the societal manifestation of "alienation" seems all around us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
My opinion is that Marx's economic prescriptions have been used by totalitarians-in-disguise who see the dictatorship of the proletariat as a convenient means to their desired ends (i.e., their gaining control over society). They claim to be Marxists but just use it as camouflage.
And, yes, I'll go a step further than you and say that Bernie/AOC going on a private-jet tour while lamenting "oligarchs" is priceless self-parody.
Small businesses have represented less and less of the US GDP since 1971 - and every year since the working class and the middle class and the government have all gone deeper in debt while the top 1% has gotten wealthier beyond belief. I think it was almost 10 years ago when big corporations finally overtook small business as the "number one economic engine". Nice idea, too late. And before you attack Marx, you better start with corporations taking over the country when their power and rights were legally enshrined to be more important than citizens. We live in a fascist state - the perfect merger of government and corporations. Marx would laugh his ass off at any criticisms of him right now. He was trying to avoid this and was pretty clairvoyant about it. Who cares if he was wrong or right about how to fix it during his time - we got all new problems today.
Actually, I wasn't attacking Marx, I was "attacking" the people who call themselves Marxist. That is, I was noting that Marxism has, in my opinion, largely been used as a tool by people who were really interested in totalitarian control.
Viz: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
That is, they claim to be Marxist but just somehow never got past that whole "dictatorship" part.
I freely admit I have not read "Das Kapital". I find brevity to be a useful and remarkably accurate predictor.
The Bill of Rights takes up maybe two pages, double-spaced. All that brilliance could be conveyed so simply.
I'll also admit that I haven't read (all of) the "Federalist Papers" but would like to do so.
The bits of "Das Kapital" I've looked at are, in humble opinion, a pretty turgid slog.
Not that Marx was wrong in identifying problems, both extant and possible, I just don't "get" what he was proposing.
You are correct that there have been numerous hegemonic incursions in our economic system, both in terms of monetary and fiscal policy.
The creation of corporations as "entities" has a lot of positive aspects (I'm essentially a one-man corporation though it's not worth much...yet :-)
However, that being said, the legal changes in 1913 and 1917 in the creation of the Federal Reserve, corporate non-profits (the predecessors of NGOs) and the explosion of the financial industry post-1980 are cause for concern. I believe it was in the late 1980s that the earlier gains of the middle class were erased and massive concentration of wealth became its greatest since prior to the Great Depression.
The off-shoring of industry has been a sore point for many people, myself included, for many years.
How prophetic Ross Perot now seems when he spoke of the "giant sucking sound" when warning about NAFTA in 1992.
Most people are probably not going to be entrepreneurs, and that's okay. But that's also why we need(ed) a solid jobs and industrial base to keep people occupied. Even if there is a bit of "alienation" in industrial jobs. My first job after high school was in a small factory. I think a lot of people there were remarkably connected to their work even though they might just be forming or fabricating one part, welding one type of connector, etc.
Certainly, it is absolutely critical that we discuss these issues!
I've had productive discussions with my accountants over the years about providing a free corporate filing for every American as part of an "anti-corporation" campaign (one of the reasons I prefer that term to anti-oligarchy is because all of these pro-corporation dems like Sanders and Sirota seen to be ok with billionaires who play nice with progressives and somehow that shields them from being called an oligarch). Corporations are the primary economic tool used to shield the individual exploiters profiting on the exploitation and it is corporate law and corporate accountability that needs to be overhauled. Not pie in the sky talk about oligarchs.
The best book about Marx’s economics ( at least through about 1976) is by Robert Freedman called Marx on Economics. This is a link to it on Archive: https://archive.org/details/marxoneconomics0000robe
I read it while taking History of Economic Thought in graduate school in the spring of 1976, I think. The professor, William L Breit, also lectured for about 3 weeks on Marx.
I had tried to read Marx in high school 10 years earlier, and some of his stuff before in graduate school, but kept falling asleep. Breit’s lectures and Freedman’s book, which largely consists of excerpts of Marx with a simplified summary, opened up his ideas to me. Be that as it may, what is the most widely misunderstood idea about Marx is the belief that he thought labor was paid less than its value. According to Marx capitalists pay labor its value.
The funniest thing about Marxists is that you cannot really catch them in a contradiction. Their reply is always, “ of course, it is the dialective.” The was extensive debates about contradictions in Marx’s ideas in the late 19th century with Engels providing the main defense usually coming up with a tautological argument to defend Marx.
Like I told some liberals who tried to jump on Bernie and AOC for flying private:
You tell me how one gets from SLC to Bakersfield to Folsom to Boise in one day, including travel to and from airports and venues and the time to spend at the venues while flying commercial. Good luck with that.
That is a valid point. I should have been more specific.
To that end, a question: what is the need for Bernie and AOC to do this? What exactly are they trying to prove?
If it's that Trump is much more tied with "oligarchs" than the Democrats (the party of AOC), that strikes me as profoundly disingenuous.
In fact, I'm not sure exactly what they're claiming.
Is it that somehow "oligarchs" are taking advantage of the system? My sense is that DOGE's work has been to reveal waste and fraud, just as claimed. I am confident we could reduce the budget significantly by identifying and eliminating that waste and fraud. Now, whether or not "we" have the fortitude to do so even after it's been identified...that's another question.
I've never been a fan of Bernie. Spent too much time around universities to go for the college coffeeshop radical stuff.
Specifically, the "everything is a right" (yes, I'm being unfair and generalizing) is a ploy to lure in the unaware and the "uncritical thinking".
I've never gotten much of a sense that either Bernie or AOC have any sensible alternatives or proposals.
But your point is definitely true, air travel today (which I vigorously avoid) sounds horrible.
I view this stupid Oligarchy Tour as a means for enraged Trump-hating grouches to get together and enjoy a group orgasm of rage. It's just a slightly refined version of Two Minutes Hate, in which Trump substitutes for Emmanuel Goldstein.
I travelled too much for business, to too many different places. After 9/11, it all went to shit. I used to hate only American Airlines, now I hate them all (except Singapore Airlines). And what's with airports? Did the city fathers of every city that ever built an airport insist on unique (read: confusing) architecture? Denver and Atlanta are similar, and everything else is different. Retirement road trips much better.
Can you expound on the "get progressive policies in place"?
Yes, @Paul Thronson, what "progressive policies" actually have been implemented and performed well for the genuine greater good, without compromising our Constitutional rights of individual sovereignty and sidelining the poor? Please, expound on that!
Let’s start with social security.
People say Medicare is pretty good too.
Though most of those people probably don't have personal experience with it. . .
I still am amused by the 2009 town hall Rep. Barney Frank did to discuss Obamacare with constituents. An elderly lady stood up and shouted "keep your government hands off my Medicare!" Took a while for Barney to explain to her how earth really worked.
Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that is doomed to fail -- unless you like the idea of 1 or 2 young workers being forced to support each retiree.
It is in desperate need of reform, but no politicians have the courage to fix it, because any mention of such a task elicits hysterical shrieks that "They're trying to kill grammy!"
Bwahahaha! The SS as Ponzi scheme meme has been so thoroughly debunked so many times, it’s always a treat to see it bought out of the ideological slime every now and then.
Uh huh.
It is unsustainable, its “trust fund” has been repeatedly raided by Congress Critters, but whatever. . .
Younger workers would be better off being required to start private retirement accounts by age 21, with minimum annual contributions. (As a small “l” libertarian, it pains me to suggest this, but I really think it would be cheaper in the long run.) People would retire with much more money.
The government can't do much of anything right.
Ah, the private requirement account. Jamie Dimon, is that you?
So in a low-wage economy, you want minimum annual contributions from those who can barely, if at all, afford food/rent/health care, and that is gonna be a retirement nest egg?
You’ll get no argument from me about Congress critters and government inefficiency, when it is run by supply-side fools.
But there are things the private sector is equally inept at when it comes to the general welfare, because it is profit centric, as opposed to we the people writ large, and it cherry picks winners and losers to that end.
As you note, politicians don’t have courage to fix it, not because they care about Grammy, but because they are owned by Wall Street. That’s why they refuse to vote for the simplest reform - raising the taxable income payroll tax level.
But raising the taxable income payment level just continues the same system.
We need to try something different.
If workers are no longer having FICA withdrawals from their earnings, they’d be better able to invest in their own retirement accounts. Maybe the required minimum contributions could start low & eventually go up. I don’t know. I just know that what we’re doing now is not working, and is doomed to fail.
I would love to see some politician tackle this issue, but it won’t happen.
Politicians, in the current paradigm, will never tackle any issue which threatens the interests of capital, because, by and large, most are bought and paid for by monied interest donors, corporate and private.
You want to try something different? So do I. But most different things that would work require, more, not less, of government involvement/subsidy, which is an anathema to your libertarian cohorts as well as the tax cut and spend steroid debt supply-siders.
Gradually cut the Pentagon budget by 50%, have comprehensive single-payer health care, institute a federal jobs guarantee to put people to work providing affordable housing until the homeless population is zero, and training workers for jobs to provide cutting edge infrastructure, from transit to broadband to renewable energy.
Pay for it with a return to the 1960 tax code, for both individuals and corporations, and with the MMT philosophy of spending with eyes on inflation rather than debt.
I’m as frustrated as you are. I think we are headed for a hard fall, and absent radical change that is based on empirical evidence about what works and what doesn’t (see Portugal and the Drug War, etc), in about twenty-five years what is left of humanity will be back to rubbing sticks together to make fire.
"Bwahahaha!" has been so thoroughly debunked so many times...
Does anyone actually laugh like that, BTW?
Another Rufo acolyte weighs in with a cute comment.
Here, get some knowledge - https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/05/30/but-hamas/
Had to look up an exact definition of "acolyte": Yeah, that doesn't apply to me...
Always looking for knowledge- thanks for the link. Not sure how you got to that topic, but okay.
It’s the only topic worth discussing until the genocide ends, imo. Then we can get back to no politics but class politics.
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/gazas-hospitals-are-the-target
I'd worry about fixing the Pentagon if I were you. Talk about "doomed to fail" . . . . .
Pfftt!
We went from hearing that DOGE would soon be visiting the Pentagon, to hearing, "Well, the Pentagon will handle its own cuts," to Trump bragging about a TRILLION DOLLAR defense budget -- to this week, when I just read that DOGE has, in fact, made some recommendations that Hegseth likes.
I still don't have high hopes for this, though. They can't pass an audit, and nobody in DC really seems to care.
I'd be happy to get on a zoom call and have this discussion.
What are policies people want done? Popular policies would be better and cheaper healthcare, better education, lower taxes, cheaper housing ... can you think of any on your own?
The policies that make things cheaper tend to come from libertarian economists, not Democrats. Most Dem policies lead to price increases, either by restricting supply or causing inflation.
So? I guess if your mission is to paint "blue man bad" "red mad gud" congrats. But the truth is that there are major differences between the people in those parties and the people elected from those parties. Not sure your point.
No. The point is that the people that promise "cheaper" stuff, have no clue on how to make things cheaper - because they are vehemently opposed to the biggest force in promoting price reduction - the law of supply and demand.
Planned economies always fail. Subsidizing electric vehicles or college tuition may feel like it makes something cost less - but all it does is push the price up for everyone. Capping retail pricing leads to shortages. Taxing unwanted behaviors are regressive to the max.
That we are in the year 2025, and idiots like Mamdani in NYC and others think that "rent freezes" and "government stores" are solutions to high cost of living is astoundingly stupid.
The key modifier was "that people actually want."
I appreciate reading sirota if for no other reason than to be reminded of the empty husk these people choose to be. And it is a choice. Unwilling to question any assumptions or to open their eyes to see that the people they believe in betray the very values guys like sirota think guys like Bernie and AOC represent. Remarkable self delusion.
I'm always interested in Matt's analysis. Others', not so much.
This is a prime example of what I mean when big voices make decisions that goes against what their audience wants of needs. It’s as if the voices are trying to persuade the audience to new ideas: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-do-people-justify-evilwhen-its
Bwah! Sounds to me like you are afraid of a liberal invading your Safe Space.
Matt, your intro to his article is a lot more coherent than his whole article. I’m not going to repeat the comment I already made on David’s article, but it’s pretty much garbage. Your intro does a good enough job of laying to waste his total misdiagnosis, and I will add that if he thinks the solution is a new anti-oligarchy movement headed by Bernie and AOC, he is clueless and delusional.
Sure, Sirota's not even left, but were/are you? Not enough "leftists" ask themselves. Actual left is not afraid of class politics or of being openly anti-capitalist.
This is far from the first time that Matt's seemed more concerned with subscriber count than subscriber souls. He's sometimes really funny. I read him.
I must say I agree!
I could not have said it better. As a matter of fact you said it so much more politely than the response I was preparing to write.
yes agree