Thanks for this piece. What the people with means and money associated with the Democratic Party and left/progressive-leaning institutions (DLP) over the past 50 years failed to do was create an organizational network counter to the Council for National Policy (1) as well as utilize AM talk radio and even shortwave radio (2) to build a counter-narrative to right-wing extremism and white nationalism. Part of the problem, as I understand it from my limited resource to do so, is that the people associated with DLP could not or cannot coalesce around a central narrative or message.
Instead, what the DLP has is several disjointed think tanks, institutions, and communication channels including independent podcasters, writers here on Substack, and alternative media outlets like VOX, Crooked Media, etc. I listen to and read many of these, and I've yet to see any effort to create a network with integrated messaging and action the likes of the CNfP (https://cfnp.org/).
Christian's (@antwest12) Blueprint and your distillation of it make an excellent starting point for such a DLP counter network to CNfP to emerge... it requires money, time, and level-headed committed people to get it off the ground. I often think that Nick Hanaure (@nickhanauer239949) and his team from Civic Ventures and Pitchfork Economics (3) would be one of the groups who has the means, experience, connections and rational headspace to kick-off such an undertaking.
If there is interest to move this forward, I'm open to further discussions even though I am a member of the "Precariat" living in small town USA.
big “fan” of hanauer too, and yeah, quotes feel necessary. i respect that he’s self-aware about operating from a self-serving place, but i’m not convinced he actually has our best interest or the planet’s at heart. he sees the writing on the wall and wants to make sure he and the billionaire class don’t end up eradicated or beheaded in the streets. fair enough. survival instinct.
they like to say that they earned it so it is their right to do with it as they wish.
but the fact that billionaires even exist says a lot. like how much is too much? someone with a billion dollars could spend $30k a day for the next hundred years and still be fine. at some point, there has to be a moral line, right? like a point where one person just has so much that it becomes unreasonable for them not to start shedding some of it for the common good. not as charity, but as obligation.
and if that’s true if it really is impossible to get that rich without wage theft or downstream harm then what’s left is just the question of who gets to decide where that moral line sits. does anyone have the right to enforce that boundary? do the rest of us get a say in what someone that rich does with their wealth?
and look, if any billionaire nick, cuban, whoever wants to jump in and genuinely convince me they got every dollar clean, with no unethical, illegal, or immoral fallout anywhere along the way, i’m all ears.
I hear you and agree. The US economic system became structured to allow massive wealth gains to those few that were positioned and savvy or unethical enough to play the new rules and influence the making of addition rules that favor them or their industry. The movement to shift wealth from the middle class took steam in the 1970's with the celebritization of Milton Friedman amidst the inflationary US economy spurred by the OPEC embargo in retaliation to the to the Yom Kippur War. This tanked the Carter Administration and gave rise to the celebrity presidency of Reagan, and we all know what happened... the kick of the deregulation era across all administrations, which opened the floodgates for the rich to get richer and opportunists and con men to grab assets and create wealth from financial instruments al la Jack Welch and his C-suite mentees backed by complicit boards of directors. The financial sector got a turbo boost with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, leading to all kinds of money-making from thin air. Bottom line is that we have economic policies that favor wealth holders and no one seems to be working to change this.
Hanaure, Cuban and other "left" or "progressive" leaning billionaires came into existence from the new economic system and policies that evolved out of the 1970's crisis, and they continue to benefit. What they don't seem to be doing is taking real steps to use their accumulated wealth to change a system that has created more poverty and hardship that they obviously see all around them. Civic Ventures push for a $15 minimum wage in Seattle. Cuban created Cost Plus Drugs to bring affordable pharmaceuticals to regular people. This is great, but not enough to reverse the ever accumulating wealth gap.
The other element to all of this is language. Harris/Waltz and other so called liberals say they want to create and implement policies so people can "get ahead". Get ahead of what or who? Getting ahead means some people get left behind. The main indicator of a nations wealth should be how many people are flourishing, not getting ahead. Harvard's Human Flourishing Program(1) would be a good place to start developing indicators how to create and implement better economic policies. Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking(2) would be a good place to mold human flourishing into an economic systems framework.
But again, all of these efforts are disconnected, disjointed and have no influence in the Halls of Power.
yeah i hear you. personally i don’t really have a problem with some people being ahead and others being behind. i just don’t think full equality, like total sameness in income, comfort, lifestyle, all of it is actually possible. not because i’m against it, just because people are wildly different. temperament, upbringing, luck, trauma, health, how much risk they can stomach... it all plays in. you’d need a whole book just to scratch the surface of why outcomes vary so much. *See appendix A*
but there’s still a line. like at some point it’s just... ok man, that’s enough. i don’t care if someone’s filthy rich, I mean whatever, and it's not possible to stop this in my opinion nor should we. but when it crosses into obscene wealth, where one person can out-influence entire cities or countries, the whole idea that it could be “regulated” kind of falls apart at that level. that's the kind of power that reshapes the rules before regulation can even materialize.
i looked through the stuff you linked and the human flourishing project is cool because it’s actually trying to measure life by things that matter: do you feel good? are your relationships solid? do you have purpose? are you healthy? that kind of thing. it’s not perfect, obviously , but it’s better than pretending gdp or stock prices have any connection to personal well being or national health.
and the oxford inet group is sort of like, let’s rethink economics from scratch. seems like they aren't just trying to patch the current mess but rather asking what economics should be if we gave a damn about sustainability or fairness or how real humans work. looks like they pull in voices from all over law, philosophy, sociology, ect and are trying to rebuild the entire frame. which is great. but like you said, none of this stuff is anywhere near actual power.
tldr; i don’t need things to be equal. nor do I think that is even possible. but i do think the game to be winnable for people who didn’t start on third base and want to have a better life and are willing to work for it. and i’d like to see the rulebook enforced on the folks writing it for once. until then, all the talk about flourishing kind of feels like a day dream.
Appendix A:
The Origins of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker
uses complexity science to explain how economies evolve and why inequality isn’t just what happens in unregulated systems.
The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits
probably most relevant currently. makes the case that so-called "fair" systems likeelite education and performance-based hiring (so called "meritocracies") actually lock in inequality over time.
The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam
unconscious bias, decision-making, and how hidden cognitive forces influence life outcomes.
Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir
compassionate but empirical explanation for how poverty becomes self-perpetuating.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
argues that capitalism, left unchecked, will always concentrate wealth. uses historical and data-heavy evidence for why wealth divergence pretty much inevitable
Evicted by Matthew Desmond
how instability kills opportunity. Makes structural inequality visible without heady theory
The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel
Asks what happens to society when we pretend everyone deserves their place in the economic hierarchy. attacks and dismantles the myth of 'deserved success.'
Thanks for your reply. I agree. I also don't think that "full equality, like total sameness in income, comfort, lifestyle, all of it is actually possible." Nor is it probable even with the most well designed economic and governance systems to support human flourishing and prevention of obscene wealth that is used to reshape rules and governance itself.
As you write, there will always be inequity because we are wildly different in several aspects of our lives. At the same time, the ability for people to become financially wealthy should not create the conditions where other people fall into abject poverty even though they've tried to do the things needed (education, abide by rules/laws, finding and maintaining a job, etc.) to live a relatively comfortable life (adequate healthy food, adequate shelter & clothing, a healthy social life, time and resources for recreational activities, etc.). Any society that expects to have long-term stability and social cohesion needs a floor without massive cracks that people, because of situations or circumstances, fall through without a chance to recover.
Thanks for the reading list. I've heard of most of those and The Hidden Brain podcast has been regular listening for the past several years. Here is another list:
The Making of a Democratic Economy: How to Build Prosperity for the Many, Not the Few. By Marjorie Kelly & Ted Howard
Let My People Go Surfing. The Education of a Reluctant Businessman - Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual. By Yvon Chouinard & Naomi Klein
Factfulness. Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. By Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund & Ola Rosling
The Big Myth. How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. By Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway
The Man Who Broke Capitalism. How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy, By David Gelles
Moral Ambition. Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. By Rutger Bregman & Erica Moore
Competition Is Killing Us. How Big Business Is Harming Our Society and Planet - and What to Do About It. By Michelle Meagher & Simon Holmes
I agree with you and although I am out protesting when I can, I'm pretty sure it won't be enough. I'm afraid that much blood will have to be shed before this is over. And I'm not sure I'll live long enough to see it to the end. But I have to do something. I cannot just sit at home, pretend everything us normal, and hope that someone fixes it. My father fought in the South Pacific and Korea, and he continued the fight back home during The Cold War. I am not built to be a regular soldier (not real good at following orders 😂), but I will do that which I can.
thanks. corrected. I had to chase down that link a couple of times because it kept getting deleted, btw. I suspect we will see more and more of that in the near future. we take our freedom to post whatever we want online for granted and it will be taken very soon.
Thanks for this piece. What the people with means and money associated with the Democratic Party and left/progressive-leaning institutions (DLP) over the past 50 years failed to do was create an organizational network counter to the Council for National Policy (1) as well as utilize AM talk radio and even shortwave radio (2) to build a counter-narrative to right-wing extremism and white nationalism. Part of the problem, as I understand it from my limited resource to do so, is that the people associated with DLP could not or cannot coalesce around a central narrative or message.
Instead, what the DLP has is several disjointed think tanks, institutions, and communication channels including independent podcasters, writers here on Substack, and alternative media outlets like VOX, Crooked Media, etc. I listen to and read many of these, and I've yet to see any effort to create a network with integrated messaging and action the likes of the CNfP (https://cfnp.org/).
Christian's (@antwest12) Blueprint and your distillation of it make an excellent starting point for such a DLP counter network to CNfP to emerge... it requires money, time, and level-headed committed people to get it off the ground. I often think that Nick Hanaure (@nickhanauer239949) and his team from Civic Ventures and Pitchfork Economics (3) would be one of the groups who has the means, experience, connections and rational headspace to kick-off such an undertaking.
If there is interest to move this forward, I'm open to further discussions even though I am a member of the "Precariat" living in small town USA.
1) https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/774133071/shadow-network-offers-a-lesson-on-the-american-rights-mastery-of-politics
2) https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial
3) https://civic-ventures.com/ and https://pitchforkeconomics.com/
big “fan” of hanauer too, and yeah, quotes feel necessary. i respect that he’s self-aware about operating from a self-serving place, but i’m not convinced he actually has our best interest or the planet’s at heart. he sees the writing on the wall and wants to make sure he and the billionaire class don’t end up eradicated or beheaded in the streets. fair enough. survival instinct.
they like to say that they earned it so it is their right to do with it as they wish.
but the fact that billionaires even exist says a lot. like how much is too much? someone with a billion dollars could spend $30k a day for the next hundred years and still be fine. at some point, there has to be a moral line, right? like a point where one person just has so much that it becomes unreasonable for them not to start shedding some of it for the common good. not as charity, but as obligation.
and if that’s true if it really is impossible to get that rich without wage theft or downstream harm then what’s left is just the question of who gets to decide where that moral line sits. does anyone have the right to enforce that boundary? do the rest of us get a say in what someone that rich does with their wealth?
and look, if any billionaire nick, cuban, whoever wants to jump in and genuinely convince me they got every dollar clean, with no unethical, illegal, or immoral fallout anywhere along the way, i’m all ears.
I hear you and agree. The US economic system became structured to allow massive wealth gains to those few that were positioned and savvy or unethical enough to play the new rules and influence the making of addition rules that favor them or their industry. The movement to shift wealth from the middle class took steam in the 1970's with the celebritization of Milton Friedman amidst the inflationary US economy spurred by the OPEC embargo in retaliation to the to the Yom Kippur War. This tanked the Carter Administration and gave rise to the celebrity presidency of Reagan, and we all know what happened... the kick of the deregulation era across all administrations, which opened the floodgates for the rich to get richer and opportunists and con men to grab assets and create wealth from financial instruments al la Jack Welch and his C-suite mentees backed by complicit boards of directors. The financial sector got a turbo boost with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, leading to all kinds of money-making from thin air. Bottom line is that we have economic policies that favor wealth holders and no one seems to be working to change this.
Hanaure, Cuban and other "left" or "progressive" leaning billionaires came into existence from the new economic system and policies that evolved out of the 1970's crisis, and they continue to benefit. What they don't seem to be doing is taking real steps to use their accumulated wealth to change a system that has created more poverty and hardship that they obviously see all around them. Civic Ventures push for a $15 minimum wage in Seattle. Cuban created Cost Plus Drugs to bring affordable pharmaceuticals to regular people. This is great, but not enough to reverse the ever accumulating wealth gap.
The other element to all of this is language. Harris/Waltz and other so called liberals say they want to create and implement policies so people can "get ahead". Get ahead of what or who? Getting ahead means some people get left behind. The main indicator of a nations wealth should be how many people are flourishing, not getting ahead. Harvard's Human Flourishing Program(1) would be a good place to start developing indicators how to create and implement better economic policies. Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking(2) would be a good place to mold human flourishing into an economic systems framework.
But again, all of these efforts are disconnected, disjointed and have no influence in the Halls of Power.
1) https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/measuring-flourishing
2) https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/inet-oxford
yeah i hear you. personally i don’t really have a problem with some people being ahead and others being behind. i just don’t think full equality, like total sameness in income, comfort, lifestyle, all of it is actually possible. not because i’m against it, just because people are wildly different. temperament, upbringing, luck, trauma, health, how much risk they can stomach... it all plays in. you’d need a whole book just to scratch the surface of why outcomes vary so much. *See appendix A*
but there’s still a line. like at some point it’s just... ok man, that’s enough. i don’t care if someone’s filthy rich, I mean whatever, and it's not possible to stop this in my opinion nor should we. but when it crosses into obscene wealth, where one person can out-influence entire cities or countries, the whole idea that it could be “regulated” kind of falls apart at that level. that's the kind of power that reshapes the rules before regulation can even materialize.
i looked through the stuff you linked and the human flourishing project is cool because it’s actually trying to measure life by things that matter: do you feel good? are your relationships solid? do you have purpose? are you healthy? that kind of thing. it’s not perfect, obviously , but it’s better than pretending gdp or stock prices have any connection to personal well being or national health.
and the oxford inet group is sort of like, let’s rethink economics from scratch. seems like they aren't just trying to patch the current mess but rather asking what economics should be if we gave a damn about sustainability or fairness or how real humans work. looks like they pull in voices from all over law, philosophy, sociology, ect and are trying to rebuild the entire frame. which is great. but like you said, none of this stuff is anywhere near actual power.
tldr; i don’t need things to be equal. nor do I think that is even possible. but i do think the game to be winnable for people who didn’t start on third base and want to have a better life and are willing to work for it. and i’d like to see the rulebook enforced on the folks writing it for once. until then, all the talk about flourishing kind of feels like a day dream.
Appendix A:
The Origins of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker
uses complexity science to explain how economies evolve and why inequality isn’t just what happens in unregulated systems.
The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits
probably most relevant currently. makes the case that so-called "fair" systems likeelite education and performance-based hiring (so called "meritocracies") actually lock in inequality over time.
The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam
unconscious bias, decision-making, and how hidden cognitive forces influence life outcomes.
Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir
compassionate but empirical explanation for how poverty becomes self-perpetuating.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
argues that capitalism, left unchecked, will always concentrate wealth. uses historical and data-heavy evidence for why wealth divergence pretty much inevitable
Evicted by Matthew Desmond
how instability kills opportunity. Makes structural inequality visible without heady theory
The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel
Asks what happens to society when we pretend everyone deserves their place in the economic hierarchy. attacks and dismantles the myth of 'deserved success.'
Thanks for your reply. I agree. I also don't think that "full equality, like total sameness in income, comfort, lifestyle, all of it is actually possible." Nor is it probable even with the most well designed economic and governance systems to support human flourishing and prevention of obscene wealth that is used to reshape rules and governance itself.
As you write, there will always be inequity because we are wildly different in several aspects of our lives. At the same time, the ability for people to become financially wealthy should not create the conditions where other people fall into abject poverty even though they've tried to do the things needed (education, abide by rules/laws, finding and maintaining a job, etc.) to live a relatively comfortable life (adequate healthy food, adequate shelter & clothing, a healthy social life, time and resources for recreational activities, etc.). Any society that expects to have long-term stability and social cohesion needs a floor without massive cracks that people, because of situations or circumstances, fall through without a chance to recover.
Thanks for the reading list. I've heard of most of those and The Hidden Brain podcast has been regular listening for the past several years. Here is another list:
The Making of a Democratic Economy: How to Build Prosperity for the Many, Not the Few. By Marjorie Kelly & Ted Howard
Let My People Go Surfing. The Education of a Reluctant Businessman - Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual. By Yvon Chouinard & Naomi Klein
Factfulness. Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. By Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund & Ola Rosling
The Big Myth. How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. By Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway
The Man Who Broke Capitalism. How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy, By David Gelles
Moral Ambition. Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. By Rutger Bregman & Erica Moore
Competition Is Killing Us. How Big Business Is Harming Our Society and Planet - and What to Do About It. By Michelle Meagher & Simon Holmes
I agree with you and although I am out protesting when I can, I'm pretty sure it won't be enough. I'm afraid that much blood will have to be shed before this is over. And I'm not sure I'll live long enough to see it to the end. But I have to do something. I cannot just sit at home, pretend everything us normal, and hope that someone fixes it. My father fought in the South Pacific and Korea, and he continued the fight back home during The Cold War. I am not built to be a regular soldier (not real good at following orders 😂), but I will do that which I can.
Thank you for all you are doing.
The Reddit post says Las Vegas PD. Is it Las Vegas or Los Angeles? In either case the portly thug in charge should be sued.
thanks. corrected. I had to chase down that link a couple of times because it kept getting deleted, btw. I suspect we will see more and more of that in the near future. we take our freedom to post whatever we want online for granted and it will be taken very soon.
Palantir stands with Israel! Meaning the 1% are committed to perpetual war as the source of their wealth. Nothing else matters.
Absolutely dig you writing.