Tag: economic insecurity

Buy Out the Empire: Making an Offer He Can’t Refuse

(Taking Up) The Collection

An Exit Strategy for Trump 2, Year 2

Taking Up The Collection

The Collection is a collective action to disrupt and dethrone the Imperial Presidency by gamifying dissent and offering a massive, 24/7 “Exit Jackpot” to reclaim the American republic.

Deal Making as a Rite of Passage

As the presidency transitions from a public office to a luxury brand, the opposition must stop reacting and start negotiating. Welcome to “The Collection,” a high-stakes digital series that frames the “Imperial Presidency” as a distressed asset ripe for a corporate buyout.

This isn’t a fundraiser for television ads; it’s a live, 24/7 “Exit Jackpot” offered to the President in exchange for his immediate resignation. By contrasting “Royal Spend” pageantry with the systemic gutting of the American safety net, the show gamifies dissent. It transforms the public from passive victims into active shareholders, making an offer no “man of the deal” can ignore.

Speculative Repair List

To win, the opposition must control the narrative by treating “The Collection” as a high-stakes spectacle. This isn’t a standard fundraiser; it is a strategic “priming of the pump” designed to maximize both viewership and capital through collective action.

Trump will likely sense the trap. The Collection weaponizes ridicule, exposing his thinning skin while highlighting the massive national debt – the “Royal Spend” – accumulated under his watch. Unlike traditional protests, he cannot simply shout over this format. As he retaliates with legal threats and censorship, the opposition should double or triple matching funds, using his aggression to fuel the jackpot.

If his desire for vengeance leads him to suppress the event, that very interference should trigger the endgame: a final “Priority Vote” where the public instantly earmarks and distributes the funds.

How would that work?

Enter The Imperial Ledger

Pilot Episode 101: “The Cost of the Crown” | Date: Immediate Future

CUE 1: A high-contrast, “Late-Night Noir” aesthetic. The HOST stands before a massive digital screen – The Ledger – scrolling with gold-on-black text and ticker tape numbers.

HOST: Good evening, citizens. Welcome to the first edition of The Imperial Ledger, the only accounting firm authorized by the reality of your own bank accounts.

Since the Restoration began in January, we’ve been told we’re living through a “Golden Age.” But gold is heavy, and someone has to carry it. Tonight, we look at the balance sheet for the 47th Presidency as we closed out 2025.

CUE 2: A 3D rendering of the White House displays The East Wing highlighted in red, then dissolves into a pile of digital rubble.

White House East Wing demolished as Trump moves forward with ballroom construction, AP photos show, Darlene Superville; Jacquelyn Martin, Associated Press, October 23, 2025

HOST: Item one on the Ledger: The Demolition of History. In October, the President decided the East Wing – a fixture since 1902 – wasn’t “ballroom” enough. He tore it down. In its place, we’re getting a $400 million, 90,000-square-foot “State Ballroom.” It’s designed to hold 999 people – because 1,000 would be “ostentatious,” I’m sure. The White House calls it a “National Security” priority. Apparently, our primary defense against foreign threats is a really, really big dance floor for donors from BlackRock, Nvidia, Meta, Google, and Amazon.

Billionaires at Trump’s inauguration hold wealth equal to 1/3 India’s GDP, Vasudha Mukherjee, Business Standard, January 21, 2025

CUE 3: The Ledger scrolls to a list of names: “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

HOST: Next, the Branding Fee. As of late December, the Kennedy Center is officially the “Trump-Kennedy Center.” Because nothing says “Performing Arts” like a hostile takeover by the Chairman of the Board. The new gold signage is still fresh. It’s the ultimate Participation Trophy: President Trump didn’t win a Grammy, so he just bought the building.

CUE 4: The Ledger shifts to the “Repair List” for the common man. Numbers start spinning rapidly.

Quiet Over Trump’s Kennedy Center Grab Risks Capitulation, Eleanor Clift, The Daily Beat, February 13, 2025

Three Repair Worthy Collections

Some viable candidate causes include:

A. The Nutritional Safety Net (Repairing Food Security)

The Fix: Funding “Community Granaries” in the 2,000+ counties most affected by inflation and benefit rollbacks.

With the administration’s proposed $300 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), an estimated 16 million children face reduced access to food.

HOST: But let’s look at the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” While you were busy getting your $25,000 tax deduction on tip income — if you’re lucky enough to make that much in tips…

#Impact AreaMeasurable Change & Outcome
1Medicaid Funding ChasmBans “provider taxes,” stripping states of $340 billion in revenue used to draw down federal Medicaid matches.
2SNAP Benefit ErosionCuts federal food assistance by $187 billion (20%), forcing a 30–50% surge in demand at local food banks.
3Admin Compliance SurgeForces states to build IT systems to track 80-hour/month work requirements for millions of Medicaid/SNAP recipients.
4State Revenue DrainAutomatic tax conformity is projected to slash state revenues by $100M to $1.2B per state (e.g., Colorado, Arizona).
5Healthcare Churn RisksCBO predicts 11.8 million people will lose coverage, increasing “uncompensated care” costs for providers by an estimated 15%.
6Work-for-Benefits MandateRequires 80 hours/month of work or community service for Medicaid/SNAP recipients (ages 19–64).
7Medicaid Cost SharingImplements co-payments of up to $35 per service for ACA expansion adults (income 100–138% of FPL).
8Graduate Loan CapsLimits federal borrowing for Master’s degrees to $20,500/year, forcing students to seek private loans for excess costs.
9SNAP Exemption RemovalSubjects 300,000+ veterans and formerly homeless individuals to the 3-month benefit time limit.
10Coverage Loss ForecastCBO projects 10.9 million people will lose health insurance by 2034 due to eligibility and subsidy changes.

That’s the trade: You get to deduct the interest on your new car loan, but your neighbor’s kid doesn’t get lunch. That’s the “Imperial” exchange rate. 

CUE: Proportion of Elon Musk’s stock options that would cover the SNAP shortfall…

Musk Wins $1 Trillion Pay Package, Creating Split Screen on Wealth in America, Rebecca F. Elliot; Jack Ewing; Reid J. Epstein, New York Times, November 6, 2025

B. Healthcare Restoration (Repairing the Safety Net)

After the only town hospital closed, a North Carolina city blames politicians: There’s no help for you here, Amanda Seitz; Allen G. Breed, The Independent, May 20, 2024

Current budget projections include a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid over the next decade. This is estimated to leave roughly 10 million to 11.8 million Americans uninsured.

The Fix: A “Mobile Health Corps” specifically for rural areas where 1 in 4 residents currently relies on Medicaid for primary care and birth coverage.

HOST: “Last month, 12 rural hospitals in the Midwest closed their doors due to the Medicaid ‘Efficiency Purge.’ Tonight, your Priority Vote can move $50 million of the Collection’s interest directly to these facilities. You have the power. You have the funds. Don’t just watch the empire rise. Fund the restoration. Take up the Collection.”

The Jackpot is growing. But while the President waits for the right number to step down, the clock is ticking for the rest of us.

CUE: Somber, black-and-white footage of a closed rural medical clinic. A small child sits on the steps. A countdown timer appears in the corner.

C. Small Business Tariffs Relief (Repairing the Bootstrap Work Ethic)

Trump’s First Year Back, in 10 Charts, Steven Rattner, New York Times, December 27, 2025

Recent trade barriers have hiked raw material costs by an average of 22%, leaving local manufacturers unable to compete with subsidized global giants. Projections suggest 15,000 small-town family businesses will shutter by year-end without immediate intervention. 

The Fix: Direct “Bridge-to-Build” grants for businesses hit by the “One Big Beautiful Bill” trade policies. Provide immediate liquidity and supply-chain pivoting funds for domestic businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

HOST: Which brings us to why we are here. The President knows he is bored by the price of housing. He’s not focused on the cost of healthcare. He’s above the concerns of the majority of Americans that come from more modest roots and less favorable gene pools. And he loves a deal. And we know he loves to move on when the price is right.

Trump Attacks Obamacare Without a Health Plan, Dean Baker, CEPR, October 6, 2025

CUE: The host points directly into the camera:

So, it’s time for the Final Collection. If the cost of his “reign” is too high for the Constitution, maybe it’s just low enough for a buyout. We are opening the “Self-Removal Fund.” A golden parachute so large, so beautiful, so massive that even he can’t say no to a private retirement in Mar-a-Lago permanently. 

“Look at the Ledger. Look at the ballroom. Look at our neighbors. Then, look at your phone. Take up the Collection. Contribute to the Jackpot for his early exit. Let’s make him an offer he can’t refuse – before there’s nothing left of the People’s House but the gold leaf.”

Why “The Collection” Works Where Politics Fails

Conventional political channels – courts, legislation, and traditional protests – rely on norms that the current “Imperial Presidency” has already discarded. These methods are too slow, predictable, and easily ignored by a leader who controls the narrative through sheer media saturation.

“The Collection” succeeds by moving the battlefield from the ballot box to the balance sheet. By treating a President with a 36% approval rating as a “distressed asset,” it converts abstract frustration into a tangible, ever-growing Buyout Number to cap his insatiable temperment. This format strips the leader of his narrative dominance, relegating him to a mere contestant whose only move is to quit. It traps a “man of the deal” in his own branding, forcing him into defensive, damaging optics that traditional politics simply cannot achieve.

Heading Trump Off at the Institutional Standoff Corral

Institutional Capture: Legislative and judicial checks are increasingly slow or neutralized by executive overreach, making “legal” resistance feel like a theoretical exercise rather than a functional one.

The Attention Economy: Traditional protests are easily framed as “partisan noise.” “The Collection” uses a high-stakes, “Jackpot” format that the media cannot afford to ignore, forcing the administration to respond to the public’s terms.

The Language of the Deal: The current administration views the country through the lens of corporate ownership. By framing the presidency as a buyout opportunity, the opposition speaks the administration’s only fluent language, making the “Golden Parachute” a psychological trap that bypasses ideological gridlock.

Turning the Corner

By prioritizing personal grudges, Trump undermines his own leverage as a negotiator. His brand is no longer just threatened by his erratic behavior, but by something more damaging: predictability. This growing boredom may be exactly what allows America to regain its collective focus.

To succeed in 2026, the opposition must “flip the script” by choosing humor, consensus, and accessibility over the reactive whiplash that defined 2025. We cannot reverse history; we can only change how we move forward.

New World Order: Art of the Deal vs Art of War, Tang Meng Kit, Asia Times, April 30, 2025

Out Loud

A smattering of a gathering for trying anything once and repeating on the most promising of failures.

Hampshire is Back

50th anniversary scenes and takeaways of Hampshire’s return from the brink.

The College Turns 50
and Learns What It’s Grown Up to Be

Mounting the comeback without staples.

Last weekend my wife Patty (F78) and I attended Hampshire College’s 50th Anniversary celebration. We live one town out from where we first laid eyes on the future, long before we realized our marriage is what that future needed to be fully lived in. We went expecting some chance encounters with a few peripheral acquaintances and a newly untangled neck lanyard. What we left with was the renewal of hope that the future not only required but could insist on the continuation of Hampshire College. The grandiosity was unexpected. But there is much to celebrate.

We arrived with guarded, pensive questions:

    • Is the existential crisis of prepandemic times only visible in the rear view? Is Hampshire back for good?
    • At age 50, is Camp Hamp ready to declare itself the institutional grown-up in a crowded room of fat elites, insulated by their liberalism?
    • Does such emancipation lend authority to the traditional school fight song? The one calling out the injustices that now masquerade as the business of the usual?

Davis Bates F73 retells the story of the Div Free Bell: “You go out into the world and Division 4, 5, and 6 will find you.”

Paraphrasing President Ed Wingenbach here, few colleges can fall back on its social justice legacies without resting on its quixotic laurels. The Hamp he inherited didn’t have that financial luxury. What it did have was a devoted alumni community that considered Hampshire their academic soulmate. Not some option on a roulette wheel of school rankings but the only choice for them. An improbable mix of trust fund spoils, interdisciplinary modalities, and the pioneering spirit of the self-initiated.

By the Skin of Our Whims

Where else could you build a degree based on the skin of your whims? Where else could you demonstrate the value of your education was not clocked to your classroom hours but to the more expansive view of independent study. Not learning for its own sake, but for putting it to work — the fruits of your Hampshire labors.

The culmination of this remains the Division III — a thesis-like concentration anchored by academically-chaired committees and assembled by …

the Hampshire student as both messenger and focus of their purgatorial scrutiny.

Hampsters in contemporary habitats.

The committee assessed the merit of the proposed Div III contract against the abstracts of the thesis. Often within the experience of delivering their realization through scientific, literary, musical, cinematic, and theatrical expression.

It’s fortunate for the college and our community that these yardsticks for graduating Hampshire remain in place 51 years later. It’s this blending of freedom, support, and guided trial that binds the real-world fortunes of alumns to their original and enduring premise for attending Hampshire. It’s true that the process still carries this dogmatic insistence:

1 Div III completion = one liberal arts degree

Perhaps that’s the price for being left in our post graduate bassinets at the entry ramp of the professional freeway? But at least the generosity inspired by these rites of passage allows us to host these spirited disagreements for another day.

Hit the Ground Solving

There were the four schools that bracketed Hampshire’s academic offerings across the liberal arts spectrum of its founding: Cognitive Communications, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. The portfolio was reshuffled with the great re-imagining of Hampshire’s relevance and differentiation from other endowment-challenged small liberal arts colleges.

This urgency pares the precarious state of four evolving social problems with Hampshire’s own comeback from the abyss of the dim ‘Mim days of F18-S19. In practical terms this means that the first arrivals no longer dabble in Div I level flirtations. They jump into the furies of the current spasming century with both skidding feet, be it…

    • Confronting climate change,
    • Escorting white supremacy out the door, or
    • Defining truth in a post truth world.

Average White Male Band

The supremacy part of hitting-the-ground was especially apparent in reliving the grainy splendor of Hampshire Video. The only hue starker than the black and white test patterns was the white maleness of the crew and cast. At the time I think most of the Infinity crew considered themselves more as outcasts — even by Hampshire freak-flagging standards. But fast forward to today and it’s undeniable. That’s not a reason to pay an apology forward. What would today’s Hampshire students want or do with such a misdirected misgiving?

A more sincere gesture would be to mentor these new voices and encourage their own shaping and discovery. That we were afforded the same pathways is the institutional memory that bears preservation — not the memories themselves. I thought of that when I heard Lisa Napoli’s virtual presence of her eighties curation segment. Lisa was lamenting the loss of her Hampshire video legacy. I almost interrupted her virtual voice by challenging her familiar lament with actual evidence.

Recently I excavated a sketch where I cast Lisa in her future real-life role of reporter on the antics of Wind Shields. The interview concerns celebrity journalism and the fortunes of Brooke’s fictitious younger sister. In retrospect, the script is sophomoric. Like so many Infinity sketches, it deserves an obscure death. But at least I was trying to venture out of my hermetic maleness. And never had such inside baseball risen this close to the surface of my personal Infinity history.

Roger Mellen (S72) introduces John Bruner (F94) who guides us through a virtual tour of today’s Studio G.

Once and Future Infinity

My favorite 50th Anniversary ceremony was the Infinity & Beyond viewing and discussion of Hampshire Video. Full disclosure: I had no hand in the assembling of the program or curating of the artifacts. Yet I got scooped into the eighties reels like so many unwashed sweaters with their drying cycles set to a mod kitchen microwave:

    • Former spouses,
    • Long dried-up mod spills, and
    • Distant combustions of drug-induced creative angst.

All living in one throbbing continuum of a continuous metallic oxide salvage mission. What could be more legacy than that? A big pile of donations, that’s what!

Failing big windfalls of liquidity, John Bruner is the proud and capable keeper of the Infinity flame. The torch he carries was passed to him by the legend known as Gunther.* We learned from Bruner that it was John Gunther (F84) who executed the monk-like preservation of Studio G as a streaming channel on YouTube. **

* Also, thanks to John Gunther for looking the other way when those of us on security detail let interrupted the slumber of the editing suites in the early morning off-hours. As my Div III collaborator Andy Morris-Friedman (F80) attests: "Maybe you could crank out a 3 minute rock video within your 3 hour allotment. But not a feature-length documentary."

** As a second footnote, Bruner provided some homework to the time-rich and cash-strapped Infinity partisans. It's assigning times, places, collaborators, titles, etc. to the smoldering collection of orphan videos now stored in this YouTube-hosted vault. Please contact John for the QR scan you'll need to access.

Many alumns I remain pals with harbor a lost treasure buried in the metallic shadows of this vast, untamed archive. I look forward to providing the door, secret handshake, and instructions for crowdsourcing this reconnaissance mission.

Tom Giovan (78F) shared the insight that Infinity itself was always about the framing, the queuing, and the segues. He figured the folks who wanted their mugs to appear on Intran would emerge from the shadows as the weekly “programming” destination. It was the “glue” between segments that the Infidiots that anchored whatever submissions had gathered in the backlog. I can confirm from the era immediately proceeding Tom’s that the glue formed its own standalone destination, whether it was introducing the news, entertainment, or bastard of both.

Unwritten Histories

The existential flash point of Miriam Nelson’s ten interminable months as the school’s president may have been the shock to the system that we never got from prior leaders. Maybe her predecessor would sooner fall on his sword than his board to balance capital improvements with lagging enrollments and budget realities. In either narrative, “Mim” held the carving cleaver in the role of the grim reaper. In the overtures to her would-be suitors, she saw in Hampshire’s buildings, property, and infrastructure something that no graduate could envision or tolerate: the seeds of an extractive business.

Februry 2019 | Cole Science Center: The winter of our discontent and the seeds of our revival.

The collective rejection of this was on full display at this weekend’s celebrations. $10 million in federal rescue funds have yet to be touched. Plan B is in place and may not be needed. Is this Hampshire’s books we’re talking about? We’ve got the vision thing and the business side playing on the same team? Amazing!

Curiously, there were teary-eyed farewells to former President Jonathan Lash curated in the 2010s reel. Yet there were no postcards from the predatory aggression or student-led brush-back against the administration in the dim, grim Mim times. John Bruner explained this as so much footage trapped in so many phones that never found its way to an arching meta treatment of this epic and ultimately heroic battle.

Any alumn Netflix producers out there?

A vulture capitalism carve-out script awaits only your filming rights. Either way, the diffuse nature of digital artifact collecting is a major challenge to a technology that remembers singular images contained in a visual lock-box in the casing of a SONY videocassette.

Next Chapters

We all left campus with a pocketful of sounds, pictures, a crumpled enrollment packet, and the exuberance that comes with believing the is a vital force for social change in a world gone to shit on our watch.

    • Can Hampshire cure climate change?
      • No and sorry but wrong question.
    • Can we nudge it back to health?
      • Better question.

Patty and I will soon depart our unglamorous work lives as salaried people. We will exchange commutes and Tupperware with a surplus of time and experience and shower them on a Hampshire community that supports the future as a nurturing place. One supporting its inhabitants on the earnings of their humanity alone. A market at the service of its citizens. It starts with a generosity still scarce in these times of perceived loss and imposed transition. Tomorrow’s Hampshire is the nesting place.

No empty nests near the Johnson Library.

References:

Ed Wingenbach Letters and Speeches

Me and God at Hampshire

Plausible Disinformation Belief

It’s no longer the personal story of the hero but the political reality of the all-powerful where the fantasy life of today’s escapism is scripted, cast, and streamed. Movie fantasy? Meet video game.

What Happens When The Escapists Are Greeted As Liberators?

Inside the House chamber, lawmakers, staff aides and journalists were told that tear gas had been deployed and to grab an emergency hood from under his or her chair. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

Prolog

Much has been said about America’s mud wrestling with media disinformation and political dysfunction. Much has been debated about the competing versions of what America stands for and what she stands against. This clash of narratives is nothing new. It comes straight from central casting and sucks your news feed dry.

What is new is a switcheroo between two competing versions of how Americans view themselves through the social histories that form of our American identity.

One is the ideal of the American dream. The other we’ll call the American hallucination. The willful removal of context from the telling of dark, American stories. Those are tales where backwards thinking slips out the back door. Casting retroactive judgments on moving pieces of the human chessboard is not just some parlor game. It’s what’s on the news menu. It’s the future of entertainment.

Retrofitting a movie ending around changing attitudes is one way to explain the wholesale rejection of the moral codes at work guiding their time-appropriate behaviors. Another is to say this is what happens to a culture that witnessed the death of the American dream. On our watch die she did. We grew up in the promise of an American dream that was within potential reach. Of which reachers? That would be the upwardly mobile as-in … anyone with modest means and slightly immodest ambitions. We all knew the dream was both imagined, and as real as our devotion to it.

Yes, it was a marketing ploy. Not everyone would rise accordingly. And yet, shouldering those hopes would nurture our stamina. We will endure this recession. We will break out of this bust cycle. We’ll reach the point where it’s our money that’s being borrowed. The ultimate payback! Such were the trailers for the American dream that fired our young, professional imaginations. A generation later, that hope has dimmed if not extinguished for millennials gaping at mountains of student loan debt. Didn’t we get ourselves through school? Wrong question to be asking, Buddy.

They don’t root for the little guy because they know first-hand their chances of taking on Goliath or selling him their start-up is nil. Instead they’ve escaped to a world where the entire power structure is questioned. The elites and the brokers and the deciders are all accountable for the corruptions wrought by their abuse of this power.

It’s a power they neither earned nor amassed but simply inherited, thus bypassing any of the accountability associated with traditional channels of leadership and trust through public dialog. It’s no longer the personal story of the hero but the political reality of the all-powerful where the fantasy life of today’s escapism is scripted, cast, and streamed. Movie fantasy. Meet video game.

Smell Testing Standards

Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill on her morning commute.

Like you, my wife and I watch our share of streaming escapism. Like you, sometimes we’re Googling while we watch to determine empirical fact from artistic license. Recently we traveled back to our formative professional adult times and streamed the movie Working Girl (1988) starring Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, and Sigourney Weaver.

If your post boomer curiosity is unaroused, I guarantee there’s no spoilers worthy of your alerting. The implausible resolution of a lurching plot twist rests on a wobbly bed of screwball comedy formulas. These wacky, zany, turns of narrative have long since thinned out on the expired belief they could pass the smell test. There were three bands of smell test results:

      • Sweet success (first and foremost): that an audience could invest its betting money in a series of improbable events coming true.
      • Scent of a popular B movie (next and likeliest): that the guy gets the girl (or in this case) the girl gets the gig and that conviction could lift the emotional prospects of its audiences.
      • Cheap cologne grade (last and least): that the silver screen could suspend enough disbelief to make them forget their off-screen troubles. Sometimes for longer than the film. Imagine! Are your movie muscles still limber? Can you still go the distance?

The final elevator scene has more sleights of hand than a fire-eating juggler of vanishing card tricks. And yet the world surrounding that bank of corporate elevators is grounded in the same plausible backdrop that would greet any movie-goer on their commutes the following work day. The change that director Mike Nichols is foisting on us lives between the hearts and minds of a repentant but worthy protagonist. Melanie Griffith’s hometown character is in a double destiny reversal with her antagonist boss. A worldlier and coddled arch-rival played by Sigourney Weaver. Who do we root for? Nichols makes the decision for us.

Crowd Scenes of Today

Is It Safe to Go to the Movies? Tara Santora, Fatherly, September 14, 2020

In 2021’s collective mental landscape, snootiness is not only in. It’s the cost of even entering the one remaining form of advancement. Self-promotion is the last resort of scoundrels and ambitious claims on climbing today’s corporate, political, and cultural ladder. Our seething anger can’t be directed at the privileged few cutting the line of our promotion. We were never up for one in the first place. And we still have jobs. Even if it’s a full time job just figuring out how to hold the one we have. Besides, no one is especially interested in our inability to rise in station or settle a personal workplace score.

However, aiming our invective at the tribe who cut the line? Sublimating my shame with healthy dollops of contempt for the success I’ll never be? Now you’re talking. Permission to uncork, sir? It is the contagion that knows no flu season. Our addiction to indignation is transmitted via smart phone notifications. No surgical strike implied when the car drives over the curb. Nothing pedestrian about these protesters.

Wait! How did we get from the crowd scene shot in a lower Manhattan office lobby a generation ago to the white supremacist march on Charlottesville in 2017? What do our current political upheavals have to do with screwball comedies, cultural smell tests, or the aerosols dancing off our phone sceens?

    • Everything, if you’re streaming wholesale retakes of historic tragedies like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
    • Plenty, if you’re rewinding to episode one of anything Ryan Murphy revisits on his $300 million tab from Netflix, or what Midge Maisel doles out to the knuckle-dragging GI Joe Schmoes in the smokey take-my-wife clubs .
    • A whole new backdrop to the Cold War once the viewer inserts heroine Beth Harmon into the cardboard cut-outs of gobsmacked prodigy bros and inscrutable Russians.

Bridge Construction Ahead

Tools of obliteration.

The point is to guide the viewer’s lust for justice to the obliteration of the bullies who tormented us through the 20th Century. The bridge leading back there is a fabrication that bypasses victims, heroes, and all history books that stand-in for the psychopathic reality hosts that set civilization on its heels.

    • Is a bridge back to the Twentieth Century the way to throw the cold water of reality on a Dorothy who mistakenly thought herself in Kansas …
      but that Kansas prohibited free and fair reproductive rights services?
    • Is it a bridge back to the Minutemen when San Francisco schools throw Paul Revere on the tinder of so many Confederate flags because of his mistreatment of Indians?
    • Is it a bridge back to the time when a white man’s country was his shining castle and everyone else new their respective roles and places? Who needs cancel culture when you can delete entire decades of coalition-building and consensus-making?

Does the retelling require the wholesale re-staging of our revisionism? A post racial past where open hearts and independent minds upstage inheritance, tribal rites, and skin tones?

Is that how social justice wins over individual liberty?

Is that how merit transcends birthright?

Are we sure we’ve persuaded our libertarian friends this is the way, past our open intolerance for one another?

And can 71 million Trump voters be fully culpable for their own alternative realities?

These are weighty deliberations for the most reasoned of actors and the most sensible of cultures. For the winner-take-all USA, it is a bridge too far for anyone expecting to meet solid ground upon its crossing.

2020 as Hindsight

In the screwball past, the audience could indulge in the implausible outcome, so long as the good guy was believable. Maybe a little more faith would enable us to fight the good fight long enough to prevail in our own reality series. But at least we had to power to change for the better.

That was the known quantity after the credits had rolled. Our current indulgence for these flights of historic fancy is the outcome of losing that faith. That expectation of a future we can have a hand in shaping, not just a present we’re preoccupied with enduring.

In the narrative, this was once centered on the change and growth of the protagonist. These days you don’t need to identify with the star. In fact if you stage an anti-hero your plot can beat up on the larger society without needing to identify with the star, as-in…

    • I don’t condone Walter White’s crimes in defense of providing for his meth empire family
    • I don’t sanction the use of waste removal consulting services for packing Tony Soprano’s adversaries in garbage bags
    • I don’t approve of Cersai Lannister’s power grab as much as I respect her dealing of bargaining chips. Would I despise a man any less?

But I do indulge with imposing my 2020 hindsight on the 1970s world — the same painted cloth of unyielding circumstance that hung behind the characters of my coming of age. The idea of switching out the social norms was no more conceivable than redirecting the crowd scenes in Working Girl off lower Manhattan. And into the East River.

Reality departures don’t mean that the reality keepers own the landing rights of reality’s return. It means that we must change and grow past where our own despair pacifies our anger and appeals to the notion of running out so many clocks. That would be the ultimate fiction and the breaking in the arc of histories yet to be written.

Talk is cheap. But shouting is even cheaper. Especially when it drowns out the opposition — the expense of listening.

And the cultural war prop room never closes for business.

Part Four: What Needs to Come Sooner

(If There is to be a Later)

Scenes from Last Episode

When we were last together in our third installment of episode three: (“Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good — What Comes Next”) we tried some perspective-taking. We slipped on the Gucci loafers of Senate Republicans to understand their resistance to helping the unemployed through the fall and winter of our pandemic discontent. We looked through the lens of Senator Rick Scott of Florida who argued that the hardball negotiation by Senate Republicans was a feature, not a bug, of keeping American labor lean, hungry, and ready to resume where it left off.

Senator Scott’s pumping on the economic relief brakes is understandable. The wealthy underwrite elections, the parties protect their donors and in Mr. Scott, we’ve got a two-for-one sale displayed proudly in the C-SPAN store window Remember that return on investment in GOP majorities a.k.a. The Tax Reform Act of 2017? Turning the clock forward to the pandemic zone shot us clear past the final solution:

1. Neutering and defanging the federal government.

2. Turning the clock back to a world of unrestrained capital

3. Fleecing, before fleeing the republic, for which it stands.

No Life Boats in Coach

Of course, once the plane crashes, fixing the auto pilot is a luxury for the survivors. Even those survivors in first class who can float their own way to safety. Even recovery of the flight recorder is a distraction to the stranded hoards in coach. Would the most unfit be voted off the island by the libertarians watching at home? What would women and children first look like to the crew piloting this rescue plane?

Wake up from the scripted nightmare and a cold splash of aspirational reality could revive us. According to former Treasury Richard Rubin, federal revenues were already running a full two points below normal when the pandemic hit. Compared to the glory days of the dot.com heyday and tax revenues are now 16.5% of GDP, compared to 20% in the late nineties.

My point? A narrow post-contested victory this November still brings the of wiggle room needed to reverse the 2017 tax holiday for those likeliest to make it a working vacation. That consequential first step has the public, and history on its side.

Confidence in paying for what exactly?

  • The freedom for taxable income to do the most good for the most salary-dependent people.
  • The priority shifting from American Color War to a national obsession with a shared precondition called economic insecurity.

That’s where capital in search of a home goes. Not its reflexive old normal routine: the highest return on the hoarded investments of insistent shareholders. That’s the bottom-line for the underwriters at the crash sites of broken auto pilots.

U.S. is Them

There are limits. Soaking the rich does nothing to broaden the commonweal. We all need skin in the game. Even the self-dealers and self-makers who think they can redirect highway funds to repair their imperial driveways. It can’t fall on the losers of a prior election. We need to move away from winner-take-all to a renewed spirit of shared sacrifice. Replacing one echo chamber with another extends the cycle. The concussive bluster of who gets to govern returns to the mutual respect of governing effectively. The new adversaries are not those in disagreement but dissolution: the enemies of compromise.

Here are the counter-arguments to Senator Scott’s tough winners-don’t-negotiate love from Rubin himself, a former Goldman Sachs-plated lion of Wall Street, and the furthest voice from the Bernie Bro Choir of any corporate-respecting Democrat:

Prediction #3 — The economy as a manageable problem to solve in a plausible way…

There will be ample room to increase revenues, on a highly progressive basis, for example, by increasing corporate taxes, restoring individual rates, repealing pass-through preferences and imposing a financial transactions tax. — Robert Rubin, Bringing the Economy Back to Life, 4.17.20, The New York Times

The calculation extends to health coverage:

We should also pursue universal health care coverage, preferably through a public option, while at the same time reducing  our system’s overall costs, which far exceed other developed economies’.  Ibid.

And that credit card balance!

Addressing our debt/G.D.P. ratio is in our longer-term economic interest and also benefits us in the nearer term, as greatly increased debt could impede the recovery. Ibid.

Some of these resentments began spilling into the public square over the summer. The backlash against systemic racism for starters. Remember that post racial society that Chief Justice Roberts used to justify the gutting of key provisions in the Voting Rights Act?

Perhaps those same rose-colored blinders are what justified the left’s lethargic turnout during off-year Obama era elections. Either way, that pendulum swing is in full counter-punch. Pendulum whiplash. Darkest midnight to highest noon.

A Petition to Replace Faster, Better, Cheaper

Why is it that economic inequality is not a bug of an unjust society? It’s a feature of a smoothly-running free market economy. For me, the answer is personal and simple. I feel lucky to have a job. And it’s not just any job so I double down on gratitude. I experience feverish gratitude that the job pays enough to sustain a family and a modest retirement savings. Head over heels on a slow day, really.  My appreciation reflects the precipitous fall from office to service worker. Concepts like recognition, generosity, or even job performance do not factor into this equation. Income flow for most of us is a precarious thing. There is no actual bump in pay for superior effort. Maintaining income flow is reward in itself.

Performance reviews aside, a former colleague summed up his amazement at another widening gap. It’s the one between

… How stubbornly we defend our pocketbooks against scams, knock-offs, and mark-ups… versus …

How cheaply we discount our own value to a contracting labor market. 

The connection here is more than personal. When every labor is justified as an exchange of assets, the cheaper the transaction, the more marginalized the laborer. We get this theoretically for buying cheap T-Shirts and jeans from Pakistan. Does that rationale find its way home when it’s our work product that finds its ways into the software code, legal contracts, marketing collateral, or even health care coverage consumed by our employers?

The corona-infested economy may well in fact settle for a continuation of faster, better, cheaper; especially if we don’t find a replacement for the race-to-the-lowest reduction-based logic. That’s a return to the humming along economy that dropped us like a stranded passenger that forfeited their free Two Day shipping flight home from planet Amazon.

It’s not enough to blame the status quo for this predicament. We need to intercept faster, better, cheaper at the factory gates before escorting it out of the board room. We need to knock innovation off its trajectory enough to factor the greater good into the disruptions to come. Only then can we justify a future that includes us in business-as-usual. Three next chapters have yet to be written. Blame their stripped-down open-endedness on the allure of alternative arrangements and these bloated time bubbles:

    • What’s an economy for? This is not the question that comes to mind in the reinsertion of the prior default settings of manufacturing and distribution. Plug and play makes sense to the owners of capital than the holders of debt, let alone the 50% who were a few off weeks from belly-up when the prior economy was purring along. How do we get from a trillion dollar cash injection to more of it actually circulating as we enter that tentative, post coma rehab phase?
    • What’s our collective sense of security? Is it to beat back the advancing hordes of the bad hombres? Perhaps it’s no longer about who’s: (1) labeling who the terrorists or, (2) determining the greater of two evils … global, or homegrown (you pick ’em!) Perhaps it’s about an America first that favors the nationalizing of the medical necessities we’ll need as more of us are victimized by changing climates, dissipating resources, and heavy hand of the unforeseen to come.
    • What’s the role of the individual in all this? Prioritizing what brings us together in shared sacrifice was a pipedream before this pandemic. It becomes almost graspable if we can re-establish the guiding clarity of the greater good. That’s no drug-induced high. That’s corona phoning in a sick-out from the Oval Office last evening. But that begs the biggest-picture question looming on the great post-pandemic horizon. How to see each other as individual contributors to that greater good, and not its dilution.

Will the pivot back to a road ahead be engineered outside the exclusionary interests of the muscular capital elites? Until offshore means: (1) a full-time residence in a private island tax haven, or (2) different planet to occupy, we have a shared outcome in a mutual controlling interest.

A Poverty of Professions

Part of that mutual interest is to occupy the time on earth of those whose needs suddenly outpace the capital formation of their labors. A paucity of wealth-providing trades and professions is a seldom mentioned scarcity in the recently completed run of the bull market. It’s also curious that our oligarchy-favoring leadership decides that throwing unregulated profits at corporations is the shortest distance between record-setting unemployment and mission accomplished.

What future economy will open the door of career choices for the able-minded people of an entering workforce?

Prediction #4 — Amazon needs workers until … they don’t

In 2020, they’re arriving into workplaces where their labor is both urgently needed and conspicuously treated as a problem to be eventually solved.” — John Herrman, Amazon’s Big Breakdown, The New York Times, 5.27.20

Easy access to short bursts of cash works out great for the connected and the corrupted. For the rest of us, writing the rules requires a new way to tie three laudable goals long buried under an unsustainable pile of Better, Faster Cheaper: compensation, merit, and stability. OK, merit cuts both ways and the current steadiness in direction is taking us to some pretty unstable territory. How about if stable keeps merit honest? That leaves an open slot for “better” to climb back in… so long as we unmoor it from the  greasy downslide to the cheap farm that globalization wins no matter who’s racing.

You Don’t Have to Worship a Dollar (to Go to Work Everyday)

I’m a part-timer nanny who drives for a ride-sharing service when I’m not pinch-hitting for a local caterer.

How many gigs are you holding up? Are they even consistent enough to be counted the same from one pay period to the next?

What if the social contract wasn’t bleed-me-dry in exchange for a chance of a promotable event in some foreseeable future? What if there was an actual dependency between the personal fortunes of the big tech elites and my take home pay? What if the downstream impact of decisions were felt firsthand by the folks who make them? Would they make those same decisions if they had to live with those decisions?

Returning to Senator Scott’s cautionary “do better someplace else” tale on the Senate floor, when was the last time you personally were moved to refuse the terms of your employer? That’s the leverage needed for economic recovery. And it’s not a return to work or the ethic of hard work. It’s the dignity of work that provides for the workers and their managers. Not simply for owners and shareholders.

The dignity of work: Step one in our long national recovery to come.