Naturally, the MAGAs will cherry-pick what they take to be the most offensive pieces of the platform, in some cases resulting in comical denunciations of things that are actually very popular.

Now the same crew that formulated this document is opposing calls for a national poll of DSA members for 2028 presidential endorsements, one which AOC would probably win. The worthies on the NPC don’t want that. Some democracy. If the Rs had a clue, they would try to make some hay out of that, though that would be hampered by their own alienation from democratic practice.

Right off the bat, the preamble implies an equivalence between Republicans and Democrats, even though there is much railing against the atrocities of Trump’s party. There is an aspiration for an independent ‘workers’ party’ that fails to reckon with the rules of our system, that render such a strategy dubious.

There is nothing wrong in general with the meat-and-potatoes sections for a Green New Deal and so forth. The big thing missing is a political strategy to make any of it happen, though in actuality the DSA chapters that are doing useful work, electing socialists and progressives to public office, are making real progress in those areas.

I’ve been saying there is a basic contradiction between the constructive, reformist dare I say ‘social-democratic’ grassroots work, typified by the Mamdani triumph, and the noodle-brained proclamations from assorted ultra-lefts on the NPC. I do not advocate any expulsions or splits. I merely point out that this tension cannot be sustained, that a break of some kind is inevitable, and I wish some people would just go away. I only hope the ultra-lefts do not bring the ship down with them.

The groups in question are called the ‘Marxist Unity Group’ (‘MUG’) and ‘Red Star.’ They bloth like to flog the hammer and sickle, but evidently the MUG is not quite as out-there as Red Star. Neither could survive a genuine national poll of the burgeoning membership, now said to exceed 120,000. They do, however, exercise overweening influence on the NPC.

There is no point in trying to dissect their internals. Simply put, they are not democratic socialists, and they have no future in politics. All they can do is drag down the rest of us. I’ve heard that one or the other sect has been able to take over some of the smaller chapters, which underlines the most important thing about DSA: its diversity. Reject all generalizations about its politics and its objectives. It is not one thing.

The one big thing that DSA mostly is can be seen in the politics of successful socialist politicians, starting with Bernie and AOC, and now with the potential blossoming of ‘The Squad’ in the U.S. House of Representatives and elsewhere.

We also see the advance of “municipal socialism,” a.k.a. “sewer socialism,” in New York City, Seattle, Minneapolis, Boston, the District of Columbia, and Los Angeles. Cities are disadvantaged by the provisions of state constitutions, but in terms of economics and population, they are the power-houses of states. So the prospects for dissemination of progressive politics beyond urban boundaries looks promising. NY state has already bent the knee to Mamdani.

The programmatic aspects of the DSA platform are constructive and politically viable, in general. Match that with the progressive politics happening on the ground and we have the makings of relief from this MAGA nightmare.

I read the original Politico article that blew up the Platner campaign and a couple of other bits, nothing comprehensive or deeply researched. A few rumors have filtered out that vilify the woman. I will ignore them.

Basically we don’t know what happened, and neither do you, though something clearly did. Does it rise to an importance that justifies the termination of his campaign? It depends on exactly what happened. If a crime was committed, Platner should be prosecuted, which would make him unable to campaign.

There is a spectrum of possibilities between bad breakup and outright, violent sexual assault. If a crime was committed, that would justify timely prosecution and punishment. In any case, the threshold for political collapse of a non-incumbent is far short of criminal procedure, and that’s where we are.

For the record, my view of the entirety of previous anti-Platner commentary, before the coup de grace, tattoo included, is that it was one enormous, stinking pile of bullshit.

The most dubious principle bandied around, prevalent in popular delusions common to all points on the political spectrum, is that it matters whether or not an individual is qualified or virtuous. It really doesn’t matter. We could wish in our politics it was otherwise, but it is not. Particularly in a legislature, an individual’s qualifications mean little. There are rare persons whose own unique qualities lead them to great achievements, both good and bad. Such persons are few. Lyndon Johnson was one, Bernie Sanders is another, but so is Trump. Qualifications do matter for leadership positions, where an individual’s authority dominates that of his political cronies.

People like to say, “I vote for the individual, not the party.” Ha-ha. No you don’t! First of all, you never know the individual. Secondly, their impact owing to their individuality in a huge, complex political system is marginal. There are exceptions, but they are rare.

For most, the only important datum is party identification, not personal qualifications. Any public official has staff and/or family that compensate for his or her deficiencies. Whether you like what Ronald Reagan was up to or not, he was rumored to remain in office at the end of his second term beset with Alzheimers. The nation did not fall apart. Another of the walking wounded was Senator Diane Feinstein of California. Now Mitch McConnell’s health is in question, not to mention the president’s.

Even with Platner’s downfall, we may not have lost an extra D vote in the Senate. It ain’t over yet. As elections roll around, I keep thinking that the state of the nation is so awful people will have to come around and give us a blue wave. Or maybe the state of the People is so awful we are doomed. I’m uncertain. It is not even obvious that we will have an honest election.

The question of “Why now?” — why the victim here waited so long to speak out, just a week before an important political deadline — has a plausible answer. I’m not saying I believe it, but it is not incredible. The explanation is she was interviewed for the New York Times article a few months ago, along with a few other women. The Times focused on the most dubious witness against Platner — a full-fledged Republican Party operative and co-founder of “Women for Kavanaugh" — and neglected the others, one of whom provided the killer testimony two weeks ago. She says she was distressed to be left out of the Times article and was faithful to the qualifications dodge I noted above, as are many. Not a crime. A huge boo-boo, if you believe her professed political beliefs.

A better question is why wait for four or five years to report a crime. Obviously it was the success of Platner’s campaign. For his victim, apparently it was fine for Platner to keep walking around, by her lights a continued threat to women of his acquaintance, but not if he was a senator. This could be argued either way. As a senator under close scrutiny, he could have been more risk averse. On the other hand, the power in his position would have made him less vulnerable. I’d say the latter is more likely. We seldom see senators taken down by sex scandals. It happens, but not I would guess as often as it might under a different justice system.

Apparently the victim was shepherded into her bombshell by a shaky so-called “influencer” by the name of Cheyenne Hunt, a self-described progressive and presumably a woman not for Kavanaugh, who has made a cottage industry of sinking Democratic politicians. Her other big scalp was the obviously slimy Rep. Eric Swalwell. Evidently there is little misogyny to expose on the Republican side. Hunt’s professed goal is for Democrats to attain the moral high ground. In other words, to lose endlessly.

The moral high ground can be a foggy place. It helped to replace Al Franken, a pretty good senator, with someone nobody can name. The Franken indictment was rubbish. Why does our side think we can keep spotting points to the Republicans?

It’s amusing, to me at least, that the moral high ground is also a common objective among ultra-lefts in Democratic Socialists of America. For them, moral purity is found in condemnation of any politics short of defund the police and other fanciful pursuits. There is virtue in simplicity, but some comrades abuse the privilege.

As for “Women for Kavanaugh," come on!

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2026/07/11/democratic-socialist-versus-communists-trump/90839578007/

I keep coming back to the central problem in this commentary: how is investment determined? We could expand this to the question of how labor needs are determined as well. It’s too easy to say that labor-managed firms under MS will sell what consumers want, at prices that are determined in a market. Or that all firms would do so. I say the market efficiency pretensions are misleading.

The availability of consumer or intermediate investment goods depends on how production is organized, sometimes described as ‘upstream.’ Consumer demand to be realized has to feed into the organization of production in supplier firms that sit behind retail vendors. Even if all goods are sold in markets, how are the initial enterprises’ labor forces and capital stocks determined? Under MS, these further decisions are made by boards or public banks. Planning prevails. Moreover, such planning is supposed to be democratic, which makes it more difficult.

A note about meetings. I’ve been in a lot of them, so I’m a cynic about “democratic planning,” about which I claim no expertise. In meetings, no small amount of oxygen is used up by people who either don’t know much and/or who just want to hear themselves talk.

More broadly, really-existing, undemocratic planning bodies have been vulnerable to bad actors who were a combination of incompetent and corrupt. This is also the case in existing corporations and government departments. Even with the best of intentions all around, planning is burdened by massive information requirements, the classic objection raised by economists like Friedrich Hayek. Nevertheless, planning goes forward, including in large public agencies and in nations with social-democratic systems, not to mention in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). My friend Bill Niskanen used to say the second largest planned economy in the world was the U.S. Department of Defense.

A subset of democratic planning is planning by selected officials supplemented by public participation, which means meetings where outsiders are able to speak their piece. I used to call this “death by outreach.” More cynicism on my part. A dirty secret about such proceedings: the bodies running them are not looking for substantive, technical advice; they are taking a political temperature. Open participation also opens the door to narrow interests who can deploy professional advocates.

Under certain versions of MS, the workers in enterprises reap the entire profits made by their firm, after a deduction for maintenance of capital. In some versions, there is a rental charge for capital, the entirety of which is owned by the state. One problem I have mentioned myself is that workers, especially younger workers, could prefer higher compensation to viable longer-term investment.

One possible question I’ve been avoiding is how the workers could seize ownership of firms and their capital? Technically this could also be a simple matter. The state could incrementally accumulate ownership stakes through taxation. Governments already own significant shares of private corporations. The difficulty is not the means, it’s the politics.

Norway’s government owns $2 trillion of private sector assets through its Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), fed, by the way, from the profits of offshore oil extraction in the North Sea, which comes out to $340,000 per citizen. The state of Alaska’s Permanent Fund is around $89 billion, also founded on oil revenues.

I did a piece on this subject, pointing out that in taxaphobic U.S., the problem for an SWF is how the money to buy assets would be raised. It is all well and good to propose a universal basic income financed by an SWF. But who paid for the SWF?

Why not build up a fund for the U.S., incrementally transferring ownership of the means of production to the state? The increments could be large, politics permitting. Leave firms under current management, but incentivize worker participation in management, as in certain European countries?

Democratic socialism has given us, piece by piece, the welfare state, with all its deficiencies, and likewise, trade unionism. Leninism in its usual conception (contradicted by Lenin himself, prior to 1917, not to mention Marx and Engels) had one dramatic, short-lived success and provided no lessons for subsequent political practice. It was a one-off. There were no repeats, not even close.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is progressing along democratic socialist lines. New York City Mayor Mamdani did not propose to nationalize the means of production, merely to provide some public grocery stores in areas of NYC known as “food deserts” (places where residents lack convenient access to supermarkets). He didn’t even suggest the city monopolize area grocery sales, which would have been bone-headed but consistent with some folks’ understanding of socialism.

As DSA progresses, now with 120,000 members, the nitwits on its National Political Committee debate how to hold it back, either by insisting on moralistic, impractical political stances or by demanding that use of a Democratic Party electoral line, that control of one of our two major parties, be foregone. A kiss of death, in other words.

Jacobin wunderkind ex-editor Bhasker Sunkara writes that he fears success will coopt the movement. It is certainly possible that progress could be slowed to a crawl. What people miss is that how to proceed by increments, small or not-so-small, is precisely the political problem. It is not solved by simply upholding the morally-satisfying maximum program. That is in fact an evasion, much like misguided urges for a third party or a ‘workers party.’

I’ve argued that democratic socialism is like a vector. It has a launching point (the current situation) and a direction. A vector has a length, or distance, and an end-point, but we only need the end-point to establish the direction. How fast and far we go is a tactical question. I’ve tried to explain how the logic of socialism differs from liberalism. We do not need to map out the ultimate objective in any detail. As we move forward, we will know what we are gaining and what we still need.

Another common misconception is to distinguish socialism from ‘social-democracy’ or liberalism by some kind of democratization of the economy. “People before profits.” Some stress public ownership of the “means of production,” an idea so vague as to be meaningless. Others speak of “workers control” (of what, exactly?). I honestly doubt many have a clue as to what any of that means.

Understanding public ownership as a principle is uninformed. Some things are better public than private, and vice-versa. There is no good reason for everything to be public. I’ve suggested the biggest priorities for public ownership.

I recently published a column explaining democratic socialism in one of our local newspapers. The objections are instructive.

One was to just yell socialism is not what you say, it’s communism and it’s bad bad bad. One alluded to my appearance as proof of his argument. It’s difficult to formulate an argument in a short comment, but none of them tried. It was all argument by assertion or bogus MAGA claims. This suggests the Mamdani approach can work, since the other side has no good response.

This is Virginia, so the message is a little watered-down. But not too much.

I know everyone has two questions. The first is, what the hell is gabagool? It’s a cold cut, properly known as capicola. Apparently gabagool is New Jersey/Italian slang. I don’t think I’ve ever had any. My Italian cold cut of choice is prosciutto.

The other burning question is what is sfogliatelle? It looks pretty good, though my dieting precludes pastry in morning.

Both of these things hold their own, but they don’t beat pastrami or a good cheese danish.

The familiarity of the show for me is in the geography. I’m from North Jersey and people say we have an accent. (Actually it’s everybody else who talks funny.) I spent years driving around the area in a different life, especially the highway to NYC on the Pulaski Skyway. I used to call it the Pulaski Smellway. For a while I lived in Newark and then Belleville (one of its suburbs) in the Anthony Imperiale years. On the other hand, even though I grew up in northern New Jersey with Italians, I never knew anybody like the characters in the show.

These characters are mostly despicable people. What is their attraction? Perhaps because the acting and writing are so good, the characters strike a convincing blend of good and evil. A few of the women are not so bad, especially the psychiatrist, Tony’s wife, and his daughter. The others all lie to each other and steal from each other. Almost nobody who comes into contact with the ‘Family’ escapes unscathed. If they smell money on you, you’re screwed.

The Russian gangsters and molls in the show have the virtue of honesty. So too the Jewish gangsters. You always know where you stand with them. I keep thinking of the plot hole about the Russian marked for execution who escapes from Paulie and Christopher in the snows of the Pine Barrens in South Jersey. He and his mates should have been itching for revenge, but they disappear from the story. I raised this question in a Facebook group devoted to the show and got driven out like a heretic.

The quote in the title of this post recurs throughout the series, the first time from Tony’s spooky, conniving mother Livia, played by Nancy Marchand in an epic performance. It really embodies the core of the series, a self-pitying contempt for the cares of others on the part of assorted characters.

I don’t get Tony’s appeal to women. Christopher makes more sense. Tony seems to be able to seduce just about any women he fancies. Why? He reminds me of me, before I lost 50 pounds. Also, I still have hair.

My favorite word from the show is “googootz,” which Tony applies to his good-for-nothing idiot son. It’s more Italian slang, this one for zucchini.

My other recent TV diversion via Amazon was a documentary about the Soviet resistance to the German invasion in World War II. Two seasons, about twenty episodes. A fair amount of obvious reenactment and animated sequences, but also plenty of newsreel/documentary footage too. The story is amazing and fascinating, the narration not much polluted by Russian propaganda.

My abiding impression: the U.S. and FDR, through some combination of lassitude, political constraints, and poor preparation, sat back while for three years (1941-1944) the Nazis kicked hell out of Russia and murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, etc. The motivation of the U.S., to favor Germany and the USSR debilitating each other while Jews were massacred, has been well-documented.

D-Day wasn’t until 1944 in June, by which time the Soviets had turned the tide and threatened to engulf Europe. Greatest generation, my ass. It doesn’t justify what Putin has been up to in Ukraine, but it does explain it to some extent.

I hadn’t realize how weaselly the “neutral” Swedes were, shipping iron ore to Hitler and harrassing the Russian navy. Finland was even worse. I suppose there wasn’t much else they could have done. They could have fought more like Norway and gotten pummeled for their trouble. Finland had been attacked by the Soviets.

Dad brought home a Russian hat with a red star on it and an automatic pistol with a working firing pin but no magazine. The hat has long since been lost. I held onto the pistol but eventually threw it away, out of fear of being caught with it during my lawless years.

In the close-in D.C. suburbs in Virginia where most ‘Northern’ Virginia DSA action has transpired, it’s mostly younger, well-to-do professionals and Hispanics. The former has been the usual source of DSA membership. The older retired folks like me move further out, where housing is bigger and cheaper.

At any rate, I wanted to be sure not to miss the meet. I played my SDS card and the young fellow running the meeting asked, “What’s SDS?” Ha ha.

Its big issue is going to be the data centers, all the rage here among liberals, about which I have mixed feelings. I did a substack post on the subject, but now I think I may have overstated. My misgivings about the opposition is its dominance by bourgeois environmentalist types who represent well-off homeowners opposed to economic development in general. The hardest part of that is opposition to new housing construction. Less well-off folks here are hurting over the costs of housing, while many suburban liberals have huge houses on huge lots in areas where zoning blocks multi-family housing. Service workers -- electricians, retail clerks, etc. -- can’t afford to live here, where their jobs are. My electrician moved out to West Virginia, where he says he is “redneck rich,” no doubt due to cheaper housing costs. The suburbanites don’t want more people nearby. I think that’s bad. The anti-data center campaigns strike me as bad politics.

As I wrote previously, the data centers make for good jobs and pay a lot of tax revenue that supports better-paid public employees, especially teachers. Our county’s schools are pretty well-regarded and have held up under the MAGA assaults over ‘Critical Race Theory’ and transgender matters. The data center boom in the county is like an oil gusher, but like most economic development, it comes with costs, possibly higher utility rates, as well as public revenue. It’s the net impact that matters, but that net is difficult to calculate. In our U.S. anti-tax environement, the public sector can ill-afford to forego any tax sources.

Last week I took in a webinar run by Indivisible, the most active lefty force in my area, which went on about the environmental costs of data centers, which I do not doubt at all, but not one word about the tax revenue they provide, nor how the curtailment of any such revenue would be coped with.

On the other side of the argument, a progressive, albeit vague attack on data centers could result in stiffer regulation. Even my DSA comrades admit the most relevant, short-term objective is regulation, not outright abolition. Regulation would put more focus on the evil Dominion Power, one of the biggest sources of political donations in our completely unregulated, corrupt state campaign finance system.

Besides data centers, the other imminent local action is to defend tenants (mostly Hispanic) from rapacious landlords.

I’ve long thought that Leesburg, VA, is ripe for a DSA branch but there do not appear to be many openings for a progressive candidacy in the county. The Democratic office-holders are all Mom and apple pie types. Our new Congressman, Suhas Subramanyam, is pretty weak tea. He may be the best we can do, but I suspect not. The liberals here are mostly animated by concern about homophobia and transphobia; it’s their kids and their kids’ friends. They don’t want more housing either.

So it goes in my corner. In general VA is trending blue. The new governor on balance is doing good things -- more good than not so good, pushed by our blue state legislature. Democratic voters tend to be geographicaly concentrated in higher-income and minority areas, but their numbers are growing.

One important opportunity here is the anti-Zionist sentiment regarding Gaza in our burgeoning South Asian population. There aren’t too many Jews here. There is one liberal-ish congregation, the other two not so much.

On top of that, the local Indian population, otherwise inclined to the revolting Modi, is itself victimized by racism. The South Asians in general are very good at politics. Many local office holders hail from that constituency. Even the local MAGAs have figured out they need to front some of them to succeed in elections.

The crypto swine have unlimited funds to intervene in our elections, the better to recruit toadies who will oppose prudent regulation of their industry, a constant threat to world financial stability. Zionist operatives supply the libelous accusations of antisemitism, as they did against Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. The American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee runs dark money from assorted billionaires and front groups. AIPAC has become so tainted by Israel’s genocidal policies that it is obliged to conceal its aid under cover of anodyne labels and campaigns that ignore Israel entirely.

The Zionists and the Arab participants in Trump’s “Gaza peace plan” (sic), today endorsed by no less than Hillary Clinton, if that isn’t the Kiss of Death I don’t know what is, still beat the drums for further war with Iran. Assorted opportunists among Democrats are on this bandwagon by condemning Trump, in effect, for breaking off hostilities.

Take the “surrender” idea. The word imparts militant legitimacy to Trump’s cockamamie justifications, by lamenting they were not fulfilled. If I brutalize somebody and then stop, is that a “surrender”?

It is true that Trump has walked back from all his idiotic excuses for the war. JD Vance has caved even more forthrightly. Democrats who attack them for that should be boiled in oil.

One such excuse was that Iran could not have nukes. Of course, they don’t have them and weren’t about to get them, Netanyahu’s lies notwithstanding. They have reiterated what they already said when the deal with Obama was made (a deal neglected by Sleepy Joe and Mrs. Clinton). Pakistan and North Korea, regimes no less sketchy than Iran, have had nukes for years. What’s the big deal?

Two was the uranium, in Trump’s words the “nuclear dust.” There was talk of a special ops raid to recover the material. Now DT says that stuff is worthless and doesn’t matter.

Three was their missiles. Now DT says other countries have them, why not Iran. Fuckin’ A!

Four was the liberation of the Iranian people from their tyrannical government. The only one who believed that was the Shah’s idiot son. There is no plausible scenario wherein bombing a nation empowers its people to overthrow their government.

Five was the money. Remember when the Rs were screaming about Obama giving Iran money? Of course it was their money, previously frozen. Now Trump admits it is their money. Moreover, there is the talk about over $300 billion in funding for reconstruction. We should wonder who else will get a taste of that.

Like the blind warthog who finds an acorn, the intrinsic infeasibility of the U.S./Israeli attack, combined with approaching midterms in the U.S., has pushed the Mango Mussolini towards the light. Anyone who obstructs this progress is unworthy of respect, not to mention political support.

For example, the bright Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, one of the Democrats’ foreign policy mavens, has the clever stance of simultaneously pointing out that the war was a bad idea (true), and it accomplished nothing, as if more ought to have been accomplished.

We are not quite out of the woods on all this. Israel isn’t quitting Lebanon, so the fat man isn’t singing.

I did say “almost.” The simple problem with BDS is that it is tainted by chauvinism regarding Israel’s right to self-determination. Israel’s chauvinism explains BDS chauvism, a.k.a. “nationalism,” but it does not justify it. As from Kindergarten, two wrongs do not make a right. Socialism beats nationalism, democracy is foundational to socialism, and self-determination is necessary for democracy. BDS’s obsession with the “normalization” of Israel is a denial of its right to self-determination. It dovetails with the periodic antisemitic lapses observed in BDS-adjacent agitation.

Self-determination means respect for national sovereignty, regardlesss of what you think of a nation’s conduct. Socialists should like self-determination because it is conducive to countries not brutalizing weaker countries. It’s good for World Peace. We like Peace. War is usually waged for the benefit of corrupt, self-interested elites. Them we don’t like. Kindergarten stuff again.

Leo goes on about BDS’s habitually over-the-top conflation of all Zionists and Jews with the worst of Israel’s actions. I’ve made this point myself. The enemy is not individuals, however Zionist their sympathies, but Israeli policy and its fundamental supporting ideology, which was chauvinist, nationalist, and imperialist from its very start in the 19th Century.

What about self-determination for Palestine? Of course, that merits support as well. In fact, as I’ve previously asserted, Israel’s denial of Palestinian self-determination is nearly disabling with respect to its own right to self-determination. That’s another reason why BDS should be indulged, if not embraced whole-heartedly.

BDS used to be toxic politics. The faults Leo recounts are not helpful. There could not have been more than a handful of Congressional districts where a pro-BDS stance would be tolerated. That has been changing. Thanks to Israel’s horrific acts, American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee donations have become a stain on centrist candidacies all over the U.S. Michigan might elect an anti-Zionist senator.

But the carnage in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere is ongoing. The shift in public opinion is not happening fast enough, which is why for practical purposes we still need to find common cause with liberal Zionists like J Street. BDS, for its part, can’t even see any value in explicit proclamations in support for Palestinian self-determination, because they come from Jews with incorrect thoughts.

Even the mad MAGAs are starting to turn against Israel, and given what passes for their intellectual faculties, Jews in general. I’ve always thought Trump, an obvious antisemite, would sell out Israel at the drop of a hat. That he has done so in a good cause by pausing the hostilities with Iran confuses people, but it does not erase the underlying prejudices boiling in the U.S. We are still in the woods.

First of all, four or even five percent isn’t so much. With a Democratic administration, there would be — or should be — few complaints from our side. That’s a tip-off to the inanity of the inflation babble. It’s also a set-up to get bitten in the ass if power shifted to the Democrats and inflation persisted. You can use conservative propaganda against Republicans, but that makes it easier for them to use it against you later.

Second of all, inflation or “affordability” glosses over the underlying, overriding issues: labor compensation and public benefits. If incomes are adequate, prices become intrinsically less important. Incomes goes to the state of political power — the power of employers to cram down wages and salaries, and the power of the Right to constrain public benefits. Related, I’ve been promoting Arin Dube’s substack on the benign effects of a higher minimum wage. Here is a Twitter version. My former employer The Economic Policy Institute has been on this forever.

Third, “inflation” obscures what I would classify as the three most important components of the elevated price level (not the periodic increase, which is the definition of inflation), important because of their magnitude and because of the availability of remedies in public policy. These three are health care, housing, and higher education.

We hear the most about gas prices, which first of all is determined by a global cartel and is not much susceptibile to government action. I realize I live a sheltered life, but I suspect most people can bite the bullet and pay $4 a gallon for gasoline. Yes I know there are exceptions. You can’t make a sound case on exceptions. Meanwhile, the biggest political targets get off scot-free.

First off, on health care, there is the shortfall in public insurance, including ‘ObamaCare’ subsidies and Medicaid cuts (the latter can be addressed by state government), as well as the inflated cost of prescription drugs due to monopolies in patents, as my friend Dean Baker tirelessly reminds us, and vertical integration in the private health insurance industry.

Second, housing. For policy this is a touch nut to crack but few things are more important for most families. We’ve had a shortfall in construction after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, including the lame response from Democrats and the Obama Administration. There are fixes.

Third, higher education. The simplest to fix, starting with the recovery of state government aid to public colleges and universities. Relief from this source should put downward pressure on the costs of all post-secondary education. Don’t assume it has only happened in blue states.

When we talk in general terms about “inflation,” we either over-emphasize gas prices or we gloss over the more relevant, substantive policy issues.

I have written that the right-to-exist question is a category error. Nations don’t really have rights. There is international law, but its enforcement ranges from weak to negligible. It’s basically law according to what the U.S. national security state demands of the rest of the world.

There is a long-standing preference on the Left for democratic rights. If you care, you can find plenty of it in Marx, Engels, and the pre-revolutionary Lenin. For purposes of this discussion, I define “democracy” broadly to include an independent judiciary and a free press. Obviously it entails all sorts of problems, but I am aware of no general principle motivating a superior alternative. Even Russian soviet asssemblies were supposed to be democratic.

There are ways of improving voting rules. I like the institution of proportional representation. I also like ranked choice voting. I’m open to all the alternatives, as long as they include a wider electoral franchise (voting available to more people). One dubious alternative, the “jungle primary” system in California, looks to be a disaster.

We are getting a master class in how democracy can be eroded, right here in the U.S.A. We also got a demonstration of it in Hungary, now thankfully swinging the other way. Neither is Poland looking great.

If you favor democracy, I think you have to favor the rights of nations to self-determination, as Lenin did (clearly in a very different historical context). That right includes the ability to abuse its own subjects, whether we like it or not. For the average citizen, however, the only way to reflect one’s will regarding public policy is through democratic procedures that determine how they collectively govern themselves. So democracy should imply the right of self-determination for nations.

Support for democracy is inherently reformist and incrementalist, in keeping with my notion of social-democracy or ‘democratic socialism.’ Hence we get some components of the Left rejecting reform for the sake of fantasy. Don’t do that.

Israel is a nation. Its founding was essential, as the only refuge, world-wide, for Jews fleeing a hostile, devastated Europe. As I have written, its ‘rights’ are irrelevant, since it is power that will determine its survival.

Clearly, Israel’s prospects for national survival look pretty good. Thanks to the U.S., it’s the 900 pound Rottweiler of its neighborhood. Still, when we say “the right of Israel to exist,” we really mean, do you support the survival of an aggressive, militarist ‘Jewish’ state in the midst of a sea of Muslims and a bunch of Christians.

The question is loaded; it’s designed to tag the respondent. If you say yes, you are reconciled to the awful crimes of that state. If you say no, you favor its violent liquidation and get classified as a hypocrite, an anti-semite, or both.

If we favor democracy, we have to reconcile ourselves to some kind of state for the inhabitants of Israel and Palestine. Its particular structure is mostly the business of those on the ground, so I am always bored with the debate between two states versus a unified secular state. Kids, we can play pretend high-school United Nations, but it won’t be up to us.

In this situation, I would classify the Palestinians as a people with an equal right to self-determination. Like all peoples, they deserve, by my lights, a hand in self-government. So do the Israeli Jews. They were all denied it by their previous overlords, the British, and before them, the Ottoman Turks. In the same vein, Jews in Central Europe were also denied democratic rights.

It could be argued that Israel’s reckless, brutal expansionism is of the same character as that of Nazi Germany and justifies the harshest judgements possible, including rejection of any tolerance for its state. It is a threat to the world, not just to its neighbors. At some point the principle of self-determination has to give way to reality.

Neither answer to the “right-to-exist” question is satisfactory. On the leftier-Left, ‘no’ dominates, but the implied threat to the well-being of Jews in Israel, whatever their deplorable sentiments, should be understood. It reflects a politics with little purchase in the U.S., even as that has been changing to some extent. We still need a politics that works, not a maximalist politics of revenge.

There are fewer liberal Zionists all the time, but they punch above their weight in the U.S. politically. Without their cooptation, the current Israeli regime would be doomed. We should look forward to that and do what is possible to magnify the trend from liberal to non- or anti-Zionism. That means, no surprise, taking a firm stance in favor of the security of Jews inside Israel. So avoid getting hung up on the “right to exist.” All peoples have a right to exist.

P.S. (Added 6/6/26) It occurs to me that a nation that denies the right to self-determination to other nations, such as by territorial expansion, loses that right for itself. That solves the Israel problem.

I have not done an in-depth study on this. Somebody ought to. Pay me and I might. It is in my wheelhouse. On its face, the implications are simple and clear. Data centers are good. No, not just good, they are a boon to social welfare. If anybody can offer a better analysis, I’d be all ears. In all the innumerable screeds against DC’s, I have never seen a decent argument. That DCs increase utility rates is not an argument, nor is it even accurate (see below). Even if true, it ignores the benefit side of the equation: the offset to tax revenue and the gains to public spending.

There is a long-standing practice of satanic corporate interests invoking liberal themes to advance their interests. This goes a bit deeper. The DC flap bespeaks profoundly reactionary politics. Naturally all the anti-public sector characters are on the anti-DC bandwagon. We need not divert ourselves with them. We know where Democratic indulgence of anti-tax sentiment leads. It leads to G.W. Bush setting the huge projected 2000 Federal budget surplus on fire.

I state my bias plainly: public spending is not without flaws, but it is usually or mostly good. Considered in terms of public benefits net of taxes, the public sector reduces inequality and benefits the working class. If you’re really liberal, or left of that, you should support an expansion of the public sector. Below I make a few suggestions for how.

The facts are simple enough to put the burden of proof on the oppositionists to DCs. Let’s start with the amount of tax revenue DCs add to county finances in Loudoun County, VA, which is kind of DC-central for Virginia and maybe for the U.S.: Google says DCs provide $700 to $900 billion a year to public county revenue. Total county budget outlays (General Fund) are $2.9 billion, the lion’s share of which is for the schools. You can do the math. Like the high ratings for LC’s schools? You want nice facilities and well-qualified teachers? That’ll cost you.

The inescapable fact is that DC county tax revenue (mostly from the personal property tax, applied to DC equipment), reduces the taxes on real property and everything else. Those who would restrict DC operations or development need to show how they would replace the foregone tax revenue. Naturally, they never do. Like the Right, they pretend we can cut taxes without consequences for the services the public tends to appreciate.

I met the guy who led the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Northern Virginia. Those are good six-figure jobs. DC’s employ few workers on-site. Most of the labor entails switching out old parts for new. Every union person should be backing DC jobs. High DC wages should put upward pressure on pay for all workers.

Our weak-tea Democratic candidates and office-holders here always indulge the anti-DC stance, pretending it is some kind of environmentalist thing, not unlike national Democrats promising not to increase taxes on anyone making less than $400K a year. Tax the rich my arse. Guess what? You can make much less than $400K and still be unimaginably better-off than half the population. To have an ample public sector we need to tax everybody. The benefits should more than offset the cost, since the public sector provides benefits and services that are prohibitively costly to individuals.

The anti-DC posture usually dovetails with opposition to economic development more generally. Let’s all just sit here, fat dumb and happy, while others struggle to find jobs and housing. My favorite nostrum is the call to “preserve our agricultural way of life.” Good grief. I guarantee, if every farm in the county was plowed under tomorrow, nobody in America would starve.

Nor for homeowners is it even a smart financial move. Denser housing with accessible public transit increases real estate value. Look at the southern half of Montgomery County, MD, where I lived for 25 years. Look at Bethesda. Nobody is fleeing MC; quite the contrary. More people patronize more businesses. Both pay more taxes. More taxes fund better schools, attracting higher-income families. It’s a virtuous circle. Economic growth needs to be properly managed, but on balance it is a good thing.

I’ve found data that indicate that utility rates have moderated over the past decade in Loudoun County (DC’s use both electricity and water). So too have tax rates. LC is growing madly in terms of population (20 percent since 2015), so it stands to reason that tax receipts from a growing economy would also grow. That permits the reductions in rates that have been announced, but requires growth in government spending. More people need more services.

Why the interest in expanding public spending in Loudoun, one of the richest counties in the U.S.? I would begin with the problem of housing. Many live well in single-family housing on lots zoned for sizes that are deliberately set to restrict housing construction. Housing costs, especially in the eastern half of the county, are forcing workers to live far away from where they work, which is not good for their families.

I’ve written about this before. There are three basic tools available to augment housing availability: rent control, zoning reform, and ‘social housing.’ The first has limited application in places where most do not rent. The third means public housing that costs public dollars, it’s doable, but it is a can of worms, technically. The second is the nut to crack for local government: facilitate the construction of multi-family housing.

Besides housing, there is this thing called Medicaid: health insurance for the poor. The state could add onto what it covers. The state could also expand its tax credits for lower-income workers. You could probably think of other things. We’re not going to see anything from the Feds for the foreseeable future. It’s going to be up to state and local governments. If you want to combat economic inequality, you want a growing public sector. If you don’t, you’re with the oligarchy. Don’t be. Si se puede.

I understand that Loudoun is not ready for my politics. I don’t care. It can get there. In your heart you know I’m right.

I want to reference two TV shows I watched. Fair warning, spoilers will be encountered. One show is “Tehran,” the other “Spooks” (a.k.a. “MI-5”). Tehran is relatively new, the first season recently completed. MI-5 is much older, of 90s vintage.

Both shows are unashamed, racist slurs on the nation of Iran. In both, Iran seeks a nuclear weapon for purposes of attacking Israel or Europe. Both of these scenarios are the height of idiocy, and both have been successfully foisted on an ignorant public in the U.S., with the disastrous consequences now in view.

It is possible that Iran would like to have nuclear weapons. The evidence for them even aspiring to that is mixed. The evidence that they (or Saddam) have any such weapons was or will soon is utterly lacking.

The real rub is the notion that, if so armed, Iran (or Iraq) would launch a nuclear attack on Israel, Europe, or the U.S. You have to be dumber than a bag of hammers to believe this. Isn’t the suicidal nature of any such attack obvious? To entertain the possibility, not only do you have to be very stupid, but you have to believe the Iranians are very stupid or insane. Either premise is profoundly racist, hence Nuclear Orientalism (‘NO’).

Used to be that the scuttlebut was that Kim Jong-Un was too crazy to be allowed nukes. Well, guess what? He’s got them, had them for a while, he can send missiles over Japan, and everybody is still here. So too with Pakistan. Long before that, it was Red China that could not be trusted with nukes. Ha! The looming question is whether the U.S. can be trusted with nukes.

Both shows are done well enough to bear watching. Spooks is not James Bond-ridiculous, though it still boasts many idiotic details. Nevertheless, in Spooks the guiding notion is that the nuclear-armed Islamic nation of Pakistan is doomed to fall to the Taliban, who would duly try to nuke somebody else. As above, you have to believe the Taliban are stupid and/or insane. Whatever they are, they are not that. After all, they drove the U.S. out of their country. Bin Ladin was not Taliban. He was a wayward agent, as far as the Taliban were concerned. They were obliged to host him but did not necessarily foment 9-11. Somebody connected over there, meanwhile, gave him up to the U.S.

Tehran is a masterpiece of Israeli propaganda. Therein, the Iranian regime lies all the time about its plans and intentions. It connives to construct a nuclear bomb with the intention of nuking Israel. Heroic Jewish- and anti-Islamic Iranians at the direction of Israeli intelligence foil the plot. Tehran is better than Spooks at avoiding dumb plot elements. Nearly every Spooks episode is one of those lame ticking time-bomb tales. The bombs seldom explode. For some reason an endless sequenc of evil-doers have it in for England. Seriously, who gives a f*** about England??

I’m something of an aficionado of espionage tales. The gold standard of course is John Le Carre, with the Slow Horses series in books by Mick Herron and on Apple TV a close second. A long time ago, I read a string of Len Deighton books that weren’t bad. Herron strains credulity a bit, here and there. Le Carre, never. Neither falls prey to basing a story on the premise that the Iranians or other Islamic fanatics are also strategic morons.

Since the subject is Vegas, we should have a picture of you-know-who.

I was impressed by the point that Vegas wagering is more transparent than most financial market machinations. The precise odds disfavoring the bettors are readily-available. Obviously, despite the lousy odds, people come anyway. Rich hedge fund investors know less about their holdings. Another key political-economic factor was the transition of Vegas from mob to corporate ownership and control. Different mob, worse in some respects. The old mob elected JFK. The present one has given us far worse.

In some ways the old, murderous mob was more solicitous of its employees. Obviously there would be lines one didn’t dare cross, but the paternalism resembled the obligations of feudal lords to their peasants, or like urban machine politicians. The corporations in charge now are more ruthless about harvesting their profits, in effect more penny-pinching than the old-time gangsters.

It’s hard to read the book without thinking of the films Casino and Bugsy, both of which lean heavily on historical events. I’ve watched these movies more than once, especially Casino, probably because it is shown more often, though for me anything with De Niro and Pesci is a must-see..

The movies include a number of close analogs with actual mob history. I also read about them in the Dan Moldea book about the merger of organized crime and pro football, “Interference.” I don’t know if Moldea published before the films. Some of the correspondences are hauntingly precise, especially the murders of Anthony "The Ant" Spilotro (Joe Pesci in the movie) and his brother.

As Cooper recounts, the only fair game in Vegas used to be blackjack. Technology has eliminated that edge by introducing machines that shuffle multiple decks of cards or continually reshuffle decks. Both make ‘card counting’ difficult or impossible. I had a Chinese buddy, Stu, who among his many pastimes would gamble. He told me they used to kick him out of casinos out of fear of Asian card-counting expertise. The gambling business has always been deeply corrupt. The customers don’t care; they keep coming.

As an economist nerd, the barren public finances of Las Vegas and Nevada interested me. I wonder if the state’s impoverished public sector has progressed at all. There is in economics the idea of the “resource curse.” A nation endowed with great earthly gifts, such as oil deposits, stands to have so much cash sloshing around that it attracts bad actors who ruin it for everybody. Nevada and its gambling industry have similar characteristics. The impacts include less economic development that might otherwise take place, as well as all manner of social pathologies. Nevada’s middle name was pathology.

The pathology proved perfectly suited to the new, less rich classes that flocked to the city. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Ordinary, not-rich Americans needed the place to escape the misery of their lives. Now they have MAGA.

A striking thing was the meaninglessness of partisan political alignments. All the successful politicians were in the bag. The liberal, Jewish mayor of Las Vegas had been a lawyer for Meyer Lansky.

These days Nevada has become a Democratic Party stronghold, and of all things, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) nearly took over its Democratic party, until they were muscled out of what they had fairly won by the ruthless, old party establishment. Another mob. Nobody should have suspected the Revolution would be easy.

Cooper pays attention to the thread of progressive agitation in the city and state. One important factor was the independence of the local press. Local press of course has been disappearing everywhere. Even our storied Washington Post has been transformed by Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos into a pile of doggy poop.

But there was activism. One source was and is the powerful culinary workers union, which I understand provided fertile ground for the growth of the local DSA. Nor can we forget the strippers union. (I go now to lead the revolution.)

Homeless advocacy is a big part of Cooper’s story, a particular political flash point for casino interests whose revenue relies on foot traffic.

The book is twenty years old. It makes me wish for a sequel, to see how the stories unfolded. New competition in gambling is blossoming in many places. Atlantic City, Indian tribes, the Internet. The region is running out of water. Sounds bad.

It was kind of like Kramer in the 10-year olds’ karate class. This game was close until it wasn’t, at the very end in the second overtime. The Spurs won going away.

The Thunder have their own superstar, one Shai Gilgous-Alexander, the league MVP two years running. As good as he is, he is not as obtrusive as Wemby. You don’t see him coming. Wemby is more like Godzilla, impossible to miss.

Back in the day, like any dude from Northern New Jersey I was a big Yankee fan. That allegiance was destroyed by Yankee owner George Steinbrenner when he traded Reggie Jackson and otherwise abused Dave Winfield. Why root for a team in the wake of such events? Sports would be more interesting if team participation depended on some kind of regional residence history. It would make for a more communal experience.

Someone had a good joke on Twitter that Wembanyama’s participation was unfair to males. It could become something like the Yankees crushing all of their competition for years, or Tiger in his prime mopping up the rest of the pro golfers.

An interesting thing is that both Oklahoma City and San Antonio are not the biggest markets and can’t necessarily buy all the best players. Some credit is due to the league for establishing a bit of a level playing field. The team from the biggest market — L.A. — is already out of the playoffs and the NY Knicks look to have their hands full if they ever go up against either the Thunder or the Spurs.

The experience did not leave me hungry for more basketball. The game was always physical, especially under the basket, but this game looked more like rugby. Not my cup of tea.

The other off-putting thing was the evident extent of the league’s capture by online sports betting interests, reflected in the television ads. The inane, brainless decadence of that culture for me is of a piece with the general population’s acceptance of the sorry state of the nation and its criminal leaders.

So in sports fandom, as in other fields, once again I’m the wet blanket.

Politics tends to be local. Mobilization conditions and opportunities differ from place to place, so what is right for NYC is not going to work in Nebraska. What is of interest in Nebraska will be insufficiently ambitious for NYC.

I suggest three priority areas to which state-based organizing can orient itself: health care, free college, and state aid to local public education. States can do most anything in the field of non-defense policy. All it takes is money. State and local administration of SNAP (’food stamps’) and Medicaid is Federally funded. They can do nice things in those programs out of reach of the Feds. They used to do the opposite, to curb enrollment in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC, a.k.a. ‘Welfare’).

States can add health benefits, alongside Medicaid. They can reverse the defunding of aid to public community colleges and universities (which should put downward pressure on the costs of private institutions). And they can improve their fiscal equalization regarding school districts. I leave the legal stuff to others better equipped, such as the author of the paper linked above.

The fate of those unfortunates in less-blue states is up to them, but that is the case now. Of course national reforms are better, when you can get them.

States’ borrowing horizons are more limited than the Feds, so it does take money, like by ‘taxing the rich.’ Call it a feature, not a bug.

Then there is the relentless liquidation of majority black districts all over the south. I wonder, if the ‘rural’ (really suburban) districts are infused with a large swath of Democratic votes, why can’t somebody use that leverage to influence outcomes in the red districts? Smaller constituencies have exerted great influence in some cases. I really don’t know where else to go from here. Gerontocratic Democratic leaders are as feeble as ever.

There is talk about the redistricting being conducive to a ‘blue wave,’ but the VA redistricting vote was close, not very wavy.

Instead, I keep coming back to the new Joaquin Phoenix movie sequel to The Joker. Its title is “Joker: Folie à Deux.” I saw it a few days ago.

For me the core of the movie is the pervasive social despair that drives the masses to pointless, destructive, and violent ends. The Batman frame is applied lightly and doesn’t do more than distract from the content. I suppose it provides some necessary grounding, given the lead character.

We’ve seen this before, the movie “Falling Down” comes to mind, but never with such a vivid view of mass psychosis. In that respect you could call it a radical film, though it provides no hope for any sort of resistance.

I’ve long admired Phoenix as an actor. Lady Gaga does very well too. The musical interludes foster a lot of earworms. They remind you of the inanity in the lyrics of popular songs, which dovetails with the mass lunacy.

I can’t complain, as far as personal circumstances go. I’m about to become a grandfather, twice over. The kids seem blissfully unaware of all that is going on. Maybe they’re lucky.

I’m always alert for pitches about emigration options, though on principle I would refuse to pony up a big chunk of money to buy my way in anywhere. I’ve mentioned my recent trip to Central Europe (Hungary, Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic). They live better than we do. Ignore ignorant reports that their economies are in worse shape than ours. They’re not.

The foreign affairs news is not so bad. Iran is still standing. Ukraine seems to be holding up. Vlad is afraid to go outside. The EU is getting its act together. Trump is hollowing out the arsenal of the U.S. military, though that ought to make Taiwan nervous.

It comes down to the insensate masses of our fellow citizens. I have as little contact with them as possible. We like our next-door neighbors, though if we ever move, an objective will be a place with no neighbors, for all practical purposes.

Instead, I commune with the birds, via our new AI solar-powered video bird feeder. Here’s one bad boy:

The gadget has only been up and running for less than a week. So far it’s always the same three birds. I might put up a suet ball holder to liven things up.

I’ve acknowledged my weak grip on Judaism, in spite of which, or maybe because of which, I knew I would absolutely have to read the new book by Molly Crabapple, “Here Where We Live Is Our Country.” It chronicles the life and death of the Jewish Labor Bund centered in the Pale of Settlement, parts of modern-day Russia, Belarus, and Poland.

Now as the Israeli fascist regime burns down the heritage of labor Zionism, Bundism is ripe for a comeback. Crabapple is one of the tribunes of this possibility. Another is the journal Jewish Currents. The most explicit activist incarnation is Jewish Voice for Peace. Crabapple happens to be a visual artist, but she is also quite a good writer.

If I have a Jewish heritage, Bundism is it. Crabapple reports that the leaders of the massive U.S. garment workers’ unions, such as David Dubinsky and others, started as Bundists. My dad knew those guys, though he was born in Connecticut.

My other social connection is that one of my oldest friends was one of the brains behind this documentary, entitled “Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans,” about armed Jewish anti-Nazi resistance in occupied Europe. To be clear, these incredible fighters were mostly Bundists, not Zionists. The film is interesting because it exploits propaganda footage concocted by the Soviet Union, in which Russian soldiers play the roles of German soldiers. When the production company, Great Projects Film Company, did a publicity tour for the film, I was able to meet one of the fighters who had come along. Very cool.

In contrast to the Zionist call for Jews to emigrate to Israel, which only built up a head of steam after 1930 because of Hitler, the Bund upheld the right of Jews to full equality wherever they happened to reside, starting before 1900. Moreover, the Bund insisted that the future of Jews lay in solidarity with the gentile working classes of their respective nations, fighting together for socialism. Those gentiles were often violently hostile to such possibilities, though there were heroic exceptions.

The determination to stay and fight has been described as “hereness,” in Yiddish “do’ikayt.” The fighting, by the way, was often physical. The Bund’s history is replete with the formation of defense squads that would patrol in places where Jews might be menaced. A U.S. analog was the “Deacons for Defense,” which consisted of black men who armed themselves to protect civil rights workers in the deep south in the 1960s.

The Zionists were the cynics, but you can’t say they were wrong. Europe indeed proved inhospitable to its Jews, who were persecuted or betrayed by a full spectrum of political tendencies. The Polish Socialist Party was often an honorable exception. The Bund insisted on staying put and fighting, and it was massacred, along with Jews of all classes. The Zionists bugged out, when they could. Maybe that’s harsh, but their survival is undeniable. So is their degeneration.

In fairness, the Zionists trapped in Warsaw did join the rest of the Jews who rose up to fight the German army. You could say they had no other choice, since by then the pending extermination of all Jews trapped in Poland had become apparent. Still, credit is due. That credit was subsequently forfeited as Zionists waged war on the Bund after liberation, to ensure that all those displaced during the war would be forced to go to Palestine. They even instituted a draft, enforced in refugee camps the Zionists took over, for a nation that did not yet exist.

In the early days of Nazism, according to Hannah Arendt, among others, the Zionists collaborated with fascists. Adolph Eichmann was once a dedicated Zionist. At the point when expulsion of Europe’s millions of Jews became impractical, the Nazi Final Solution was formulated. Some on the Left have tried to make hay of the links between Zionists and fascists, but the choice to collaborate was clearly made under duress, faced with the threat of liquidation. It’s easy to criticize from a safe place. By now there is no lack of ammunition with which to criticize Israeli policy.

Nazis and Zionist Jews, in bed together, in the 1930s? It’s not so implausible. In the U.S., the interest among the racist Right in sending black folks back to Africa has been a thing since the 19th Century. Among Zionists in Israel, it was the original “revisionist” wing, led by Mussolini-admirer Ze’ev Jabotinsky, that has now become ascendant. The revisionists thought that Israel ought to encompass not just the land west of the Jordan River, but Jordan as well. By now Jabotinsky’s ideological descendants have their eye on Southern Lebanon, Syria, and who knows what else. This was foreseen.

The Bund insisted on celebrating and creating autonomous Jewish culture and the language of the Jewish ghetto, Yiddish, while rejecting (sometimes mocking) Jewish religious devotion, as well as upholding socialism in solidarity with the entire working class. It may surprise a few, but the most explicit revival of this stance in the U.S. happened to have been the Black Panther Party, also reconciling what it called “revolutionary nationalism” with socialism. It’s a heavy lift.

Crabapple weaves this history together with the U.S. radical past. I would take it a bit further, as I have before. The Bund was an important precursor of the Russian revolution and its communist party. In this respect, the Jewish component of the European working class was a social vanguard of the broader movement.

In the U.S., African-Americans and POC are in a similar position. Economists speak of “segmented labor markets.” The segmentation serves the political purpose of obstructing working class unity. In Europe, it was the massive Bundist constituency that formed a vanguard, by virtue of its second-class citizenship, hardly a citizenship at all. The U.S. analogy is obvious. There is no shortage of socialists among POC in the U.S. Their disinclination to take charge of the Left, something clearly within their capacity, is important.

Another striking parallel to current events was the primacy of anti-immigrant or anti-refugee sentiment among gentile populations, who assumed a god-given right to reside in their native land and to deny such rights to others.

If there is a lesson in Bundism, it’s that revolutionary nationalism, however noble and uplifting, is compelling for the oppressed minority but hard to do. It depends upon a positive response from an indifferent, if not bigoted, majority.

There were bright spots of gentile aid to beleaguered Jews in the face of widespread, vicious anti-semitism in central Europe. In the end, it all came to naught. Those who made it out to Israel were saved, the others not. At the same time, as I’ve said more than once, Bundism does provide an off-ramp for progressive Jews stuck in socialist Zionism.

Crabapple turns this conclusion inside out. The Bund did not fail. Humanity failed. It failed to prevent the monstrous crimes culminating in the Holocaust. It failed to defend democracy in Spain. It failed to welcome refugees desperate to escape Europe, befoe, during, and after the war. It failed to bomb the infrastructure of the Final Solution. It failed to denazify post-war Europe.

I would suggest that the book is not a story about Jews. It’s about a uniquely persecuted people struggling to become human and striving to make others human. Ultimately there are no nations, ethnicities, religious faiths, political outlooks, gender identities. There is only humanity, seeking liberation.

A fundamental element of liberation is the ability to choosc a place to be. “[H]ereness” is itself fundamental. Judaism has been said to be a repository of the historical progress of Humanism. The Bund was its apotheosis, again not merely a Jewish thing. Israel, quite the opposite.

I come today with a sermonette on the matter of voting ostensibly to fund Israel’s defensive weaponry, the fabled “Iron Dome.”

There is a piece on Zeteo to the effect that for Israel, there are no defensive weapons. A common excuse among flaky Democrats for voting to fund the Iron Dome was that it was defensive. This line has become much less popular, for obvious reasons. Actually there is a much simpler, basic point that comes from the economics of grants-in-aid, my own specialty.

The basic idea is that aid is fungible. It is unlikely to affect a recipient’s decisions though it may be designated for a specific purpose. Look at it this way. Suppose you routinely spend $100 a week on groceries, and I pledge to give you $20 a week, but just for groceries. There is little chance of forcing you to spend $120 a week in response. There are any number of excuses you could offer for failing to do so.

In economic jargon, my pledge has an “income effect” but not a “price effect.” You can spend the $20 any way you like, perhaps for a marginal increase in groceries. The more likely way to influence your decision is to match your grocery purchases at a particular rate. Suppose that rate was 50 percent. Then in effect your groceries were getting a fifty percent discount, encouraging you to spend more.

The first pledge described above is analogous to what economists call a block grant. The second is like a matching grant. Historically, block grants were so flexible as to spending targets that they demobilized constituencies supporting more targeted grants. This was how most social spending was blown up in the 1980s. An exception was Medicaid, funded with a matching grant.

Israel surely spends more on its Iron Dome than whatever the U.S. provides, so voting for or against such funding has little to do with Israeli defense capabilities. Iron Dome funding is just more dough that could end up anywhere. By now, Israel’s rampages in the region are so egregious that any dollar of aid, even for baby formula, is worth opposing.

Objections to Israel boycotts, which after all are non-violent, have become kind of quaint. My view: boycott every fucking thing. Boycott Israeli chewing gum. Jesus!