There are a lot of things to unpack – in that title, and in the last election. One thing that hasn’t required unpacking has been Robert Reich. He’s been one of the folks I’ve followed for decades because, honestly, he’s hit a lot of things on the head for a long time.
And he communicates it in an easy to understand way. He also does his own drawings! Seriously, check his videos. Finding out he’s the dad of one of my favorite DropoutTV hosts also makes absolute sense. He knows the value of humor.
He’s also an anti-corpo cyberpunk in a nice sweater.
I mean, I think he could pull this off but…
This came from his Facebook, showing an actual quote.
“.. If we get tariffs, we will pass those tariff costs back to the consumer,” Philip Daniele, CEO of vehicle parts supplier AutoZone, told Wall Street analysts .. “We’ll generally raise prices ahead of that.”
Tariffs will lead to higher prices paid by consumers. Corporate profits will get fatter. Trump will cut corporate taxes even further.
More money will get pumped into stock buybacks instead of wages. CEOs and wealthy investors will reap the spoils.
This was always the MAGA agenda.
And yes, I read his substack. While everyone else took the lesson for Democrats as “Dump LGBTQ+ folks. Sacrifice non-Evangelicals and POC who don’t follow MAGA.” this was his view.
Democrats must no longer do the bidding of big corporations and the wealthy. They must instead focus on winning back the working class. They should demand paid family leave, Medicare for all, free public higher education, stronger unions, higher taxes on great wealth, and housing credits that will generate the biggest boom in residential home construction since World War II.
They should also demand that corporations share their profits with their workers. They should call for limits on CEO pay, eliminate all stock buybacks (as was the SEC rule before 1982), and reject corporate welfare (subsidies and tax credit to particular companies and industries unrelated to the common good).
Democrats need to tell Americans why their pay has been lousy for decades and their jobs less secure: not because of immigrants, liberals, people of color, the “deep state,” or any other Trump Republican bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of economy’s gains.
Or, in a language the choombas can get: Screw the corpos – they’re the real reason your eggs cost so much. Take back everything they’ve stolen!
I told a friend of mine recently: “I can’t lie. I feel like half my heritage sold out lots of folks for cheap eggs they will either never get or will kill them with e.Coli.”
You cut off people’s choices and resources – keep their wages low, make their living expenses high, get them desperate – and they can be induced to making bad choices. Heck, that’s what most film noirs are about. I think that is the core lesson behind this election. We did a terrible job explaining “Your eggs cost more because this company is jacking up the prices and their pet politico is blaming it on trans kids.”
I’ll leave you with something else. I saw a note from Walter Jon Williams – he wrote a formative 80’s Cyberpunk book, Hardwired. Pick it up- it still reads really well. Too well. It’s why he said “It looks as if we’re going to be living inside one of the dystopias I wrote back in the 80’s.” And why he hasn’t written more in this vein. Too close to reality.
Maybe this is the part of me that aligns with Marqueź and Solzhenitsyn, but my reaction is I want to write more in this vein. I want to write stories that will get the new regime angry at me. That celebrate my queer friends and all the PoC who didn’t decide to cozy up to the dictator. Ask anyone from Chile or Argentina how well that worked back in the day…
In the meanwhile, I’ll be doing what I can to promote my favorite sweater wearing cyberpunk, and try to create a world where the only time he’s making drawings is when he finally gets onto one of his son’s game shows.
Biomechanoid Blues 