I have always found grocery stores fascinating—both as endpoints of a staggering global web of logistics, agriculture, and commerce, and as labor stories. So I was enthralled by Ann Larson’s new book “Cleanup on Aisle Five,” a first person account of working in a grocery store during the course of the pandemic, which was just published this week.

Larson, a writer, academic, and cofounder of the successful activist group Debt Collective, writes in the tradition of workplace classics like Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed.” And Larson is no poverty tourist. She found a job at a grocery store in Utah in the fall of 2020 out of economic necessity, and worked there long enough to experience firsthand the struggles endemic to the industry. I spoke to her about class, service industry labor, and the harsh realities behind the smiles of your grocery store cashiers.

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How Things Work: In your book’s conclusion, you write, “I urge my college-educated peers to abandon the idea that our degrees entitle us to live lives of dignity denied to others.” Given your background, were you surprised when you ended up working in a grocery store? Or did it strike you as a pretty natural thing, given the precarity of the American economic system, which you know well?

Ann Larson: I was not surprised. My life as a white collar professional had always been precarious. I had experienced what people call “downward mobility” on a couple of fronts. I had wanted to be a professor, but the adjunctification of higher education made full-time jobs nearly impossible to come by. As a cofounder of the Debt Collective, I saw firsthand how difficult it was to maintain the organization financially in a system where fickle foundations call the shots. In some ways, the supermarket job was the most stable work I had had in years! But knowing that I had fallen down the class ladder did not mean that I felt that retail work was beneath me or that I deserved better because I had an education. As a person of the left, I knew that meritocracy is a myth, and that social class explains people’s occupational outcomes. I still hoped that I would be able to maintain my hold in the white collar world. But I had run out of options.

You’re an experienced organizer, and you write about the benefit that a union would have brought to the grocery store. But ultimately you decided not to try to organize one in your time there. What was it about the nature of the workplace that led you to that decision? Was UFCW, America’s biggest grocery union, a presence in your area, or not really?

Larson: I worked in Utah, what the right wing calls a “right to work” state, where there are high barriers to organizing a union. To my knowledge, UFCW was not in the community. I didn’t know any other stores that were unionized. Moreover, in my 13 months on the job, I never heard any employee use the word “union.” I write in the book that collectivizing our struggles felt foreign, even dangerous, as if the idea existed in another universe.

Given this context, the main reason I did not try to organize was fear for my colleagues. I knew that it was illegal to fire workers for trying to unionize, but what if the store fired people anyway? I couldn’t imagine putting my colleagues at risk so that I, someone who did not plan on making a career at the supermarket, could impose my view of what needed to happen. I have only become more convinced in recent years that organizing in retail will require a big support system outside stores. Shoppers and community members are going to have to do some of the heavy lifting such as raising money for a strike fund, making it clear they won’t shop at a non-union store, and providing other kinds of solidarity. The idea that retail workers are going to carry the burden alone, even with the support of professional organizers, is a fiction.

You write eloquently about the dilemma of being a supervisor, and how that challenged your own ability to think in terms of solidarity with your coworkers. I liked the descriptions of your own internal struggles as you tried to reconcile your own day to day responsibilities at work with some of your broader beliefs. Why is it so difficult to build solidarity in that sort of environment, where every tiny microlayer of management is designed to enforce the company’s rules on everyone below them?

Larson: The supermarket is an open, quasi-public space where anyone can come and go. But in another way, it is a closed universe that operates according to its own laws. I came into the store with an understanding that working people were exploited by employers who extracted labor for profit. But that idea—as true as it was—didn’t provide a road map for how to manage the store.

I tried, for example, to be a “laid back” supervisor. At first, I didn’t complain when cashiers and baggers extended their break times or took a long lunch. I figured people were tired and hungry! But I quickly learned that allowing one person to break the rules put pressure on others. If someone came back late from a break, the cashier who was next to go had to wait. And if everyone took a long lunch, then we would be short staffed which forced people to work faster.

Enforcing the law was the only way to be fair. But it could also come off as rigid and inflexible. Such contradictions meant that it was impossible to reconcile my beliefs with daily life on the job. It wasn’t until I left the store that I realized that an effect of the hierarchy was that one person’s perk always came at someone else’s expense.

You worked at the store during the pandemic, and you discuss the fact that grocery workers took enormous risks to keep the public fed during that time and got virtually no permanent gains for themselves as a result. That’s always struck me as one of organized labor’s greatest failures of the pandemic era. Can you see any way that that might have turned out differently, or is the power of workers in the grocery industry just too weak?

Larson: I share the view that labor failed to take advantage of the pandemic as an organizing opportunity. This was a moment when unions could have made demands. I don’t have enough of an inside view of the labor movement to know why that didn’t happen. I do remember a lot of fighting about culture war issues, some related to the pandemic and some not, that took up most of our public discourse at the time. Zooming out a little further, I see labor’s failure as symptomatic of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of working people in favor of a politics focused on professional class concerns.

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Grocery stores seem like miracles of logistics and modern convenience. You write about both the ways that supermarkets made life better for Americans, and the ways that much of that convenience has been built on the abuse of the grocery work force. Tons of your coworkers were broke, sick, injured, or all of the above at any given time. What do you think would most surprise the average shopper about the way that the people at their local grocery stores are treated? And why the hell can’t cashiers sit in a chair???

Larson: Shoppers might be surprised to learn that cashiering is dangerous. I was shocked at the level of suffering that I observed and experienced. Scanners allow cashiers to work fast which is a convenience for customers. But scanning leads to pain in the arm, hand, and wrist. And standing leads to back and foot pain. (When I started the job, I was told that cashiers had to stand because a standing worker looks more eager to serve.) It’s extremely difficult to get any kind of workers comp or disability. One reason is that OSHA, the federal organization that is supposed to protect workers, has been underfunded for decades. A bipartisan failure. Cashiering looks like a chill, easy job. But I want shoppers to understand that when they walk into a supermarket, they are walking into a meat grinder that is churning through bodies for convenience and profit.

Making grocery (and other service industry) jobs more humane and livable is one of the deepest challenges in American labor. What do you think would move the needle the most on this, in terms of government policy? In terms of organized labor’s own actions? And in terms of actions that individual shoppers can take?

Larson: Unionization is at the top of my list of what can move the needle. If I could flip one switch tomorrow, I would eliminate “right to work” laws that have made states like Utah so hostile to organizing. I would also like to see an increase in the federal minimum wage which has not been raised since 2009. Raising the minimum would communicate to employers that they can no longer get away with paying as little as possible.

In terms of organized labor, my experience confirms something I learned from your book, “The Hammer.” Unions should invest more in organizing at the grassroots level. I suspect that one reason no one at my store ever talked about unionizing is because they had never been approached by an organizer. When it comes to shoppers, I urge people to get to know who works in their store. Say hello to your cashier and ask how she is doing. Those of us who don’t work in stores should also get ready to support retail workers on strike. We can refuse to cross picket lines, donate to strike funds, and communicate to stores that we won’t shop in outlets where workers are not unionized. Organizing in retail can’t be done by workers alone. It’s going to have to take all of us.

You can order Cleanup on Aisle Five from an independent bookstore at this link.

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• Previously, in How Things Work author interviews: Megan Greenwell on private equity; Chris Mathias on fascism; Jeff Schuhrke on labor’s foreign policy; Eric Blanc on organizing; Tom Scocca on mortality. Also, on groceries as a labor story: In 2021, I wrote a profile of the workers in a single grocery store over the first year of the pandemic; and in 2024, I profiled the insurgents trying to reform the UFCW from within. Larson and I have both been fellows at the excellent Economic Hardship Reporting Project, an organization that supports journalism about these sorts of issues.

• The Labor Notes conference will bring thousands of labor people to Chicago this week. If you’re going, great news: My friends at In These Times magazine are sponsoring an after party on Sunday, June 14, featuring me, Alex Press, Kim Kelly, Max Alvarez, and music and comedy more. Get your tickets right here. See you there hell yeah.

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We are all worried about AI. Bernie Sanders has a bold proposal: The federal government will take a 50% equity stake in the big AI companies, and use it to create a sovereign wealth fund that will benefit all Americans. “[This] legislation would guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by A.I. are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer,” Sanders wrote. “If the big A.I. companies continue to grow as rapidly as many analysts expect, then the value of the sovereign wealth fund will grow as well — and the benefits to the American people will grow along with it.”

I am just as freaked out about AI as Bernie, and for the same reasons. The actions (or inaction) that the federal government takes in the near future on AI regulation will be of great consequence to the political economy of America and the world. Bernie is trying to set a marker for a left wing, humanistic approach to these issues. The left does in fact need at least some policies to rally around, lest we all holler frantically about how dangerous AI is while the real decisions are made elsewhere.

But I can spot a few potential pitfalls in the approach that Bernie is advocating. In the spirit of advancing the discourse, let me touch on them briefly. First,

We Don’t Need a Sovereign Wealth Fund

The United States of America’s federal government does not need a sovereign wealth fund. We issue our own currency. Money is not a thing that the federal government needs to take from outside of itself and hoard in an investment fund like a retiree. If the federal government wants to spend money, then Congress just votes to do so, and the money is created. We did just that during Covid. Remember? And also to fund all those wars and things. If Congress wants to issue every American a $1,000 per month check, they don’t need to check an investment account that is populated with the stock of major companies and see what the balance is. They just do it. The meaningful constraint on the federal government’s spending is inflation. The meaningful constraint on our economic development in general is “what can humans do in the material world.” Money is just an accounting tool.

The economist Stephanie Kelton—a former economic adviser to Bernie Sanders!—explained it well last year, when she wrote that “Just as the NFL understands that the Superdome doesn’t need a storage facility to accumulate a hoard of points ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl, and Delta Airlines knows it doesn’t need a strategic reserve of #SkyMiles in order to dole them out at will,” the federal government does not need to seed an investment fund with assets in order to disburse dollars to Americans.

Now, there may be political reasons to pretend that the act of the federal government giving us all money is a thing that is directly funded by a particular investment account. It is the same reason why we all pay into Social Security, rather than just having the government tax us an appropriate amount and then when we get old pay us an appropriate amount: It creates the widespread belief that these payments are justified, that they are a thing that we all deserve, that the federal government has a responsibility to responsibly manage its budget in the same way that you do for your own household. It is a thing that people can intuitively understand and this helps to insulate these programs from political interference. (Notice how easy it has been for right wing ideologues to slash funding for various government programs, and compare that to how hard it would be for them to slash funding for Social Security.) But it is not, strictly speaking, an accurate way to view the way that the federal government funds things.

In this case, the way that people understand what is happening between the government and the AI companies actually matters. Because if we forge ahead with the idea that we’re gonna take a bunch of OpenAI and Anthropic stock and put it into a sovereign wealth fund that will give you payouts, we are creating…

The Investor Mentality

This is extremely dangerous. This, in fact, is capitalism’s most pernicious tool for preventing all of the nice things that The Left says it wants. Virtually all of our collective economic assets—all of the wealth of public pension funds, of labor unions, of college endowments, of hardworking people everywhere trying to save enough to buy a home or retire on—are invested into the stocks and bonds of corporations. Whether you are very conscious of it or not, we are all very much invested in the economic success of all of the corporations whose equity makes up the markets that we are all invested in. Capitalism therefore creates a direct economic incentive in the profitability of these companies, even while the things that all of the companies are doing to be profitable are the things that are fucking us up—crushing labor power, buying off the government, and so forth. (I wrote more about this process here.)

A side effect of Bernie’s proposal is that it would create at national scale the impression that all Americans are investors whose economic well-being is tied to the financial success of the AI companies whose stock is in this sovereign wealth fund. That’s an illusion! The public, as represented by the federal government, does not need to hope that OpenAI stock goes up so that we can get some money. We can just tax OpenAI. Or we can just appropriate money to people. Or, preferably, both. The point is that by setting up the sovereign wealth fund, we would, in one grand gesture, make hundreds of millions of Americans believe that their own incentives are aligned with those of the AI companies, because they are investors in them. In this sense, it would be the greatest and most permanent public relations coup that the AI industry—which is unpopular because it might, you know, destroy humanity—could ever hope for.

Maybe that is why the AI companies themselves as well as Donald Trump are kind of enthusiastic about some version of this plan?

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What Problems Are You Trying to Solve?

Bernie correctly points out that AI is a technology that has been built using the raw material of the collective intellectual product of all of humanity. It comes from all of us. To allow the proceeds of the technology to be captured by a lucky few would be a disaster for economic justice. True.

There are other issues with AI as well. If I were to summarize the things that The Left is worried about when it comes to the way that AI’s development is playing out, I would say the main things are:

1. It’s going to supercharge economic inequality and create a tiny group of unimaginably rich and powerful tech oligarchs;

2. It’s going to automate and destroy a lot of jobs and crush the power of labor;

3. It’s going to zap all of our brains and make us unable to think independently, and;

4. It will maybe, you know, become superintelligent and enslave humanity.

With these basic shared fears in mind, consider the consequences of taking half the stock of the biggest and most powerful existing AI companies and putting it into a sovereign wealth fund. That path would do something to mitigate problem #1—it would reduce by half the potential wealth of the owners of the AI companies. Yeah. Good. Ok. But it does this at a great cost. Because, by promoting in the American public the idea that we all have a direct stake in the economic success of these companies, a sovereign wealth fund encourages everyone to think not as citizens, but as investors. That means that in exchange for addressing part of problem #1, we have created an incentive to give up on problem #2, #3, and #4. Why? Because while normal citizens worry about the damages all of these things will do to people, investors think about and value corporate profits above all. And the corporate profits of AI companies will increase as they become more successful at automating jobs, marginalizing labor, insinuating themselves into the educational and creative spheres of life, and becoming ever more superintelligent. If you don’t believe that being an investor in a company can overpower your abstract political beliefs about the social good of the company’s actions, try being a union pension trustee some time.

The trade that I am describing here is, in sum, an attractive one for the AI companies. Which is why Sam Altman is right there in the middle of the discussions for some version of this plan.

Think instead about what sort of approach we might take in order to try to address all of the problems. That approach would be, in short: Regulate and tax the AI companies. Regulations can put hard guardrails on how companies can use AI to replace jobs, and on how AI can be used in schools and in creative fields, and strict safety and monitoring protocols can be created to try to make sure that these incredibly powerful and wealthy companies do not create the Terminator while they’re fiddling around in search of profits. Then you can tax the fuck out of them to head off the oligarchy and inequality problems. Collective ownership of the equity of companies can certainly be a part of this package, but it is quite dangerous to make it the primary part of the package. We can accomplish the same goals in more socialist ways with less downside. There is much to be written about every aspect of this, but for now it is enough to just highlight the contrast in these two approaches. On one hand, strictly regulate what the AI companies can do in order to prevent harms before they happen, and tax them to balance the scales economically; on the other hand, tell the public that we are all investors in these companies, make people think their own economic well-being is aligned with that of the companies, and create incentives for everyone to overlook the various society-wide problems that the operations of the companies will produce, in the name of maximizing profits.

For these reasons I suggest that we on The Left rethink the sovereign wealth fund thing.

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Come to Our Labor Notes After Party

I’ll be at Labor Notes in Chicago later this week. If you see me there come up and say heyyyyyyy. And there’s more good news: This Sunday, June 14, my friends at In These Times magazine are having a great after party and fundraiser that you are required to come to. Get your tickets at this link— cheap! See ya there.

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• Related reading: Capitalism’s Washing Machine; Financing Our Own Destruction; An Existential Threat to Organized Labor’s Ability to Help People.

• I wrote a book about organized labor and why it is the key, the heart, the most vital ingredient to heading off the socioeconomic apocalypse that looms for America. It is called The Hammer and you can order it from an independent bookstore, or wherever books are sold. Still feels relevant! If you want me to come speak to your group about these issues, email me.

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On a brilliant, sunny Wednesday afternoon, a group of women in purple t-shirts huddled along the sidewalk of Willoughby Street in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Behind them was the gothic black metal fence surrounding Mercy Home for Children, the sprawling brick building where all of the women worked. They were out front, today, in their 1199 SEIU union t-shirts. They were on a picket line. They want a contract. They want respect.

Mercy Home is a place that takes care of children and adults with developmental disabilities. It has more than a dozen locations across New York City. Since October of 2025, the employees have been trying to negotiate a new union contract with the company. The union says that Mercy Home pays its workers less than their peers in the city, and significantly less than people who do similar work in nursing homes. The company is offering only paltry raises. Yesterday’s picket line was an attempt to prod the negotiations along. I went out there to Willoughby Street to speak to some of the women about what their jobs are like.

Nadine Johnson

“I’ve been working at Mercy Home for 23 years. I’m a medical direct support professional. I take my individuals to my appointments, make sure they don’t miss anything, and just teach them everyday life skills. But the most important thing is medication, and making sure they get to see their doctors.

We need more money. Everything is going up but our pay. Gas, rent, electricity, everything has gone up. So we just want a decent wage to live. That’s it. After 23 years, I’m not even making $20 an hour. And that’s sad. That’s very sad. My son works in the mail room, and he makes more than me. That’s a shame. For the job we do, the effort, we treat these guys like family. It’s so unfair. So unfair.

My day starts off dropping off individuals to programs right here at this office. Then I run around and do my appointments. After my appointments, I’m running to sit with another individual who’s in a nursing home right now. Then I’m running from there back here to pick them up and take them back to the residence. So by the time I get back, my day is done. I’m in the streets all day long. Show me some respect with my pay. All I’m asking for is fair pay and respect. That’s it.

Negotiations with management have been terrible. They are not giving at all. It’s like pulling teeth. They’re not negotiating. They’re stuck at this certain number, and it’s doing nothing for anyone. They wouldn’t want those number. Two percent [raise]! That’s nothing.

We literally do the work. They sit back and get the pay. That’s not fair. Come on, at least give us a decent wage. We’re not asking for much. Bring us up to $20 at least. We’re not even there. That’s sad!”

Mona Ford

“I’ve been here 20 years. I’m an overnight direct support professional. I work overnight shifts, like last night. We work from ten in the night until eight the next morning. For the past four years I’ve been doing this. I did 13 or 14 years on the evening shift, which is from three in the afternoon until ten at night.

You have to cook. When the individuals come off the bus, you have to get them ready to get their snack. After snack, they go to the recreation room, and after that they come back. They have dinner. You take them up and you shower them. You give them the medication. So we’re doing [Licensed Practical Nurse] work when we give them meds, because you have to pass this exam every year so that you can give medication. And after that, you have to sit and do the goals—all their goals, what they can do, what they can’t do.

So it’s a long haul, and you never finish. We have runners. They run out the building if you’re not watching. They’ll go out one stair and come down the other. You have to keep an eye on them at all times. Right now we have three people here, but at my other [location] I have 13, all ladies.

I like the work. If not, I wouldn’t be here. The individuals—some of them have no one but us. Some of them, bank holidays, Christmas, birthdays, no one comes to see them. We spend more time with them than we do with our own families. We’re always there. We’re nursemaids, we’re housekeepers, we’re the doctors, we’re the cooks, we’re family, we’re friends. Everything. Some of them were there from [the time they were] babies. And now they’re getting older.

It’s been nearly two years, and we need a contract. I think it’s unfair that they just, they’re not coming to the bargaining table trying to help. If you are negotiating, you bring your part and I bring mine and you meet in the middle. They are not doing that.

We need respect from management, from the office. And proper pay. That’s what we need. They want to speak to you as they like. As I told them before, they have a plantation mentality. They think we are slaves to them. For these past [snowstorms] that we had here last year and early this year, some of our staff worked five and six shifts straight. They didn’t get home. You would think they would show us at least a little bit of respect, knowing that we are there for the individuals, not for them. They don’t care. They think we have to do it, and we have to take whatever they pay us. It’s not fair.

We’re under $19 an hour, after 20 years. Don’t come to work here.”

Chevelle Hall

“We’re not getting enough pay. We’re overworked. Three people cover the night shift. If someone doesn’t come in, two people work. Where does that pay go? It’s a three person job. Two people do the job, where does that other money go? We have three individuals each. I’m responsible for three girls, she’s responsible for three guys, and if that person [doesn’t come in], there’s three more. We’re doing medication, we’re getting them up, we’re getting them showered, we’re making sure they’re eating. We’re helping them. We’re their hands, their eyes, their mouths. During the day, they go to their programs. It’s like school, a little bit.

I started a year ago. After me, a lot of people started, and they stopped. I’m only still here because of the individuals. You come here and you grow a bond with them, and you see that they really need you. You don’t want people to come in and take advantage of them, so you’re there to help. We’re there, and we’re helping. I think the least you could do is to take care of us. We’re taking care of them.

Some of them, their parents are still in their life, or their family. Most of them, they’re not. We are their family. We are their friends. We are the person they see every day. We will celebrate the holidays with them. It’s we and them.

We would like daycare here. We would like more pay. We want more than the 2%. Everything goes up but the pay. We have kids! We’re leaving our families at home to help take care of [the people here]. At least we could get the basics.”

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• Find out more about 1199SEIU here. Find out how to contact Mercy Home for Children here. Find out how to contact your New York City Council representative here. Get in touch with a union organizer to help you organize your own workplace here.

• Related reading: On the LIRR Picket Line; At the May Day union rally; If you don’t have a union, someone is stealing your money.

• There are a lot of working people in America with a lot of legitimate issues, but there are not very many labor reporters to write about them. How Things Work is one very small part of trying to fill that hole. You can help support independent labor reporting by becoming a paid subscriber here. It’s just six bucks a month or $60 for the whole year, and it is the only way we keep on going, and keep this site paywall-free so that anyone can read it. Rock on my friends.

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Today, the Florida legislature is meeting in a special session to consider oafish brute governor Ron Desantis’s proposal to slash the state’s property taxes. Currently, Florida residents can exempt $50,000 of their primary home’s value from taxation. Desantis, seeking a signature policy win before his term is up at the end of this year, is trying to raise that exemption first to $250,000, and eventually to zero out property taxes altogether for 92% of homeowners.

One obvious thing to be said about this plan is: if you get rid of property taxes, you are going to cost local governments a lot of money. School districts are particularly worried. For good reason. The Florida Policy Institute took a stab at calculating the losses for every county and school district in the state. The initial $250,000 exemption would cost school districts $5 billion a year. That number would rise to $8.6 billion per year with total property tax exemption, which Desantis wants to have by the year 2030. Poorer counties, where property values are lower, would be hit harder by first tranche of the policy— “In many rural fiscally constrained counties, due to the assessed value of properties, the cost of a $250,000 homestead exemption is close to the cost of full elimination,” according to FPI.

Education officials, whose own initial estimates of revenue losses echo those of FPI, are freaking the fuck out. “It would have a significant adverse effect on the quality of education here,” the Pasco County superintendent of schools told the Tampa Bay Times. Even a $150,000 exemption, the very first step up Desantis’s proposed ladder, would amount to “about an 18% decrease in teacher salary, to give you a scope of it.”

“‘Concerned’ is probably an understatement,” Winter Garden City Manager Jon Williams told the Orlando Sentinel. “We don’t have that kind of capacity within our budget to be able to absorb that.”

“It’s going to mess up a lot of stuff,” said Ocoee Mayor Rusty Johnson.

Of course, the same local officials seem to take it for granted that Florida voters would approve the tax cuts, as they would need to in order for them to go into effect. A poll in April found that 77% of state voters were either “definitely” or “probably” in favor of rolling back property taxes. Floridians, many of whom are the sort of people to deny climate change at the same time that a hurricane is carrying away their roof, are generally happy to make poor long term decisions in exchange for short term benefits. (As a Florida native, I reserve the right to speak accurately about the many idiots in Florida.) These people will fill every last wetland and kill every last endangered species in the state in order to build enormous highways that take them to a simulated walkable city overseen by a cartoon mouse. We should not expect too much wisdom from Florida voters, at least not as the voting base stands right this minute.

Desantis is making vague promises that all of these revenue shortfalls will be replaced by grants directly from the state to local governments, to maintain “core local services.” Even if you are foolish enough to trust that such grants would come close to replacing the revenue that will be destroyed, you will notice that this would shift power over local budgets from cities and counties (some of which are Democratic) to the state (which is, at the moment, solid red). It is a state version of the ideological veto that the Trump administration has wielded ruthlessly against blue states, cities, and institutions of all sorts. If a Florida locality passed a law that displeased erudite humanitarian Ron Desantis, he could threaten funding for their libraries and street sweepers and everything else in order to scare them out of it. Thus, the plan would not only scratch the Republican itch for regressive tax cuts, but also for centralizing power in their own gerrymandered hands. It would prompt local governments to immediately try to fill the hole by imposing steep fees on every last transaction and license and raising taxes on every last property not covered by the homestead exemption. It would leave citizens more beleaguered, with worse services and schools, and more subject to the political control of “Moron kid of the owner of several regional Ford dealerships, who wants to hurry up and sign whatever the governor wants so they can get back to sexually harassing high school waitresses at the golf course clubhouse,” which is a fair description of the median Republican Florida statehouse member.

Axing property taxes is just the latest manifestation of the grand right wing project—which has defined the South for generations—of making states into little dystopias of poor public services and poor public education in order to give wealthy residents low taxes and a large pool of desperate, low-wage labor to fulfill all of their needs. For red states like Florida that have already done away with state income taxes, property taxes are the final barrier standing in the way of fully realizing this ill-advised model of government. Republicans imagine that pushing taxes on wealthy residents as close to zero as possible will attract an influx of rich people to their states, and that those rich people can send their kids to private schools and start profitable businesses with all the low-wage labor, and this will lead to a state with great golf courses and rich private developments behind security gates and awful public schools and well-funded militaristic police forces to keep the poors at bay. What the South already is, in other words— just more so.

“This is really a historic opportunity to have more money in people’s pockets and to actually have their home be their private property that the government just can’t use as a piggy bank,” says Ron Desantis, who assumes that voters are gullible rubes with the understanding of a child. Paying property taxes means that “you never actually own anything. you just rent it from the government forever,” say a zillion gullible rubes online, proving him right. Southern Republicans have had great success by wagering that their voters have the attention spans of goldfish and economic reasoning skills of hyperactive kittens: They will vote for all tax cuts, complain about how the government doesn’t do things well, and then blame immigrants and/ or their black neighbors. It’s been working for a long time!

If there is any tangible lesson to be extracted from this latest step down the path towards a government that exists solely to defund everything except the police who will tackle you when you protest the government, it is that the political opposition must be able to articulate a positive vision of what government can and should be—along with a negative vision of the bootlicker goons whose entire political platform is to fuck up your schools and cut your wages and funnel your state’s wealth into the pockets of New York investment funds. Have some fucking self-respect, Florida homeowners! You are being treated as weak pawns who will give up all the promises of civilized society in order to save a few bucks on your tax bill. You will get a tax cut and in exchange you will give up any possibility of having a state where everyone has equal access to a decent education and functioning public services and the plausible possibility of making a better life for themselves than their parents had. That ain’t gonna happen when you defund local governments and put total economic power in the hands of people who consider Fox News their favorite philosopher. I’m sorry for sounding like some kinda MSNBC boomer here, but come the fuck on. Republicans want you dumb and desperate and willing to serve them drinks on a golf course for less than $15 an hour. That’s it! Enjoy your tax cut, suckers! Huddle in your home and pray there are no storms this year. They ain’t coming to rescue you. They cut the funding for that. Maybe that money you saved on property taxes can buy you a bus ticket to a blue state.

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Also

• Related reading: The Cannibal South; Fascist Economics Don’t Work; The Confederacy Won’t Die Until Florida Does.

• Florida politics are particularly interesting because… demographically, it’s barely even a red state! There is no reason the Democrats in Florida should be so pathetically weak, except for their own pathetic nature. Florida is a state powered by a tourism-centered service economy. That means that organized labor can be powerful there. If you want to make Florida’s politics better, join a union. Here is a book that can tell you more about how.

• The year is 2026. The economic model of journalism that existed for the past century has collapsed. Now, we all need to pay for the publications that we like to read, or else they will not exist. That is the situation today. Annoying, I know! But here at How Things Work, we have been existing for three years on the strength of readers like you who choose to be paid subscribers, because they understand these hard facts. If you like reading this site, and you are not destitute, take a quick second to click to button below and become a paid subscriber yourself. It’s not too expensive and it really matters. Thank you all for being here, always.

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There are only a few reasons why you might be hired for a prestigious job that you are obviously not qualified for. One is “they have recognized you for the genius that you are.” The urge to conclude that this is, in fact, the reason must be overwhelming, if you are the person in question. But this is rarely the explanation.

Another possibility is “the person who hired you is a fucking idiot.” This happens. A number of current United States cabinet secretaries got their jobs this way.

The most likely reason, though—one that often overshadows the other ones—is, “you are willing to carry out the dirty and distasteful things to come.” This is why weird hirings at the top always provoke dread among all the other employees. Maybe you are a hidden gem, sure, but Occam’s Razor says that you are probably just a hatchet man.

Nick Bilton, a former tech writer for the New York Times and Vanity Fair and maker of a few documentaries, was just hired as the new head of 60 Minutes. Bilton has had a successful media career, certainly, but the nature of his success has never been “he is a super smart journalist,” nor has it ever been “he is experienced in television news.” I have never felt it necessary to follow his work closely, so I do not want to caricature him unfairly, but he has always been slotted in my mind in the category of “People who are successful because they put a lot of effort into having fashionable eyewear.” (This will take you far, if you’re in the right rooms.) Hiring Nick Bilton to lead the most storied and respective investigative program in television news history is kind of like hiring a NASCAR driver as CEO of General Motors. I mean, yes, you have some experience in the field, but…………….

This job also comes with a lot of CONTEXT, which looms over CBS headquarters today like Godzilla about to breathe fire. David Ellison, the rich kid of one of the world’s richest men, wanted government approval for a merger of Paramount and Warner Bros, and so he has decided, as a calculated business decision, to disembowel CBS news’s credibility and make it more flattering to the Trump administration, and to carry out that task he put Bari Weiss in charge of the network, and she is well on her way to disgracing and ruining the institution already. As the crown jewel of CBS News’s journalistic image, the ongoing dismantling of 60 Minutes’ credibility has been particularly striking. Bari breezed in and started meddling with stories for political reasons and firing journalists who objected and generally smashing up, in a few months, editorial prestige that has taken decades to build. There is every indication that 60 Minutes is on its way to being transformed into something more like CBS Sunday Morning—a show with nice stories about kittens and celebrities and interesting trifles of Americana, but nothing that would offend anyone who holds the sort of power that might affect the business interests of David Ellison.

(I wouldn’t worry too much about CBS becoming another Fox News. Roger Ailes, who created Fox News, was a genius—an evil genius, but a genius nonetheless in the practice of manipulating the medium of television for political ends. Bari Weiss is not this sort of genius. Rather than being transformed into a sophisticated right wing propaganda operation, it is more likely that CBS News is just made dumb and pointless.)

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So as you can imagine all of the real journalists at CBS News, and at 60 Minutes in particular, are on edge. And in comes Nick Bilton, a guy with carefully groomed stubble and no TV newsroom experience, as if everything is fine and dandy, and he hits them with a staff memo that says things like, “On the very first episode of 60 Minutes Mike Wallace said: ‘If this broadcast does what we hope it will do it will report reality.’ I can’t think of a better north star for 60 Minutes than that. Above all, that means a commitment to fairness—in story selection, in the edit room, and in the broadcast.”

These are the words of a hatchet man. There are more red flags flying over this memo than a Soviet military parade. Heyo! Let me mention two. First, the most glaring: If you walk into a newsroom that values editorial credibility and has very recently had that editorial credibility fucked with by Bari Weiss under the guise of “fairness,” and you make “fairness” the center of your memo, you are telling everyone in a not very subtle way that you are there to continue the corporate project of fucking with the editorial credibility. Second, and only slightly more subtle—by not directly mentioning the CONTEXT monster that is in the forefront of the minds of every journalist at CBS, Bilton reveals himself as a goon, a soft-peddler, a PR man, an obfuscator; the opposite of everything that 60 Minutes is supposed to be.

Journalism—real journalism—is, above everything else, allergic to bullshit. Bullshit is the mortal enemy of journalism. Real journalism aspires to be the opposite of bullshit. You can be a great journalist without being attractive, friendly, likeable, charismatic, as long as you possess a determination to root out and expose bullshit wherever it is found. Indeed, many journalists are unlikeable because they have this quality. The ideal leader of a hard-hitting investigative journalism operation is someone who is smart, driven, and virtually unemployable in any other context due to their pathological hatred of the corporate niceties used to obscure the lies of the rich and powerful. A willingness to studiously ignore the devastating political proclivities of your billionaire bosses may be good for most careers, but it is a very bad sign if your career is supposed to involve doing real journalism.

If you decide not to promote and defend bullshit, there are some jobs that you will not be offered. And if you decide to make a career of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable and whatnot, there are some jobs that you should not take, under any circumstances. Not if you have self-respect. Not if you care about any of the stuff that all of us have been saying we care about. This is not some high-minded rhetoric meant to imply that journalists are heroic; it is a baseline standard that thousands and thousands of journalists who are not and never will be famous have adhered to for their entire careers. Because they are journalists! Why else would you do this? For 98% of them—all the ones who will never get jobs at anywhere as famous as the New York Times or 60 Minutes—this industry is one of low pay, little prestige, and high instability. The only benefit to being a journalist is that you get to call bullshit on powerful people. If you’re not interested in that, do something else!

Once you take the hatchet man job, everyone is going to know what sort of person you are. A high salary can’t buy back respect.

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Related Reading

• First, Kill the News

• Notes on Access Journalism

• When Do You Need to Quit Your Job?

They say that the Age of Exploration is over. Everything out there has already been discovered. We’ve been to the top of Everest and the bottom of the Marianas Trench; we’ve staggered to the North Pole and frozen at the South; we’ve trekked from East to West, shot satellites into space, and mapped the Earth’s surface down to the inch. The only suckers left chasing mystery are tuning into “Ancient Aliens” and falling for internet scams. A long line of conquerors, from Magellan to Google, have at last subdued the unknown. If you want adventure now, better look to Mars.

That’s what they say.

Buy into that line of thinking, and you’re sure to live a small life with short horizons. Reject it, and your eyes will open to the infinite grandeur. The world is full of baffling enigmas. Life is but a momentary chance to shine light in its shadowy corners.

Let me give you an example: I like pie. It’s one of my top interests. Everybody knows that about me. Now, one day I was looking at a map and I stumbled upon a dot in the remote New Mexico desert: “Pie Town.” Isn’t that interesting? A town called Pie Town. And there’s a place there that sells pie. How about that? You better believe that caught my eye.

But there’s more. Right down the road from Pie Town was another tiny dot: Datil, New Mexico. At that, my intellectual excitement went into overdrive. You see, I come from St. Augustine, Florida. Do you know what grows only in that part of Florida? Datil peppers. We make hot sauce out of them down there and it’s very tasty. Anywhere else you go, nobody knows what datil peppers are. Their loss!

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Right there, in parched west-central New Mexico, you have Pie Town, close by to another little town with a name that has something to do with me. What are the chances of that? Is that a coincidence? Is the universe sending me a message? What goes on out there? If I didn’t find out, I would forever be haunted, like explorers are by buried treasure. But my buried treasure is pie. So I booked a flight to Albuquerque.

“I’m going to Pie Town,” I’ve been telling people recently.

“Pie Town?” they would say.

“Pie Town.”

“Okay.”

“That’s right. I’m going to Pie Town.”

“Okay. For what?”

For what?? For what did mankind go to the moon? To have a damn barbecue? I’m going there to find out what’s there. I’m going there because life is a journey and all journeys must have destinations. In doing so I join a long line of adventurers who overcame the nagging of those with small minds. “Oh, Shackleton, why go all the way to Antarctica? Will you be home for church on Sunday?” This is the sort of inertia that drags on everyone who chooses to be a bit unorthodox, a bit daring. While I condemn many of the things that conquistadors did in their quest for gold, I understand the crazed compulsion of the search itself. There may be an entire town made of pie out there. If you think you’re keeping me away from that, brother, you don’t know me very well.

When people accept that they cannot hold you back from your task, they move on to adjacent forms of subversion. “What’s there? What does it look like? How will you get there? Why don’t you look up some videos of YouTubers who have had this same idea before you?” These are the wheedling cries of those who would turn on the lights at a haunted house. “I must know everything! I must leave nothing to the imagination! I aim to drown myself in information, allowing it to suffocate all romance!” This attitude accounts for much of the misery of modern life. As Charley Crockett said, “When that open road starts to calling me/ There’s something over that hill I just got to see.” If you look up everything on Google Maps first, you’ll never need to see anything. Chill out.

Undertaking a spiritual journey into the desert gives you a certain kinship with those who came before. Just as the hardscrabble dreamers used to wake beside their covered wagons and gather wood for a morning fire, I too wake in the Albuquerque airport Sheraton and pour the water into the little single cup coffee maker. The details may have changed, but the need to buy some water bottles and gas up the Toyota before you turn west off of Interstate 25 at Socorro has not. Once you get on Route 60, my friend, you are really out there in the middle of nowhere. You would have to hitchhike all the way to Magdalena just to find a coffee shop. Look within—out here, you are on your own.

The Chihuahuan Desert ecoregion is dusted with shrubs of various sizes, brown grasses interspersed with the grasping fingers of the creosote bush and isolated Cottonwood trees. It’s not the featureless, undulating red sands of the Sahara, but the pointillist palate of Van Gogh if he ran out of everything but green and brown and yellow. I’d call it a scrubbedy landscape. The sun is hot and the dust attacks the windshield even if you keep on spraying the wiper fluid every fifteen minutes. I bet navigating this land by horse was a real nightmare. And many of them, in the olden days, were doing so while drunk on whiskey. Hot and sweaty and drunk and falling off your horse into a thorny bush, growing more ornery by the hour as your modest canteen was drained. What a nightmare! This general experience probably has much to do with why many of the Old West “ghost towns” in this region are now abandoned.

Yet mankind persevered. Twenty miles outside Magdalena you’re thinking about six shooters and covered wagons and prairie dogs and then—bam!— you see a hulking, white space telescope. Pointed up at the stars. Keep turning your head and you see another. And another. And two dozen more, gleaming white dishes the size of buildings slung out in an enormous crescent over miles of open desert, antennas reaching up to grab some cosmic rays that I’ll wager are very interesting indeed. This is the Very Large Array, the self-descriptive name of one of America’s most important astronomical sites. Where our imaginary drunken cowboy was draining the last drops of his ill-advised whiskey and cursing at wolves just a couple centuries ago, scientists now come to look at black holes and wonder what’s happening inside them. As parables of optimism go, this one is hard to beat. Never lose hope. This land may be inconvenient for an afternoon stroll, but you better believe we’ll figure out something useful to do with it.

Forty more miles down the road is Pie Town. The first and main thing you’ll see there is the wooden general store-looking Pie Town Pie Company building. Inside is the entire Pie Town EMS staff in matching t-shirts, taking up a corner table. There was a line of tourists waiting to get their hands on some of that pie. A harried and forgetful woman took orders at the counter. I waited patiently. When I finally made it up there, I ordered one slice of New Mexico Apple Pie—flavored with a little green chile—and one slice of Blueberry Lemon Buttermilk. They were both good. Lemons aren’t native to these parts, but thanks to modern shipping they are transported fresh all the way out here for inclusion in the pies. Wonderful! A triumph of logistics.

There was also a peaches and cream pie, and a cherry almond pie, and a few others. Based on the ones I had, I feel confident that those other ones are good, too. I can say all the pie was good to eat, whether you’re talking about the crust, or the filling inside. I enjoyed it. What am I, a restaurant critic? You know that pie was tasty.

There’s not much else to see in Pie Town so I headed back down the road. At Datil, I pulled off and talked to the lady in the gas station. “I come from St. Augustine, Florida, and we grow datil peppers there!” I told her. “Oh really? Wow,” she said. She didn’t give a fuck. I thought about buying a hat but they cost $30, which seemed a little steep for a joke that takes so much explanation.

Like a free diver on a world record descent, I didn’t linger unnecessarily. I had been where I was going. I had slipped the surly bonds of everyday life to touch the face of Pie Town. I’d had two pieces of pie and I was happy as a clam. Is this what life is all about? If so, it’s okay with me. David Hume taught us that we’re not promised tomorrow. You have to take advantage of every sliver of daylight. Keep it moving. I hit that gas and pushed on, screeching south at Socorro heading towards Elephant Butte. Past Truth or Consequences, on the road to Las Cruces, staring out at those craggy Sierra de las Uvas Mountains looming dead ahead. There’s something over that hill, baby, I just got to see. For me, it’s pie. What is it for you? You better go find out, before that sun goes down.

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• Previously, on the open road: America Is Becoming Dallas; Ride or Die, Cowboy.

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Jeff Bezos (net worth: $275 billion), like John D. Rockefeller handing out shiny dimes, says that the bottom half of American earners should pay no income tax. This offers us a good opportunity to clarify and hold prominently in our minds the underlying battle for power that frames all of American politics today.

There are a number of things that can be said in response to Bezos’ comments in a CNBC interview this week. “Fuck off back to your mega-yacht and contemplate the grim reality that death will come for all of us, Jeff, you testosterone-swilling union busting devil.” That’s one. Another would be to point out, as the economist Gabriel Zucman did, that Bezos frames the discussion over taxes in an intentionally misleading way to elide the fact that low and middle income earners in America have a higher total tax burden than the very rich, which is why billionaires like Bezos love to crow about the absolute number of “billions” they pay in taxes rather than expressing such things as percentages of wealth. Another would be to note that the economic benefit of tax cuts to low earners is limited to a portion of the low amount they earn, giving them no redistributive value, which is why Republicans love to offer them in lieu of actual government benefits, which they brand derisively as “entitlements.” It does not take a very sophisticated understanding of mathematics to understand why “everyone keep more of what you earn!” is a policy that helps someone making billions of dollars more than it helps someone who earns $50,000.

Rather than rehashing these obvious points—true things that would already be well understood were it not for the fact that people with a lot of money have spent generations spending money to obscure them—I prefer to use the gift of Jeff Bezos opening his mouth as a chance to ruminate on an even more basic dynamic at work here. This is one of those things that is certainly not a novel insight, but is something worth reminding ourselves of periodically so that we don’t fuck around and lose our way.

The state, and capital. Two competing power centers. The state has the theoretical ability to limit the power of capital. In a democracy, where the state is theoretically subject to the input of the working class, and may theoretically be made to function in service of the interests of the large majority of the population who hold little capital, the power of the state is always a potential threat to the power of capital.

How powerful should the state be, and how powerful should capital be? Capital (representing both corporate interests and the rich) has a simple answer: Capital should have maximum power. Capital wants to do what it wants to do without being told that it can’t do everything it wants to do. Don’t we all!

So capital has two options. It can seek to co-opt state power—by buying politicians, influencing the electoral system with money, pursuing regulatory capture of government agencies, etc—and neutralize the desire and ability of the state to work against the interests of capital. Or, even more straightforward, it can seek to eliminate state power entirely. In addition to electing Republicans who slash regulations and eliminate state functions, the easiest way to do this is to starve the state of funding. When you starve the state of funding, you destroy its ability to carry out the regulatory actions that would limit the power of capital, even if the mandates to do so are still on the books.

Additionally, the functions that the state becomes too weak to carry out can be privatized and shifted under the control of capital, meaning that capital has the incentive not only to murder the state, but to feed on its corpse. A little added bonus.

State funding comes from taxes. The reason why the forces of capital are so intent on slashing taxes is not only because they want to keep more money in their own pockets; it is because slashing taxes defunds the government and naturally drains the hard power of the state, laws notwithstanding. You can tell the IRS to diligently monitor every billionaire’s finances in order to collect every last tax dollar legally owed, but if you lay off all the auditors at the IRS, they just won’t do it. Multiply this by every government regulatory agency. This is the perpetual battlefield of American power, which gets branded as “Red vs. Blue” and whatnot, in ways that are mostly misleading.

In modern American history, capital has owned essentially all of the Republican Party, which operates with the primary purpose of serving the interests of capital, and also has bought as much of the Democratic Party as possible, in order to neutralize the chance of substantial opposition. The main thing that has distinguished the Democratic Party from the Republican is that the Democratic Party is at least contested terrain for the interests of capital, whereas in the Republican Party it has always been a settled issue.

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Normal people don’t like paying taxes, understandably, for the same reason that people don’t like big bills for any reason. That’s to be expected. The forces of capital understand this and have always sought to weaponize for their own project of starving the state. All organized anti-tax political projects should be understood through this lens. Jeff Bezos is just the latest self-interested capitalist trying to put an appealing face on tax cuts which would ultimately serve his interests. Jeff Bezos would be happy to pay a modestly higher personal tax rate in the short term in order to raise public support for cutting taxes in general in order to weaken the federal government and thereby make it easier for Jeff Bezos’s companies to do whatever they want in the long term. Weakening labor regulations and safety regulations and environmental regulations will enable Jeff Bezos and friends to add far more wealth to their own accounts in the long run than they would pay today by picking up the tab for low earners as a PR move. This is all pretty transparent.

When Democrats who should know better start touting tax cuts out of political desperation—well, that is when it is worth saying: Hey, idiots, stop. Cory Booker and Chris Van Hollen and Katie Porter and other ambitious Democrats who are pushing middle class tax cuts—rather than wealth taxes on the rich—as their signature economic proposals need to pause and look in the mirror and say, “I wonder if it is a bad sign that I have the same signature economic proposal as Jeff Bezos?” Sometimes Democrats do this because they are bought and paid for by the interests of capital, and sometimes they do it just because they think it is political clever and electorally popular, but either way, what they will accomplish if they succeed is to make the state weaker and consequently make capital itself stronger and more able to dominate the lives of humanity. I do not think it is a radical request to ask that Democrats not do that. Fucking idiots.

Into this two-way power struggle, let me remind you of one other power center that has the theoretical ability to compete in this game: labor. Organized labor can be its own power center. It is not the power of capital. It is the power of working people, organized and acting together for their common interests. In a healthy America, organized labor would be competing on an equal playing field with capital to influence the state to serve its interests. The state would have two clear, strong, powerful constituencies competing for influence: on the one hand, a few billionaires and mega-corporations, and on the other hand, the vast majority of the population, who work for a living. The weakness of organized labor in America tilts the battle for power into a two-way struggle, between capital and the state, rather than a more balanced three-way struggle between capital, workers, and the state. Needless to say, capital much prefers a simple two-way struggle. Without the power of organized labor backing it up, the state itself has less ability to resist the constant effort of capital to co-opt and destroy it. So when you contemplate our unhealthy and imperiled democracy, never forget that a strong union movement would drastically improve the entire dynamic, in favor of humanity’s interests. I wrote a book about this if you’re interested in a longer discussion of it.

Until organized labor grows substantially more powerful, we are left to watch guys worth hundreds of billions of dollars try to put a friendly face on the project of weakening government power so much that it can no longer get in the way of their ability to own everything and control all the wealth and not have to answer to anyone. Protecting state power and making that power genuinely answerable to honest democratic elections is the whole ballgame right now for 99% of us. Don’t think it is cute or clever or populist to help capital destroy the only thing holding it back from utter domination.

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Extras

• Related reading: Why Republicans Love to Offer You Tax Cuts; How the “Working Class Republican” Scam Works; We’re All Mice Trying to Chew Through a Trillion-Dollar Tree.

• This week, I went on The Valley Labor Report, the best labor show in the South, to talk about union power and inequality and the public sector right to strike and more. I also spoke to Alternet about the rise of Christian nationalism in a Substack live, which you can watch here. Also, I spoke to the French organizer and writer Lumir Lapray about labor power, in an interview that you can read here. That interview is published in French. I don’t know what it says but it sounds very poetic. If you’d like to read a longer discussion of why organized labor is the key to solving our national predicament, you can order my book “The Hammer” from an independent bookstore. If you would like me to come speak to your college or union or other group about these things, email me.

• Adjacent to the project of keeping the power of capital in check is: the media. The publication you are reading, How Things Work, is true independent media. We have no corporate sponsors and no paywall. This place is wholly supported by readers just like you who toss a few bucks in the hat to help keep us going. This is socialist journalism in action. If you like reading, please look deep into your conscience and then take a moment to click the button below to become a paid subscriber. It’s affordable and it helps us survive. I thank you all for being here.

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Bruce Springsteen played Madison Square Garden on Saturday. Bruce Springsteen! Madison Square Garden! Every upwardly mobile white middle aged couple in a fifty-mile radius was seeking to make their way into the city for date night with The Boss. Standing on Seventh Avenue and 33rd street under the watchful eye of an Ariana Grande for Swarovski billboard, you could watch them all stream by, holding hands, waving on their friends, ready to celebrate their good fortune. In they came. From Jersey! From White Plains! From Westchester! And, oh yes, from Long Island!

It was a perfect night to launch a Long Island Railroad strike.

More than 3,000 LIRR workers from five different unions are now on strike, for the first time in more than 30 years. Nothing prompts angry denunciations from the city’s reactionary media outlets like a public sector strike, particularly one involving blue collar workers who make six figure incomes. The very concept offends the most basic values of the sort of person who owns the New York Post. Rather than descend into the muck of manufactured anger, I prefer to take a big picture view: Union power is rare; here is an important economic chokepoint that is subject to union power; these workers are using that union power to get themselves the best deal that they can; strikes that successfully demonstrate the power of organized labor are good.

At issue in the strike is a relatively small gap between the raise percentage requested by the unions and the raise percentage that New York state is willing to pay. Because the LIRR workers are subject to the byzantine bureaucratic demands of the Railway Labor Act, they can’t just strike willy-nilly; this strike comes after three years of navigating successive government boards and mediation processes.

On Saturday night, a small group of strikers huddled with picket signs outside of Penn Station’s soaring, pointy glass LIRR entrance. They chanted about the head of the MTA: “Janno Lieber/ Has no clue!/ Fair wage/ Good for you!/ Good for me!” Occasionally, a passing Springsteen fan would give them a pumped fist in support.

Ian Parfrey wore a colorful bucket hat and a long goatee. He has been a locomotive engineer for the past 12 years. He drives trains from Grand Central out to Ronkonkoma and back. “We’ve reached the complete end of our labor process here. They’ve dragged out giving us a new contract for over three years now. The sticking point mainly is that we want a wage increase that at least covers inflation, and they’re offering a wage increase that does not cover inflation. Plus they want givebacks on top of that,” he said. “Some of these guys work jobs that are eleven-and-a-half hours long. They do four round trips, six round trips. They’re going back and forth like a pinball with barely time to eat or piss.”

“We are highly qualified and skilled people. We know how to operate any kind of train over every mile of track that this railroad has,” he said. “The training process for this job is over a year long. It consists of multiple examinations. Some of the written ones are incredibly difficult. We are very qualified. And, you know, frankly we deserve this money.”

George Barreto, another member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, has been on the job driving trains for 28 years. He grew up in New York but now lives in Philadelphia and commutes to work five or six days a week. “On Thursday, I ran a train out of Grand Central to Babylon, after the fire outside of Penn Station in the tunnel caused a massive service disruption. I got a call from the railroad, an ASAP call, ‘How fast can you get in? Can you get to Grand Central at 1:30?’ So in a half hour, I was at work in the blink of an eye. My day changed from a relaxing day off to, I’m helping the railroad out of a disaster, just like that. It happens all the time,” he said.

“You’re never really ready to go on strike. It’s a hard thing. The fact is, anybody who ever says ‘I wish to go on strike’ has never actually been on strike. It hurts everybody. It hurts the passengers. It hurts the riding public that we don’t want to hurt, because they’re our friends, our neighbors, people we care about. The people who care about us. We’re not looking to inconvenience them,” Barreto said. “The amount of studying, the amount of dedication required to get these jobs is often insurmountable. When you do finally qualify, you’re working nights, weekends, holidays for years on end. Mistakes are punitive. They can come after you very quickly. In short, we’re responsible for people’s lives. You cannot make mistakes. It’s a little different from working in an office.”

Some of the LIRR drivers are in the Teamsters. One of them was Ezekiel (whose last name I missed), who was hoisting a picket sign with one hand and passing out red Gatorades with the other. He had been a locomotive engineer for only a year and a half, making him one of the youngest people out there. When I asked him why he chose the job, he smiled shyly and replied, “I’ve always liked trains.”

Despite his energey on the picket line, “It kinda blows,” he said. “I know it blows for the commuters, it blows for me. Hopefully the Long Island Railroad comes to the bargaining table.”

A group of union officers, stout men in tight polo shirts, stood chatting off to the side. One was Mark Wallace, the BLET’s national president. He has a southern accent, unlike his extremely New Yawky members on the line. He narrated some of the years-long process that led up to this point.

“Two panels. Six arbitrators, that were picked by Donald Trump as a Presidential Emergency Board. We don’t like Presidential Emergency Boards either! We’ve had to eat out of a bad plate of food many times because of a Presidential Emergency Board. But that’s what’s always been the basis for the agreement we end up coming to. And [the LIRR] refuses to recognize that,” he said. “That was six independent arbitrators saying, ‘This is what’s fair to settle this.’ And this is the first time in our organization’s history—the BLET, we’re 164 years old—that we’ve asked for a Presidential Emergency Board. We normally would push back and say, ‘let us handle this on our own.’”

Though strikes under the Railway Labor Act are rare, this is Wallace’s second in two years—New Jersey Transit workers went on strike last year, over similar issues. So the union knows how fast the pressure will build. “The cost [of the LIRR strike] to the economy of New York, the comptroller said yesterday, it’s $61 million a day,” Wallace said. “That’ll pay for years of the increases we’re asking. They’re the ones that chose to go down this path.”

The mood was fairly happy out there, among the giddy Springsteen fans, with the Empire State Building looming in the background like a giant needle. But that was just the first day. Today is Monday, and the strike is still on, and that means that it is the first day that commuters are fucked. This can’t go on too long. There will be much grumbling. But look up Seventh Avenue and you will see Billionaire’s Row, and look down Seventh Avenue and you will see Wall Street. There are worse things than a few thousand well-paying union jobs for the people who drive our trains. Don’t be mad when union workers make a good living. Instead, get a union of your own, and join them.

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• Related reading: Vibe to Heal America; The Consequences of Bad Labor Law; To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members.

• Here is a map of picket line locations for the LIRR strike, if you would like to join one in support. If you would like to organize your workplace and need help, contact EWOC. If you want to learn more about the labor movement and why it is so important to saving our miserable country from the fate that capitalism hath wrought for us, order my book “The Hammer” from an independent book store.

• Labor reporting in the United States of America: There’s not very much of it. Not even enough to send a reporter out to all of the strikes that happen, even though we don’t have nearly enough strikes. Sucks! One small thing you can do to mitigate this is to support independent media of the sort that might write about labor issues. Media such as… How Things Work, the publication you are now reading. We exist solely because of the financial support of readers like you. If you like reading How Things Work, please strongly consider clicking the button below and becoming a paid subscriber, for just $6 a month or $60 for the whole year. We will hang together or we will hang separately, my friends. Thank you for reading.

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Yesterday, the New York Times reported that venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz has become the single largest political donor in this midterm election cycle, dropping more than $115 million to support their own business interests. This is horrifying for our democracy, sure, but the story did have one paragraph that made me chuckle:

[Pointy-head billionaire technofascist Marc] Andreessen has told friends a story about a confrontation he had about a decade ago with David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, at the headquarters of Condé Nast, which owns the magazine. Mr. Remnick’s team argued that the tech elite were out of touch, a person who heard Mr. Andreessen’s version of the story said, but when the investor saw how well appointed the Condé Nast offices and bathrooms were, he concluded that it was the media elite who were out of touch.

Astute readers will detect in this paragraph strong echoes of the interminable accusations of being “elite” that have helped to make America’s political rhetoric of the past decade so nightmarish. Republican elites calling Democratic elites “elites,” and vice versa. The observation “Hey, all the people calling the other side ‘elites’ are actually elites themselves!” is true and also has been made often enough at this point that we do not need to keep on making it aloud.

Now, the spectacle of a Silicon Valley billionaire accusing the nation’s most prestigious magazine editor of being out of touch is like watching a quadruple amputee and a triple amputee argue over who is more likely to win the Olympic pole vault. But the fact that such an accusation could even creep into Andreesen’s misshapen brain is an illustration of why such arguments are so alluring. The rubric of being “in touch” allows those who are undeniably elite to indulge in the fantasy that they can claim solidarity with the Regular People just by cobbling together a list of characteristics and activities that they have in common. It is a cheat code for soothing the egos of those who would never want to actually be a regular person, but who yearn for the populist shield of being sufficiently in touch with the experiences of regular people to lend their opinions credibility and insulate themselves from accusations of elitism.

Thus, proclamations of being In Touch tend to quickly devolve into laundry lists of the sort of shallow factoids found in dating questionnaires: I like sports! I listen to popular music! I recently pumped my own gas at a gas station, with no assistance from a service worker! The nature of these justifications is that they must be things that someone whose life experience is substantially out of the mainstream can do without altering anything about their own material circumstances. They often include things that happened before someone became an elite (I went to a public elementary school!) or things that amount to inconsequential safaris into the Land of Normal Folks (I went on a hunting trip, just as country people do!). The fantasy here is that the more behaviors one can claim that are shared by the median American, the more one can claim spiritual kinship with the median American, while studiously ignoring the market value of the home you live in.

In order to keep our national dialogue free of obscurity, it is imperative that we have crack down on these discussions of who is and is not out of touch. Most of the people who engage in them fail to live up to even the paltry standards of their own discourse. Just ask the questions with a tiny bit more clarity:

• Have you taken a flight recently? The majority of Americans did not take one flight in the past year.

• Did you read more than two books last year? You’re in the minority.

• Have a college degree? Also a minority.

• Do you eat out? The most common place that Americans eat out is McDonald’s, and the most popular sit-down restaurant brand is Olive Garden. Is that where you go? Or do you go somewhere fancy, like, you know, TGI Friday’s? What—fancier than that? Wow.

• Are you a white male? Seven in ten Americans are not.

Etcetera. I can barely imagine what qualities Marc Andreesen believes that he has that qualify him for being In Touch, but I guarantee that they are all very stupid.

The thing to recognize here is that this entire framework is wrong. It is a childish exercise in self-justification that does not even take itself seriously on its own terms. Elites—economic, cultural, and otherwise—feel deep shame and guilt at their own unjustified position in the socioeconomic hierarchy, or anomie at their own isolation from the rest of mankind. They search desperately for trivial points of commonality to make themselves feel a part of the society that they have worked so hard to ascend away from. Yet, if they were being honest with themselves, they would have to confront the hard reality that the one life experience that would prevent them from being out of touch will remain forever out of their grasp, by its very nature.

Because being in touch with normal people is not about having similar hobbies or watching the same TV shows. (The very idea that there is a median “normal person” that you can measure yourself against to ensure your own normality is a meaningless statistical fiction in a country as large and diverse as ours.) I submit to you that the one characteristic that unites the lives of all Normal People is this: They are at the mercy of forces greater than themselves. They have to work for money in order to pay bills in order to survive. They are at all times subject to the cruel depredations of fate. Even if they have savings, the stability of their lives could be snatched away by a single disaster. If they rest for too long, they will lose their ability to support themselves and their families. They are all, to varying degrees, in the position of having to do things that they would not choose to do, because those things are necessary in order to earn money and live and navigate their position in society.

And guess what? Once you have a few million dollars in the bank, you are no longer in the position that I describe. Once you have a few million dollars in the bank, you may still choose to work, and you may still want to get richer, and you may decide to live a more lavish lifestyle that requires more income, but you are fundamentally removed from the necessity of shaping your life around the need to work to live a decent life. A few million bucks in the bank means that you have passed from the world of need to the world of choice. You have gained the ability to dictate the substance of your life. You have finished weaving the safety net that will prevent you from falling into the pit of penury. You may still like the same things that other people like, but you do not share the most powerful defining feature of their lives. You are free in a way that they are not and never will be.

This does not make you a bad person. This does not mean you don’t deserve to be happy. That doesn’t mean that you have no problems. I am not sitting here telling you to feel guilty. I am simply stating the material fact that at a certain level of wealth, it becomes impossible to be truly in touch with the life experience of most people, because the most significant aspect of that life experience is one that disappears when you surpass a certain level of wealth. If you do not have to work to live then, yes, you are out of touch with the organizing principle of the average person’s life. You may feel sympathy for them, or spiritual and political affinity, but your life is of a fundamentally different type than theirs.

Congratulations! You’re out of touch. Enjoy it. If you don’t like it, give all of your money away. Otherwise, shut the fuck up.

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• Related reading on the psychology of the rich: Grievance Poisoning In the First Degree; Prisoners of Fortune; Abominations of Capital.

• One good labor story to read today: Emily Markwiese on how a coalition of union activists in Washington state saved one of their comrades from being deported by ICE.

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If someone were to steal the land you lived on and then go try to sell it at real estate events overseas, I bet you would be upset. I bet you would be happy if people protested it. This, in essence, is the situation unfolding at the series of “Great Israeli Real Estate Events” being held this month in the New York area, and the public outrage accompanying them. These events market land in Israeli settlements to buyers in America. Last week, there was a raucous protest of one of these events held in a Manhattan synagogue. Yesterday, there was another such event at a synagogue in South Brooklyn. Another protest was announced. Another chance for confrontation. A miniature local theater in a sprawling global war.

The event was advertised as being in Flatbush, but I would call it Midwood—Avenue L and Ocean Avenue. It is a heavily Jewish neighborhood, just down the street from the grand facade of the East Midwood Jewish Center, where a banner advertised “The shul with the indoor pool.” Yet this slice of South Brooklyn is too diverse to be an enclave. Get off the Q train at Avenue M and you see Jewish families and Middle Eastern families and black people and white people and Mexican people and everything else. There are kosher bakeries but also sushi and Italian ices and a Georgian Khachapuri restaurant. The sun was still shining bright at six PM. A group of Latino kids played handball in the park on East 18th Street, right next to a group of Jewish kids playing basketball in their athletically disadvantageous outfits of long black pants and white button up shirts. A girl threw a ball to a dog. Birds chirped. Leaves bloomed. A fine spring night in the city.

A block away, Ocean Avenue was closed by a long police barrier manned by dozens of cops shifting from foot to foot. To get over to the action you had to walk the long way around, down East 19th, a lovely and leafy block of spacious suburban-esque homes surrounded by mature trees and trimmed hedges. Then you could walk down Ocean Ave itself, also blocked off and eerily quiet. Some people loitered on fifth and sixth floor balconies, peering down at the intersection of Ocean and L, fenced off with metal police barriers and rapidly filling with angry people.

Most of the angry people, numerically speaking, were pro-Israel counterprotesters. Hundreds of them filled a designated area on Avenue L, waving Israeli flags and American flags and pro-Zionist signs. Directly next to them was the designated press pen, which I avoided getting in on the principle that you never want to be in an enclosed area when shit goes down. I don’t generally believe in press passes—the First Amendment is every American’s press pass—but I did put mine on last night. At things like this it can help you avoid being snatched by cops or swung on by angry protesters, at the margins. It was not enough for one twitchy photographer who slid up beside me and whispered, “Watch your back. They don’t like press either, this community.”

The first actual protesters to arrive were a group of Orthodox Jewish people from NKI, who oppose Zionism for religious reasons, and who show up at many pro-Palestine protests. They set off a back and forth round of jeers. “State of Israel, shame, shame! You don’t speak in the Jewish name!” they chanted. “You’re not Jewish!” chanted the other side back at them.

Some standard issue keffiyeh-clad pro-Palestine protesters began to trickle in. An old woman holding a miniature Israeli flag sidled up and said “Animals. Animals” at a bored-looking white guy slumped across the handlebars of his bike. Swarms of neighborhood Jewish teenagers had formed around the protest area, and were posturing and yelling and zipping back and forth on electric scooters. “I’m right next to the jihadist!” one kid hissed into his cell phone with a grin plastered across his face. Cops were everywhere. Every few minutes a fight would almost start, but there was always a cop a few feet away to break it up. Even those of us who favor police reform would admit that this was in the category of “good uses of an army of cops.” Without the NYPD lining every surrounding block the entire thing would have degenerated into a wild street brawl in two seconds.

The vibes were vicious. Testosterone permeated the air. It smelled like cologne. Whether that was from the men of Midwood or from the cops, I’m not sure. The Jewish teens, seized with the energy of being on the bigger side of a crowd, hollered increasingly vicious taunts, egged on by a handful of middle aged right wing men who were poor role models.

“You can shove your Palestine up your ass!”

“Fuck Palestine and your mother!”

“Muhammad is a rapist! I’ll break your face!” This sort of thing. It was not an atmosphere conducive to reasoned conversation about the difference between Zionism and Judaism and the actions of the Netanyahu government and so forth. Not that some of the pro-Palestine people didn’t try. “They’re using dogs to rape prisoners,” one explained to an impassive cop standing between him and a red-faced screaming man in a yarmulke.

After a while the protesters filed out of their little area in the middle of Ocean Avenue and marched back around the block. They walked briskly down the sidewalk, surrounded by a line of police, and then a pack of hooting and enraged pro-Israel people strode beside them in the street, issuing insults and threats. A moving gauntlet, for three blocks, back around to Avenue M, where the protesters gathered in the intersection, finally together in numbers, slightly less intimidated. Some people threw eggs at them, which broke on the dark asphalt of Ocean Avenue. An NYPD chopper hovered overhead. The protesters were standing in the street which was arched like a small hill, so that from the edges all you would see, every couple of minutes, was a surge of photographers running towards a bunch of people’s backs, where some minor scuffle was popping off. Here, the protest played out as most protests do, albeit one taking place on a little concrete island surrounded by unusual levels of menace. A kid wearing a sheisty shot down the street on a scooter with a huge Israeli flag. An angry middle-aged white guy of a familiar type poked his finger towards college students in keffiyehs and screamed “You and me! Let’s go! As a matter of fact, bring three of you! You and me!” The mutual anger settled into balance.

I have but little to add to the substantial global commentary about the atrocities and oppression that the government of Israel has carried out against the Palestinians. There was a right side at this protest: The people defending the beleaguered Palestinians were right, and the people in the grips of religious-nationalist fervor screaming for their blood were wrong. For an American, though, the most useful thing about these particular protests may be a chance for us to get a new perspective on what it looks like when a nation acts just like us. The historical precedents of Israel and of the United States are quite different, yes, but the basic dynamic of “religious minority feeling the sting of persecution secures homeland by forcefully taking the land of other, weaker people who were not the ones persecuting them, while being extremely self-righteous about it”—well, that should ring familiar to anyone who has ever watched the Dallas Cowboys play the Washington Redskins.

When you stand surrounded by hundreds of flexing young men drunk on rage, testosterone, and politics, you can really feel part of a tradition running through all of human history, and through all of the world’s nation-states. Any country that wants to draw borders and motivate its young men to kill for them must whip up a crowd like this, at scale. Give all these teenagers uniforms and machine guns and you have an army. Call them heroes and point them at your enemies and you have geopolitics. Drape them in flags and make up songs celebrating them and lavish praise on their dead bodies and you have patriotism. Some causes are righteous and some are not, but if you know the exhilarating, giddy feeling of standing in a big group of your friends and feeling collectively ready to beat someone’s ass, together, then you can understand much about why it is so difficult to achieve peace on earth. There will always be young guys soaked in testosterone and high on dreams of Defending Their People, and, thus far, there have always been older men willing to send those wild young men to fight to protect the things that older men have. It is easy to get young men to fight. They will fight for a girl, for their family, for each other, or just for the sheer hell of it. It’s not really their fault. We can work to dissipate that energy, to channel into less murderous arenas, and we can hold up love of humanity as our highest virtue, or we can wave flags and extol the need for Real Men to protect God and Country at gunpoint. All societies make their choices.

Eventually the protesters and their infuriated entourage began to march back to where they began. I broke off and slipped into Falafel Tanami, on Avenue M, where you could see all the police right out the window. “What’s going on out there?” a portly Orthodox man with a beard asked the kid working the counter. “I have no idea,” the kid shrugged. The man behind the counter handed out fresh falafel balls to everyone waiting in line, as a little treat. They make a great falafel there. Everyone was happy. Everyone likes falafel.

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• Previously, in street reporting: Minneapolis when Alex Pretti was killed; Springfield, Ohio waits for ICE; New Orleans versus the fascists; At the Houston Rodeo.

• Save the children. Organize a union. Join a protest.

• Where is the best falafel in New York? If you know the answer, sound off in the comments. Otherwise I will be forced to do the hard work of finding out myself.

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Yesterday, the national co-chairs of the Democratic Socialists of America published a piece in Jacobin headlined, “We Need a Left-Labor Presidential Candidate.” In it, they say they “are calling for a new popular coalition of social movements, labor, and the Left to recruit and run a candidate for president of the United States” in 2028. Given the fact that this demand is coming from the organization that just powered Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign for New York City mayor, and that has produced Congressional and municipal candidates across the country, it deserves to be taken seriously.

In a vacuum, I think it is encouraging that The Left (such as it is) is undertaking some sort of formal planning well in advance of 2028. I can also foresee a number of potential obstacles that stand in the way of the plan that DSA’s leaders are putting forward. In the spirit of Encouraging The Discourse, I’m just going to spitball all of that below. Let me stress that I have not spoken to any of DSA’s leaders, so this is just a reaction to the piece that they published. Please be a responsible internet commenter by reading their piece yourself before jumping in with opinions on it.

Stipulations

Much of the piece is spent making the case that Trump is awful, that public appetite for opposing him is high, and that the Democratic establishment sucks and will surely unite behind a shitty candidate unless the left does something. All of this is true. Also, we are stipulating here that we are discussing running a candidate in the Democratic Primary, and not as an independent. Running a third party left wing candidate for president is a bad idea for reasons I have discussed before.

Stuff I Agree With

“Zohran’s victory has reshaped expectations about what is politically possible… The Left has a historic opportunity — and a responsibility — to seize the moment.” Yes. The political position of DSA today is much elevated from its pre-Zohran levels. It has more supporters, more name recognition, and more momentum. In politics, there is great wisdom to striking while the iron is hot. Running full speed into the momentum you have tends to be more productive than saying “Let’s sit back for four years and build ourselves up until everything is perfect.” While it’s true that DSA doesn’t have the infrastructure of a national political party, backing a primary candidate could be the perfect opportunity to start building that infrastructure in earnest!

Having a candidate you really believe in at the top of the ticket tends to animate voters, helps turnout, helps your candidates farther down the ticket, and gives priceless visibility to your policy positions. It helps you recruit new followers and builds the movement. We saw all of this with Bernie’s presidential campaigns. Even though Bernie lost, his campaigns gave great energy and support to The Left. Running a credible campaign and losing leaves you stronger than not running at all.

There must be a credible left wing candidate in the Democratic primaries. That much is certain. Someone needs to be occupying the lane that Bernie has so successfully carved out. Not to have that would be a disaster for the Left and for America. However. There are still some…

Tricky Questions

What about AOC? What about AOC? AOC seems quite likely to run for president. If she does, she immediately becomes the most credible left wing candidate in the Democratic primaries—the one with the most charisma, the most resources, and the most name recognition. Does DSA envision automatically anointing her as the candidate they are describing, if she runs? Would she need to audition for their support? If AOC sought to put some amount of formal distance between herself and DSA, would DSA seek to run another candidate against her? You see what I’m getting at here. One can envision a scenario where AOC runs, seeks to present herself as slightly more mainstream in order to draw in broader primary support, and by doing so pisses off the Left, which proceeds to recruit and run another candidate in the same races.

Splintering and factionalism are the oldest stories on the Left. I’m not saying this will happen, but we should establish up front that this would be bad. Given the Left’s position in American politics, it is vital that we do our best to coalesce around ONE credible left candidate, and do everything possible NOT to split the left wing vote in the Democratic primaries. Maybe AOC would run and DSA would back her and everything would be smooth; or maybe AOC would run and a lot of feathers would get ruffled over purity but DSA would ultimately overlook that and back her for the cause; but either of those outcomes would be preferable to the Left splitting its precious resources between more than one candidate. That is a path to losing. Also it would produce tedious diatribes against DSA among mainstream Democrats that we would all have to listen to for the next decade, and that is boring. Let’s not split the vote no matter what.

The DSA leaders write, “We need a broad left-labor coalition, composed of labor unions and other mass organizations, that can draft a platform, recruit candidates for federal, state, and local office across the country, and nominate a viable socialist candidate for the 2028 presidential election. The work of identifying that candidate — ideally a nationally known elected official or labor leader — must begin now.” What does this coalition look like, exactly? And what process will be used in order to make its nomination choice? Even among groups that are fairly ideologically aligned, there is sure to be a turf war, given how high the stakes are. Who decides who gets to be in this coalition? How much power does DSA envision wielding in this coalition? If this process is led and dominated by DSA, that would tend to attract to the coalition only groups that perceive themselves as less powerful than DSA, while groups that perceive themselves as just as important or more important than DSA would tend to be less willing to subjugate their own political choices to DSA’s. If DSA is a minority member of this coalition, how will power be distributed? Is it based on the membership of the respective groups? Does each group in the coalition send one representative to a big caucus? How do you ensure that the full membership of each respective group respects the candidate choice that this coalition makes?

These are just examples of the things that make something like “a broad left-labor coalition, composed of labor unions and other mass organizations” challenging. I am not trying to be negative! These things can be navigated! They are just things to have clarity on before The Left plunges headlong into this process.

And I can tell you that the most challenging part of a coalition like this would be….

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The Labor Part

When you imagine the sort of “left-labor coalition” that could power a credible presidential campaign, you probably imagine the “labor” part of it as: Big national labor unions. If you want political power you want SEIU, you want the teachers unions, you want AFSCME, you want the Teamsters, you want UAW, you want the AFL-CIO, you want the biggest and most well-financed national unions with the biggest membership coming together to christen and support a Labor Candidate that can credibly claim to be The Labor Candidate because of this strong union backing.

Will these sorts of major national unions come to the table as members of a DSA-led left-labor coalition? Will they agree to subjugate their own political agency to this coalition? No. They will not. Big unions in America have been losing power in the workplace for many decades (here is a good book to read about that). But do you know where they still maintain a fair amount of power? Inside the Democratic National Committee! Big labor unions, to a large degree, are the Democratic establishment. They are a junior partner to capital, sure, and they have often been marginalized and taken for granted by Democratic administrations, but they jealously guard the access that Democrats grant them. Unions got a lot from Biden and the vast majority of AFL-CIO unions would be ecstatic for an exact repeat of the Biden administration. Most of the major unions endorsed Hillary Clinton and Biden rather than Bernie because they treasure their open door to the Democratic establishment and would not want to see it closed because they pissed off the establishment by backing an insurgent—even if that insurgent is, objectively, the most pro-labor candidate.

Getting the big unions to make themselves a part of a left-labor coalition that explicitly seeks to challenge the Democratic establishment will not happen until the big unions perceive that the Left is where the power is. As DSA Congressional candidate and union activist Claire Valdez told me recently, “We need to demonstrate that we can win” before we can expect these mainstream, less ideological unions to coalesce around left wing, pro-labor candidates.

What the labor part of a “left-labor coalition” that could be built today would look like in practice would be, you know, a bunch of left-leaning locals and a bunch of progressive labor-aligned groups that are not unions, along with maybe the handful of big unions that tend to be more progressive (UAW, AFA, Unite Here, etc.)—though even those unions would surely reserve the right to make their own political endorsements should they choose to. It’s not just that unions tend to be pragmatic and transactional politically. Unions, at least the ones who might care about left wing values, are also democratic organizations that will do a lot of fretting over anything that might require them to subjugate their own political preferences to a larger group. This is also why it is hard to get the AFL-CIO, a coalition of many dozens of unions, to do anything bold.

Given all of this, it is also easy to imagine a scenario where DSA and friends back a left wing candidate and say that This Is The Labor Candidate, and meanwhile there is another Democratic establishment candidate who is standing up there with the endorsement of all the big unions. This, in fact, is what happened to Bernie! It’s not the end of the world or anything, but it goes to show why it is hard to realize the dream of unions showing enough solidarity to make themselves legitimate progressive kingmakers in Democratic politics.

If you object to this by saying, “But it would make more sense for unions to support the left wing candidate who is objectively more pro-labor on a policy level and who will be less likely to sell them out down the road,” I say to you: Hey brother, welcome to my life! I been writing this shit for years and years and yet progress has been slow. This is why I have a sense of some of the challenges ahead. You don’t have to convince me. You have to convince the inexplicably powerful Senior Vice President of the Amalgamated Widget Union whose most dearly held value is his ability to get backstage access to the Democratic National Convention and take selfies with someone famous over by the open bar.

Big Picture

Nitpicking negativity is much easier than organizing. So let us not lose perspective. It is vital that there is a credible left wing candidate in the 2028 Democratic primaries. Maybe that will be AOC, but maybe not. Credit to DSA for starting this conversation before it’s too late. A left-labor coalition is a desirable thing. If you are a union member, you can help bring this dream about by getting involved in your union and running for a position and helping to move your union left. If you are a left wing person not in a union, you can help bring this dream about by unionizing your workplace and joining the labor movement. If America’s union density continues to decline, so too will the utility and power of any left-labor coalition. The job of creating more union members is one that is vital no matter what is happening with electoral politics

Never in my lifetime has it been so clear that the political establishment has failed miserably and that its failure may well destroy us all. Don’t underestimate the chances of a left wing candidate in 2028. Pendulums swing.

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• Related reading: How to Win Red States With a Labor Party; To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members; Bernie Lost Because American Doesn’t Have a Strong Labor Movement; Run a Left Wing Democratic Primary Candidate in 2028. No Matter What.

• I wrote a book called “The Hammer” about why organized labor’s decline has gotten us into the fucked up position we are in today, and how we can turn that around. Relevant. You can order it from an independent bookstore. You can also get help organizing your workplace, donate money to support union organizing, or join DSA.

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May Day is for the workers. In some beautiful future, every worker will get May Day off. One day. But not yet. For now, it can also serve as a day when you remember the workers who are still working, and think about how you could make their lives better.

On my way from Brooklyn to the May Day rally in Washington Square Park yesterday, I saw all the people working who make New York City work. The Mexican construction crew sitting in a line against a concrete wall on my block, covered in dust, taking a break from building the building across the street. The woman selling them lunches out of a big plastic cooler. The woman pulling hot metal trays out of the steam table at the restaurant on the corner. The women with paper masks on at the nail salon on Flatbush Ave. That place is cheap, so they can’t be making much. The man with the apron stacking avocados outside the fruit stand. The aggrieved checkout clerk at the Duane Reade who becomes the convenient target for the rage of customers mad that all of the detergent is locked up and the staff is too small so there’s always a long line. The guy chopping jerk chicken with a cleaver at Peppa’s. The bus driver (union) pulling up at the corner of Parkside as an elderly woman cusses about how slow the bus is. The barista at the coffee shop, trying to remember to smile.

The woman in the booth at the subway station (union). The guys in orange vests picking their way down the subway tracks to fix things (union). And the subway driver! (Union). Without them we don’t get to where we need to go.

The World’s Funkiest Guitarist playing for tips on the West 4th Street A train platform. He’s at work. The cops (union). The guys making falafel in the falafel spot. The guys making pizza in the pizza spot. The guys making turkey sandwich cheese mustard mayo lettuce tomato onion at the bodega. The guys unloading band equipment outside the Blue Note. The chess hustlers banging timers for $20 a game. The people selling dosas from the strictly vegetarian cart. The tarot reader. The $5 portraits girl. The guy who looks like a child psychiatrist sitting at the card table with a sign that says How Do You Feel. The immigrant mother with a toddler on her back selling gum and candy out of a box. Everybody. The workers! They were still working. All the rest of us were marching for them.

It was beginning to be warm. The sky was powder blue and cloudless. It was almost too nice to think about revolution. But not quite, of course. Not on May Day. Thousands were out in that park, including hundreds of Laborers, Locals 78 and 79, all in their neon orange union shirts, all having a fine time, half listening to their various business agents who took the stage. Hearing these guys talk transports me, mentally, back to the 50s, when New York City was crowded with burly trade union guys who ran their little sliver of the city with an iron fist. “They consida collective bargaining a threat ta national security. I say collective bargaining is a threat to a dictata!” said one local’s business manager. “If I had one dolla I couldn’t put one dolla next ta that dolla unless I put labor in the equation!” said another.

In the American imagination at large, this particular demographic barely exists any more: multiracial, multigender, hard wearing people, people who build things for a living with the sunburns and muscles to prove it, a little macho, a little swaggering, union to their tip toes, who will come all the way downtown from Queens and stand in a big crowd of kiddie communists to tell the damn Dictata to keep his grubby hands off our collective bargaining. While political consultants slot everyone here into their predictive analytic machines and try to match them with the proper messaging stereotypes, the reality is that these are some of the people that unions help to live decent lives, and so they will show up (with some prodding from the union) to be a living show of force for the value of unions themselves.

Such a satisfying scene. A sledgehammer to all of the ways that idiot pundits talk about politics in our idiot country. All of these Laborers with neck tattoos and shades, smoking little cigars, picking up their free t-shirts from the LIUNA booth sporting a retro Knights of Labor sign that said AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL. Their DJ played Michael Jackson and Soulja Boy and made everyone dance much more easily than the self-consciously Left Wing music that would be played later on. I was standing up on a bench to get an elevated view of things, and sitting right below me was an elderly black man with a pilled-up green union beanie on his head, with stooped shoulders and a skinny neck and white hairs sprouting from his chin. And sitting right next to him was a portly older white man with white hair a pink face and sweat running down his arms. And both of them were wearing t-shirts demanding workplace safety. Now here were two guys who looked about as unlikely to hang out in the same place as you can get. Two old retired working guys who you would look at and assume left work and went in the opposite direction, to the most opposite places you could find. Yet both of them were out here in the name of Workplace Safety. Sitting next to each other on this beautiful day listening to music they didn’t know. I don’t want to make too much of it—I’m sure they both have other interests beyond workplace safety, and entire rich inner lives that might still be at odds with one another in some respects—but the fact is that they both ended up right there, on May Day. That’s what a union gets you. Everybody out there together for something bigger than their own narrow little preferences. It shouldn’t be such a rare thing but the modern world can make it feel like it is. That makes it feel all the more moving.

The circle was even wider than that. A skinny NYU kid with a lip ring and a t-shirt that said TROTSKY wandered amid the gruff Laborers. So too did a flamboyantly gay kid with eye shadow and belly bared beneath a purple half-shirt. Waltzing through the scene were 19 year-old models who had strolled up from Soho and old hippies in Free Cuba buttons and midtown doormen in 32BJ SEIU gear and hotel workers waving Hotel Union placards and prim women dressed in the crimson robes of characters from the Handmaid’s Tale standing next to cornrowed women in orange LIUNA hoodies who were desperately, helplessly dancing to “Man in the Mirror.” We were all out here, because this is what the labor movement is: a thing that says we all have something in common. Despite what the world might tell you. You hang out here for a while and you start to think: All that stuff about how demographic is destiny and we’re all on competing teams who hate and fear each other is bullshit, man. Here we are! All of us! Different people coming together. Not on some cartoon, We Are The World shit, but being in one place for a common cause, while all still being ourselves. It still exists. And then you can grasp quite easily why anyone whose business thrives on division would not want the labor movement to exist.

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The clown fringe Marxists were out there selling the Workers Vanguard paper with the headline, “Want Socialism? Fight Mamdani.” And Zohran Mamdani was also there himself, on stage, speaking about how much he values New York City’s unions. The labor movement’s unifying power cannot be crushed to earth by the right nor the ultraleft.

All of this in New York City was but one of many, many May Day rallies all across this great land. Serious ones. They shut down the schools in Chicago. They swarmed the airport in San Francisco and the Amazon offices in Manhattan and the intersections in DC. Thousands of teachers marched in North Carolina, and thousands of students walked out all over the place. More than four thousand May Day demonstrations nationwide, according to May Day Strong organizers. That’s a lot. That’s enough that if you hear anybody say, “People should do something,” you can say to them, fairly, “They did. Did you?”

One thing you can take away from May Day is anger—anger at capitalism, at imperialism, at oligarchy, at Trump, at inequality, at union-busting, at war, at The Way Things Are Going. This sort of anger is legitimate and is, indeed, the fuel for change. It deserves to be nurtured and channeled and to find its expression in the streets and in politics. But I have to admit that my takeaway from yesterday was not anger. Perhaps because of the weather, but more, I think, because of the people. The glorious tableau. Everybody! Together! And for who? Not for a game or a concert or a celebrity that we all worship. For us. For the workers. For you and me and the other people stuck stacking the avocados and driving the trains. It was a reminder that this thing, we all have in common. We aren’t all the same but we are, in this sense, all on the same team. The team of the people. The fact is that the majority of us are on this team, and the only reason it doesn’t always feel like this is that the handful of people on the other team have invested a lot to make us forget it. If everyone would turn off the TV and put away the internet and go outside and see the May Day rally a lot of the poison we call politics would be purged, naturally, like a sweat lodge for our national identity. This ain’t patriotism, baby. It’s the labor movement. Something better, for you and me and all of our friends, everywhere.

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• Related reading: They Are a Minority: The God of Solidarity; Two Visions of Politics.

• Let me give a special shout out to the workers at Hachette Books, who just announced that they are unionizing with the News Guild. The publishing industry is far less unionized than the media, so theirs is an important campaign. You can sign a letter supporting them right here. A couple years back I wrote a book called “The Hammer” about how the labor movement can save us all. Hachette was my publisher. So I expect the company to welcome this unionization with open arms! And look forward to not having to go wave a picket sign down there, although of course I will, if necessary.

• Thank you for reading How Things Work. A relative small percentage of you who read this site also choose to be paid subscribers, and you are the ones who make it financially possible for this place to exist. Independent media is always a tenous industry, so I appreciate each and every one of you. If you enjoy this site and want to help us continue with our work, take a quick second right now and become a paid subscriber yourself. It’s affordable and comes with good karma. Happy May Day, every day.

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Zohran Mamdani’s successful run for NYC mayor last year made New York City’s DSA a legitimate political force. The group’s next big campaign is that of Claire Valdez, a New York Assembly member who is running for US Congress in New York’s 7th district, covering parts of Queens and Brooklyn. Valdez, a union activist, is endorsed by both Mamdani and Bernie Sanders. Her main primary opponent is Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, a more mainstream progressive. Thus the Democratic primary will be a significant measuring stick for DSA’s ability to move safe Democratic districts left.

I spoke to Valdez about her (very good) labor platform, the politics of unions, the future of DSA, and the possibility of an AOC presidential run. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.

How Things Work: You came up through the UAW, both as a member and then as an organizer. How did that shape your politics?

Claire Valdez: I moved to New York in 2015 to work at a really small museum in Long Island City. And like many arts workers, had pretty low wages, long hours, and I started looking for work and [got a job as a program assistant at Columbia University’s visual arts program]. It was in the interview process that I found out it was union. It was in some ways an accident. But I was looking for more time—and working at Columbia was the first time in my life I had a strict nine-to-five, no weekends or nights, a living wage, and hour-long lunch breaks. That was really transformative for me as a worker. Not having to work a second job. Knowing that if I needed time off, I could have it.

I remember the first time that I went to a union meeting. We were finalizing our contract at the time. It was a big meeting of 200 or 300 people in a big auditorium at Columbia. There’s all these people I’ve never seen before, and we’re all talking about what we wanted to see in our contract, if what we had in there was good enough. It was just the most democratic thing I had ever experienced in my life. And I wanted very much to get involved…

In 2022 I joined the bargaining committee and got really plugged in. Got a real crash course on how to bargain a contract. I was elected unit chair of our shop, and learned how to investigate grievances and be with workers in disciplinary meetings, and how to organize—and how to organize across pretty real political and ideological differences, too. When people hear that I organized at Columbia, they think that I organized grad students. I organized clerical workers, and call center workers, and dining hall cashiers. People come from all kinds of backgrounds. It’s a deeply working class union. A lot of people are there for 20 or 30 years. It has provided real stability and a path to the middle class for a lot of people.

Did that union experience motivate you to go into politics? Or were you a very ideological person before that?

Valdez: I, like many of my millennial cohort, was radicalized during the Iraq War. I think the difference was that the union gave me a place to put my anger and frustration and really use it towards productive ends. I’ve always been political. I just didn’t realize that actually politics is something you do, and not just something that happens to you, and you have to have a good opinion about. That it’s possible to change your circumstances if you organize with other people.

You have a robust labor platform. One part of it that jumped out to me is that you advocate for providing federal government funding for union organizing, which has been a pet issue of mine for years. I can’t recall ever seeing it in a Congressional platform. Even unions don’t lobby for it! What’s your vision for that?

Valdez: Right now, we live in a world where the government is supposed to be a kind of neutral arbiter in labor disputes. We shouldn’t be—we should be actively investing in people’s right to organize. We should actively be helping to support workers who are up against really entrenched corporate power, and this is one avenue for doing that. Organizing can be incredibly time intensive, and it can be expensive too. This is some small way to say, “We can help you print literature, and buy the pizzas, and pay for lawyers, and get your feet underneath you while you’re approaching other unions to help out.” Unions are strapped too. The task ahead of us is enormous. The vast majority of Americans do not belong to a union, even though a huge percentage [say they want to]. That’s a real crisis in American life, if people want to organize and they can’t. We should be addressing that crisis with a scale of solution that actually meets the moment.

We in the labor movement have been trying to reform labor law for at least 80 years. We have failed to do it, and the Democratic Party has failed to do it. What’s the political path you see to actually passing some of these reforms in the real world?

Valdez: I think it’ll be hard… but this is really a moment when the labor movement has real popularity in the United States, and there’s real salience in people’s lives. I think people are working more than they’ve ever worked before. Work encroaches on every single moment of our lives, even after we clock out. The threat of AI is really present in people’s lives. There are mass layoffs at Microsoft and Google. Thousands of people are losing their jobs right now and being replaced by AI.

I think people are feeling a squeeze right now that goes beyond affordability, and is hitting at their sense of control over their lives. We need the labor movement to help us with this. We need unions to actively engage in this idea, and have a vision for federal policy that makes it easier for people to get into unions.

2026 will also be a year where there are a lot of progressives running all over the country, a lot of challengers to incumbents. This could be a real sea change. I’m hopeful that a lot of us win, and we can demonstrate that there’s real momentum for this, and that we shouldn’t be taking unions and the labor movement for granted. Unions are not a turnout machine for the Democratic Party. They’re like a central pillar of American life. I think they’ve been taken for granted too long by the Democratic establishment.

Ironically, “Democratic establishment” is where most big unions tend to land, electorally. There are some exceptions, but most didn’t endorse Bernie when he ran for president, most didn’t endorse Zohran until he won the primaries, and most are not endorsing you in your primary either. What’s it going to take to convince the union establishment that the left is not just on their side, but worth going out on a limb for?

Valdez: Yeah. It’s a great question.

I don’t know the answer.

Valdez: Winning helps. We need to demonstrate that we can win, and that we have a real vision for a working class agenda that is in partnership with them. Building a relationship with the labor movement is also part of that task. A lot of these decisions are relational, they’re not really ideological. That is understandable in a world where labor might be on its back foot, facing real challenges. I think when we win we can demonstrate there’s a real constituency for the vision we have.

After Zohran’s win, it seems like DSA is being treated as much more of a serious political force. But during his campaign, his association with DSA was used to try to smear him in a way that reminded me of people who said that because JFK was Catholic, the Vatican would be controlling America. How do you explain your relationship with DSA to voters?

Valdez: What people are coming to understand about DSA is that its power comes from its democracy. It comes from the fact that members have a real say in the direction of the chapter, in the campaigns we take on, in developing strategy… Everyday people who are members of DSA who might not have political science degrees or have read Capital can engage in this process, and help strategize towards what we’re going to be putting our resources into. That’s really powerful. This is why my union really grabbed hold of me. It’s like, “you actually are a smart, strategic, political person, and we need you to help us.” That’s profound democracy that most people don’t experience for most of their lives. That’s why people come out to canvas. That’s why people spend 20 hours a week of unpaid labor doing work to organize for trans right, for bodily autonomy, for a random Assembly campaign. It’s just so meaningful when you tell people that you trust them and believe in them, that they have a lot of power. That’s the role of the labor movement too.

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Have you thought ahead to a day when DSA can be a legitimate electoral alternative for Americans nationally, even outside of blue cities?

Valdez: Zohran’s campaign and election, I think, has real reverberating effects around the world. People are starting to see DSA as a viable political vehicle. I think some people are frightened by that idea, but some people are really excited by it. I would like to see us develop a political program nationally. It will be harder in some places than others. But as Zohran continues to govern, as people continue to see that a democratic socialist can run the largest city in the country, there will be an increasing kind of faith and understanding that democratic socialism equals good governance and real, material improvements for working class people.

You’re running for Congress. There’s a long term trend of Congress becoming less powerful, and under Trump, Congress has been almost completely sidelined from political power. Does that worry you? It seems like even Democratic presidents will have the same incentives to marginalize Congress.

Valdez: Unfortunately, I think that’s true. There are movements to expand Congress. Congress hasn’t been expanded since the [19]20s, even though the population has grown. That’s one thought and idea. I think this is also why I believe so strongly in the labor movement. Real power exists in working people, and when they organize together they can change the balance of power in the United States. We’ve seen that before throughout history. That’s really the place where I want to see more power, taken more seriously, is the labor movement and working people. That’s why I’m running for Congress.

What’s your diagnosis for the rise of Trumpism over the past decade?

Valdez: It is a real failure to put working people at the heart of our agenda. People’s lives have gotten harder. Things are more expensive. Our wages have not gone up. The Democratic Party has not really presented any vision for how that can and should change. I think a lot of it has to do with their capitulation to a donor class and to business interests over the base of the party, working class people. Trump won in 2024 in large part because of the genocide in Gaza, and the fact that the Biden administration wrote blank checks to the Israeli government to bomb refugees, and we all saw it happening—and it continues to happen—in real time. The Democratic Party was unwilling to acknowledge that and acknowledge our absolute complicity in sponsoring it. A lot of people just stayed home in 2024. In my district, a lot of people left the top of the ticket off their ballot. We can’t ignore the fact that the Democratic Party also helped sponsor a genocide. The Trump administration has continued to do so as well. That’s just the most recent outrage that working people had to witness and endure.

Would you like to see AOC run for president?

Valdez: Yeah. That would be fun.

Do you think she will?

Valdez: I don’t know. I think either Senate or president, she could do either one.

Bernie running in 2020, and Zohran running in 2025—just having someone at the top of the ticket who has a real message and can communicate it effectively—is such a game changer for everything down ballot, for changing the electorate. It can be so helpful for the movement.

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BONUS: Five Question NYC Lightning Round With Claire Valdez

Best place to hang on a summer weekend day in New York City?
Valdez: Gotta be in my district. I love McGolrick Park, in Greenpoint.

What’s your favorite restaurant in your district?
Valdez: It’s a bakery, Masa Madre in Sunnyside. They have the best conchas I’ve had in my life.

Best subway line in New York City?
Valdez: It’s not actually the best, but it is my favorite: the M. It’s my train line. It has a beautiful view of the city. I’ll say it, I don’t care.

Which has better rappers, Brooklyn or Queens?
Valdez: I live in Queens, I’m just gonna say Queens. [DEFENSIBLE BUT DEBATABLE]

What’s the coolest neighborhood in Brooklyn or Queens?
Valdez: It’s gotta be my neighborhood, Ridgewood. Which is also the platonic ideal of Queens and Brooklyn.

[Unusually for a politician, none of these answers are preposterous.]

Also

• Previously, in How Things Work NYC politico interviews: Zohran Mamdani; Julie Su; Brad Lander.

• May Day is this Friday. Have YOU made a plan to participate? Find an event near you. Don’t just sit there being all, “People should rise up.” Hit the streets!

• Earlier this week, I published my brief annual State of How Things Work report. The short version is that we are writing a bunch of cool shit and it would be great if we could survive and thrive throughout 2026 and beyond. Support independent media: Become a paid subscriber today. Six bucks a month or $60 for the whole year. Cheap!

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The publication you are reading, How Things Work, turns three years old this week. Incredible news. On these birthdays, I like to write a little overview of what we did here in the past year, and where we are going in the coming year. If you are interested, please read on.

When I had my first real journalism job, which was neither fun nor glamorous nor especially creative, I developed one basic desire: To one day be able to write what I want, and have enough people read it to make it worthwhile. I have that at How Things Work, and I am grateful to all of you for helping to make that possible.

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The Most Popular Stories of the Past Year

1. You’re a Bunch of Cowards! On ICE agents.

2. The Subway Is Not Scary. On urban fear.

3. We Are the Bad Guys. On foreign policy.

4. Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses. On fascists.

5. Remove Your Ring Camera With a Claw Hammer. On home improvement.

6. Intolerable Things. On the Minneapolis Alex Pretti protests.

7. Hate Has to Scatter When Minneapolis Arises. On the Minneapolis general strike.

8. Go Ahead and Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You. On writing.

9. America Is Becoming Dallas. On our Texas future.

10. Cold City, Hot Heart. On Minneapolis.

In addition to these pieces, in the past year we have also published interviews with authors, politicians, government officials, and union leaders. We have published on-the-ground reporting on immigrant persecution in Ohio, ICE in New Orleans, Kamala Harris on book tour, Bernie Sanders in Indiana, centrist zombies in DC, Zohran on the campaign trail, and more. And we have published plenty of other writing about the labor movement, the media, the military, the police, solidarity, AI, racism, climate change, class war, billionaires, idiots, jerks, frauds, and other topics.

The full archive of three years of How Things Work can be read here, for free.

The Socialist Media Model

This site began as an experiment. I wondered if it would be possible to build a sustainable publication without a paywall. As you can tell by the fact that you can read our entire archives for free, nobody is required to pay to read How Things Work. Instead, I simply ask those of you who are able to pay to do so, by becoming paid subscribers. This model appealed to me for a few reasons: First, because like all writers, I want my stuff to be read as widely as possible; second, because as more high quality writing and reporting moves behind paywalls due to the collapse of journalism’s traditional business model, lower income people are left with a lower quality information environment than higher income people, which is just not good; and third, because as a believer in the general principle of “those who have more should kick in a little more in order to help take care of everyone” that underpins socialism itself, I was curious as to whether this system would work in the real world.

Happily, thus far, it has. Every single one of you who has become a paid subscriber or otherwise donated to How Things Work have proven that this model can succeed. I think that is just nice. Thank you, all of you.

That said, I want to be honest about the challenges here as well. From a business perspective, giving your product away for free is obviously not recommended. It incentivizes people to take it and not pay, even if they could. In order to make this work, I have to be able to convince readers to embrace the (thoroughly unfamiliar, in a capitalist world) idea: You don’t have to pay for this, but if you can, you (please) should.

This can sound akin to paying taxes, which feels dreary, or it can sound akin to charity, which feels wheedling and unimportant. I don’t love these comparisons. I like to think of this place more like a public park: It’s open to all, it’s free to use, and there is donation box that pays for the upkeep. If you are not destitute, it is a social good to toss in your fair share to help keep the park open. If you are destitute, don’t worry about it. We’re all in this together. This is the business model of this publication. I do not like asking for money any more than you like being asked for money, but in general I think that it is a good thing to promote this sort of business model, and make it viable, and help it spread.

Here is a simple illustration of who I want to encourage to embrace this model:

HOW THINGS WORK READERS

AROUND 7%: Paid subscribers.
LET’S SAY, GENEROUSLY, 50%: Cannot afford to pay.
REMAINING 43%: Could afford to pay but do not.

When I ask people to consider becoming paid subscribers, I am not trying to squeeze more out of those of you who already pay. Nor am I trying to harangue people who cannot afford to pay. Rather, I am trying to speak to the 40%+ of readers who could pay, but don’t. I am not trying to guilt trip you! No! Ugh! I myself read a number of publications that I like but don’t pay for, simply because there are so many of them. Mine is not the only site worth paying for. I do not expect all 43% of those readers to immediately become paid subscribers. Even better, I don’t need all of you to become paid subscribers. If we can just get a decent chunk of those of you who read this site more than occasionally, and find it valuable, and can afford to pay for it without financially harming yourself, we can keep this place sustainable and growing.

If you fit in that category, I would truly appreciate it if you become a paid subscriber today, to keep How Things Work going for another year. Paid subscribers create a predictable income stream that allows me to do this like a job, not a daily scramble for tips. There are a variety of subscription rates you can choose, to fit your willingness and ability to pay.

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You can also make a one-time or recurring donation to our reporting fund.

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If you are interested in organized labor, politics, and America’s crisis of inequality, you can buy my book “The Hammer” from an independent book store.

Order "The Hammer"

Over the past three years, a small number of supporters have made larger donations to support How Things Work. If you would like to make a larger donation—or if you would like to invite me to speak to your group, or if you just want to say hi—you can email me directly at Hamilton.Nolan@gmail.com.

Journalists take a backseat to no one when it comes to navel-gazing and self-importance. I apologize if you find these periodic updates about this place tedious. In the grand scheme of things, this is just one small independent publication in a large sea of media. Then again, a lot of small things together can become big things. To be able to write what I want, to speak my mind freely, to go to where things are happening and write about them, to interview interesting people, and to have readers willing to take their time to read this—this, my friends, is the dream. We are living it together. How Things Work would not have made it one year, or two years, or three years without all of you. Thank you. We won’t stop.

-Hamilton

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In order to operate effectively, journalism must be powerful. Not the power of beautiful language, but tangible power—the social, cultural, political, and economic power to assert and protect its own interests. In this, it is no different from any other endeavor that involves clashing with the competing interests of powerful people. If you don’t have the power to protect yourself, the other powers will crush you.

People in journalism tend to dislike talking about their field in these terms. Fifty years of weaponized political attacks on “media bias” have succeeded in making journalists gun shy about speaking plainly. “Power” smacks of politics, which smacks of partisanship, and journalists have been trained to see this as a road leading towards a rhetorical battle better left alone. That does not change the reality, though. The practice of journalism involves finding and sharing true information about powerful people and institutions. It involves prying open doors that powerful people and institutions would rather keep closed. How do you either convince or force them to open those doors? With power. You must have something to offer, and something to threaten with. A carrot and a stick.

For journalism, the carrot is access to an audience. Powerful people want that. The stick is—not to be grandiose about it—the truth. Journalism can tell a lot of people true things that may make you look bad. (Sensationalized smears can also serve this function, but we are discussing real journalism here, which holds the truth as its purpose, and not its more nakedly weaponized cousins.) Powerful people don’t want that. These are the twin incentives that legitimate journalists wield.

An important piece of context about being a journalist is: As a rule, powerful people don’t want to talk to you. Why would they? They are already powerful. The status quo is their friend. Talking to journalists offers uncertain upside and a lot of potential downside. Yes, they want to get in front of your audience, but they don’t want to end up at the center of a negative story. In a vacuum, the starting position of most of the people that journalists want to talk to is a closed door. The logical move for really powerful people is to try to get the audience of journalism without the risk, by building their own parallel simulacrum of a media ecosystem that works only for their own interests. This already exists everywhere from Fox News to Access Hollywood. This is the form of journalism that powerful people prefer. If real journalism is going to exist, it must find a way to overcome the fact that, as a class, the people it wants to cover have every incentive to ignore, avoid, and discredit it.

The easiest card for powerful people to play against journalism is access. Access to them. Why did a politician vote that way? What does the police chief think about those protests against his cops? What is a CEO doing about his company’s scandal? Why did that famous celebrity do a racist rant on social media? The answer is: no answer. They will not talk to you about it. That is their power. What will you, a journalist, do about it? Lecture them about their responsibility to help create a robust public discourse?

Access to powerful people and institutions who would rather not give you access has always been a fundamental quandary for journalism to solve. There are only a few ways to solve it. One way is for journalism to fold. You say to the powerful: “In exchange for access, we will be nice!” You write puff pieces. You censor yourself, to greater or lesser degrees. You don’t act in ways that would piss off the people you need access from. Fox News types do this, sure, but even the most legitimate beat reporters—who must maintain access to the most important newsmakers on their beats in order to do their jobs—struggle with this temptation. It is a way to make the people you write about happy, and to make your job as a journalist much easier. Unfortunately it also eliminates much of the value of journalism.

Another, more honorable approach is to forswear access. If the powerful refuse to give you access if you write honestly, fuck them. Writing honestly is not negotiable. So you do your job without access. You can write a profile of someone without speaking directly to them, by speaking instead to a variety of people who know them. You can write about what is happening inside of companies without the company’s help, by cultivating inside sources. You can write about what politicians are doing without their official statements, by seeking out well-informed leaders. You can cover events without being granted press access, by going in with the public. You can write incisive, observational work just by learning a lot about things. And you can always talk to the majority of people on earth—regular people—who do not have the same contentious relationship with the press that powerful people do. You can build a healthy and worthwhile journalism practice by finding ways to tell the truth without access to people who would rather not talk to you, treating access as an occasional treat, rather than as the foundation of your work. Indeed, this is the variety of journalism that I and most of the best writers I know have practiced for most of our careers. Out of necessity.

But it is important that someone gets some access. Most US Presidents do not want to talk to me, but as long as they are talking to the AP or the New York Times or whoever, I can still hear from them. Most CEOs do not want to talk to me, but as long as they are talking to the Wall Street Journal, they are at least talking to someone. And so on. Because information is public, journalism is a collective practice. We don’t all need to do everything, but we all—journalists and readers alike—have a vested interest in someone somewhere doing everything. In order for the doors of access to stay open, the powerful must have some fear of journalism. This is the unvarnished truth. Not fear that we are going to unfairly smear them, but fear of the fact that journalists will find and publish the truth no matter what. This is what creates the incentive for the powerful to talk to us, in order to at least tell their side of every story. This incentive serves all of journalism, and informs all of the public. We can never let this go, or everyone who cares about the truth is done for.

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Creating and protecting the power of journalism—the power that balances out the competing power of the powerful people we write about—is also a collective responsibility. Whether we personally get access or not, every journalist is responsible for doing our part to build the power necessary to make journalism itself a force to be reckoned with; to make it a force powerful enough to exist, and serve the public good, on a playing field where powerful interests would rather crush it or co-opt it or marginalize it. That does not imply anything devious. All that is necessary from us is to tell the truth. The truth is journalism’s power. The truth is journalism’s credibility. To pursue hard stories, to write incisively without fear of retaliation, to report aggressively because things are important, to resist the urge to allow ourselves to be flattered or bought off or intimidated by society’s various power centers—that’s on all of us. A high school newspaper editor speaking the truth about a bad principal and an investigative journalist grinding through leaked documents and online journalists losing their jobs because they pissed off some litigious rich guy are all, in the broadest sense, doing the same thing: Keeping journalism strong by doing what journalism is supposed to do.

Those who get the access do not get it on their own. They get it, in part, thanks to the power that all journalists help to create. So the access carries responsibility. If you get access to the president and then sit idly by as he rambles without answering your question, you have failed to live up to your responsibility to the public. If you get access to the wife of one of the world’s richest men and come away with nothing juicier than “‘I am not talking politics,’ she said. ‘No, no, no, no, no. No way,’” then you have failed to live up to your responsibility to your audience. If you get access to the editor-in-chief’s chair at an entire national news network and proceed to shut down critical reporting and run puff pieces about the nation’s most powerful people, you have, in a real sense, failed to live up to your responsibility to journalism itself. It’s not just about you and your shitty job, here. You get the access because thousands of journalists did thousands of stories to build credibility with an audience to give you the leverage to make the powerful people come to the table. Squander that, and you are not just advertising your own shamelessness; you are squandering something that you are too stupid to know is valuable, like a toddler gleefully tossing a Rolex watch off the side of a boat.

This weekend, the journalists who do not understand journalism will gather in a Washington ballroom for the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner. This grotesque little schmoozefest is extra-revolting this year, what with the Trump administration’s overt attacks on the free press. But in reality, it has always been revolting, independent of the party in power. It is revolting not because a particular political attendee did a particular bad thing and then shared a cheery evening dining with Wolf Blitzer. Rather, it is revolting because it embodies the elevation of access over journalistic value. It is a ceremony that shows the entire nation what it looks like to make the deal to have access in exchange for giving up the demand to use that access for the public good. It is a spectacle in which a room full of many of the most prestigious and highest paid journalists in America proudly celebrate their own neutering. Happy pets coming home from the vet with no balls, still wagging their tails. They’re just happy to be there.

Access is nice. Access is alluring. Access is also dangerous. It is a drug prone to causing grandiosity, narcissism, and delusion. Like all drugs, it is healthier when used sparingly. Make them open the door grudgingly. If they’re too happy to see you, it’s a trap.

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• Related reading: The Press Is the Government’s Enemy and That Is Good; The Public Good, Not Patriotism; Fuck the White House Correspondents Association Dinner (2012).

• Occasionally I like to shout out some good books that have come out in recent weeks. Here are three from writers that I respect: “The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own,” by Les Leopold; “Chains of Command,” by Brian Callaci; and “How to Sell a Genocide,” by Adam Johnson.

• For the 23rd consecutive year of my journalism career I will not be attending the White House Correspondents dinner. Instead I will be chilling with you—my treasured, wise readers. How Things Work is an example of an independent media outlet able to exist wholly outside of the grasp of the Washington, DC black hole. Credit for this goes to all of you, who enable this publication to exist by becoming paid subscribers. You can join the ranks of paid subscribers for just six bucks a month or $60 for the year. It’s a good cause and I think it is worth the money. I thank you all for doing your part. Keep coming back.

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As an undergrad, I spent a couple of years as a philosophy major, before dropping out. Therefore I never quite reached the level of solving the mystery of consciousness, or understanding what the fuck Wittgenstein was talking about. The main thing that I took from my small philosophy education was much more practical: the ability to tell when someone is just talking out of their ass.

Encountering the writing of genuine philosophers at the age of 18 makes you feel, intellectually, like a slow mouse being toyed with by a cat. That’s because, like most 18-year-olds—and, if we’re being honest, most humans—I was used to developing whatever philosophical or ethical or political positions I held via the time-honored process of “thinking about how I feel in my gut for two seconds and then conjuring up justifications to support that feeling.” This is how most people decide their positions on most issues! Socrates figured out how to prove this long ago, in such an embarrassing fashion that they made him drink poison. The microscopic depth of our reasoning on most things can be seen in any Youtube video of a snide comedian making normal people look like idiots by asking a few factually informed questions.

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Philosophy offered my first exposure to genuine systematic thinking. These people didn’t just decide what was right and wrong based on their emotions; they thought about the metaphysics and then the, you know, phenomenology(?), and then the various other levels of philosophy, and then, finally, upon that tower of inarguable logic, placed the scales of morality. Some philosophers are wrong and some are crazy and some are impenetrable and I would certainly never recommend that you try to follow all of them at once, but I am grateful to them for teaching me the basic lesson that your beliefs should be based on principles. Your values should be in line with your principles. There should be underlying reasons for your conclusions. These principles and values and reasons and conclusions should all fit together in a reasonably coherent way. This lesson alone was well worth those years of half-assed attendance by me.

You may not agree with someone’s principles and conclusions, but the fact that they have some set of coherent principles means that they are, at least, trying to reason things out on an honest basis. This sort of argument is, it goes without saying, the minority of what people experience in the real world. The most common reference point most Americans have for this might be the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, which we are all forced to ponder in public school. Say what you will about these documents, but they contained arguments with foundations. All men are created equal, and therefore, X. Despite their hypocrisies and inconsistencies, the founding fathers did at least offer centuries of Americans at least one single example of an attempt to lay out political principles coherently.

The opposite of this—people making political arguments based on pure emotional backfilling—is so common that it is usually not worth remarking on. I want to make an exception, though, for the particular category of “Dumbass emotional arguments masquerading as genuine philosophy.” We can’t make fun of every public pseudo-intellectual or politician who hastily scrounges up laughable justifications for their positions. (We may commit that sin ourselves sometimes.) But we can and should make fun of public figures who do this while also posing as some sort of modern age philosopher kings.

Give me a break, buddy!

Which brings me to Palantir. Evil surveillance company from hell. You all know it. Alex Karp, the lapsed academic who became Palantir’s loudmouth CEO/ Satan, published a book last year called The Technological Republic. The book is not just an attempt to situate Palantir as the solution to The West’s various social crises; it is also a self-conscious effort to position Alex Karp as a public intellectual of the first order, a man who is both thinker and doer, who has systematically diagnosed the ills of our economy and culture and built the terrifying, capitalist totalitarian private market solution for them.

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The book’s website prominently features this quote from a George Will review: “Not since Allan Bloom’s astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind—more than one million copies sold—has there been a cultural critique as sweeping as Karp’s.” Now you know a guy is thirsty for intellectual respect if he’s waving around that quote.

Anyhow, today, Palantir has gone mildly viral by posting on Twitter, “Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief.” Followed by 22 bullet points that sum up the book’s arguments. At last, a version of the book that tech people can read! The instant reaction to this bullet point list among non-tech people was “Wow, this is some fascist shit.” Which is true. But I want to make an even more rudimentary point that is, I think, a very important piece of context: This is not a coherent set of arguments at all. It is not a philosophy. It is not a set of intelligible ethics. Rather, it is a list of angry reactions to being yelled at—given a somber voice and dressed up as some sort of wondrous work of intellect.

To illustrate this, let me re-order some of the key points on this list into more honest groupings.

I WANT TO BE FAMOUS AND POWERFUL BUT ALSO I WANT PEOPLE TO STOP SAYING MEAN THINGS ABOUT ME

• 9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

• 11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

TECH PEOPLE LIKE ME ARE COOL. HEROIC, EVEN

• 16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

I WANT TO BE AN EXTREMELY INFLUENTIAL POLITICAL FIGURE WITHOUT PEOPLE MAKING FUN OF THE CRAZY SHIT I DO OR HAVE DONE

• 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

• 19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

THE SPECIFIC WAYS THAT PALANTIR MAKES MONEY ARE ACTUALLY NOBLE ACTS OF PATRIOTISM

• 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

• 5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

• 7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

• 12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

• 17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

DECADES OF BEING INSULATED FROM NORMAL LIFE BY GREAT WEALTH AND INTERNET ADDICTION HAVE CAUSED ME TO EMBRACE A GRAB BAG OF NEO-FASCIST IDEAS THAT ARE COINCIDENTALLY FLATTERING TO PEOPLE LIKE ME

• 20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

• 21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

• 22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Seen like this, Alex Karp’s self-serious techno-fascist listicle becomes more preposterous than scary. Is this really a bold and sweeping “cultural critique” deserving of great public respect? Or might it more accurately be described as “Alex Karp putting his own insecurities, craving for approval, and lust for money into bullet point format?”

It’s a list a child would make! “MY PHILOSOPHY: 1. You must be NICE to me. 2. My hunger for candy shows that I am SMART.” It’s embarrassing! Have some self respect, dude. You are a right wing billionaire weapons merchant. You are the human face of technological totalitarianism. You are the embodiment of just how close America is to a horrifying public-private partnership of fascism. You are the closest thing that we have to Dr. Evil. Stop acting so thirsty. It’s unbecoming. Your job is not to grovel for praise from Silicon Valley people who have not finished a book in the past 14 years. Your job is to keep doing cartoonishly evil shit until a hero finally vanquishes you. We all know you’re awful. Don’t work so hard to be awful in new and more tedious ways.

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Previously, in Awful People

• You’re a Bunch of Cowards! (ICE agents)

• Adult Babies (College presidents)

• Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation (Pamela Paul)

• Getting Yelled at by Dumbasses (Fascists)

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The most meaningful state level wealth tax in America may soon be on the ballot in California. There, a major healthcare workers union, SEIU-UHW, is spearheading an effort to get a very unique wealth tax on the ballot for voters this November. This tax would target only billionaires who were residents of California as of January 1. It would charge them a one-time levy of 5% of their wealth, with most of the money earmarked to fill the hole in state healthcare funding that Medicaid cuts in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is set to cause.

Already, the proposed wealth tax has caused a number of mega-billionaires to threaten to leave the state, even as they pour tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to stop the measure. It has prompted much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the right wing media. California’s ambitious Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has come out against it. On the left, support for wealth taxes is seen as a necessity to combat America’s inequality and oligarchy.

I spoke to two of the people at SEIU-UHW who are leading the push for the wealth tax: Suzanne Jimenez, the union’s chief of staff, and Dave Regan, the union’s president. They say they are on track to submit the signatures required to get the measure on the ballot within the next few weeks. They talked to me about trying to prevent the decimation of healthcare in California, while navigating opposition from billionaires and their political allies. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

How Things Work: Tell me the origin story of your decision to pursue this wealth tax. Presumably there are a lot of different routes you could have pursued to tackle this crisis in health care funding. Why this?

Suzanne Jimenez: It really all started with HR 1, “The One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law by the President last year. There’s a whole coalition across the country that did everything we can to stop HR 1. We were not successful. When the president signed that into law, that really is decimating health care across the country. But specifically in California, we are looking at $100 billion in cuts to our health care system in the next five years. That means hospitals are going to close, clinics are going to close, ERs are going to close, services will be cut back. When we look at home care services, nursing home services, those are things that seniors, veterans rely on. But also, these cuts mean that, on the conservative side, 150,000 health care workers will be laid off. Millions of people will lose access to care, in terms of their insurance. We’re also seeing what’s being projected as four million businesses are going to see increases in the premiums that they pay for their employees. So, all of that to say, if we do nothing we are going to see a real collapse of our health care system in California. That’s really where this initiative came from, is to solve a problem that was created by the federal administration.

Why target billionaires with a wealth tax, instead of pushing for more traditional tax increases?

Jimenez: Looking at the scale of the problem, we knew we needed lots of revenue to come in. When we looked at how we could generate revenue, it was clear we have a small group—just over 200 people—of the most fortunate people, not just in California but in the country. If they paid a one time 5% emergency tax, we could at least raise enough revenue for the next five years and solve the problem in the more immediate term, while we figured out a more long term solution. So honestly, it was: How do we generate the revenue needed? How does it impact the lowest number of people? And these are the folks that could pay this tax.

Dave Regan: There’s about 200 and some odd billionaires in California. Six years ago, their aggregate wealth was $700 billion. Today, it’s $2.2 trillion. So these 200 folks have had their fortunes grow by one and a half trillion dollars in six years, and all of that is outside the purview of the traditional tax system. So when you have to solve a problem of this magnitude, this seemed to us to be an obvious place to go…

Emmanuel Saez, Darien Shanske, and Brian Galle [economists who helped to design this wealth tax proposal], they had worked on legislation in the California legislature previously. There was a bill that was introduced. It could never get a hearing, even in California. So the other reality is the only way you can overcome the way that politics functions is to put this in front of voters.

The obvious problem with state wealth taxes is that billionaires can move. Which is a challenge that every state-level wealth tax will face. How do you think about that?

Jimenez: There’s two pieces to this. One, that’s always the campaign message, scare tactic, that wealthy people use—that a wealth tax is going to drive wealthy people away from fill-in-the-blank state. When we look at Massachusetts, they passed a wealth tax, and it’s on millionaires. The largest argument against it was that all the millionaires were going to leave. Massachusetts had something like just upwards of 400,000 millionaires. After this tax has passed, they now have over 600,000 millionaires. So that hasn’t come out to be true. Washington [which recently passed a new state tax on incomes over $1 million], we heard the same argument. That’s not coming out to be true.

The way that [our] initiative was written, it’s based on residency as of January 1 of this year. If you were really trying to get out of paying this tax, you would have had to change your residency. That doesn’t mean moving, that doesn’t mean buying a house in another state, it doesn’t mean getting a driver’s license. Residency is very difficult to change. So we think that all of the reports on this are overblown. Even if a couple of them moved out of the state for a one time tax, it won’t hurt the economy and it won’t hurt our state… part of why we made this a one time tax was that we wanted to be able to talk about that this is not about driving out folks that are innovating or creating jobs. This is about solving a problem, specifically all of the cuts in health care.

But when someone like Sergey Brin moves to Miami, he’s taking a large percentage of the wealth you’d like to tax out of the state, right?

Jimenez: No. The state’s budget is based off of income tax, primarily. Sergey does not get much income. That’s been another thing that’s very deceptive that these ultrawealthy folks have been moving in the media. “If we leave, then the state budget is going to be decimated.” They pay two and a half percent of the total state budget, comes from these billionaires. Teachers, firefighters, working people pay much more.

Regan: Our measure taxes their worldwide wealth. It’s not a California calculation. As Suzanne said, it’s based on residency. So to be precise, there is no economic incentive to leave California. There’s irrational reasons to do it, but there’s not a rational reason. If we can agree that you can’t legally change your residency in ten days at the end of calendar year 2025, which is what some of these guys were saying they were gonna do.

[Specific taxation decisions would ultimately be made by the state’s Franchise Tax Board.]

Do you think the shame argument can work? When billionaires openly move in order to try to avoid state taxes, can we shame them effectively for that?

Jimenez: I would love to believe yes—only because when we’re thinking about the magnitude of the problem we’re trying to solve here, why are we not talking about 39 million people whose health care is going to be at risk? Or 50% of California children rely on Medical/ Medicaid, and nobody’s talking about kids, seniors, all the people that won’t have access to health care because of the cuts brought on by HR 1. Yet we’re talking about these poor billionaires. That’s where the shame needs to come. Why are they not stepping up? One time, 5%, let’s make sure there’s not a health care collapse.

California governor Gavin Newsom opposes the wealth tax. I read the Politico story, Dave, that reports that when you met with Newsom, and he asked you to withdraw the measure. And your quote is, “I said: ‘Governor, this is our solution. We have a solution. Do you have a solution?’ And he said, ‘I do not have a solution.’” What do you think is behind Newsom’s opposition? Is it about him running for president in 2028?

Regan: I think it is the obvious. I think it is that he’s running for the presidency, and he’s relying on enormously wealthy people to fund his effort. I said that to him—that if I was sitting in your chair, Gavin, I might be making that argument, but there has to be a solution. It’s okay to say this isn’t the solution. But what is the solution to this problem that is literally about tens of millions of people? You may be running for president, but you are still the governor of California until the end of this year. And this potential looming health care collapse is the largest problem facing California. I don’t think that’s debatable.

Your union is spending a lot of money on this effort. What did you say to your members to get them behind this?

Regan: When we lost [the fight against HR 1], and people say, what’s going to happen now? Are we going to see service reductions? Are we going to see layoffs? Are we going to see people lose their coverage? The honest answer is—yes. So what are we going to do about this? We’re a large local union. We’re fortunate that we’re well resourced. But it’s not a tough case to make people that when the midrange projection is 150,000 lost jobs, over three million people losing insurance coverage, 23, 24 million commercial insurance customers, including us, seeing double digit premium increases… the question we ask ourselves is, are we capable of doing something that answers this fundamental threat? Not dealing with it at the back end, to pick up the pieces. Can we do anything to prevent it? And we can do something. Our members, we’re spending millions and millions of dollars on this. All of those decisions get approved by our executive board. People are as excited about this as they’ve ever been. They’re glad and proud and happy that they have an organization that can at least compete a little bit with the most powerful people in the world. That’s a really good thing.

It’s a really interesting story of labor driving a big issue. In your proposal, though, most of the money is earmarked for health care. I know that some other unions have wondered about their own issues—teachers, for example, saying “What about education?” To what extent have you been able to unify labor in California behind this?

Regan: I understand the teachers’ position, and we’ve talked to both big teachers unions. The One Big Beautiful Bill did not cut education. It cut Medicaid. Medicaid is the largest health insurance program in America. It covers over 80 million people. That’s what President Trump and the Congress went after to finance, yet again, another huge tax break. We are trying to restore funding that was specifically attacked by the President. And 10% of what we’re doing is earmarked for public education and food assistance. It’s not like we’re doing nothing. But the first thing you have to do is that, an attack on the whole of the healthcare system predicated on Medicaid, you’ve got to fix that. And this doesn’t detract from anyone else. And if we don’t fix that, then the state is gonna be taking money from the education budget, from the social services budget, from everything else we do, because you’ve got millions and millions of people who are showing up for uncompensated care. Somebody’s got to pay that bill.

Have there been any surprises for you in terms of who supports this measure, and who doesn’t?

Regan: [Democratic candidate for California governor] Katie Porter, who has cultivated this reputation as a progressive. What does that mean, Katie, when you can’t get behind this? And Eric Swalwell, who bailed out of the race for good reasons, he wasn’t a proponent of this. This is why workers are cynical about politics.

The other Democratic candidate for governor is Tom Steyer, a billionaire himself. He would have to pay the tax.

Regan: Steyer is for it.

It seems like states will have to show and prove that these measures work in order to elevate the profile of wealth taxes as an issue. Are you thinking about the path to a national wealth tax? Have you been talking to others about that?

Regan: The One Big Beautiful Bill took a trillion dollars out of the national Medicaid budget. Five years for California is $100 billion. But there’s a parallel situation in the other 49 states… those folks are facing the same freight train coming at them that we’re facing. We have the ability to do something in California. The question is, for the other 49 states, what are you doing? California is 40 million people, but whatever state you’re in, it’s proportional. Over 20% of the population is covered by Medicaid. The entire healthcare system is affected when you blow that hole in it.

Where is the Congressional and national political leadership on this? That, to me, is surprising. What could be more central to the well being of the population? This is a catastrophe. We think that word is fair. We’re not doing that just to be flippant about it. This is a genuine catastrophe, and it’s being obscured because of this kind of narrative around the lifestyles of the rich and famous, as opposed to what’s going on with the majority of people in this country.

Jimenez: A lot of the coverage on the initiative itself has been focused on billionaires. At the end of the day, the only reason why we introduced this initiative was to solve this problem. What’s heading towards California if we do nothing, if this doesn’t pass, is that not just patients but all Californians are going to lose access to care. We’re going to see closures of hospitals, clinics, and other different health care services… that’s what we’re trying to solve here. Everything else about billionaires and what they’re talking about really is second to this enormous collapse that’s heading our way.

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• Previously, in How Things Work labor interviews: Shawn Fain on class war; Sara Nelson on one member, one vote; Gwen Mills on new organizing; Jeff Schuhrke on foreign policy; Eric Blanc on worker to worker organizing; Julie Su on economic justice; A striking journalist. Also: The Real Litmus Test for Democratic Presidential Candidates (it’s a wealth tax).

• Books. Unions. Two good things that we must preserve at all costs. I wrote a book about the labor movement, and how and why it can be the tool to turn around America’s inequality crisis. There is a lot of fun to read reporting about worker struggles in there too. It is called “The Hammer,” and you can order it from an independent book store, or wherever books are sold. Good thing to give to anyone you want to RADICALIZE.

• Another good thing to preserve: Independent media. Here we all are, reading How Things Work, a real live independent media publication. This place is funded directly by readers like you who think it is worth preserving, and therefore choose to kick in a few bucks to become paid members. If you can afford to do so, I hope that you do that as well. That’s how we keep rolling and stay ahead of the corporate AI media death star. Thank you all for being here.

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On Sunday there was a big union rally in Manhattan. Zohran Mamdani spoke, and Bernie Sanders spoke, and they were both very good, but in reality, the headliners were there in order to fill up the place so that everyone could listen to the workers speak.

In the heart of the event, about a dozen working people from a whole variety of unions took the stage, one after the other, to give short talks about their own struggles. It is not so common to find yourself in a big crowd at a professionally produced event where everyone is listening intently to regular people. As Studs Terkel proved long ago, regular people often have the most interesting and important things to say.

A Delta flight attendant said: “I’ve had many experiences on the aircraft and abroad that have shown me that my employer will never care about me as much as these flight attendants right here when we share that jumpseat. They’ve done things for me such as giving me safety tips in a new city; helping me get emergency medical equipment while I’m assessing an unconscious passenger on the floor; or even finding me a hotel room when our company has ‘lost me’ in the system, and I’m stranded with no place to sleep.”

A New York City municipal worker said: “Right before Thanksgiving, over 30,000 New Yorkers were at risk of losing Medicaid. Right around the holidays! And what was the cause of this? A failed AI system. It was city workers, union workers, my own DC37 family, that worked overtime throughout the holidays when the system failed us to carry that burden. And our jobs are threatened? We are the expendable ones?”

A special education teacher from Queens said: “Our field is highly devalued. You see it all the time in the news. We are constantly looked down upon. There is no profession that exists without schooling by a teacher. Hello!… The burnout in our profession is real. But still we are expected to work over 40 years in the same capacity if we want to retire with our full benefits.”

A concierge at a luxury condo in Manhattan said: “I’m sitting across the table with billionaire building owners fighting for a new contract, and they want us to give back our health care premium. They want to mess with our wages. We’re not having none of that… If we vote to strike on midnight, April 20, we will walk off the job. And one thing I know for sure is that rich people do not like to be inconvenienced. We’re talking about people that may have to put out their garbage. Noooo!”

An Amazon delivery driver who is also a working musician said: “I have learned a hard and often repetitive lesson: that everyone is an artist until rent is due. That my work and creativity are limited to what is in my bank account. Which means if I want to bring my ideas and music to life, I have to sacrifice 40 hours of my life to a corporation that doesn’t give a shit about people. That doesn’t sit right with me.”

A barista at Starbucks said: “Before I worked at Starbucks I was at Chipotle, under then-CEO Brian Niccol. We were understaffed, underpaid, and underworked… In 2025, I started working at Starbucks, under our CEO—Brian Niccol. And would you believe it? We are understaffed, underpaid, and underworked. But now I am a member of the union that I looked up to.”

As worker after worker spoke—a video game worker, and a journalist, and a bank teller, and a museum worker—the question came to me: When do you ever see this, in America? When do you see all of these very different types of working people coming together, and sharing their stories, and clapping and cheering and lifting one another up? Nowhere. There is nowhere that a scene like this ever plays out, except at a union rally.

Bernie talked about economic policy, and Zohran talked about city policy, and the union leaders talked about labor policy, and the workers talked about workplace policies. But underneath it all was a deeper ethic. It was the ethic of solidarity: Your fight is mine, and my fight is yours, and we will stand together. We are all family. We will support one another. More simply, it is a vision that rests on love. Love as the guiding force in our interactions with one another. The solidarity, and the organizing, and the political action, and the policy choices are all downstream of the foundation of love. If you decide that you will love humanity then the choices that follow will make themselves.

This is one of two fundamental ethics that give rise to the politics of the world. The other one is fear. If fear is your guiding principle, your dominant emotion, your primary motivating force, then your interactions with mankind will follow a separate but equally understandable path. You will barricade yourself from others, you will guard what you have, you will protect your own people from other people that you perceive not as comrades but as threats. You will build walls and buy guns and hire soldiers and hoard money and close your fist instead of open your arms. You will seek to dominate others as a way to get ahead of them dominating you. If fear is the basis of your vision, then all of these things become common sense, and the things that are motivated by love come to be seen as silly, utopian, unrealistic, openings to be exploited by the more steely-eyed people like you who understand how dangerous this world really is.

Starting from a place of love produces one set of politics, and starting from a place of fear produces another. You can recognize the two sets of policies that arise just by looking at the world today.

It is worth noting that which one of these starting points you choose is not an observation about how the world is—it is a choice about how you want the world to be. To settle on a politics of love is not to deny that the world can be a scary place. It is to decide that the way to make it better is to love one another rather than to kill one another. Solidarity does not arise because nobody is rude, selfish, angry, or annoying. It arises out of the understanding that we are all that way. The fact that people have bad qualities does not have to mean that our entire orientation towards life must be guided by those qualities. It can mean instead that we adopt the opposite qualities, and watch the force of the good unravel the bad.

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This is not a modern quandary. Wise people for thousands of years have understood these dynamics. This is the Christian ethic as well, perverted though it has been by mankind. View the world with love, and things like, for example, waging a war in the name of economic domination becomes unthinkable. It violates every principle of solidarity with mankind. It simply cannot be done if you hold solidarity in your heart. But if you accept fear of danger and the subsequent need to do whatever is necessary to protect your chosen people as your starting point, it can be easily justified.

You see a homeless person on the street. Is that person your brother? Then it goes without saying that you need to do what is necessary to help him. You need to figure out how to house him and take care of his needs and give him a path back to a decent life. You need to figure out how to create the infrastructure to accomplish those things. You need to build an agency to do so, and staff it, and tax the public to pay for it. Thus politics are produced from a simple starting point of love. If you start from the opposite point, the politics write themselves as well. That homeless person is a possible threat. He might steal and he is dirty and you don’t want to see him. You have to build a police department and a jail and tax the public to pay the cop to pick the guy up and put him in a cage. Both of these paths follow naturally from their origin.

Politics can be intricate and confusing and riddled with personality clashes and egos and demands to reconcile competing claims of necessity. It is worth, sometimes, taking a breath and remembering why we believe the things we believe, why we feel that it is worth doing the things we do. Center yourself back on your basic guiding belief and the cacaphony of politics will quiet down and the questions will answer themselves.

Do you know the most frustrating things I have ever participated in, the things that made me want to scream at people and cuss them out the most? Unions! Because unions force us to deal with other people as equals, and other people have just as many annoying qualities as I do. But when I feel those frustrations, I can step back and remember that all people are the same and it is necessary for us to love one another and to embrace the principle of solidarity and therefore it is necessary to trudge the sometimes excruciating road to build the unions to win the difficult fights to take care of one another.

Life is not a fairy tale. Having good politics does not mean that life will be easy. It just means that you will be able to look back on your life and know that you tried to make the whole world better and not worse. You will organize the unions and sit in the meetings and pay your taxes and do the socialism because you know that if we all do this then everything will be better for everyone. Because you would rather say, “Hey, I got your back” than “Hey, I got mine, so fuck you.” At union rallies, they often chant, “We believe that we will win.” “We,” in this case, is everyone. We believe in humanity. There is no winning a fight against ourselves.

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• Related reading: We’re All Mice Trying to Chew Through a Trillion Dollar Tree; The God of Solidarity; New York Socialist City; How to Put Money Directly Into Union Power.

• C-Span has a video of Sunday’s entire rally, which you can watch here. The rally launched a nonprofit called Union Now to help fund union organizing and strikes, which you can support here. If you’re in New York City, you can support 32BJ SEIU building workers on the eve of their possible strike by coming to a big ass rally tomorrow, Wednesday April 15, at 3 PM at Park Ave and 79th street. Should be fun. We are family.

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Today I want to tell you about something new and important that is about to be launched into the world.

How did America get to the horrifying place it is in today? While there is no single explanation, 20 years of writing about this question has led me to a fairly straightforward story. After World War 2, one in three American workers was a union member. The power of working people was high. As a result, we had the greatest shared prosperity this nation has ever seen.

Over the next 75 years, the power of unions was severely eroded by a legal and political assault led by corporate America and its allies. That this happened is not surprising. It is just the incentives of capitalism at work. Companies—even more than the public—understand that unions are powerful. They understand that unions are capable of moving wealth away from investors and into the pockets of working people. Attacking existing unions and making it very hard to build new unions is common sense for these corporations. They have been very successful. Today, fewer than one in ten American workers is a union member—despite the fact that a large majority of workers say that they would join a union if they could.

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The enormous rise in economic inequality that has produced our modern American oligarchy and gone a long way towards capturing our political system was directly enabled by the decline in power of unions. Battered as they are, however, unions still exist. Fifteen million people are still union members. After getting involved in unions myself, I witnessed firsthand their transformative ability to give power to formerly powerless people in a workplace. As a labor reporter, I have seen countless examples of how a union can create economic and political power for workers who were ignored and exploited before they had a union. Over the past decade, I came to understand that—contrary to conventional wisdom—unions are the most accessible, potent, and realistic road to power that most regular people can access. I also came to understand that because unions naturally fight against inequality, they have the ability to turn around the exact crisis that has gotten our country to where we are. In other words, despite their decline, unions remain the single most important tool to fix the single most important problem in America.

The first challenge to unlocking this potential is to help many more people organize unions. This is hard, but we know how to do it. It can be done. The second challenge is helping workers who have unions win contracts and other vital fights against companies. It is tragic to see a group of workers struggle and win a union, only to be thwarted when they try to get the contract they deserve. This problem, too, is hard, but not a mystery. It can be done.

Solving both of these problems requires a lot of resources. It requires money. Some of that money can come from existing unions, but that is not enough. We need help. We need a reliable pipeline of money from donors, from foundations, and from regular concerned people—a pipeline directly into union organizing, and winning hard union fights, including strikes. While there are many great nonprofits in the labor world, and many good small and large workers groups that you can donate to, there is not one clear, well-defined way for you to make a donation and know that it will go to directly build national union power.

A few years ago, I wrote a book about all this, called “The Hammer.” One of the main characters in the book was Sara Nelson, the head of the Association of Flight Attendants. Over the course of many months, she spoke repeatedly about her desire to build a new organization that would help to solve the problems I just described. I’m happy to say that after much work by many righteous people, that organization is here. It is called Union Now. It is going to formally launch tomorrow.

Tomorrow, there will be a launch rally in New York City, with Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, Sara Nelson, and a host of people from many different unions. The rally starts at 2 pm at Terminal 5 in Manhattan. If you are anywhere near New York City, you should come. The RSVP link is here.

I cannot count the number of times that people have asked me over the years: “If I want to help unions, where should I donate?” In response to this, I have always rattled off a list of independent unions and organizing nonprofits and political groups and publications. I have given and will continue to give money to all of those groups myself. But now, I will have an easier answer: You can give to Union Now. They will take the money and use it to support major, strategic union organizing campaigns that will move the needle. They will take the money and use it to support workers on strike, to help them stay out long enough to win. These are direct, targeted ways to build union power, period. This is the sort of credible pipeline of money directly into critical union fights that I have long wanted to see. The fact that people like Bernie and Zohran and Sara Nelson and many other union leaders and union members are taking the time to do this rally speaks for itself. The changes that progressives want to see in America will never become a reality unless we can rebuild the power of the working class. That means organizing more unions and giving them what they need to win hard fights. That’s what this is all about.

One of the greatest things about the labor movement is that it is filled with amazing people with righteous motives willing to fight for the cause. Because the fight is so difficult, it can be natural for people to feel the need to protect what they have. Union Now is exciting to me because it is meant to be a pure value add. It does not seek to suck up money that previously was going to other labor-related causes. It seeks to unlock funding from an entire universe of people who may not have known how to pull all of these threads together before, or where to give that would be effective in bolstering union power. Winning organizing drives or strikes or other labor battles against enormous companies like Delta or Amazon or Starbucks or REI is expensive. But it is necessary. So we gotta find a way to pay for it. We are growing the pie, baby. Up with the workers.

I have been helping informally with getting Union Now off the ground, but I have no formal role with the organization. Nor do I speak for it. I am only speaking for myself here. I think this is exciting and it is the fruition of something that can do a lot of good. As the group gets up and running in coming months, I will share more updates on it. In the meantime, come to the rally. Give to the cause. Organize your workplace. Kick ass. Union power comes from us.

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Union Now

• RSVP for the rally with Bernie and Zohran: Sunday, April 12 at Terminal 5, 610 West 56th Street, New York, NY. Doors at 12, event starts at 2.

• Donate.

• Union Now. Logo by the great Jim Cooke.

Also

• Related reading: We Need a Big National Strike Fund; Three Crises of Labor; Trampoline Unionism; Ten Times This.

• Contact EWOC for help organizing your workplace. Join DSA. Order my book, “The Hammer.”

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The daily onslaught of outrage porn that characterizes the Trump era can cause us to become unmoored from our memory of what “mainstream” meant in the very recent past. Every so often you need to level-set. The best way to do this is to compare something now to its status just a few years back, like making a mark on a door frame where the floodwater was. Then you can gape in horror as the mark is swallowed up the next time you check back.

The Louisiana Republican Senate primary is a useful tool of this type. There, the incumbent Bill Cassidy is facing a close challenge from House member Julia Letlow. Cassidy, a doctor, earned a reputation in recent years as one of the less crazy Republican Senators. He was one of only three to vote to impeach Trump after January 6. Also, he’s a doctor, which would tend to make you think that he believes in science, though that did not stop him from twisting himself into a position that allowed him to vote to confirm RFK Jr.

Trump, in search of revenge, has endorsed Letlow. Polls are close. But now, Letlow, the MAGA candidate, has a problem: oppo researchers uncovered a 2020 video showing Letlow endorsing the concept of DEI when she was interviewing to become president of the University of Louisiana Monroe. She said at the time that she would want “a person around the table that is cognizant and fighting for diversity, equity and inclusion.” And, when she was serving in a comms role at the university, she “signed a statement embracing diversity as one of UL Monroe’s ‘core values’ shortly after the death of George Floyd.”

The year 2020—not so long ago! But look how far we’ve come. It is almost possible to experience glee watching the incredible contortions that these two fine Republicans are now throwing themselves into. Bill Cassidy, the sober, upright doctor, the man brave enough back then to impeach Trump, is now releasing statements that say “While Liberal Letlow was pushing DEI policies at ULM, calling herself a ‘strong and progressive leader,’ Senator Cassidy was working with President Trump and others to secure billions of dollars for the state and bring conservative policies to Louisiana.” Julia Letlow, a university executive, shoots back that Cassidy “helped write the infrastructure bill that had DEI initiatives hidden throughout it. I would make sure we continue to get it out of our schools.”

She also vows to stop making parents vaccinate their children for anything, while Cassidy, burdened by his medical credentials, must settle for acknowledging that vaccines are real, while voting for a guy who doesn’t.

The medical doctor is pointing his finger and screeching “woke!” at his opponent, the university administrator, for once saying that diversity in the workplace might be desirable. The university administrator, in turn, is proclaiming that she actually “stood with President Trump as he dismantled this ideology.” (The ideology in question is “racism is bad.”)

It is impossible not to marvel at the utter moral depravity of two highly credentialed and educated professionals desperately debasing themselves in order to compete for the David Duke vote. Truly, both of these people exhibit the ethics of toadying prison guards trying to impress their bullying boss with their capacity for abusing those under their care. A total absence of any standards that might prevent them from doing any grotesque act that might gain them an advantage in their horrifying careers. A case study in how not to live. A sad example for children of the depths that adults can sink to when they do not take to heart the lessons that we are all taught in kindergarten.

It is scarier still to reflect on the fact that this dynamic—not just a race to the right, but a competition to signal the most gutter bigotry and willingness to lick the boots of the dear leader—now characterizes every single Republican race in national American politics. There is nothing in the party except for this. All other dynamics have been purged. Anyone unwilling to participate in this cruel charade has retired or is about to. This is it now. In order to be allowed entry into national elected office as a Republican, you must be willing to say “I value diversity” when that is politically expedient and then be willing to rapidly shift all the way down the spectrum to “Let’s bring back Jim Crow” if that becomes the agreed upon position of the party’s leaders. That is the sort of person you must be. Republican primaries may offer a choice of candidates, but all of the candidates will be that sort of person.

The murder of George Floyd, the mass uprisings that followed, and the subsequent elite backlash to that short era of change are the dominoes that fell to get us to where we are in American politics right now. Those were the biggest protests in American history. What happened to all of that appetite for change? Electorally speaking, it was placed on the shoulders of the Democratic Party, a party whose leadership could not wait to dump that burden in the trash as quickly as possible. It didn’t take long for Joe Biden to whiplash back to “The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police,” as all of his colleagues applauded. “DEI” itself was the sanitized corporate version of civil rights, of equality; it inspired no real passion in the first place, and when the Republicans used it as their racist Trojan Horse of choice in the next election cycle, there were few Democrats willing to make it their cause. The struggle against racism was passionate in the street; its passion was cut in half in the packaging of DEI; that weak half was entrusted to PR staffers like, well, Julia Letlow; and after they allowed any remaining passion to deflate, DEI was recreated by racists as a scarecrow meant to frighten off any future attempts to fight for equality. The Democratic leadership, which saw the Black Lives Matter movement as an electorally dangerous ally that just needed to be momentarily appeased, acquiesced to the transformation of “DEI” into the latest iteration of “busing” or “Sister Souljah” or other racist-tinged code word.

And here we are. One bitter lesson to be learned from the past five years is that it is a strategic mistake to allow demands for material change to be soaked up by the soft sponge of corporate and political promises. Every movement for racial and economic equality in American history has sparked a vicious backlash. We know it will come. We must build a stronger backstop against it than “Chuck Schumer and Roger Goodell’s personal commitment to justice.” So where can we direct our efforts, if not at politicians and corporate PR offices?

Try this: union contracts. Union contracts. Organize a union, and get a contract. In that contract, put all of the nice promises that the company is mouthing about DEI. Once they are in the contract, they are no longer promises. They are assurances. Though many people vaguely understand that unions are important for economic equality, few think of unions as being on the front lines of these fights. That’s a missed opportunity. Everything that “DEI” claimed to be about, union contracts actually accomplish. Research shows that a union in the workplace closes racial wealth and pay gaps, raises the pay of women, and reduces discrimination in hiring, firing, and promotion. Unions do it! Measurably! Enforceably! No bullshit!

Instead of applying pressure in order to extract empty promises from Julia Letlow and “END RACISM” painted in NFL end zones, we can apply the same pressure to form unions and win contracts. Those contracts will then deliver tangible gains that will not disappear within 18 months, as soon as the political winds shift. They will not disappear, because they are in contracts. Nor will the unions themselves disappear. They are tools of power, and they will still be there, when we get a racist president, and a monstrous racist political movement that totally takes over one of our two major political parties and befuddles the half-assed other ones. When that happens, we will still have our unions, and our unions will still have power, and they can lead, and the half-assed politicians can follow. The targets of our movements are good ones. But we can think differently about how to get there. Let’s try more unions next time around. The state of American politics today is the best argument in their favor.

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• Related reading: More DEI! Louder!; The Consequences of Rejecting “Defund the Police”; Do What You Believe In.

• Today in shouting out a strike: More than 1,300 union members at Olin Winchester in Kansas City, MO are on strike right now. See here for info on how to support them. Winning strikes is good for everyone.

• I wrote a book about the labor movement and how it can change America in the ways discussed here. It’s called “The Hammer,” and you can buy it wherever books are sold. Also, as spring approaches, you can order a “How Things Work” t-shirt that looks great, to wear in the sunshine. You can also make a donation to our reporting fund. But the best thing you can do—the thing that makes the gods of independent media most happy—is to become a paid subscriber, to keep this publication going in 2026 and beyond. Your support keeps this place alive and keeps it free for everyone to read, regardless of income. It’s affordable and good karma. Thanks for reading.

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