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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More

• 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.”

• This publication, How Things Work, is 100% funded by readers like you. If you want to help us keep going, take a second to click to button below and become a paid subscriber today. This site is free for all to read, whether you can pay or not. Keep coming back.

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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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Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:

BAD WRITER [touchily]: “Actually, I do use AI to help me write.”

Okay. That checks out. Carry on.

Want to use AI as a Valuable Part of Your Writing Process? Want to use it to “generate pushback on my column thesis” and be “more comprehensible” and “craft unique angles” and offer “positive and negative feedback” and “scale the quantity” of your “output?”

Knock yourself out.

You have my blessing.

Hey buddy— go for it!

Some in the “real writer” community find this sort of rampant outsourcing of the writing process to AI to be distressing. Not me. Would I do it myself? No. I have self-respect. But I want to tell you, my friends, that you have my full support for all of it. Want to throw your dashed-off notes into ChatGPT and have it spit a draft back at you and then edit that and call it your own? Want to toss a few hastily written headlines at Claude and have it generate the outline of your piece? Want to dump your entire career archives into a chatbot and then order it to replicate your own voice so you don’t have to?

Do you, a grown man, a successful professional writer who has received a book deal paying you real US currency, want to use AI for the purpose of “making sure the book matches [your own] writing style”[???]? Guess what, brother: I support you. I affirm you. I am right here offering you a classic thumbs-up gesture of affirmation.

“Whoa, a writer who I have never regarded as particularly inventive is using AI? I am surprised and disappointed.” There’s a sentence I would never utter. Instead, I would accept the news of your AI use with total equanimity, nodding almost imperceptibly to indicate that this is not something worth raising my eyebrows over.

No, I will not be joining in the chorus of condemnation. On the contrary. If you are a professional writer, I want you to use AI. Because this industry is competitive. I’ll take any advantage I can get. And if you want to make your writing suck, that’s all the better for me. One less person outshining me.

The tepid, conformist nature of your AI-assisted prose will only make my unexpected bons mots stand out more sharply. While you lean on a technological crutch of grammatical mediocrity to drag your essays over the finish line, I’ll be metaphorically zipping past you on my “magic carpet” of words emerging directly from my own declining and unpredictable brain. Over time, the intellectual box into which AI has seduced your creative process will suffocate you, leaving your bereft readers little choice but to drift into my subscription base.

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You’ll be all, “Politics in America is divided—but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s discuss how to bridge the partisan divide.” Your sense of joy at the possibilities of the English language will have been so eroded that you won’t even understand why that sucks shit. Meanwhile I’ll be dropping some wild similes you could never even imagine. “Politics is like a sea slug.” What?? How?? Readers will flock to me to find out. Too bad your AI editor struck that line from your piece as “indecipherable.”

You and your friend “Claude” wouldn’t last two seconds in my cipher.

Maybe you read the studies about how AI use causes “cognitive surrender” that slowly destroys your ability to think critically about the linguistic cud that the machine is serving you. Or about how it causes “cognitive foreclosure” that prevents you from ever developing the skills to critique AI output even if you wanted to. Maybe these studies give you pause, when you think about introducing these inscrutable tools of mental paralysis into your own creative process.

Don’t worry about it!

Life is hard enough already. You’re busy. You have lots of things to do—laundry, making lunch, and more. The last thing you need is a bunch of jealous (Brooklyn hipster) writers lecturing you about how this magical productivity booster is somehow “bad” for you. Those are probably the same haters who told you to stop doing so much crystal meth. Some people can’t stand to see you succeed!

I just checked a calendar—it’s 2026. AI is here to stay and you might as well beat the rush by using it more and more, right? Right. In the name of efficiency, it just makes sense for you to turn over ever greater portions of your thought process to this seductive helper, never stopping to ask yourself what it is costing you. You are a nice person and your job (writing) deserves to be easy. There, there. Allow yourself to sink into the warm opiate of cerebral ease. This is better. Yes. This is much better.

By all means—proceed.

And then, when you have settled into this comfortable pattern, sit back and watch me unsheath my massive, work-hardened intellect, built to staggering strength through a daily regimen of thinking about stuff. I think you’ll find that your panicked efforts to resist my onslaught will prove unsuccessful, hampered as you are by atrophied muscles of the mind. Ask your AI companion for some final words of comfort. The hour of your doom draws near.

I will crush you with ease.

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The ascendance of Christian nationalism inside of the second Trump administration has meant a lot of work for Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU). The 70-year-old organization has rarely been so challenged on both the legal and policy fronts. The AU is currently involved in lawsuits and political organizing on issues including abortion, LGBTQ rights, the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, and more. Last week, the group sued the Department of Defense and Department of Labor, seeking information about Christian prayer services that Secretaries Pete Hegseth and Lori Chavez-DeRemer have held for employees of their agencies in the wake of a 2025 executive order by Donald Trump vowing to “Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” in government.

I spoke to Mariko Hirose, a veteran civil liberties attorney who serves as AU’s chief program officer, about the status of the group’s legal fights, and the broader challenges of the neverending battle against Christian nationalism. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

How Things Work: I want to touch on the series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits you’ve filed against the DoD, DoL, and other federal agencies. What are you looking for, and what’s at stake in those lawsuits?

Mariko Hirose: The most recent set of FOIA request lawsuits were about getting more information about the prayer services that have been going on in government buildings during work hours at the Department of Labor and the Department of War, which is very concerning. We know that over Christmas, Franklin Graham gave a message about the importance of following a god of war. At the Department of Labor, MAGA preacher Leon Benjamin is arguing that the employees are working for god and Trump. These are supposedly voluntary, but if you are an employee in these agencies, are you really going to feel like you need to attend to keep your job or be promoted? Especially with news reports that even intern applicants are being asked about their political loyalty to the president?

Trump issued his executive order about “Anti-Christian Bias” a year ago. What has come of that in the past year?

Hirose: That’s the subject of some of our other FOIA request lawsuits, against the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of State, and Department of Veterans Affairs. We’re trying to get at that question of what’s happening with that. But also exposing that there’s really no basis for spending taxpayer resources on this kind of a task force—this call to create an “anti-Christian bias” task force, not actually responding to instance of widespread anti-Christian persecution, that is about propping up Christianity instead of spending resources creating an equal workplace. That’s why we’ve been investigating those agencies: those are the agencies where we’ve heard of proactive steps to create task forces.

I imagine that normal people who aren’t lawyers who hear about the preaching going on inside of these government agencies would think that that obviously goes against the separation of church and state. What is the legal case that the government makes to justify it?

Hirose: I don’t think they have made a legal case justifying it. I don’t think we have an administration that cares about following the rule of law. We’ve warned members of Congress from the beginning about Pete Hegseth and his agenda. He has Christian nationalist tattoos on him. I don’t think he shies away from pushing his Christian nationalist agenda, which is the antithesis of church-state separation that’s in our Constitution.

How well the rule of law will hold up throughout this administration is obviously an open question. How confident are you that the courts will intervene in this area? Have the courts gotten more hostile to you during the Trump era?

Hirose: We have a Supreme Court that has been steadily cutting back on the meaning of church-state separation. So we should be concerned, all of us who care about democracy and these foundational principles in the Constitution.

Seeing what’s happened at state and local levels, I do think there is a lot of support among the American people for church-state separation. There is a lot of public outrage about what’s been happening in Oklahoma for the past three years, for example, with efforts led by Christian nationalist politicians to insert religion, forced education, into public schools. When the American people see these efforts to force religion and take away the religious freedom of families, they have really seen the problems and opposed it vigorously. I do think this is an agenda that is being driven by a small minority of well-funded people—an extremist political movement. So that’s where I find hope.

Is the second Trump administration different from the first on these issues?

Hirose: They’ve definitely been out there more. What’s happening with the prayer services, the anti-Christian task force, the “Religious Liberty Commission” that Trump has launched—it’s really focused on one very narrow view of faith, a very narrow version of Christianity. In the second administration, yes, the president is more overtly pushing for Christian nationalism, and has cabinet secretaries in place that want to realize the idea that this country was founded as and should be a Christian nation.

Have the red states been getting more radical on these issues in tandem with the federal government?

Hirose: Yes, I think what we’re seeing is that Christian nationalist politicians in the red states are feeling empowered by both what’s happening in the federal government, and also in the Supreme Court. They are taking actions that are unpopular with their electorates, but they’re trying to push laws that violate fundamentally what church-state separation has meant in this country. So that’s why we’re seeing in places like Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas—those are places where we are challenging laws forcing the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. There’s efforts to force Bible study in public schools.

I covered a bit of Texas politics recently and noticed that the main issue seemed to be Sharia law, for some reason. Do you think there’s been a rise in discrimination against non-Christians at the same time that Christian nationalism has been on the rise within government?

Hirose: Absolutely, and that’s two sides of the same coin. Christian nationalism is about favoring one version of Christianity. That means disfavoring and discriminating against other religions, and even other versions or other denominations of Christianity. In a lot of our lawsuits—for example, against the Ten Commandments [in school]—we have Christian clients who, their faith is to believe in church-state separation. They do not want the public schools to teach their children from the version of the Bible that is being proposed in school classrooms.

On your comment about anti-Muslim bigotry, yes, we have heard a lot of anti-Muslim rhetoric coming out recently, and the talk about Sharia laws is a reflection of that.

Hanging the Ten Commandments in public schools is maybe the most obvious education fight you’re in, but what other education issues do you have your eyes on?

Hirose: Public taxpayer funding going to private schools, many of which are religious. That happens through private school voucher programs. It happens through coordinated efforts to start the country’s first religious public charter schools. That’s a context in which we challenged Oklahoma’s decision to allow the first religious public charter school. The Oklahoma attorney general opposed that as well. That case went up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court did let stand an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision that said that approving that kind of a school to open would violate church-state separation. But now there are efforts to try to overturn that law, and that fundamental principle, and we’re seeing both in Oklahoma and other places efforts to open these schools.

The problem with public money going to private religious schools—or any private school really—is that private schools aren’t open to all students the way that public schools are. Our taxpayer money should go to public schools that are open to all students, that are not allowed to discriminate. That’s where the money is needed. Instead we see a pushing in many states to take that money and give it to private schools.

It seems also that many of the anti-trans measures we’ve seen recently are rooted in claims about schools, and school athletics. Do you see that as a Christian nationalist issue as well?

Hirose: Yes, absolutely. The anti-LGBTQ+ policy pushes that we’re seeing are really animated by the beliefs of the Christian nationalist political agenda. We’re seeing that play out in schools through book bans and efforts to challenge curricular decisions to be more LBTQ+ inclusive.

This is an oversimplified question, but what accounts for the surge in political power of Christian nationalism right now? They’ve been around for decades. Why are they having such a moment?

Hirose: They’ve been strategic in terms of how they move forward. They’re very well funded. There are billionaires. There’s a connected network that is funding the movement and putting people in places of power.

It’s a reaction to the progress that the civil rights movement has been making across the board. One of the moments in which the Christian nationalist movement got a lot of energy was after desegregation, and trying to figure out ways not to have schools desegregated. So segregation academies and preserving white supremacy was one of the roots of the Christian nationalist movement. And then as we’ve had successes in the civil rights movement moving towards more equality—racial equality, LGBTQ+ equality, gender equality—we’re seeing a backlash to that. I guess that’s also another hopeful way to look at it. This is a side effect of the successes we’ve had, and we will be able to overcome this moment.

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The Democratic Party sort of has to be the opposition party on this issue by default. How encouraged or not encouraged are you by where the bulk of national Democratic politicians are on these issues?

Hirose: Well, I would say that church and state separation should be a completely bipartisan issue. It’s just a fundamental part of the American Constitution. It’s like saying, “Who’s in favor of democracy?” Everyone should be. It’s fundamental to democracy.

But it’s fair to say that today the Republican Party is pretty well captured by the Christian nationalist vision, at least at the moment. We’re looking to the Democrats for whatever opposition will happen in the near term.

Hirose: I don’t know that that’s true. I think that these debates play out really differently in the red states. It may be one political party, but even within that there may be significant differences. For example in Oklahoma, with the religious charter schools case, it was the Republican attorney general litigating the case and arguing for church-state separation. We were on their side. It was an Oklahoma Supreme Court who ruled in favor of church-state separation. We’ve had clients who are Republicans who don’t want public funds being taken away from public schools and put into these uses. And it’s especially true for rural Oklahomans, for people in rural areas. They really depend on their public schools. These are rural Oklahomans who are people of faith, but they know they have access to Sunday schools and to religious education, and what they need is investment into public schools that are going to teach core subjects.

On abortion, the AU’s website says plainly that “Abortion bans violate the separation of church and state.” Is your argument that abortion bans are inherently religious? Or are there religious and non-religious bans?

Hirose: The way that it’s been pushed here is quite evidently religious. It’s about the religious view of when life begins. So that’s the problem. We see in the legislative record when abortion bans are debated, how this comes in—that it really is about religious motivation.

Is there anything on the abortion front that you think people should be watching? Is there a realistic potential for a national abortion ban?

Hirose: It is an issue that people should watch and be concerned about. It’s one of the things that was in Project 2025, which I’m sure you’ve been following… it is a road map for Christian nationalism. They talked about going after reproductive freedom. They talked about LGBTQ+ rights and undercutting that, that was a very big theme. And then about private school vouchers, which plays into what we were talking about.

We can’t say they didn’t warn us!

Hirose: Yep, at least we knew what to expect. We certainly started planning based on what they said they would do.

A lot of the work you do is in the courts, but what do you tell regular people that they can do if they care about the separation of church and state?

Hirose: Follow what’s going on in local politics and in your school board. Often some of the most important church and state separation issues are playing out in those places. And that’s where your voice can make the biggest difference.

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• Previously, in religion: We’ve Given Religion Too Much Respect; Anti-Religious Politics; The God of Solidarity; Onward, Christian Soldiers—To War! Previously, in interviews of interesting people: A nurse; A boxer; A tenant union organizer; A DSA politician down South; A former Secretary of Labor.

• Many of you may have attended No Kings protests this weekend. Be aware that the next action that the organizers of those protests have called for is a national general strike on May 1: “No work, no school, no shopping.” If you are one of the millions of people who has mused about how we should have a general strike over all this stuff that’s happening, you must participate! Put it on your calendar now! No whining! More on this in coming weeks.

• How Things Work exists because of the support of readers who choose to become paid subscribers. These noble supporters make it possible for me to do this work and publish it without a paywall, so everyone can read it, regardless of income. If you can afford to subscribe for six bucks a month or $60 a year, you will do your part to help keep independent media rolling in 2026. I appreciate your consideration.

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In every job, there is some gap between the advertisement and the reality. The outdoor job boasting “fresh air every day” consists of picking up trash. The service job “perfect for sunny personalities” consists of getting yelled at by angry customers. The day care job that offers “unlimited cuteness” consists of cleaning up poop. This is how it goes. We must all endure some amount of hastily concealed tribulations in order to pay the bills.

Likewise, we must persevere through bad bosses. We must learn to navigate pernicious supervisors, backstabbing managers, and incompetent executives as the price of gainful employment. Good bosses are a stroke of luck, rather than a baseline expectation. If we all limited ourselves to workplaces that were free of bad bosses, it would take ten years to find a job.

Mostly, this is to be expected—an inducement to aspire to a promotion, or to start a union, rather than a catastrophe. But there are some jobs where a bad boss is a bigger deal. There are some jobs where a bad boss can very quickly get you into a genuine moral crisis. If you have a job like that, shrugging off what the bad boss is doing can become not an act of resilience, but one of gross negligence.

The military is one job of this type. There is more moral urgency attached to the military’s conduct of its affairs than to, you know, a restaurant’s conduct of its affairs, due to the fact that the military kills people. There are higher stakes to poor management decisions. If you are a line cook and your boss tells you to cook a dish improperly and you acquiesce for the sake of keeping your job, you can be forgiven. If you are a member of the military and your boss tells you to kill innocent people or bomb their homes or snatch their freedom and you acquiesce for the sake of keeping your job, forgiveness is not so certain. You become not a beleaguered employee, but a true villain. The space that the world is able to afford you as a matter of sympathy for your workplace annoyances shrinks down to almost nothing once guns are involved.

People join the military for all sorts of reasons: For economic opportunity, for adventure, for patriotism, for sheer lack of options. Most soldiers, it is safe to say, believe they are doing something good. Even those who are not ultra-patriots probably believe—and are told, by ads and by supervisors and by TV and by politicians and by the public—that their jobs are, on balance, honorable ones. They do something difficult, and they believe they do something necessary, and they take a certain amount of pride in that, as anyone would.

But the military is a gun in the hand of the Commander in Chief and we have a Commander in Chief who is dumb, narcissistic, unpredictable, and dangerous. The bad boss problem, for soldiers, is everything. It is the difference between being honorable and being the violent foot soldier of a thug. Which situation is closer to reality now, do you think? Being a soldier is not inherently righteous. That is a fairy tale they tell teenagers in order to get them to join the military. The righteousness of an army is wholly dependent on the righteousness of the cause that the army fights for. (Teenagers learn this, too, about other armies in other nations. We are careful never to tell them to apply the principle to the United States itself.)

It is a moral imperative for members of the US military to leave their jobs as soon as they are able to do so. The reason for this is simple: They have a bad boss and he is making them do bad things. He has made them murder boaters illegally on the high seas. He has made them kidnap the head of a sovereign state and kill many people surrounding him. Now, he is making them carry out an ill-conceived and unnecessary war in the Middle East that has killed nearly 1,500 civilians, including more than 200 children. These grave moral crimes, all of which violate US or international law (not that it has mattered in practical terms), are being carried out by United States soldiers who surely imagined that their military careers would be ones made up of righteous, praiseworthy acts. Instead, these soldiers have been enlisted as direct or indirect killers of civilians, terrorizers of innocents, and destroyers of global stability. Are we meant to wave off the complicity of members of the military in these awful acts? Here in America, when we are talking about American soldiers, we typically say they are honorable public servants and dismiss any blame for the havoc they wreak. Whereas if we are speaking about other soldiers in other nations, we expect and call for them to be killed by our own soldiers because they are carrying out equivalent duties. I hope I do not have to point out the ethical schizophrenia of this approach.

My purpose is not to demonize members of the military. On the contrary. People who joined an organization with noble intentions, who were told that they were serving the purest interests of their country, are now in the position of being foot soldiers for a gangster-style president who is quite possibly the single biggest threat to peace on earth. It is important that we speak honestly about the fact that these soldiers are in the perilous position of risking their lives in order to carry out villainous goals. That would be a tragedy not only for the victims of American imperial overreach, but also for the American soldiers themselves, who will be cursed to live their lives with the knowledge of what they have done. You may have joined the organization imagining what good it could do with a good boss. But that is not the world you have actually entered. In this world, the world that exists, you are an armed member of a deadly organization run by a bad boss. He has done and will continue to do bad things. And who will have to carry out the bloody acts inherent in those bad things? You will. It’s a bad deal. While you may have come to find yourself in this position through a series of well-intentioned actions, the fact is that the only ethical thing to do is to do your utmost to remove yourself from a job that might ask you to kill, unethically, on behalf of a bastard.

The military is not the only sort of job in this same position today. Many well-intentioned people who went to work in, say, the State Department, or the CDC, or other branches of government may now be faced with a similar moral dilemma. Versions of this exist in the private sector as well: You loved computers because they were neat, and you were good at math, and then you look up one day and you are building targeting software for Palantir that will be used to blow up poor people overseas. You need to quit your evil job. It is easy for this conversation to descend into a morass of blame—“You never should have worked there in the first place!” “I went there to do good things!”—but that sort of hollering is ultimately less important than what you can do right now, which is to stop working for an evil boss who will surely make you an accomplice to evil things.

It might be cool to be in the military and you might love the work and you might feel a strong bond of brotherhood with those you work with but there is just no way to avoid the fact that you are there to follow orders and the person giving the orders now is bad and the result will be that you will do bad things, and that will be your responsibility, your fault, and your legacy. Your life is worth more than that. You are not a bad person. You do not want to be a mere tool of a villain. When the boss is going to drag your soul to hell with his, it is time to do something else.

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• Related reading: When Do You Need to Quit Your Job?; Quit Your Evil Job; Leave the Military; Leave the Military Now; We Are the Bad Guys.

• I published a couple of freelance pieces in the past week: One about the dreary Jeff Bezos era of the Washington Post, in the Columbia Journalism Review; and a much stupider one about the TV show “Alone,” in Flaming Hydra.

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Today—as airline security lines stretch six hours long and untrained Playskool paramilitaries begin to incompetently pose as TSA agents—is a good time to think about labor law. Not necessarily all of its minutiae, which can be deadening to the mind and have the effect of making you not want to think about it at all. Just the important parts.

The main thing to understand about US labor law is that its primary function is to restrict the power of workers in favor of the power of businesses. The ideal of the law as a way to mediate the desires of both capital and labor in the interests of the common good has become wildly tilted towards the interests of capital. It exists, on balance, not to facilitate the existence of organized labor but to handcuff it. This is not a state of nature. It is a policy choice. And, when viewed in the context of a nation slipping dangerously into oligarchy, it is common sense that this policy choice will, in the long run, be proven to have been a very, very bad idea.

In a world where a few people have a ton of money and millions of people have very little, how do regular working people build power for themselves? By voting for nice politicians? Haha. No, what they do is they organize as workers, agree to act collectively, and force the rich people and their businesses to grudgingly bow ever so slightly to the workers’ demands. American workers figured this out more than 100 years ago, organizing and striking against violent and unaccountable industrial bosses in a legal and economic landscape that was much more Wild West than it is now. Labor law developed over the first half of the 20th century as a response to “labor unrest,” with the goal of creating “labor peace.” Workers had to get so organized, strong, and unruly that businesses and their government allies finally recognized that a legal framework that allowed unions to exist in exchange for restricting their ability to Fuck Shit Up was preferable to a perpetual, all-out war.

Unions can build power in any industry, but the most enticing place to build power is in economic chokepoints. If you can organize the workers in those key parts of the economy upon which everything else depends, those workers will naturally have a lot of leverage, because if they strike, everything grinds to a halt. Both a century ago and today, the most obvious chokepoint vulnerable to labor organizing has been the transportation industry. Shut that down and you paralyze a whole lot of other economic activity downstream of it, creating tremendous pressure to settle any strikes quickly. In the pure, deregulated state of capitalism that businesses claim to love, workers would immediately organize powerful unions in these vital industries and use that economic leverage to claim their fair share of profits, and to exercise power for organized labor more broadly.

And that is why the Railway Labor Act exists! After decades of punishing railroad strikes and general unrest, Congress decided that the industry was so especially important that it needed a labor law all for itself. Exactly a hundred years ago, in 1926, the act was passed laying out exactly how railroad workers could organize and strike and mandating a strict process for adjudicating disputes. (Note that the need for “labor peace” in this industry was so obvious that it got its own labor law almost a decade before the NLRA, the labor law for everyone else, was passed.) Over the years, the Railway Labor Act (RLA) was expanded to govern the airline industry, which is what railroads were a century ago: The vital backbone of America’s transportation infrastructure, which can cause chaos nationwide if its operations are interrupted for even a short time. Unions in industries covered by the RLA can’t just organize and strike for their contracts like everyone else. They must follow a Byzantine and highly regulated process to negotiate and proceed slowly up a prescribed ladder towards the theoretical possibility of a strike, overseen by government mediation boards the whole way. The key thing to know about the RLA is that it exists to put labor power in these industries in a straitjacket precisely because of the fact that unions in these industries would have so much power if they were allowed to act freely.

The result, today, is that the airline industry is highly unionized, but that those unions are quite restricted in their ability to strike or take similar direct labor actions. This is not to say the unions do nothing—airline pilots and flight attendants alike have pressed on the edges of the law with creative quasi-strike tactics over the years—but the penalties for flat-out illegal strikes can be ruinous. So these unions’ power, while considerable, is bureaucratized and channeled through a series of government checkpoints that ensure that they are never allowed to really flex their muscles in a way that would enable them to reap the benefits that their position in a key mode of the economy should theoretically make possible.

The government’s commitment to prioritize the smooth flow of commerce over labor power is, by the way, completely bipartisan—you need only think back to Joe Biden, the most pro-union president of my lifetime, quashing a potential national railroad strike in 2022, a decision fully in line with precedent. A century ago, when labor law was first being written, its creation felt like a victory to many unions. It was seen as the fruition of decades of fighting in the streets, an acknowledgement that union power had grown so strong that it was better for everyone to build them a legal and regulated seat at the table with business. Yet in the decades since then, whatever balancing function the law originally served has been lost. Businesses’ successful assault on the foundations of union power has turned that seat at the table into a prison. The idea was that the government would be a fair referee of labor and capital’s disputes, and that would be better than all of us splitting one another’s heads open. But capital proved to be adept at buying the referees. Today’s corporate legal assault on the very existence of the NLRA is just the final coup de grace in a long perversion of what labor law was supposed to be in the first place.

Note that the equal and opposite force of labor law should be antitrust law. If America is determined to use labor law as a way to restrict rather than facilitate worker power, then it should also (if it wanted to prevent the total corporate capture of our economy and government and subsequent slide into oligarchy) be using antitrust law as a way to restrict the tendency of corporate power to consolidate and grow via monopoly. I would like to see a version of labor law dedicated to protecting and enhancing, rather than restricting, worker power—but until we get there, any idiot can see that we must, at the very least, have tough antitrust enforcement in order to have any hope at an economy that accomplishes an equitable distribution of resources in even a minimal way. This is not a leftist wish so much as an enlightened capitalist nod to reality. If you want to prevent an inequality crisis so acute that it threatens the golden goose of American capitalism, you can maybe either restrict the power of workers to claim their fair share of the economy, or you can allow corporate power to consolidate according to capitalist logic. But you certainly cannot do both.

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We are doing both. Doing both creates an unsustainable power imbalance. Which is exactly where we are today. Besides the general crisis of oligarchy, corrupt government, and punishing economic inequality, we have the specific issue of gridlocked Congress, unpaid TSA agents, and a faltering airport security system being plugged disingenuously with the president’s private racist army. Imagine an alternate reality in which the TSA workers had a real union and the right to strike. Every single part of our situation would be different. Imagine if airline pilots and flight attendants and mechanics could strike as well. Do you think that Congress would be so cavalier with its government shutdowns if it meant the immediate cessation of air travel in America? Not at all. It wouldn’t happen. The price would be too steep to pay.

And do you think that capital’s power imbalance with labor would be so severe if airline unions and railroad unions and longshore unions at the ports were able to strike in order to support the labor fights of other unions in other parts of the economy? Not at all. This ability alone would go a long way towards forcing corporate America to bargain fair contracts that, today, they simply dismiss out of hand. The fact that unions cannot do this is not natural. It is a result of labor law. It is a result of our own policy choices.

The big labor law reform bill that many Democrats support, the PRO Act, does many good things that would make it much easier for private sector workers to organize unions and win contracts, and harder for employers to illegally union bust as they do now with little fear of consequences. But the PRO Act does not do much to change the Railway Labor Act. Even Democrats fear what would happen if organized labor were free to use its full leverage in the chokepoint of the transportation industries. This fear is misplaced. People think to themselves, “Oh no— if the airline workers could just strike, it would cause chaos.” That’s the wrong way to think about it. The power of the strike is a temporary crowbar used to push a power imbalance back towards a balanced state. What we forsake by restricting the unions with the most potential leverage in our economy is an economy in which big business keeps that power for itself, by default. We are so far down in the hole of inequality that there is no corner of organized labor power that we should not unleash. If unions don’t have that power, much, much worse institutions will.

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• Related reading: To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members; The Hammer, Not the Handshake; Unions and Antitrust Are Peanut Butter and Jelly; Why you are leaving money on the table if you don’t have a union; Why Democrats are idiots for not unifying around class war.

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There are two basic ways to attract rich people to your state. The first is to make your state an attractive place to live: have good schools, have a well-run government, and take good care of your residents in order to create a large pool of happy, healthy, and prosperous people, who will be a pleasure to live around, and who will attract more people in a virtuous cycle. California and New York are examples of this approach. They are not perfect, but they are full of rich people because rich people find them to be attractive places to live and raise a family and do business.

The other way is to get on your knees, crying and dripping nervous sweat, and yell out: “Please, come to our shitty state! We’ll let you do whatever you want! We won’t tax you! We’ll let you exploit our impoverished work force! We’ll make sure our yokel legislators prioritize you personally above everyone else! Please! We’re desperate!” This is the approach of, for example, most of the states in the South. Rather than investing in their own population, they work to keep their own population poor and needy so that out-of-state capitalists might want to come and build a factory where they can employ them cheaply and without a union. The rich people who run the factories will then have to, at least, buy a house in the state, though they will fly back to New York and California as often as possible.

This has more or less been the South’s strategy since the end of Reconstruction. And look at the results—the South is still poor as shit. It hasn’t worked after more than a century. What to do? Double down, of course. That’s the strategic thinking that helped the South win the Civil War.

A necessary part of this cycle is that states take from their own most needy citizens in order to try to attract out-of-state people who are not needy at all. It is a reverse Robin Hood with an anti-hometown twist: “I’m born and raised in South Carolina and I love it deep in my bones, and that’s why I’m going to make sure our public schools are awful and our wages are low and all of you have no legal recourse to fight for yourselves at work, in order to funnel money into the pockets of investors in Japanese auto companies, a few of whom might find it necessary to move into a gated community within our state’s boundaries. Please vote for me for governor.” The politicians never quite word it that way. Instead they say, “I love Jesus.” But that’s what they mean.

As a native of the South, it is a perverse pastime of mine to watch this process constantly unfold in new and ever more destructive ways. The explosive growth of wealth at the very top of the income spectrum has added an interesting new wrinkle to this dynamic. The cannibal South’s appetite for its own children is only increasing.

Focus today on Texas and Florida—South-ish states who are forging new frontiers in the Southern pattern of wealth attraction. In the Trump era, both have had great success in attracting entrepreneurs and tax-avoiders by branding themselves as ultra-MAGA Free States. Many of the world’s richest people have washed up in South Florida in recent years, fleeing the taxes of California and other fiscally sane states. The richest man of all, Elon Musk, has moved the bulk of his operations to Texas, crying all the way about other state courts that dared to try to enforce the law upon him. Texas politicians have an ambitious plan (which is having some success) to turn the state into a financial capital—Y’all Street, to rival Wall Street. Their pitch to companies is a corporate version of the pitch that Southern states make to wealthy individuals: “Come here and you will be free to exploit your customers and investors! Screw everyone, with our blessing!” (Or, as the FT puts it, “an effort by Texas to form its own economic nation-state with an unabashedly pro-CEO bent, a departure from norms about neutrality between investors and management.”) Just as some of America’s biggest hedge funds and money management firms have relocated to Miami in search of sun and no state income tax, Texas hopes that its own pathologically pro-CEO system, designed to make it harder for investors to ensure that company owners aren’t ripping them off, will attract a broad swath of companies to their own scorched land. The vision is that eventually, both Silicon Valley and Wall Street, along with all of their associated billionaires, will reconstitute themselves in the lands of skin cancer and guns.

Already free of state income taxes, Republicans in both Texas and Florida are also trying to slash their property taxes, a move that would most benefit rich homeowners, and would necessitate the shifting of both state’s tax burdens more drastically onto middle and lower class residents. Very much in line with the overall philosophy.

Achieving this sort of reverse class war governance comes with some contingencies. As the Republican Party has long known, getting non-rich people to vote against their own economic interests requires some other bones to be tossed. Those bones are usually religion and bigotry, topped with whatever culture war crusades happen to be in vogue. In Texas and Florida today, this is producing—along with screaming Islamophobia, anti-trans cruelty, and everyday Bible-thumping—a sustained campaign to make education at all levels in the states dumber, by leavening it with crude religious zealotry and subjecting it to Trumpian standards of censorship. It is this attack on education that I want to comment on, because it is going to interact with the broader project of licking the boots of the rich in some fascinating ways.

The first and most obvious thing to say is that once you start draining the tax base that supports your public schools and hanging the Ten Commandments in classrooms and making students sit through anti-communist indoctrination classes and banning thousands of the world’s greatest books and so on, one side effect will be that rich people are not going to send their kids to your public schools. Duh! Everyone with means will opt out of your public schools because for the most part they did not get rich by getting shitty educations. This is why, for example, Ken Griffin and other finance zillionaires are paying to build their own bespoke private schools down to Miami. Griffin is a large financial backer of Ron Desantis. He has invested in Florida Republicans to ensure that he gets the tax and regulatory policies that are most favorable to his own $49 billion fortune. The price of this is that Florida’s public schools are decimated by right wingers. Ken Griffin does not care about the fact that hundreds of thousands of Florida kids will receive worse educations in exchange for his lower tax rate, because he can simply build a good private school for himself and his peers. This is an example of the fundamental moral depravity of the very rich.

It is not just K-12 public schools that are under attack in Texas and Florida and other red states. They have also been busily destroying the quality of education at their own state university systems. Ron Desantis has annihilated Florida’s respected New College, wholly in the name of weird right wing culture war. University professors are being subjected to both implicit and explicit censorship in Texas and Florida. The quality of higher education that citizens of these states receive, in other words, is being eroded because the limits of academia are being dictated by people who are not academics. And who are, in many ways, anti-academics!

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Zoom all the way out, and what you will see is this remarkable process unfolding: State politicians giving away the well-being of their existing residents in order to attract out-of-state rich people who, due to the very erosion of living standards that occurred because of the policies used to attract them, will then conduct as much of their lives as possible outside of the states that they are taking advantage of.

Ken Griffin goes to Harvard, makes a fortune, builds his business in New York and Chicago, and then finally deigns to move his hedge fund down to Florida in order to not pay taxes, builds a private school, and then watches the kids of all his associates go back to Harvard. Do you think these masters of the universe are going to send their kids to the University of Florida or the University of Texas to learn some halfhearted religious bullshit? Hell no! They want the best educations for their kids. They will not be utilizing the educational systems that have been degraded in order to redirect more wealth into their own bank accounts. Harvard and Yale will educate a crop of imperial capitalists, grow their fortunes, deploy them down to desperate Southern states that they can plunder, and then accept their children back again in order to repeat the process. Notice what the Southern states themselves get out of this process: Less than nothing. They are making the ambient education levels of their own residents lower in order to be better exploited by out-of-state wealth. They are ensuring that their own residents will be less competitive with the Harvard cutthroats of the future. They are locking themselves into a perpetual cycle of having to offer ever more extravagant enticements for out-of-state rich people to come on down, because they robbed themselves of the ability to build their own ladder upwards by giving it all away to attract the last generation of out-of-state wealth. This deranged and suicidal cycle, at least, explains how this stupid system has gone on for so long. The way it is able to extract from the normal residents of a state in exchange for absolutely no positive return is a marvel to perceive.

Come South! Please! We’ll build a wall around your private compound, to protect you from the desperate hordes that we have produced on your behalf.

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• Related reading: The Cannibal South; America Is Becoming Dallas, Part One and Part Two; The Confederacy Won’t Die Until Florida Does; The Republican Party Is a Trick.

• I wrote a book about the labor movement, called “The Hammer,” that includes a chapter about South Carolina—the most anti-union state of them all, and a leading proponent of the Southern economic strategy. Yet there are still unions there, and some hope. Check it out, if you’re interested. If you live in the South, please organize your workplace as fast as possible.

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Rarely has a story filled me with such a profound sense of dread as Josh Dzieza’s New York Magazine piece this week headlined “The Laid-Off Scientists and Lawyers Training AI to Steal Their Careers.” More than anything I have read before, this story has begun to crystallize for me the exact ways that AI is a threat not just to jobs, but to the entire existence of organized labor in America. This is serious shit.

We are all familiar with the ways that the “gig economy” has preyed upon flaws in American labor law to weaken workers and strengthen capital. Employers figured out that by making all of their workers “independent contractors,” they could avoid paying them benefits, abdicate most responsibility for their welfare, push work costs onto them, and, crucially, rob them of the ability to legally unionize. This dynamic has been evident across the economy for decades. The same dynamic making people become Uber drivers also has made everyone adjunct professors and has made everyone work for shoddy subcontractors rather than directly for the firm that it seems you actually work for. It is the push to eradicate, to the extent possible, the existence of the full time employee. The rise of the gig economy is a serious threat to organized labor power. The labor movement has made efforts to nibble at its edges, but success has been hard to come by.

In Dzieza’s story, I saw something that is potentially even more deadly. He profiles Mercor, one of several companies in the business of hiring economically desperate professionals—not just lawyers and scientists, but screenwriters, designers, PhD’s, and experts in a wide variety of academic and professional fields—to train AI models to become better in their areas of expertise. Major AI firms hire Mercor to improve their models. Mercor recruits the appropriate pool of expert workers, all as contractors, all working remotely, and then, with no predictable schedule, tosses them batches of work, which they all compete to finish as quickly as possible. Workers do not know the end client. Workers are monitored by software that tracks their actions scrupulously the entire time. Workers can be deactivated and cut off from their supply of work for any reason at all. Workers describe a process of the company cutting rates for the same tasks over time—from $30 an hour, for example, down to $16 an hour. Mercor’s 22 year-old founders became billionaires last year.

Exploitative work is not new. It is a feature of capitalism. American workers have been fighting against it for centuries. The labor movement has a rich history of organizing highly exploited workers and improving their conditions. Coal miners. Factory workers. The list goes on. People died. Violence was intense. Is a company like Mercor really so bad compared to all this?

The answer, I think, is that a company like Mercor poses a fairly unique challenge to the labor movement’s prescription for empowering workers. Here are some characteristics of the type of work that Mercor and its AI industry clients are offering. While many of these characteristics have been present in various workplaces throughout modern history, I do not believe that this lethal combination of characteristics has ever been so ascendant at the center of our economy:

• No worksite. Remote workers are hard to organize.

• No full time employees. Independent contractors cannot legally unionize.

• Workers are in competition with one another for piecework, rather than cooperating on tasks. The nature of the job encourages workers to see one another as threats, not as peers with whom to foster solidarity.

• Total technological control of the work process by the company. Absolute monitoring of tasks, absolute lack of transparency by workers into the company’s operations and what their coworkers are doing, and absolute ability of the company to fire workers at will.

• The success of the company contributes to the economic precarity of its own workforce. These workers, already unable to find jobs that can support them after years of training, are employed to improve the AI models that will automate their own industries. The better Mercor’s workers do their work there, the fewer good jobs for humans there will be in their own fields.

• The workforce gets better as it becomes more economically desperate. A subtle second-order effect of the dynamic described above is that as improved AI models eat more jobs in professional fields, the pool of highly trained workers forced to work for a company like Mercor will expand. Meaning that over time Mercor will be able to offer AI companies more highly skilled workers to train its models, while at the same time being able to offer those workers less, because they are competing with more of their unemployed peers. The leverage of the workers goes down as Mercor’s ability to hire better workers goes up.

As you consider this set of characteristics, ask yourself: Where, exactly, is the realistic intervention point for a labor union to build power for workers here? Even if you were able to overcome the significant hurdles of having a disparate pool of remote workers, and make a list of workers to organize, and pull them together and get them willing to act in solidarity, and avoid having the company deactivate them immediately, they are still caught in a system that is constantly employing them to undermine their own leverage. Even in the best scenario, labor’s leverage at a company like Mercor would be: The company can’t fire these workers because there is a demand for their services from the AI clients. But the more successful the workers are at their jobs, the more the advancing AI models will automate their industries and create an expanding pool of desperate workers who are forced to underbid and undermine the workers at Mercor who organized. It is a non-virtuous cycle. It is a bloodless white collar version of an imperial conqueror who employs impoverished natives as soldiers to oppress their own neighbors.

My own union, the Writers Guild of America, has more or less fully unionized the screenwriting industry. The union is strong and well organized and has experience using its position at a vital chokepoint in the entertainment industry to build and exercise power for writers. It is probably the best-case scenario for existing unions facing this type of AI threat. And even in the case of the mighty WGAE, what companies like Mercor are doing give me the sickening feeling that we are fucked.

The WGA signs contracts with all of the big Hollywood studios and entertainment companies that make films and TV shows. We have an ability to exercise power against these existing companies. We can put provisions strictly regulating AI in our contract with these firms, and strike to enforce it. The real threat we face, though, is not just from the firms who are signatories to our contract wanting to use more AI to replace writers. It is that AI models, trained by us, will become so skilled at replacing writers that entirely new firms can rise up, with little friction, and make film and television without employing writers at all. AI is not the usual sort of threat to labor. In the case of AI, economically desperate workers of today are not training their temporary replacement, or helping a company move to a different place where labor is cheaper; they are training a permanent replacement. The highly trained workers at Mercor are in effect the last gasp of the skilled workforce that they thought they would be entering. They are the desperate members of an expedition, forced to eat the horses that were their only hope of escaping the bad place they are in. After that, they can only eat each other. Then they all die.

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Even with respect to “the gig economy”—though it is very difficult—the path for organized labor has been clear. Organize the workers. Build their collective power. Use that power to fight and win protections. But this entire paradigm is being broken now. Even if we could organize the workers of Mercor (something that unions have thus far not even attempted in any serious way), we cannot escape the fact that the very nature of their work is to improve the thing that will destroy their own career prospects in the future. We do not have unions at the AI companies. We cannot strike against them in any meaningful way. Nor do we have a clear path to assert the power of today’s highly skilled workers against the companies of the near future that will be using the AI models we just trained to replicate our work without us.

The progress of the AI industry is in effect shrinking the sphere of economic life in which unions might even hope to be able to help humans. At some point that sphere will become too small to matter to most humans.

This is not just about writers. Not even close. It is about architects and lawyers and scientists and teachers and a whole host of other fields that are facing the same dynamic. The basic threat of white collar job automation by AI has been understood for a long time. But I do not think that organized labor itself—all of the labor unions in America today, the ones still able to exercise power on their own little industrial islands—has really begun to reckon with what we are up against. It is not just that workers are threatened by the job automation, the disappearance of their careers, their declining leverage in the economy. It is that, absent federal laws, it is unclear what unions can even do about this. We can’t organize AI models, and organizing unemployed people offers little power.

The speed at which the AI industry is moving relative to the federal government means it is pretty unrealistic to expect any of us to be saved by the law any time soon. This is very bad—even for the lucky slice of workers who are members of strong unions today. A guillotine is being constructed, by our own desperate peers, that will be capable of rendering today’s version of organized labor more or less obsolete, at least in many of today’s industries that host strong unions. We are heading to a place where not only are workers exploited, but organized labor as it is currently constituted has no moves to make to help them. I confess I don’t have the answer here. But we had better get our fucking thinking caps on, fast.

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• Related reading: Minimum Standards for Taking AI Seriously; Thinking of AI as a Social Problem; The Gig Economy Is a Vampire; Ten Times This.

• Despite my pessimism here, it remains true that increasing union density is the most direct way to build the army necessary to take on the forces of capital that are pushing the transition that I talk about in this post. Unionize your workplace, now! Wherever you work! The labor movement needs all the soldiers it can get. I wrote a book about this, which you can order from any independent bookstore.

• This publication exists because readers just like you choose to become paid subscribers. There will never be a word written by AI here, unless I am dead. If you enjoy reading How Things Work and want to help us keep existing in 2026, take a quick second right now and become a paid subscriber. It’s affordable and it makes you cool. Thank you all for reading.

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Julie Su was the United States Secretary of Labor for the last two years of the Biden Administration. (Technically she was “acting” Secretary, since Republicans refused to confirm her). She began her career as an attorney fighting for immigrant workers in California, and went on serve as California’ Secretary of Labor under Gavin Newsom before heading to Washington.

Now, she’s come to New York City, where the political action is. Su recently became Zohran Mamdani’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice, a job that will allow her to oversee a broad swath of economic and regulatory policy in the city, and to serve as one of the key people tasked with making Mamdani’s political agenda a reality. In a subterranean conference room in City Hall yesterday, I spoke to Su about her plans for the city, helping gig economy workers, immigrant justice, and how to fight for good labor policy at a time when the Trump administration is dismantling everything from above. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.

Hamilton: Your position, Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice, is newly created. How do you conceive of it? What are your priorities?

Julie Su: Economic justice, right? It is both by definition and by breadth a reflection of this mayor’s commitment to using every tool in this city’s portfolio to make life better for working class New Yorkers. That includes making sure that the laws that protect working people are enforced fully, so that a worker who goes to work at the beginning of the day knows they’re going to come home with all the wages that they earned. It means that we are going to measure the economic health of the city—including its growth, including our development, by how working people do. Whether they benefit from capital investments, or property and real estate. It means that we don’t just want working people to get the basics. We want them to be able to enjoy the full cultural and artistic life of the city. The things that make it a world class city should not be out of reach for the workers that live here.

Based on some of the enforcement actions announced so far, it seems to be both consumer protection and worker protection, is that right?

Su: Well, oftentimes it’s the same people. Workers are consumers and consumers are workers. In New York City, that agency protects both, and that’s not by accident. But we also have broader enforcement. We enforce the human rights laws of the city, making sure that if somebody goes to search for housing or search for a job, they don’t get excluded because of some status. One of the things about this portfolio and putting together various enforcement agencies is recognizing that commonality. We also have small business services under economic justice. Oftentimes, the same corporate entities that exploit working people, either by wage theft or misclassifying them, are the same ones who engage in price gouging and junk fees that hurt consumers, and are the same ones that make it very hard for small business to operate—either through competition, or through creating platforms that small businesses have to pay an enormous amount of their hard earned money to just participate in. So the ability to look at that holistically is the mayor’s vision of not just picking and choosing among the ways that people struggle to make a living.

Are there measurable economic goals that you plan to judge your success by in this job?

Su: I fully adopt the mayor’s goal that we’re going to measure the health of the city by whether it’s affordable for working people. One of those measures will be whether we can reverse the exodus of working people from the city by making it easier to make a living. That includes having child care, a problem that we’ve already begun to deliver on. It means having transit that people can afford so you can do something as basic as get to and from work. It also means increasing what workers keep in their pockets. Part of this is about money, but part of it’s about time. Working people can’t live a decent life or feel secure at the end of the day if they have to work two or three jobs. It’s part of the cruel trick of this idea that stripping workers of protections gives them more so-called “flexibility,” right? If the flexibility is just to go get another job because you can’t live, that’s not flexibility, and it’s actually not well-being.

It’s how much workers make. It’s how much workers have a chance to organize. We are looking at everything that we can do with our tools to support workers organizing for a better life. There are a number of workers who are negotiating for first contracts in New York City. We support strong first contracts for working people who have chosen a union. Our mayor has shown up on the picket line. It’s still too hard to join a union and get a first contract in this country. We want New York City to be different.

Are there policy levers that you can push in this job that will make it easier for workers here to organize and win?

Su: I am taking a hard look at every lever that we may have, and my direction to the entire team under economic justice is that we should unleash our whole power for the good of working people. That means looking at authorities we already have, and dusting off ways that they’ve been interpreted to be narrower or weaker than they should be. It also means understanding that who we see and who we invite into the halls of power matters.

I learned this at the federal level. There are lots of authorities that you can exercise when you are in governing that might not be explicit authorities, but that can really show whose side you’re on—that can demonstrate that workers are at the heart of your agenda. That can be everything from helping to achieve good contracts, to looking at how capital investments go to benefiting people who have always been an afterthought in the past.

My sense is that the business community in New York is still figuring out how to navigate this administration. Have you found them to be nervous about you?

Su: Yes, but mostly I hear that secondhand. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. We have to have the highest aspirations—which this mayor has been clear about, and which is what swept him into office with a real mandate—and we have to be very pragmatic about what we can deliver. Anybody who’s willing to help us deliver a more affordable New York City, a New York City that does right by its workers, I want to work with them.

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The gig economy in New York runs the gamut from food delivery workers to graphic designers to writers. What can people in the gig economy look for from you?

Su: I’m glad you mentioned artists. In the portfolio is the arts and culture—the museums, the libraries, the industries like entertainment and media that make New York City such a world class destination. Looking at that through economic justice is probably about who can afford to participate. But also about, what is the life of artists, and those who create? This problem is not unique to New York City, but many of those jobs have become increasingly insecure for people. Some of that is the evolution of the industry, but it’s also choices that have been made to strip working people of their ability to organize, their ability to be protected by labor laws. Those industries matter a great deal to us, because they’ve already lost a number of protections that were guaranteed to workers for a hundred years.

You just got back from a trip to Thailand. Tell me about that.

Su: About 30 years, in one of my first cases as a young lawyer, I had the incredible privilege of representing a group of garment workers who’d been trafficked from Thailand and forced to work behind barbed wire, and under armed guard, in an apartment complex in Southern California, where they sewed clothes 18 hours a day and were paid pennies for it. When they were discovered by federal authorities, they were thrown into a federal prison and told they were going to be deported. We fought for their freedom from detention. We fought for their ability to stay in this country. One of the first spaces in which I saw that attacks on immigrants are attacks on workers. And we filed a lawsuit against the companies they were sewing for, who disassociated themselves entirely from the operations and said they weren’t responsible, they didn’t know. Our argument was: You are responsible, and it’s not enough to say you don’t know. It’s not enough to close your eyes to the exploitation that you enable and then blame somebody else for it. That case really brought about some changes to this idea of corporate responsibility when you subcontract for labor. [Su’s work on the case eventually helped to win a settlement for the workers, led Congress to pass an anti-trafficking law, and earned her a MacArthur Genius Grant.]

They not only were able to get stability living in the United States, they also went back to Thailand and did things for their families that I think they never imagined. They’ve been asking me to go visit Thailand for—this is a trip decades in the making. Last year, after the Biden administration, I promised them that I now had some time and was gonna go with them to Thailand, so that trip was planned for February.

That case centered on immigrants and labor. Did you take anything from that case that seems relevant to the political atmosphere around immigration today?

Su: In that case, initially, the workers had been trafficked. Their passports had been taken from them. They had been working in the country. When they were rounded up, forced into prison jumpsuits, and told they were getting deported, I saw it as sending a message to all working people who were working under unspeakable conditions, who were regularly threatened by their employers that their immigration status would be weaponized against them, as a message back to all those workers. If this group of workers could be summarily deported, then other workers would be made even more vulnerable too. So it was about this group of workers, but it was about all workers whose immigration status is used to exploit and dehumanize them…

The government is supposed to enforce labor laws, not enable employers in breaking them. We changed policy that would allow workers to come forward when they are being abused and end that exploitation without fear of deportation. So now, fast forward to today, where the machinery of the federal government is being used to send that exact message that working people are criminals—and that the power of the federal government is going to be used to support exploitative employers. It is bad policy. It’s bad for individual workers. It’s bad for our economy. It’s bad for the rule of law.

What’s the experience been like for you over the past year, watching the Trump administration more or less dismantle a lot of what you did in Washington?

Su: Well, it’s disastrous. I think it’s also tragic. One of the lessons of my life’s work is that when working people do well, everyone does better… Working people, when given a shot, transform their communities. They create real security and become key to the economic life of their entire neighborhood. So I think what’s happening is disastrous at the hands of the federal administration, by vilifying immigrant workers. The federal government has decimated communities. Hurt small businesses. You hear about businesses that close because they no longer have their workforce, or they no longer have people coming to the stores and restaurants because people are afraid to leave their homes. That cannot be the America that we are trying to build. You tied this to what we were doing in the Biden administration—President Biden was very clear that the federal government has tremendous power, especially if we use federal dollars to stimulate real growth and to rebuild our infrastructure. And that wasn’t just physical infrastructure, although that was a big part of it—roads, bridges, pipes for drinking water, high speed internet—but it was also, you know, child care infrastructure. Infrastructure that supports families and makes it easier to live. And the reversal of all of those funds, many of them midway or 80% of the way through finishing of projects, has also been really devastating to the union workers who were doing that job, and also what was being built.

A lot of the analysis in the labor world now is that the only real way to do good policy in the near term is on the state and local level. Is that your analysis, too?

Su: I’m never gonna give up on the importance of federal policy. The ripping up of federal union contracts, that’s been disastrous too. Any time you attack working people, you not only hurt those groups of workers, you’re really taking away the basis for security in families, in streets, in neighborhoods, and in our country. You have people who have devoted their lives to public service, and are now completely thrown out of work.

When you dismantle FEMA, the next time there is a federal disaster, everyone is gonna pay for that. When you stop any kind of scientific research, the next time there is a pandemic—or even just the fact that we are seeing a rise in diseases that have been largely addressed through vaccines—you hurt everybody by doing those things. So you can’t give up on the federal government. There’s nothing like the breadth and depth of what the federal government can do. But yeah, when it comes to pro-worker policies, I think cities and states are now demonstrating that they’re going to do everything possible to fill the gaps. And here in New York City, we are gonna show what is possible when government actually aligns with and prioritizes working people. My hope is that that’s not just going to be good for New Yorkers—it’s going to show the country a way forward.

BONUS: Impossible NYC Lightning Round With Julie Su, Who Just Moved to Brooklyn Like One Second Ago

What is the coolest neighborhood in New York City?
Su: You know I can’t choose.

You can choose. You’re a resident.
Su: I’m definitely not going to choose. I’m still learning all of them. Genuinely, I find a cool neighborhood everywhere I go.

I’m gonna put you down for Downtown Brooklyn. Best restaurant in New York City, or just a restaurant you like?
Su: Ooh. What’s a restaurant I like?

City Hall Cafeteria?
Su: No, no no. Well, there is not far from here, I think it’s called Pearl’s Diner, where we as deputy mayors get together just to get to know each other.

Cali or New York City: which has better food?
Su: Stop! It makes it seem like I don’t want to answer questions. Give me any other place and I can choose. California or New York City? You can’t choose between those two.

Alright. You can argue with Zohran about that. Last question: How much should a cart falafel cost in New York City, in an ideal world?
Su: Not as much as it costs now.

[NO MORE THAN SEVEN DOLLARS. THIS IS THE ECONOMIC JUSTICE WE NEED.]

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• Previously, in How Things Work New York City interviews: Zohran Mamdani; Brad Lander; Tom Scocca. Previously, in NYC politics: Up With Zohran; New York Socialist City; The Subway Is Not Scary.

• Springtime is coming. Now is the time to buy a fly How Things Work t-shirt. It looks freaking great.

• Thank you for reading How Things Work. In my last essay I wrote a bit about the tough economics of independent media, and I want to especially thank everyone who donated as a result of that post. The deal around here is: There is no paywall on this site, there are no ads, and there are no corporate sponsors. Everyone can read How Things Work for free, regardless of their income. In exchange, I ask that if you like reading, and you can afford to pay, you take a quick second to become a paid subscriber today. It is the noble paid subscribers who make it possible for this publication to exist, for everyone. Join them! Together we will survive and thrive.

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Advertising has always had an uneasy relationship with journalism. The uneasiness rises along with the rebelliousness of the journalists’ own self-image. Staid news operations can run all sorts of ads, secure in the sobriety of their own content; the alt-weeklies and underground papers and left wing rags and Playboy In Its Golden Age of Articles that fostered the freest writing and thinking attracted the ads for escort services and rock concerts and bong stores, businesses that would not be bothered if their ad ended up to a “fuck the police” essay.

For anyone reading this, most of the journalism that you have consumed for your entire lifetime has been primarily supported by advertising money. The industry settled on the self-regulated idea of a “Chinese wall” between the business side and the editorial side of publications, a separation that can be enforced zealously or can degenerate into a polite fiction, depending on the scrupulousness of the editorial side itself. The journalists most attached to their own anti-establishmentism can bristle even at this reality. At Gawker, I recall an incident where we took a screenshot of an ad on our own site, and then published a post mocking it. This led to a panicked meeting with the ad department at which a new rule was created that said we shouldn’t, you know, do that. We were making enough money at the time to laugh about it.

In retrospect, bitching about ads—though philosophically valid—was a luxury problem. Today, enormous tech platforms have monopolized much of the ad money that used to be spent directly at news publications. Many alt-weeklies have gone extinct; glossy, ad-heavy magazines are a thing of the past; the online news sites that were once seen as the looming threat to traditional journalism have themselves been wiped out by Google and Facebook’s ability to suck up their advertisers.

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Still, advertising alongside journalism lives on—often, today, at more niche, boutique publications that command ideologically coherent audiences that very specific advertisers seek. For writers like me, who are trying to build sustainable micro-publications amid the rubble of the industry we came up in, this is good news. Subscription revenue is valuable but hard-won, and can fluctuate with macroeconomic trends that make individual readers feel richer or poorer. Ad money could be a crucial stabilizer, the difference between small publications fizzling out or continuing to grow.

With more than 41,000 subscribers, How Things Work is big enough to sell ads. Not evil ads, but ads or sponsorships from, maybe, progressive organizations or unions or other groups aligned with the tone and readership of the site. A little research told me that by not having any ads here, I am leaving an amount of money on the table that is very substantial, for a small publication like mine.

So last week I sat down to make a profile on a site that connects publishers to advertisers. There I was, filling out forms about my paid subscriber percentage and average open rate and clicks per month. After an hour or so of this. I stopped. I closed the tab and I never opened it again. I could feel the slippery slope slipping, and I didn’t like it.

The pernicious thing that I felt in that moment is not just the vague and nagging feeling that advertising is bad—as a matter of real world journalism ethics, “It’s fine for the New York Times to sell ads to anyone who knocks on their door but shoestring independent media publications should not even sell ads to nonprofits who are doing good things” is a pretty counterproductive position. No, what bothered me is that I could feel the focus of my mind turning to the question of how to sell ads. I could feel my mental energy being allocated to questions of finance and marketing. This is bad. I only have a certain amount of mental energy and focus to begin with. Every bit of it that is being used to figure out how to sell ads is not being used to think about what I am writing here.

I am aware of how simplistic this sounds. But it’s true. The writing on this site is the product of a mind that gets to use most of its energy on thinking about the actual issues I am writing about. (You’d think the writing would be better, right? Sorry!). Perhaps there are other writers, steely machines, who can compartmentalize the personal and business and editorial operations of their minds with the efficiency of computers, leaving each bucket insulated and unaffected by the operations of the others. That’s not me. If I want to write anything “good,” I need to mostly be thinking about that thing. I need to use most of my mind to learn about it and read about it and go and look at it and ponder and turn over thoughts and conclusions and sentences and paragraphs until I can put them on the page. (Bullshit job, right? I know). If I am spending a significant portion of my time thinking about marketing my publication and selling ads, there is no way that the writing here will not become less thoughtful. It’s just arithmetic. I only have so much brainpower to go around. I could deny this reality, but for myself, I would still know that it’s true.

This quandary—which applies to any writer who is operating solo, and does not employ a staff who can take these marketing and finance tasks off their plate—got me thinking about other ways of filling these gaps. In the old days, people of means were commonly patrons of the arts. The Medicis, and whatnot. There is a long history of rich people running high quality publications just because they want to, and can afford it. Some of today’s billionaires still dabble in this: The Atlantic, for example, is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, whose net worth is $12 billion. She retains enough enthusiasm for journalism to keep The Atlantic robust enough to have hired 50 journalists last year. “I want to build the greatest collective of nonfiction writers in the English speaking world,” Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg boasted last week. The Atlantic indeed has a number of very good writers. But given the publication’s prevailing ideology, if it is the greatest collective of nonfiction writers we have, we are all in deep trouble.

Praying for billionaires to save us is a fool’s game. Better to pray for billionaires to be destroyed. It’s worth noting that some of the journalists The Atlantic hired recently were laid off from the Washington Post by another, even richer, billionaire. An industry full of journalists on our knees all hoping to be fortunate enough to kiss the feet of the next momentarily beneficent oligarch is an unhealthy place for us to be.

The vast majority of How Things Work’s revenue comes from—and will continue to come from—a relatively small percentage of readers who pay six bucks a month or $60 a year. Being directly reader-supported is ideal for any writer, but growing this base in order to keep the publication stable and growing is a grind, and one that is getting more difficult as more writers are forced to compete for similar pools of readers.

There is at least one obvious way to address this. I have a very small group of subscribers who pay more than the listed subscription price. They are, in essence, donating to support this publication, in the same way you would donate to any worthy cause. (One reader in particular, who is too modest to be named, has made several annual donations to me that have given me the freedom to do more on-the-ground reporting. Even a basic reporting trip of less than a week can easily cost a couple grand, so these donations have been a significant help.) It does not require a billion dollars to be a patron of journalism. A handful of five-figure donations could provide significant financial stability, support reporting budgets, and, crucially, replace the revenue that would be coming in if I went to the trouble of having ads and a paywall on this site.

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What I am talking about are upper middle class people becoming sponsors of journalism. Most readers cannot afford a large donation. But some can. And it only takes a few, really, to supplement the existing subscriber base in a way that would make it reasonable to say, “I don’t need to worry about selling ads on here.” If you spend some time looking at wealth distribution statistics, you will see that while the overall percentage of people who can make five-figure donations without feeling it is small, it encompasses a number of people that implies that hundreds of readers of this site could do it.

Of course, while I’m arguing for my own publication here, the larger and more worthwhile underlying point is one that I feel an obligation to raise periodically: If you think that journalism and good writing and quality information in general is a valuable public good, it is really important that you support it financially. In the past, it was supported by ad revenue, so you didn’t have to think about supporting it directly. Now it is not. We all need to pay. If we don’t, two things will happen: A lot of journalism will simply disappear; and a lot of the remaining journalism will retreat behind paywalls, where it will become a luxury good, a trend that is itself detrimental to the public good. If you are a person who has a lot of money, and you can sponsor a writer that you think is valuable, you should consider doing it. A donation that can be very substantial to a journalist is still a small fraction of what wealthy people might donate to other cultural institutions, which are sure to spend more of it on shiny advertising and champagne than any journalist will.

I have been a writer long enough to appreciate the fact that it is a gift for any of us to be able to do this for a living. Maybe one day that will require a paywall and ads on this site. For now, it doesn’t, and that is a gift in itself. It means that I can see every reader as equally valuable, and it means that I can write what I want without having to think about navigating the feelings of various advertisers. Even if you think that I, personally, am the world’s biggest moron—a defensible stance!—I hope that you recognize that as a general matter, it is great benefit to America to have as many writers as possible running around with an audience and the ability to say exactly what they think. When that fades away, it leaves behind something much more grim.

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If you would like to give money to support How Things Work, you can email me: Hamilton.Nolan@gmail.com. (You can do the same for any other journalist, I assure you. We are not registered nonprofits, we are just regular people.) If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, you can click the link below. If you can’t afford to, that’s fine! The whole point of this system is to keep the site free for everyone to read. Keep coming back, my friends.

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Related reading: The Slow Assassination of the Free Press; Incuriosity, Inc; Where Does News Come From?; What Was Gawker?

You may not know that I have a crystal ball. It’s true. I can see the future. A year from now, the Democratic primaries for the 2028 presidential election will get going. People will say, “This is the most important election of our lifetimes.” People will say, “We must stop Trumpism, above all.” People will say, “Now is not the time to take a big risk.”

All of this will be true, for whatever it’s worth. Whatever election we are currently facing is indeed the most important election of our lifetimes, due to the fact that it is occurring in the present, the only vector of time over which we are able to exert influence. (If you pay attention, you will notice that 100% of presidential elections are dubbed “the most important election of our lifetimes.”) It is, indeed, important to defeat Trumpism. And, of course, every candidate in the race will declare themselves to be the one to do it. Fortunately for those concerned about divisiveness, the least divisive candidate will be, by definition, the one who gets the most votes.

Yes! My magic crystal ball hath shown me a vision of Gavin Newsom and Mayor Pete and Gretchen Whitmer and Rahm Emanuel and a slew of other Establishment Democrats proposing devastatingly modest policies while saying “Now is not the time to take a big risk,” as kind of stupid political pundits nod their heads. This, my friends, reflects a misapprehension of the risks that we face. The triumph of Trumpism—a word that connotes fascism, oligarchy, and the gutting of democratic elections—is not something that can be prevented by racing to the mathematical middle of polling positions. Instead, it will require changing the substantive material conditions that allowed it to come about. What a concept! And there is no single change more necessary to fighting oligarchy and saving our democracy than making sure that a small handful of people do not have so much money that they effectively control our country. That means, quite simply, reducing the fortunes of the megabillionaires. The greatest “risk” for the Democratic Party in 2028 is not some Clinton-era projection of what Pennsylvania voters believe to be radical; it is the possibility that the already-existing oligarchs might use their power to convince the Democrats not to attack their fortunes even if they win the election.

If this happens, it means that the policy platforms of both parties have been effectively captured by the megabillionaires. Which would mean that we have already lost the most important battle. The greatest danger to democracy is not a single autocrat who practices transactional corruption for rich supporters—it is when the rich fully control both parties in a two-party system, eliminating all political risk to their unchecked power.

You hate Trump. You see the dangerous place our nation is in. You genuinely want to ensure that Democrats win in 2028. Given how bad things are right now, there will probably be multiple candidates in the primary who would seem to be a breath of fresh air. You may look at the Democratic field and be tempted to cast your vote based on, say, whose personality you like the best, or—more pernicious—who you believe to be most appealing to theoretical swing state voters that you have concocted in the corners of your imagination.

Let me suggest to you a much more effective and straightforward litmus test for candidates. It is: Do they support a wealth tax? If they do not, then they are not going to be willing to attack the underlying problem that got us to our troubling position in the first place. Do not cast your presidential vote for any Democrat unwilling to support a wealth tax.

This week, Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna unveiled a proposed 5% annual wealth tax on America’s billionaires. This proposal will be cast as “radical” when the primaries roll around. Do the math, and you will see that it is not. It would in fact allow billionaires to retain their status as billionaires and even centibillionaires. A tax of 5% annually is less than the rate of return that billionaires are already earning on their existing assets. Therefore it represents a small drag on their growth rather than a mechanism to reverse it. It can more accurately be characterized as a modest first step. A radical approach would be confiscatory taxes that eliminate the existence of billionaires. (I favor this approach, because it would actually solve the underlying problem. But I would settle for a first step.)

As governor of California, Gavin Newsom has come out strongly against the similar wealth tax proposed for billionaires in his state. Note that politicians may oppose state-level taxes by arguing that the rich will simply flee to another state. A federal wealth tax solves that problem. When Newsom likewise comes out against the national wealth tax, please remember that he is weaseling up new objections to a policy that solves the objections that he raised to the state-level wealth tax.

It is far too early to begin picking and choosing preferred candidates today. We all may find some potential candidates charming and others not. The situation we are in is far too grave to allow yourself to make decisions based on such trivialities. Donald Trump’s tax policies have enriched existing billionaires by hundreds of billions of dollars. It is rational for these billionaires to now spend a great deal of money on political donations to both parties to protect their fortunes. Any Democrat unwilling to advocate some form of wealth tax to begin digging us out of this deep hole of inequality is not worthy of your vote.

It is easy to stand up at a campaign rally and yell “FUCK Donald Trump!” It is much harder, and more meaningful, and requires more bravery, to defy the power of organized money. Don’t get distracted out here.

I know you don’t mean to do this, but if you vote for Democrat who opposes a wealth tax, you are going to be contributing to the long-term worsening of the situation which produced Trumpism. Do not do it. This is the policy litmus test that matters. If voters make it clear that this is a red line that must be respected, it will also put more pressure on candidates inclined to simply sell out to billionaire donors. Democrats who lack real ideology want it to be easy to oppose a wealth tax. Don’t let it be.

The level of extreme wealth currently held by fewer than a thousand billionaires is incompatible with the existence of any kind of true democracy in a nation of 340 million people. These people are happy to allow the class war to fade into the background, subsumed by all of the other political issues that feel pressing. Do not help them.

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• Related reading: The class war is real, the great wealth of billionaires is America’s underlying problem, and we must claw back that wealth before they use it to further monopolize political power. One day we should have a maximum wealth, but in the meantime we have to strengthen organized labor in order to give non-billionaires the power to take your money back. For a longer explanation, I wrote a book about this.

• You can join DSA and organize a union at your workplace, and you should.

• Like many industries, journalism has been gutted over the past decade, primarily because tech billionaires figured out how to suck all the money out of it. Ironic! The publication you are reading right now, How Things Work, is my quixotic little attempt to ignore these macroeconomic trends. This place is able to exist thanks 100% to financial support from readers just like you. I am able to write things here and to go out into the world and report things because people like you choose to become paid subscribers, at $6 a month or $60 for the year. If you can afford to chip in here, I would appreciate it. This is socialist media funding and we can make it work. Rock on.

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There is a noteworthy and little-discussed contradiction at the heart of our nation’s reckless ongoing exploration of new frontiers of economic inequality. It is the underlying assumption by capitalists that their political opponents will save them from themselves—and that they are therefore absolved of any responsibility for trying to curb their own most destructive impulses.

This dynamic leaps out in the ongoing discussion of how the AI era will supercharge inequality, and what to do about it. Last week, much of that discussion centered on a widely discussed report projecting a downward spiral of AI-fueled automation of white collar jobs, which would not be replaced elsewhere in the economy, which would then cause a drop in consumer spending and a gigantic recession.

This scenario prompted a good deal of pushback from other analysts. The most high profile report disputing it came from the enormous financial firm Citadel. Here is a key paragraph from that report, arguing that an AI-fueled collapse of demand would not play out as feared. The bolding is in the original:

The critical variable in AI displacement is the elasticity of substitution between AI capital and labor. If that elasticity is extremely high – i.e. firms can substitute nearly all human labor with automated systems at relatively stable cost – then labor’s share of income could collapse. In such a world, capital income rises dramatically while wage income contracts. But even here, aggregate demand does not automatically implode. Capital income has a lower marginal propensity to consume than wage income, but it does not have zero spending velocity. Profits can be reinvested, distributed, taxed, or spent. For demand to fall structurally, redistribution mechanisms would need to fail persistently, and investment opportunities would need to dry up simultaneously. Democratic nations facing such displacement risk would generally be expected to err towards in regulatory and fiscal policy shifts that offset the worst-case outcomes, further limiting substitution elasticity.

I want to focus on that last sentence. Citadel says here that if the economy does begin to suffer the mass layoffs and rapidly increasing fortunes of the very rich due to AI that many predict, it will cause our government to step in with “regulatory and fiscal policy shifts that offset the worst-case outcomes.” In plain language, that means higher taxes on the rich and on the corporations that are reaping the profits, stricter regulations on AI firms, and various redistributive economic policies that move wealth from the winners in the AI economy to the losers. Their argument not to fear the worst, in other words, rests on the assumption that the government will recognize the worst outcomes happening and step in to prevent us from descending into economic dystopia.

This same logic prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—the most liberal of the AI CEOs, for whatever that is worth—to call for more “progressive taxation” on the rich and, potentially, on AI companies themselves. The implication is that, yes, the job automation and extreme concentration of wealth that you fear from AI will happen, and the solution must come not from the industry itself, but from government.

Here is the simple point I want to make today: The class of people telling us that government will step in to prevent the worst economic outcomes of our era is the same class of people who are working to prevent the government from doing so! Citadel, for example, is owned by hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, one of the biggest Republican donors in America. One of the biggest donors to Donald Trump’s Super PAC is the president of OpenAI. Not only is the AI industry money flooding into the midterm elections mostly going to Republicans, but even the bipartisan spending is designed to head off regulation of the AI industry by Democratic states and national officials. (Even Dario Amodei himself, the left-most outlier, can only bring himself to call for the rather mild actions of progressive taxation and “a resurgence of private philanthropy” to head off disaster, rather than confiscatory wealth taxes and state ownership.) All in all, the political spending of those who profit the most from the AI industry is geared to ensuring that those crucial “regulatory and fiscal policy shifts that offset the worst-case outcomes” never happen.

This is a neat trick, no? Those who benefit the most from unequal distribution of wealth can freely agree that the massive job automation and increasing inequality that is likely coming would be devastating for our economy and social stability. But, they add in a soothing tone, “Don’t worry—the government will step in to save the day. Although, not if we can help it.”

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It’s an elegant example of the sin-purifying illusion of capitalism itself. The rich are asked only to act in their own best interests. In doing so, they are just following capitalism’s incentives, like everyone else. You can’t judge them for that, can you? At the same time, we allow them to take a step back from their own political actions, don their “Analytical” hat, and tell us that their own efforts to grab every last dollar for themselves and allow society to crumble into hellish inequality are unlikely to succeed—probably, in a democracy, the government that they are busily trying to co-opt for their own interests will rise to the occasion of preventing them from carrying out their own economic wishes. At least, to some extent.

In case you have never noticed before, capitalism is, at its core, insane. Once you start looking, you can see this very same dynamic in action everywhere. Climate change? “World governments will eventually navigate us through this problem,” say the capitalists, as they drill oil and make the problem worse as fast as possible. Public health? “I’m sure the government will figure it out,” the capitalists say, while spending freely to torpedo any efforts that might detract from private health insurance profits. The winning class in capitalism is able to launder its own moral responsibility by shrugging and pointing to the incentives of the game they are playing and assuming that the whole system will self-correct before it blows up.

When the rest of us put on our own “Analytical” hats, it is clear that both A) the capitalists cannot evade their own moral responsibility in the eyes of a just god, and B) until that god comes down to earth, we had better change the rules of the game or else they will just keep doing what they are doing. Analytically speaking, the sad truth is that creating the political will for billionaires to acquiesce to allowing a system that they have captured to rein in their own power usually requires whole lot of people to get Luigi-ed. Those of us asking to tax the rich and have public health care and seriously slash carbon emissions and socialize the gains of AI are actually trying to build an off-ramp before society reaches the more extreme point. It would be nice if the rich would help us with that, rather than fighting as hard as possible against it. They stand to benefit more than they think.

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• Related reading: Confiscate Their Money; Enough Wealth to Warp the Universe; On Having a Maximum Wealth.

• You may have heard about the brothel workers in Nevada who are currently trying to unionize. An important campaign for the labor movement to support. Some of those workers have been fired by their boss as retaliation for exercising their right to organize. Here you will find a link where you can support those workers.

• The AI industry has many billions of dollars, but independent media does not. Here at How Things Work, we need your help to survive and thrive. If you have read this site for a while and you enjoy it and you are not destitute, I ask you to take a quick second to click the link below and become a paid subscriber. It’s six bucks a month, or $60 for the whole year. Your support allows me to keep this site paywall-free so that anyone can read it, regardless of income. If you can afford to support independent media, please do. Thank you all for being here.

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In a world of sovereign nations, the method for determining where justice lies in war is pretty straightforward: The nation that started it is wrong. This is the spirit of international law. Nations may disagree, and nations may have severe disputes, but one nation cannot militarily attack another nation. That is the first and most fundamental rule for a world at peace. The speed with which this central fact gets lost in discussions of our own wars is remarkable.

It is possible, in theory, for wars to be justified by humanitarian reasons—preventing a genocide, for example. In the real world, apart from some beleaguered UN missions, these morally motivated wars are almost impossible to find. The utter insincerity that powerful nations drip when deploying this justification in their rhetoric is easy to see by reflecting on the fact that if humanitarian wars were common, the nations who most often claim their motives are pure, like America and Israel, would in fact be the first targets of the humanitarians.

The simple prohibition on attacking other countries is a product of wisdom that has been repeatedly won via the blood of millions of deceased people. Two world wars in the 20th century demonstrated clearly enough that war is a counterproductive way to conduct international affairs. We lost 100 million people proving to ourselves that, overall, a hard rule against starting wars produces a world preferable to a world in which that rule is not respected. It will always be tempting for a stronger nation to use war against a weaker nation that displeases it in some way. It will always be the case that a nation that starts a war believes that its reasons this time are sound. What we have learned, in the most destructive possible ways, is that we are all better off with a hard and fast rule against making exceptions to the rule.

Opening the door to things like “preemptive wars” to head off some form of (real or concocted) threat has the same effect as saying it is okay to shoot someone if they make you nervous. It causes a lot of people to get shot unnecessarily. As a rule, it produces more bad consequences than good. The judge will explain this to you when he sentences you to prison for murder, after you shot someone who made you nervous. The only difference between nations and individuals in this respect is that there is no judge who can hold nations responsible for their murders.

The childish appeals to emotion used to justify each violation of this rule are always laughably insufficient. Whatever particular outrage—some attack or atrocity or act of oppression—that is waved around to prove that war is necessary will inevitably be far less harmful to humanity than the war itself. Starting a war to rectify some infraction against justice is like burning your house down when you see a roach. There are better ways to address it. Your response is infinitely worse than the thing that you are purporting to avenge.

It is not difficult to understand the implications of this simple framework. A nation that attacks another is wrong. The leaders that order such an attack are doing something bad. They bear the moral responsibility for all of the suffering, death, and destruction that follows. And the military that carries out such a war is acting unjustly. Its soldiers cannot claim to be on the honorable side. Their deaths are a tragic waste. The deaths that they inflict are shameful. The nation that succumbs to the lure of patriotism in order to cheer them on is complicit in a crime against humanity.

Such conclusions seem simple and uncontroversial in cases where we are viewing the situation from some distance. When it involves us, it suddenly becomes difficult to find things stated so plainly. All of the rhetorical contortions start. The flags wave and the soldiers must be respected and so on. This doesn’t make much sense. The urge to fall in line—to rally behind the government, to support the troops, to dwell on the bad things that the subject of our attack may have done to make us angry—is omnipresent, but always misleading. When we’re wrong, we’re wrong. To wait for thousands of deaths and years of self-indulgent reflection before being willing to state this is pretty cowardly.

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• Related reading: We Are the Bad Guys; Nations Are People; The Patriotism Trap; Leave the Military Now.

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America has been successfully invaded by an army of shoddiness. Our bones are gnawed upon by lazy rats. Even our pervasive sense of menace is shoddy in its approach.

The government has organized itself to please the King of Shoddiness, a man wholly concerned with spectacle to the exclusion of substance. The announcement of a program or action is all-important; what happens after that, no one cares. We watch federalism reshaped into the edifice of a casino, a swooping artifice of neon hung on a flimsy frame, fronting a blocky and neglected interior whose employees are rapidly losing interest in the customers.

The Secretary of Defense is a drunk newsman whose ideas for history’s most powerful military extend only to “increase your max bench,” and tail off from there. Likewise the FBI director, whose bug-eyed macho posturing evinces the desperation of a man trying not to think about the contempt in which his underlings hold him. The Attorney General’s primary qualification is the willingness to make loud declarative statements that are provably false while maintaining the serious visage of a television anchor. The Secretary of Homeland Security spends her time donning tactical gear and tossing around her inhuman ringlets while making videos for those with a Nazi propaganda kink. The Director of National Intelligence, a self-promoting political chameleon, has achieved the neat trick of being both incompetent and frozen out of power by other incompetents at the same time.

The Transportation Secretary, a former reality star whose official White House biography boasts that “Rachel and Sean are America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple,” is not even close to being the cabinet’s least qualified member. The Education Secretary and head of the Small Business Administration are just rich women seemingly assigned their positions at random. Others have, if such a thing is possible, negative qualifications. The Secretary of State landed his job by proving himself willing to adopt a posture of submission towards the man that he had tried and failed to cast as less manly than himself during the 2016 primaries. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is a certified loon, a classic dissolute child of privilege swirling into ever deeper cesspools of fringery, a former environmentalist transformed into a pesticide-boosting anti-vaxer, a man with no emotional or mental grounding in anything other than his determination to fulfill his destiny of poisoning the family name forever.

The Labor Secretary and her husband are both under investigation for different sex-related violations, simultaneously. The Vice President combs expensive lotions into his beard and practices taking the oath of office in his mirror at night, tears running down his lonesome face, dreaming of being able to hurt enough people to prove to his mother that he is worth something.

If these people were concerned with carrying out a coherent ideological mission they would be in trouble. They are not. Their small personal ambitions to have official titles and taxpayer-funded private planes occupy their small store of energy. For these baubles and modest perks they are happy to perform a gruesome pantomime of deference to a tacky know-nothing whose plastic skin droops further towards the gutter with each passing day. Embarrassing, one might think; but the smallness of all involved serves them well. They are too shallow to be filled with shame, overflowing as they already are with the yokel dazzle of a Price Is Right contestant who has just heard their name called, at last.

Propping up this leaky and flatulent balloon of misplaced careerism is an even more debased substructure of boosters who find satisfaction in the firm placement of a brown loafer on their collective carotid artery. A parallel world of media, which cultivates the appearance of news with none of its reality, exists to help prompt these political actors when they forget their lines. Awkward young white men in tight blue suits, their minds marinated for years in the virtual fascism of internet marginalia, find rewarding jobs as twitchy boosters of real world fascism for imaginary audiences of pale and insecure peers who never had anyone to urge them to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The Non-News propaganda world has slippery quality of an MC Escher staircase to nowhere; with no attachment to anything but lols and lies, it can never be pinned down by any arrangement of facts, no matter how painstaking. Not even the greatest chess grandmaster can beat a child who doesn’t care how the pieces move anyhow. It thrives equally on your outraged attention, which it counts as a boost to its reach, and on your inattention, which leaves it alone to build its fantasies in peace. It is a cancer that grows whether you think about it or not, placid in its malignancy, driving you deeper into despair.

Saddest of all is “the base.” Base in class, base in emotion, regarded by those it supports in the same way they would regard any pedestal: A thing to stand upon in order to boost themselves, and then to promptly forget. The paltriness of this entire movement’s gestures at any version of substantial truth mean that it is impossible to be a genuine supporter without having an overwhelming amount of ignorance, delusion, or both. Bolstering the ranks of the purely deluded are the movement’s cynical supporters, aware of its bullshit but willing to overlook it due to a traumatic belief that nothing really matters. This layer of unhappy and unsuccessful con men lurk about in grudging respect for the more successful con men they see in charge. These are the angry small business owners with violent daydreams, the wheedling would-be hustlers trying to take advantage of modest and clumsy bribes, the Mar-a-Lago ghosts who haunt suburban Fort Lauderdale McMansions, clutching cheaply framed photos of themselves posing with the president in a holiday party receiving line. This coalition of the doomed lines the road to perdition, grasping for any crumbs that might fall to them, forsaking all earthly pleasures other than hypnotism.

What defines our seedy era is not its dishonesty, which has always been the government’s baseline orientation, but rather the pointed lack of concern for covering that dishonesty up. The well-crafted lies have given way to careless ones. The conspiracies all fester in plain sight. The payoffs and the quid pro quos are conducted casually. The motivation to appear more just than they really are has left the ruling class. In its place is an odd sort of affinity for tawdriness, a newfound respect for disgrace. If everyone abandons all pretense at telling the truth all at once, well, the pressure’s off, isn’t it? It feels easier than ever before to sink into a warm bath of mediocrity. Acceptance of permanent decline is the only item on the menu. You might as well grab what you can before it all collapses. We are a nation commanded by the sort of people who would have stolen something off of a coworker’s desk before evacuating their World Trade Center office on 9/11.

So what? It’s all falling down anyhow. All your facts and logic can’t make it matter. It only matters if you think it does.

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• Related reading: A Television Show Called the USA; Now We Will Get What We Asked For; The Land of Greater Fools; Getting Yelled at by Dumbasses.

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Politics is a good investment. For businesses, interest groups, and wealthy individuals, spending on politics offers one of the more attractive potential returns on investment you can find anywhere. For a one million dollar donation today, you can get the most powerful politician in the world to threaten your competitors or get the federal government to support your deadly chemical. Even in less overtly corrupt times, political spending has long been one of the few arenas where 1000x returns are plausible—a million bucks spent on lobbying firms, candidate fundraisers, super PACs, and lavish trips for Congressional staffers can easily become a billion dollars in government contracts or favorable legislation.

Since the 2010 Citizens United ruling threw the floodgates open, political spending has increased, and with it, public concern. Sure. With each passing election cycle, more direct and indirect spending floods into campaigns, inevitably transforming many of our elected officials further into marionettes that dance at the whim of their paymasters. It is odd, a decade and half into the post-Citizens United world, that mainstream political reporting has changed so little. The news is still in love with narratives about Small Town American Values and public polling. In fact, simply reading publications that track who is giving money to whom is often the most effective way of monitoring what politicians are doing, and why. A large majority of political communications are just a heap of bullshit covering up various implied obligations in return for payment. Everyone kind of understands this in the abstract, yet the power of narrative on the human mind is so strong that people would find it grotesque if this were the dominant frame of reporting. People want glossy campaign videos, damn it. Life is hard enough already.

In 2020, total “dark money” spending (from groups that do not need to disclose their donors) on the federal election cycle was a billion dollars. In 2024, it doubled to nearly $2 billion, with an unknown amount of additional spending that can’t be reliably tracked. Corporations and other interest groups can give unlimited amounts to super PACs, which can spend it more or less however they want in order to help out preferred candidates. Reporting requirements, particularly for spending in the lightly regulated online landscape, are easily evaded. It’s not that America has no restrictions on political spending today, but we have closer to no restrictions than to “meaningful restrictions.” The two-party system guarantees a race to the bottom in the attempt by both parties to hoover up as much cash from influence-seekers as possible. Any move by one party to tap into an even more corrupt and compromising source of funding will always be matched quickly by the strategists of the other party, in the name of the greater good of winning elections. Any legislative attempts to pass a law rolling back the harms of Citizens United will itself run into—haha!—a wall of spending to block it. Therefore there are virtually no structural impediments to the increase of political spending, and the increasing capture of politics by money, as far as the eye can see. Part of the money is dedicated to taking steps to ensure that nothing will threaten to restrict the freedom that the money now enjoys.

Elon Musk gave nearly $300 million to Republicans in 2024. The super PAC representing the crypto industry—an inherently predatory industry that detracts from the public good by its very existence—has nearly $200 million to spend on the upcoming midterms. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has given $20 million to a new group designed to fight against California’s proposed wealth tax on billionaires. These are all straightforward examples of some of the main dangers of unrestricted spending in a democracy: Very rich people are able to make their own weird personal whims into national political issues; Corporations are able to use politics as a way to protect their own profits, to the public’s detriment; the wealthy are able to write checks to prevent proposed laws that might cost them money. I don’t think I need to dwell too much on the extent to which our system of campaign finance is poisonous and potentially deadly to our pretenses of being a democracy.

No, I want to make an even simpler point—one that, I think, gets lost a bit in the justified gnashing of teeth over dark money’s rise in each political cycle. Which is this: Rich people and corporations have not even begun to spend what they are capable of spending in order to buy political influence. If you think that we have too much money in politics now, well, it can get much, much worse.

The six largest political donors in 2024 were all billionaires who gave more than $100 million each to Republicans. (The largest individual donor to Democrats was Mike Bloomberg, who gave $65 million.) Elon Musk’s net worth today, thanks to recent valuation of SpaceX, stands at $845 billion. The $300 million he donated in 2024—which made him the single most influential donor in America—represents 0.035% of his net worth. That is the equivalent of a $77 donation from an American with the median net worth of $193,000.

What does this tell us? This tells us that Elon Musk was able to buy his way directly into the White House, and make himself one of the most feared figures in national politics, for a sum that he would not even notice spending. Consider now if he decided to spend, say, ten times as much on the next election. Three billion dollars. More than the entire amount of dark money spent in 2024. Would he notice that much spending? Not really. And what if he spent ten times that much on the following election? Thirty billion dollars, triple the total amount of money spent on every House and Senate and presidential candidate in a full election cycle? Would he notice that? Not really. He spent more than that on Twitter. That amount of spending is immaterial to his life.

In other words, Elon Musk could, if he cared to, become by far the largest donor in every single state and federal election race in America in a given campaign cycle without even feeling it. What we all saw in 2024—an internet-poisoned insane man pursuing his weird and racist personal obsessions shoulder-to-shoulder with an aspiring dictator—is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the sort of financial influence that Musk could wield if he decided to pursue his goals in a more systematic way.

Musk’s great wealth makes him an outlier even among billionaires. But the same principle applies a bit further down the Forbes list. The third largest donor in 2024 was Miriam Adelson, who gave Republicans about $150 million. That is 0.4% of her net worth of $38 billion. She too could easily 10x her political spending—and, given the fact that she controls casinos, could likely reap a regulatory windfall in return. Hedge funder Ken Griffin gave Republicans $108 million, just 0.2% of his $50 billion net worth. In the name of deregulating Wall Street and fighting against economic populism, what is to stop him from upping his political spending to a billion, or two, or three, or ten? There is zero lifestyle difference between having $40 or $50 billion, but there is a great difference in potential power between spending $100 million on politics, or a hundred times that.

The proposed California wealth tax, a one-time charge of 5% of billionaires’ wealth, would cost Sergey Brin about $12 billion. He has thus far put $20 million towards fighting it. Consider how much more it would be economically rational for him to spend, if necessary.

And what about corporations? The main super PAC representing big tech and AI companies raised $125 million last year. Goldman Sachs estimates that these same companies will spend over $500 billion building out AI capabilities in 2026. What, do you think, would be a reasonable amount to spend to protect a $500 billion investment if these companies truly believed that it were threatened? It would be foolish not to be willing to spend, you know $100 billion or more, if it seemed to be a political necessity. The level of corporate spending today—high enough, of course, to make the tech industry one of the most powerful players in Washington—is only as low as it is because they do not perceive any serious threat on the horizon that would call for the spending to be higher.

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Meta’s $65 million investment in election spending this year, fighting against state-level AI regulations, may seem scary. Now, imagine what a $65 billion investment in political spending would buy. This scale is within the realm of possibility, given the total amount of AI investments happening now.

If you are a human being who is capable of understanding the dangers of money in politics, this perspective is important. America’s essential problem is that we have an economic system that concentrates huge amounts of money in few hands, and a political system in which we allow money to directly buy power. The outcome of that combination is easy to grasp. The most unsettling thing about where we are in our devolution is that the vulnerabilities of this combination are not even close to being fully exploited by the forces of capital yet.

“Do campaign finance reform” is the most direct solution to this, but the more relevant question is “How?” How do the forces of economic equality and progressivism compete in this landscape? One somewhat encouraging fact is that while we should never minimize the ability of money to buy influence, it is also not completely impervious to other factors—a billion dollars could buy Mike Bloomberg a successful presidential campaign, for instance. Money is very effective at bribing politicians and creating propaganda, but it is somewhat less effective for buying the enthusiasm of the people. That is an arena in which organized people power can compete with organized money, and win.

More practically, the people need their own organizations that can bring together the combined political and economic strength of tens of millions of working people in order to compete with the interests of billionaires. What are these organizations? They are unions. Organized labor is the counterweight to organized money. We must get millions more Americans into unions, and the political power of those unions will increase and help to balance out the oligarchy. This is the path. Not throwing money directly at Democratic politicians who can always be out-bought by wealthy interests. No: Building our own institutions that sit outside of electoral politics that can effectively wield power on behalf of the entire working class. If you find the constant pleas for money from shitty Democrats to be exhausting, and you find the economic odds of trying to outspend centibillionaires daunting, and you wonder where you should be putting your efforts in order to not waste them… welcome to the labor movement, my friends.

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• Related reading: Enough Wealth to Warp the Universe; Confiscate Their Money; There’s No Justice Without Power.

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