Aug 5, 2022 - Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced late Thursday that she has agreed to back Democrats' new reconciliation bill, but only after securing changes to a proposed levy on major corporations and forcing the removal of a provision targeting a notorious tax loophole exploited by rich investors.

In a statement, Sinema (D-Ariz.) said that she and the Democratic leadership agreed to strip out "the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate's budget reconciliation legislation."

"Because of her—and her alone—billionaire fund managers will keep 'getting away with murder.'"

"Subject to the parliamentarian's review, I'll move forward," said Sinema, a key holdout whose vote is necessary to pass the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, a roughly $740 billion bill that includes renewable energy investments, drug price reforms, health insurance subsidies, and giveaways to the fossil fuel industry, which were added to win the support of right-wing Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)

Senators are expected to begin voting on the final version of the bill as soon as Saturday.

While Sinema vowed to work toward "carried interest tax reforms" at a future date, her decision to tank Democrats' latest attempt to limit the egregious loophole for private equity moguls and billionaire hedge fund managers likely means changes won't be coming any time soon, given the close margins in the Senate and GOP opposition.

Democrats are reportedly planning to replace the carried interest provision—which was far weaker than progressives had hoped and would have left much of the loophole intact—with a tax on stock buybacks.

"Kyrsten Sinema has spent her entire Senate term posturing for a multimillion-dollar job in private equity," said Erica Payne, founder and president of the Patriotic Millionaires, a group that supports progressive tax policies. "Now she's looking to close the deal."

"When Sinema loses her primary and her Senate seat (if she even bothers to run at all) her private equity billionaire backers will give her not a golden parachute, but a diamond-studded, ruby-encrusted platinum one," Payne added. "Because of her—and her alone—billionaire fund managers will keep 'getting away with murder,' and Kyrsten Sinema will be their (very well-paid) hitman."

Sinema also won unspecified changes to the structure of the reconciliation bill's proposed 15% corporate minimum tax, which was aimed at preventing large companies from dodging taxes by stashing profits overseas. Republicans falsely portrayed the minimum tax provision as a "dangerous" attack on "American manufacturing," a line that seems to have swayed Sinema.

In the lead-up to her statement Thursday night, Sinema also faced an ad blitz and aggressive lobbying from the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and other business interests opposed to the corporate minimum tax, the biggest proposed revenue raiser in the Inflation Reduction Act.

On Tuesday, Sinema held a private call with Danny Seiden, president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce. According to Seiden, the Arizona Democrat asked him if the minimum tax was "written in a way that's bad."

"The meeting went great," Seiden told CNN.

Alex Parker, a tax policy expert, tweeted Thursday that "one thing I'm pretty sure about with this refined book minimum tax is that it won't stop the phenomenon of companies with 0% effective tax rates."

According to a new analysis that the watchdog group Accountable.US shared with Common Dreams, prominent members of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce such as Amazon, AT&T, Bank of America, and Microsoft "paid some of the lowest federal effective tax rates on tens of billions in 2021 earnings" and "have spent billions of dollars on acquisitions, stock buybacks, and dividends."

"Across industries, big corporations are making record profits after inflating prices to indefensible degrees on everyday Americans, including many that have paid relatively nothing in federal income taxes," said Liz Zelnick, spokesperson for Accountable.US. "It's no wonder corporate special interests are saying, doing, and spending whatever it takes to avoid paying their fair share." ...Read More

Aug 4, 2022 - “The globalists can go to hell,” thundered Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. “I have come to Texas.”

He was delivering what was essentially the opening keynote of the four-day Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas — the preeminent convening organization of the American right-wing movement. The conference Orban helped kick off will conclude in part with a speech from former president Donald Trump. And the message the Hungarian leader sent was one that united Republican anger at “liberal hegemony” with his own narrative of illiberal triumph.

In his remarks, Orban laid out the clearest platform yet for what some analysts have dubbed “the far-right international,” a notional alliance between far-right and ultranationalist parties on both sides of the Atlantic. He trumpeted his hard-line stances against immigration, his staunch Christian nationalism, his opposition to “gender ideology” and his indifference to those who view his quasi-autocratic rule as a threat to democracy in the heart of Europe.

Orban made no bones about his contempt for U.S. Democrats and the supposed liberal media. “They hate me and slander me and my country as they hate you and slander you,” Orban said of Democrats at CPAC. “We should unite our forces.”

“We must take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels … we must coordinate the movements of our troops because we face the same challenges,” Orban added, gesturing to the upcoming U.S. midterm and presidential elections and European parliamentary elections in 2024. “These two locations will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for Western civilization. Today, we hold neither of them. Yet we need both.”

Orban chose to gloss over the outcry that followed a major speech he made last month. Just across the border in neighboring Romania, in a picturesque town home to a considerable ethnic Hungarian population where Orban delivers an annual address, he warned, among other things, that Europeans must not “become peoples of mixed race.”

From his perch in Transylvania, Orban summoned the spectral menace of racist ideologies that have long haunted Europe. One long-term Orban adviser, Zsuzsa Hegedus, tendered her resignation with a letter that described Orban’s speech as “a pure Nazi text worthy of Goebbels,” and the “racist” culmination of an increasingly “illiberal turn.” (She later backtracked, appearing to echo Orban’s defenders that his remarks were misconstrued. You can read an English translation of his speech here.)

Orban supporters say that he was speaking principally about simply limiting migration and preserving European “civilization.” Even then, he used hopelessly bad historical analogies to make his claim, styling Hungary as a modern-day bulwark against Muslim encroachment as it was in supposedly fending off the Ottoman Empire at the gates of Vienna in 1683. In truth, the Ottoman army had myriad Christians in its camp, including thousands of Hungarian peasants marshaled by the Hungarian Protestant nobleman Imre Thokoly.

Whatever the case, Orban’s rhetoric now is a sign of an ideologue who is increasingly unrestrained on the world stage. “It’s one thing for Orban to drop words such as ‘replacement’ into his speeches — a dog whistle to white supremacists and their ‘Great Replacement Theory,’ but seemingly innocuous to other people,” wrote Andreas Kluth for Bloomberg Opinion. “It’s another to give speeches that sound like passages of the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935.”

Was it “an accidental slip?” Kluth pondered. “Or a sign of growing confidence, signaling a clearer line in future?”

No matter the geopolitical feebleness of Hungary in its own right, Orban and his allies see themselves as standard bearers for an illiberal future. “We do hope that you can learn from us the political mindset how to be a successful conservative, as we also learn from you, and from Ronald Reagan,” Miklos Szantho, director of the Center for Fundamental Rights, a Hungarian think tank believed to be funded by Orban’s government, said at a CPAC gathering organized in Budapest in May. “As he put it so many years ago, ‘We win, they lose.’ That is what the Hungarian right has done.”

Big elections are around the corner — from the United States to Italy, where a party whose origins are rooted directly in Italy’s fascist past may soon lead a new governing coalition, to Brazil, where embattled far-right President Jair Bolsonaro is already echoing Trump’s falsehoods over the threat of a stolen election.

In February, Bolsonaro visited Orban in Hungary and celebrated the “affinities” they shared and “values that we represent, which can be summarized in four words: God, homeland, family and freedom.” That motto, noted Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, echoed the slogans of Italian fascists in the 1920s and 1930s, which were imported by their Brazilian counterparts and also given voice by the right-wing Portuguese dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar.

None of these observations or criticisms seem to check Orban and his ilk. On Thursday, he returned the favor, casting the West’s “liberal progressives” as the successors of totalitarian communism. “We have seen what kind of future the globalist ruling class has offered,” he said. “But we have a different future to offer.”

What is that future? I explored that in a three-part series earlier this year on Orban’s political impact on U.S. Republicans, many of whom admire his dismantling of Hungary’s media establishment, his war on LGBT rights and his aggressive attempts at boosting his country’s birthrates. They are quieter about — though possibly still supportive of — his bending of the country’s judiciary and erosion of European democratic norms.

“This is the desire to build an ‘illiberal international’: a world shaped by the kind of politics that eschews the rules-based international order, liberal democratic norms, and transparency; institutions, and norms that currently make it possible for the European Commission to sanction Orban’s government and for the West to sanction Putin’s Russia,” wrote Andras Toth-Czifra, a Hungarian expert at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

“By hitching themselves to someone who has put himself forward as a post-liberal intellectual, I think American conservatives are starting to give themselves permission to discard liberal norms,” Lauren Stokes, a historian at Northwestern University, told the New Yorker for a lengthy piece on Orban’s American appeal published in June.

“When a Hungarian court does something Orban doesn’t like — something too pro-queer, too pro-immigrant — he can just say, ‘This court is an enemy of the people, I don’t have to listen to it,’ ” she added. “I think Republicans are setting themselves up to adopt a similar logic: if the system gives me a result I don’t like, I don’t have to abide by it.”

“In order to win, it is not enough to know what you’re fighting for,” Orban told the CPAC crowd on Thursday. “You should also know how you should fight: My answer is play by your own rules.” That’s a message the Republicans appear to be hearing loud and clear.

Ishaan Tharoor is a columnist on the foreign desk of The Washington Post, where he authors the Today's WorldView newsletter and column. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.  ...Read More

The results indicate that voters' fears impact political participation on several fronts: 42% are afraid to attend a march or rally, 35% are nervous about putting up a window or yard sign, 23% are concerned about opening their door to a canvasser, 19% worry about attending a candidate forum, and 13% fear going to vote.

"Heightened levels of concern among young people and Black and Hispanic people are driving many of these numbers, while white people express lower than average concern about all polling place scenarios except fraud, even though research has shown that voter fraud does not exist on any significant level," GPAHE highlighted.

For example, 18% of both Black and Hispanic Americans are afraid to vote—and among all Generation Z voters, or those ages 18 to 25, that figure is 23%.

GPAHE co-founder and president Wendy Via said that "these findings are extremely alarming."

Via pointed out that the survey also asked about Americans feeling fear related to multiple major issues—from political and racial division to loosening gun regulations—and in various spaces, including concerts and festivals, government buildings, grocery stores, movie theaters, places of worship, restaurants, schools, and workplaces.

"Not only are people afraid as they go about their daily lives, they are scared they will face intimidation and threats at their own polling places," she said. "The fear people are experiencing—especially Black people, Hispanic people, and young people—is a form of voter suppression that needs to be addressed before the election."

Along with releasing the survey results, GPAHE sent a memo to U.S. secretaries of state about the data. As the group summarized in a statement, it also offered recommendations:

The poll shows that a majority of respondents—across party lines and including gun owners—believe Americans should be banned from carrying firearms at polling stations.

According to the memo, "Currently, a total of 12 states have prohibitions on carrying firearms at polling places, eight states prohibit both open carry and concealed carry at the polls, and four prohibit concealed carry only."

The document declares that "given the nationwide concerns around the November elections and the harassing behavior already witnessed during the primaries, GPAHE's survey data is a call to action for secretaries of state."

Beirich similarly stressed that state and local leaders must urgently do more.

"Our states are failing communities that have been historically disenfranchised, and they are failing young voters," she said. "In an environment where white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys are showing up at parades, town halls, campaign rallies, and school board meetings, and where people are carrying their AR-15s into campaign events, it's no wonder that people are more afraid."

The memo and poll come after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday held a virtual discussion with Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite Jr. and about 750 election officials and workers.

The DOJ's Election Threats Task Force also released updates on its first year of work, including that approximately 11% of more than 1,000 contacts "reported as hostile or harassing by the election community" met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation.

"Officials in states with close elections and post-election contests were more likely to receive threats," a department statement said, adding that "58% of the total of potentially criminal threats were in states that underwent 2020 post-election lawsuits, recounts, and audits, such as Arizona, Georgia, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin."

During a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Polite said the DOJ's investigations into threats against election workers have led to charges in five cases and one conviction, and he expects more charges are coming.

"The trauma experienced in this community," he said of election workers, "is profound and unprecedented."

Also on Monday, a federal judge sentenced Guy Wesley Reffitt—the first defendant convicted at trial in the DOJ's criminal inquiry into the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol—to over seven years in prison.

Reffitt, the department noted, is among more than 850 individuals who "have been arrested in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol, including over 260 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement." ...Read More

AUG 5, 2022 - As a kid growing up in Ohio, I walked the halls of Johnny Appleseed Junior High with the daughters and sons of union workers—electricians, autoworkers, steelworkers—at companies like Westinghouse, Tappan Stove, Ohio Brass, and General Motors.

By the time I graduated from Mansfield High, those plants were shutting down. Corporate America wanted cheaper labor, wherever they could find it. First, they went to anti-union, low-wage states, often in the South. Then, when those wages weren’t low enough, they moved overseas—first to Mexico, then to China. Always in the name of “efficiency”—business-school-speak for “pay workers less.”

As they shut down production, these CEOs earned the monikers “Chainsaw Al,” “John the Cutter,” and “Larry the Knife.”

It transformed our country. A toxic combination of shareholder capitalism and pliant politicians gutted our middle class, hollowed out our towns, and dried up opportunities for people outside big coastal cities and people without college degrees or inherited wealth.

And it upended our politics.

We are supposed to be the workers’ party. Democrats must be that party again.

The geographic heart of the transformation in Americans’ voting patterns lies in places like my Ohio hometown, in the manufacturing towns of America’s industrial heartland.

The “blue wall” was crumbling. Between 2012 and 2020, Democrats lost nearly 2.6 million votes in small and midsized towns in Ohio and the Midwest. A recent report sheds light on how it happened—and what progressives can do to fix it.

I’ve spent my whole life with these voters. For those of us who come from the Midwestern progressive populist tradition, these are our friends, our neighbors, and our families. My fellow Democrats need to start by understanding these voters—and the ways politicians of both parties have let them down, over and over.

These folks have been through a lot—from the 2008 financial crisis to COVID to inflation. And those blows followed decades of job losses.

A majority of voters in these communities say they or a family member suffers from a chronic health condition. A majority have had personal experiences with disabilities, job loss, mental health issues, and addiction. Half have experienced a loss of pension or retirement savings. Their paychecks and job security have been eroding for decades.

Their hard work doesn’t pay off like it used to. And for women and people of color—who make up more of these voters than the national media narrative ever portrays—hard work has never paid off the way it should.

All these Americans are desperate for more stability and security in their lives. But they wonder if things will ever get better. They think politicians have forgotten them.

The people I grew up with knew that Republicans would sell them out to corporations—Bush negotiating NAFTA, Gingrich fighting to bring China into the WTO, Trump granting corporate tax breaks. That surprised no one.

But many Democrats’ active encouragement of the corporate outsourcing agenda came as a shocking betrayal. Those decisions stung much worse coming from the party of Roosevelt—the party that for generations these workers had trusted to be on their side.

We are supposed to be the workers’ party. Democrats must be that party again. We must sharpen the difference between us—historically, America’s party of workers—and the party of big business.

Many are waking up to this reality.

As inflation continues to batter families’ bank accounts—and the president’s poll numbers—even free-traders of yesteryear are beginning to admit the problems of a labyrinthine supply chain stretched across the globe.

And for the first time in my memory, there’s real momentum to take action to fix it. Democrats just passed the kind of industrial policy we haven’t seen in many decades, to build out domestic supply chains of key inputs like semiconductors.

It will create the kind of jobs that too many communities have lost. And it sends a clear message to these Americans that we have not forgotten them.

None of this requires compromising on our values. A commitment to populist economics and fair trade isn’t just compatible with a commitment to social justice—the two naturally go together. One need only read Martin Luther King’s dozens of speeches to unions, and ponder what he was doing when he was killed, to remember the deep connection between workers’ rights and civil rights.

A relentless focus on populist economics wins out over Republicans’ manufactured culture war.

When you’re on the edge, worried about the next layoff or health setback and struggling to make ends meet, the latest Twitter feud or cable news controversy is just background noise.

The hometowns of America’s heartland have been battered and bruised. To create a durable governing majority, we have to show these voters—through our words, through our actions, through our policies—that we hear them. We see them. We are on their side. ...Read More

July 28, 2022 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Commons — I’m writing from Ukraine, where I serve in the Territorial Defense Forces. A year ago, I couldn’t have expected to be in this situation. Like millions of Ukrainians, my life has been upturned by the chaos of war.

But for socialists to use this discontent to demand less aid to Ukraine and less pressure on Russia would be a rejection of solidarity with the oppressed. ...Read More

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“Paper Girls,” a new streaming series from Amazon Prime Video, is unmistakably a product of its era. It’s adapted from a (wonderful) comic book, it foregrounds young women of color, and it’s, well, a streaming series—a format that barely existed a decade ago. But it takes its title from a form of once-ubiquitous child labor that’s now all but extinct: The four tweens at the center of the action make a habit of rising before dawn to deliver a daily newspaper (the fictional Cleveland Preserver) on their bicycles.

That’s no anachronism. Like the eponymous Brian K. Vaughan–scripted, Cliff Chiang–drawn comic that inspired it (which concluded with its 30th issue in 2019), “Paper Girls” (Amazon’s Version) is set in the autumn of 1988, in the imaginary Cleveland suburb of Stony Stream, Ohio.

That’s where it begins, anyway. Fast, profane and wholly unpredictable, “Paper Girls” has enough bizarre twists and jaw-dropping surprises that I’m not giving away too much by telling you it involves time travel. All eight episodes of the Amazon adaptation are available now.

The first chapter, “Growing Pains,” includes a montage where we see the four girls who will become our heroes dragging themselves out of bed while the rest of their households remain asleep. Twelve-year-old Erin Teng (Riley Lai Nelet), a Chinese American girl who looks after her anxious mother, scissors open a twine-banded stack of newspapers that a panel van has deposited onto the sidewalk in front of her home, the A1 headline warning of dire developments in United States-Soviet relations. As New Order’s “Age of Consent” kicks in on the soundtrack, a bleary-eyed Erin begins rolling up the papers and placing a rubber band around each one to make these floppy, lightweight, un-aerodynamic periodicals solid and throwable.

Streaming technology has not advanced to the point where you can smell the fresh ink on the newsprint or feel it rub off on your fingers, but these are details my decades-old memory readily supplied. Your faithful correspondent delivered papers in a suburb on a single-gear dirt bike, and then a grown-up ten-speed, for several years in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I wondered what had become of what was my first job in media.

The decline of local news, and of the daily newspaper, is a subject that has rightly inspired a lot of hand-wringing in recent years. That fewer and fewer readers are relying on paper-papers as opposed to digital editions gets covered, too. This year, Gannett—America’s largest newspaper chain—reduced the days of the week on which print editions are released at 186 of its papers, the Washington Post reported in April.

If newspapers-on-newsprint are in decline, then newspapers-delivered-by-kids-on-bikes seem like a relic of the even-more-distant past. But no one seems to know exactly how recently they disappeared. ...Read More

These titles will be released in 2022, but you can order them from Hard Ball Press just in time for the holidays!

 ATOMIC DIPLOMACY3 [Autosaved].pptx

Tune of the Week:  Rising Appalachia - Bring It On Home ... 5 minutes

At the start of “Alex’s War,” a documentary about Alex Jones, the infamous talk-news conspiracist guru of InfoWars is described by assorted media outlets as “a performance artist,” “paranoia porn,” and — in the words of John Oliver — “the Walter Cronkite of shrieking bat-shit guerrilla clowns.”

All of which, of course, is accurate. Yet none of it fully captures what an important figure Alex Jones has become, even as he’s been systematically de-platformed. (The de-platforming, of course, only helped his cause. It shored up and even mythologized his image as The Man Speaking Truth to the Power That Doesn’t Want You to Hear Him.)

A couple of decades ago, when he was on the rise as the ranting scourge of “globalism” and other evils, most of us dismissed Alex Jones as an outlier and a self-promoting blowhard who was ultimately a trivial voice shouting from the wilderness of his extreme beliefs. There was no denying that he had the charisma of a right-wing fire-breather like Michael Savage. But the defining quality of Alex Jones was a willingness — more than that, a compulsion — to lend credibility to conspiratorial nonsense. The Oklahoma City bombing was, he said, an inside job, brought off with the cooperation of the U.S. government; so was 9/11. These beliefs, or so it seemed at the time, were on the fringe of the fringe.

As it turned out, though, Alex Jones, with his raving fruitcake paranoia, was an avatar of the new age. He has remained, in some horrible way, consistent in his beliefs, always blaming the government — and, by extension, the globalist cabal — for whatever disaster befalls us. The assertion, which he clung to for years, that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was staged, another hologram in the government’s grand plan to control us, may have sounded, on the face of it, like the belief of someone who was losing his mental faculties. Yet how much of a leap is it from that level of warped reality to the trope that Jones became head cheerleader on two years ago: that Joe Biden stole the election? And that’s a belief that has taken over the Republican Party, not to mention a good slice of the American electorate. While Alex Jones was, and is, a bat-shit guerrilla clown, the truth is that to a disturbing degree it’s now his world, and we just live in it.

“Alex’s War” is a movie that helps us understand how that happened. Directed and edited by Alex Lee Moyer, it’s a rather strange film, in that it’s two hours and 11 minutes long, and for that entire time we’re immersed in the world according to Alex Jones without anything in the way of mediating voices. To call the film uncritical would be an understatement. It presents, without commentary, a documentary record of Jones’ career, from his earliest days on public-access TV to his rise as a talk-radio maven to his status as a rabble-rouser of insurrection, a man who was instrumental in stoking the rage that fueled the chaos and destruction of January 6. Moyer got incredible access to Jones, but you could argue that to do so she allowed her movie to fall down in its role. “Alex’s War” never overtly takes Jones to task. It never frames his celebrity as part of a larger social virus of dark fantasy and misinformation. It doesn’t show you a thing about his personal life, or anything about his business of using politics to sell health supplements. “Alex’s War” is so free of judgment that an Alex Jones fan could probably watch it and think, “He slays!”

So how could this be a responsible movie? In the following way. “Alex’s War” is not a piece of pro-Jones propaganda. It’s closer to a piece of media-age vérité that assumes we know what the facts are, and that we don’t need to have our hands held as Jones spews forth his red-pill view of reality. Still, one might ask: Doesn’t this neutral perspective create a danger of making Jones look more reasonable and compelling than he is? I’d argue that that’s the film’s strength. Alex Jones is a compelling figure — to millions of his followers. He’s not just an alt-right talk host you might disagree with; he’s a cult leader, the way Donald Trump is. In both cases, if you don’t grasp the fundamental appeal of that, you’re just keeping your head in the sand.

Jones now looks like a retired pro-football lineman or an aging biker, with a brawler’s build and a beard grown to offset his thinning locks. We see him leading protest marches in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, where he helped the “Stop the Steal” movement take root. As he stalks the streets shouting hoarsely through a bullhorn, he has a commandingly world-weary bruiser-of-the-people, freedom-fighter-as-martyr vibe. At 48, he carries himself like a rock star of the dispossessed. If they made a biopic about Jones (and they should), the actor to play him would be Russell Crowe.

But “Alex’s War” also features a great deal of archival footage of Jones in his earlier days, and this stuff is fascinating, because you see how he evolved, and also how far ahead of the curve of the new down-the-rabbit-hole America he was. Born in 1974, he grew up in Rockwall, a wealthy small town on the outskirts of Dallas, where he was an athlete, a street fighter, and a delinquent. His family moved to Austin (to get him away from the tough vibe of Dallas), and he has resided in that liberal bastion ever since. As a teenager, Jones may have been a punk, but he was also a voracious reader, consuming comic books and science fiction and big fat tomes about history and fascism, as well as “Julius Caesar” and Gary Allen’s “None Dare Call It Conspiracy,” which the film quotes from: “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” (It would be hard to think of a statement presented as the holy truth that is so wrong.)

During this period, friends of Jones’ family included a U.S. operative who would talk about clandestine missions, as well as someone involved in the government’s secret research on psychedelics. You think: Fair enough. But then Jones says, “My dad had friends who were in the John Birch Society, so there was a background noise from them about the one-world government, the cashless society, the plan to break up the family, and all this.”

That’s an astonishing quote, since it includes most of Jones’s shibboleths. Jones is always talking about the “research” he does (that word is a tic with him, as if he were the Woodward and Bernstein of uncovering the New World Order). But what that quote reveals is that he swallowed most of his ideology whole-hog as an adolescent straight from the John Birch Society, a club of anti-Communist, anti-Semitic late-’50s cranks who were marginalized out of the conservative movement by William F. Buckley. You only need a couple of short lines to connect the dots from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to the Birchers to Jones. That’s his research.

In the ’90s, when he was still young (he turned 20 in 1994), Jones was strikingly good-looking in a Hollywood way. With his blond hair and regal smirk, he resembled a sunny-jock version of Bruce Davison, with a touch of a lost Bridges brother. He was a natural camera object, and talking into the camera he felt right at home. He had a money stare: tight-lipped, thousand-yard, with unbreakable eye contact. From the start, he was a dystopian fabulist, which became his form of showbiz. We see him at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing, sowing the seeds of conspiracy — which, as he now realized, you could do with anything. “Why has the media ignored two seismograph reports from the University of Oklahoma that show two distinct explosion patterns?” he asks. “I am not sitting here claiming to have the answers, but I know this: They don’t want you to know something. They’re keeping something from you.” Welcome to the new truth!

Yet it wasn’t all conspiracy. Jones was like a preacher, and what he was preaching was a religion — “stop the dehumanization.” And really, who doesn’t think contemporary America is dehumanized and only growing more so? Who doesn’t feel at times, in this society, overly controlled — by technology, by the corporatization that rules the technology, by the government that works hand in glove with the corporations, by not one but two political parties that seem increasingly out-of-touch with the needs of average people? Jones, like Trump, tapped into all that. But what gave it meaning was the way that Jones, a political carny barker, used conspiracy to reverse-engineer history. To him, every disaster, every predicament, everything about our world you don’t like had been planned and caused. By whom? By them. The globalists. The pedophiles. The technocrat corporatists who want to use vaccines to sterilize the population.

Jones had an interface with traditional media — and built his legend — when the BBC filmmaker Jon Ronson recruited him to infiltrate the Bohemian Grove, the annual two-week gathering of the rich and powerful on a 2,700-acre campground in Monte Rio, Calif. He and his cameraman, Mike Hanson, snuck in by pretending to be fat-cat members of the elite, and once there they filmed a Bohemian Grove ceremony, “Cremation of the Care,” during which the members wear costumes and cremate a coffin effigy before a 40-foot owl. Jones’ interpretation of this — that the men were doing it to expiate their sins — was sheer conjecture, but there’s no doubt that when this footage was shown as part of the BBC’s “Secret Rulers of the World,” it looked like something out of “Eyes Wide Shut.” It became the cornerstone of Jones’ “proof” that the world was being overtaken by a cabal of globalist creeps.

Yet Jones, by his own admission, finds most of the proof he seeks within himself. We see his broadcasts on Sandy Hook, where he said things like, “My gut tells me people controlling the government were involved with this. And it’s not even the gut, it’s the heart. It’s right here in my heart: I know things, I feel things.” Ah, research! The obscenity of the Sandy Hook rants, in which he claimed that the massacre was “a giant hoax,” were a paranoid wrinkle too far. The parents of the Sandy Hook victims filed a defamation suit (they’re seeking $150 million in damages), and as a result of that lawsuit it was reported only today that the parent company of InfoWars has now filed for bankruptcy. We see clips of Jones in a deposition, doing the worst sort of dissembling — apologizing for what he said, but not really. Not denying the denial of reality. He has become the Olympic champion of fake-news doublethink. But the other champion of that is Donald Trump, who we see asking the crowd on January 6, “Does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes?” He’s using Jones’s Sandy Hook logic. I feel it, so it must be true. Forget the globalists. This is the New World Order. ...Read More

Aug 4, 2022 - My first job out of college was as a cashier selling snacks and magazines at a Chicago airport. My coworkers and I—about two hundred of us, mostly African Americans and Filipino immigrants—made long commutes from all over the city, earning less than nine dollars an hour and constant disrespect from our bosses. Our general manager, a man I’ll call Richard, was known for scrutinizing workers’ uniforms as we punched in to find minor infractions, or sneaking up on us at the register to catch us texting when no customers were around, then writing us up. Our jobs were miserable, and he made them more miserable. 

So like millions of other workers before us, we began to organize a union—talking endlessly to coworkers on our breaks and the train ride home, mapping out with staff organizers who was a leader on which shift and which of their coworkers they could convince to vote for the union, figuring out how to overcome divisions between workers across barriers of race and personality, crafting an effective pitch for Filipino workers to make in Tagalog to coworkers on the fence, and a million more tiny details that all had to line up to win the vote. I took the job with the intention of helping organize a union but wasn’t prepared for the pushback that Richard spearheaded. The day we announced the union drive, union supporters on the early shift wore union buttons to work. Management took the buttons as declarations of war, and Richard sent all the union supporters home. The call quickly went out from organizers to union supporters: management had attacked us. We had to strike back. 

Richard sent so many of us home that the company no longer had enough workers to run the stores, so he left the main office deep in the bowels of the airport to do our jobs in the terminals himself. Near the security checkpoint, we rehearsed how we would confront him. My conflict-avoidant heart raced. Growing giddy, we passed through security and roved the airport, racing around the never-ending stream of travelers to look for him. We eventually tracked him down at a store in Terminal 3, ringing up customers for four-dollar bottles of water. Richard, visibly sweating, refused to speak with us. “As you can see,” he said, fussing with a display case of Chicago-themed tchotchke key chains, “I’m very busy here.” 

We were forging ahead, shouting our demands, when Richard—this man who had inflicted so many petty indignities upon so many of us, had made us feel so small in exchange wages just above the least he could get away with paying us—suddenly halted his pretense of working and took off at a near sprint down the terminal, abandoning the store with no one at the register. We watched him run, astonished.

“Whatcha runnin’ from, Phil?” one of my second-shift coworkers called after him down the terminal, cackling. Just a day earlier, he had terrorized us, his subordinates. Now, he couldn’t even look us in the eyes—he was afraid of us. I’ve done a lot in my life since that day, but never have I felt as exhilarated and as shocked at my own sense of power as I did among a whooping group of cashiers and stockers, watching our boss shrivel in the face of the collective power we had built together.

The labor movement isn’t just the best means for workers to win better wages and benefits; it’s also a generator of genuine heroism in average people.

My experience wasn’t out of the ordinary. Every time workers grow fed up with their jobs and start talking to coworkers about forming a union to change it, such scenes of human drama play out—often with not just paychecks but life and limb at stake in the face of strikebreakers and police. The labor movement isn’t just the best means for workers to win better wages and benefits and end their managers’ on-the-job dictatorship; it’s also a generator of genuine heroism in average people. Every union fight is a David-versus-Goliath battle—the epic stuff of Biblical narratives, of Greek myths, of Hollywood blockbusters. 

There’s a rich history of labor documentary and feature filmmaking in America, as well as excellent labor journalistic and historical writing, and fictionalized labor organizing narratives pop up occasionally in film and TV. Yet few twenty-first century labor fights ever receive mainstream narrativization (and those that do can see their politics watered down). In the labor movement’s recent decades of decline, few tales from the frontlines of the class war have turned into character-driven, compulsively readable books or watchable movies. Daisy Pitkin’s On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union is an exception. A working union organizer in the trenches for nearly two decades, in her memoir she depicts what organizing a union actually looks like: the newfound capacity for heroism and solidarity among workers and the boundless rapacity and cruelty of bosses, the steadfast dedication and stupidity of labor leadership, and the grueling personal toll of throwing one’s life into organizing only to be rewarded with half-victories or outright defeat. Few writers have captured the triumph and tragedy of organizing a union in America in prose as intimate or compelling. 

Pitkin tells the story of a five-year union organizing campaign, begun in 2003, at an industrial laundry owned by Sodexho in Phoenix, Arizona, where wages were low and working conditions were brutal, unsafe, and unsanitary. Workers sorted and washed bags of linens from major institutions like hospitals, working at breakneck pace while operating massive, dangerous industrial laundry machines. “Sometimes there are syringes and scalpels, sometimes body parts, wrapped in the linens,” a worker named Alma tells Pitkin. Safety gear is absent or insufficient, and “there is a lot of blood and puke and feces.” Alma’s coworkers have stories of limbs crushed while working the machines.

Pitkin begins as a rookie organizer, new to the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), a scrappy union launching an organizing drive among low-wage, immigrant, many undocumented, mostly women workers in a red state. “We both laughed a little,” she writes of her initial job interview with an organizing director, “and shook our heads at how fucking hard it would be, how much of a war.”

War it was. The campaign starts in secret, with organizers pulling trash bags out of the laundry’s dumpsters to search for workers’ contact information. They make contact with workers in the middle of the night after shift changes and organize a secret union committee, which then carries out a stealth campaign to convince a super majority to sign union cards. After painstaking organizing, workers call for a union election. As they so often do, management immediately goes scorched earth, intimidating workers and targeting key union supporters. When workers walk off the job in response to health and safety concerns, Alma is fired in retaliation, then hired by the union to continue the fight. She grows close to Pitkin, and the book is written in a series of second-person letters to her.

At every step, Alma and her coworkers, alongside Pitkin and the other organizers, face constant attacks from the boss. Their task is to figure out how to keep the group of low-wage immigrant workers bound together in a sense of solidarity that is strong enough to withstand those attacks, despite the obscenely pro-management bias of US labor law—“a situation in which the level of unfairness and volatility is often so extreme it is difficult to capture through language,” Pitkin writes. Plant management’s abuses were, in fact, so numerous and so egregious that Human Rights Watch would release a 2010 report on them.

Throughout, Pitkin weaves in labor history, telling the story of the mostly female, immigrant workers that made up UNITE’s predecessor union a century earlier—and of the 146 who burned or jumped to their deaths in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, and the bosses who faced almost no repercussions for the incident of mass worker death. That history isn’t ancient for the workers, who know of another Arizona laundry where a manager tried to block an exit and force workers to continue working during a fire. For Pitkin, the history serves “as a reminder of the urgency and high stakes of organizing, of what can happen if we lose.” 

The campaign confronts a new set of difficulties when Pitkin and her team learn of a merger between her union, UNITE, and another, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE), to create UNITE HERE. As labor’s membership roles have dwindled in recent decades, such mergers have become common survival strategies. Like many others, this merger was executed from the top, with little input from workers or lower-level staff. 

Problems immediately become evident once HERE arrives in Phoenix. The unions’ two cultures differ wildly—principally, from Pitkin’s perspective, around HERE staff’s cultlike fealty to their leadership and personally intrusive organizing tactic called “pink-sheeting,” in which organizers obtain intimate personal information from both workers and other organizers, then use that information to lean hard on workers and organizers to carry out the union’s organizing program. In 2009, Steven Greenhouse reported on these tactics in the New York Times, with one worker telling him, “I quit the union because I felt this was psychological abuse.” Pitkin calls them “a minefield of manipulation.” ...Read More