YES. Your article is the print version of the verbal rants I've been having with my County party leadership, some of whom share our frustration. I want to do two things: 1) Start a Save the Democrats activist group whereby we lean on Party Leadership at the national and state levels (PA in my case) to operate more transparently (and that includes booting out the useless consultants who guided Dems in 2024 to a resounding loss). They can start by publishing their org charts. 2) have our Dem County Chair conduct mini public 'town halls' in red municipalities this year, a listening tour of sorts. Changes are beginning to affect Butler County and all voters/non-voters are starting to see bad things heading their way. I can guarantee the R party will not be asking nurturing questions. And in this way, we can use these turbulent times as an opportunity to set differences aside, because we'll all in this boat now. Thank you for your post Robbin.
I keep asking during the last 10 years what were WE DEMOCRATS doing? Mostly I heard how stupid trump & his supporters were/are. Meanwhile trump & supporters were CAREFULLY mapping out Project 2025.
TODAY I'M STILL ONLY HEARING how awful & stupid & evil trump/musk are. However, IMO they captured congress, presidentacy & as we know, he already had SCOTUS. This us why the #1 post mortem is critical. Can we please stop talking about trump, etc & start talking about WHAT WE ARE DOING?
You are 100% correct. And the postmortem must include an understanding of what they are doing with the stock market. We can no longer just focus on issues. The billionaires are playing the system and do not give a darn about our social issues or project 2025. You need actual experts to help you understand crypto, what the consequences of a crypto reserve would be and why the stock market has tripled since 2017 despite the economy not being great. Once that is done. You will be able to understand that the primary joint issue among people is anti-billionaire wealth multiplication. Making money just by having money. Wealth is not untouchable. Capitalism should reward work and production. Not just having.
I want Ken Martin, head of DNC, to succeed. But he needs to do much better than he did on 2 MSNBC appearances. I was particularly aghast at his refusal to answer questions about the D's position on transgender issues. Rather than say that Dems are the party of human rights and elaborate on what that means, he failed to answer the question and repeated 3 times that Americans care most about "kitchen table" issues...a phrase that is feeling old and tired and lacking any bite. He needs to own the successes of the Dem party including Biden's long-term investments while saying that the country is at a crossroads and we need to focus on basic economic inequalities in this country, tax the rich ....and right the sinking ship.
I wonder if we can put pressure on thr creation of a sort of Shadow Cabinet/Opposition Voice. Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Florida Democrat, is becoming a leader to watch in the Democratic Party. The youngest member of the house, he is pushing for democrats to lead not just a minority party, but an opposition party, and to put up an actual fight. Rep. Jasmine Crockett from Texas also shared ideas of having a group of progressive Dems serve as voices of reason and rally citizens. What do you all think? Would love to create a sort of working group with you all!
"We are not questioning the necessity of these jobs." We should be, unless you're making yourself available. Jess Piper here in MO, and David Pepper in OH are two others who come to mind. Your article today is marvelous and should be a wake-up call. While the snooze button is pushed in DC, the rest of us can support AOC, Jasmine Crockett, Chris Murphy, and J.B. Pritzker among too few others who are speaking out. We might also find Tim Walz in whatever windblown pasture he was sent to at a critical point in the campaign and bring him back. If the Republicans were weird then, I'm not sure what word describes them now.
I agree with your post but I don’t think it goes far enough. I am old enough to remember the 1950s. From then through the 70s, an American worker could support his family on one income. The rich and corporations paid their fair share of taxes and the middle class thrived.
I don’t want to sugarcoat that era because there were plenty of social inequities. But a person could get a job at Bethlehem Steel right out of high school and live a decent life.(I picked Bethlehem Steel because I grew up in Buffalo). One income was enough.
It all began to change in the 80s. Reagan started the era of deregulation and anti union warfare. Corporations, following the economic theory of Milton Friedman, focused solely on the maximization of profits. That, in combination with NAFTA led to offshoring of jobs, the downward trajectory of wages, and the need for two incomes for a family to survive.
Now almost all of the wealth is held by the top 1%. In my opinion the underlying cause of the so called working class’ malaise is severe inequality of income, escalating costs of health care, the Walmartization of small towns, and the hollowing out of the social safety nets.
The right has effectively hidden this problem by playing a cynical shell game. Blaming “woke”, transgender people, immigrants and the bogeyman du jour. All of course amplified by the bigotry of right wing magaphones.
The democratic messaging has been sclerotic at best. Addressing that alone is grossly insufficient. The democrats have been complicit in the takeover of America by the oligarchs and the ultra wealthy. To see that all you have to do is look at the Obama years. He appointed Eric Holder as AG. Absolutely nothing was done to punish Wall Street for the economic collapse of 2008. The guilt of Wall Street was obvious. But Obama, Clinton and democratic electeds were supported by Wall Street. Don’t get me wrong, Obama was generally a very good president. And the democrats, in general, are much better than republicans.
My observations are not original to me. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been talking about it for years. The Democratic Party is mostly quiet because they love the status quo. All you have to do is look at their donor lists. Most large campaign contributions come from the well heeled and corporations expecting something in return. My $25 contributions don’t move the needle. Elon Musk’s $250,000,000 buys the presidency.
Unless wealth inequality is addressed absolutely nothing will change. People will get sick of republicans. They will then elect the democrats. Then the cycle will repeat. Merely changing messaging won’t cut it.
I also agree that Wall Street is a scammers paradise. The fact that high frequency trading is legal is proof enough. Don’t get me started on “private equity” and hedge funds. The carried interest exemption for hedge fund managers is an affront to all working Americans. Neither democrats nor republicans will touch this outrage because they are owned by their corporate masters.
Love your message. However, Warren positions create confusion that helps crypto and stock market bros continue their victory dance. Warren for instance hits crypto hard but she does not understand why it is so successful, how it works or who it is hurting. Crypto regulation is a gift to crypto. It further hides the real wrong of crypto. Anything the supports the existence of crypto markets helps crypto value. Anything that would allow certain cryptos to control who can exist as a crypto protects the value of the primary crypto players (bitcoin, ripple, dogecoin, Ethereum) aka the groups that brought trump to victory. Those who are injured by crypto are people who earn actual currency and don't have a major stake in the markets. Allowing valueless crypto to be bought, sold and borrowed on is a wealth multiplier. The markets go crazy as money is reinvested in the markets. The top 1 percent winning trillions. In some ways crypto has helped the US gain wealth verses the rest of the world and our stock market have out preformed the world market accordingly since 2017. Warren goes after side effects of crypto. And i get why it would be damaging to undo the effects of crypto if we now said it was illegal. But it sure seems like they do not even understand it.
I like your post but I do not understand crypto. It seems like it is a fertile ground for fraud. The lost souls who bought Trump’s meme coins after the insiders pumped and dumped got screwed. By the way, don’t understand meme coins either.
If Don the Con thinks meme coins are great then you know it’s a scam.
You seem very smart and probably far more knowledgeable than me in most areas. And I appreciate your pro-people stance and honesty regarding your lack of knowledge of crypto. And that is exactly why I feel the need to scream at democrats that they need to take the time to know what's going on it the stock markets. They need to actually understand crypto. There is a reason well over half of trumps monetiary contributions came from crypto investors. Starting with knowing why the stock market has tripled since 2017 with the rise of crypto. A handful of crypto giants have explained this to Trump.
Crypto is not hard to understand once you realize how simple it is, there is just a lot of noise that surrounds it and the noise that surrounds its connection with blockchain technology. The fact that we have a market for a valueless coin that sets new value for the entire coin by recent purchases is insane. Yet if it allowed to simple set value by transactional agreements and can be borrowed on the losers are those who don't participate. Its such pure profit that the only way it can be stopped is by shutting it down, dilution from competing cryptos or complete hack attack. In fact if the US does buy a bitcoins reserve it would double in a day and potentially rise to tens of trillions in value. The dangers of that are astronomical to the balance of the worlds economies. The impact on inflation and the hard earned buying power of earned monetary currency will be far beyond the unfair wealth multiplier system already in place.
Meme coins are just a simple version of the same grift. The only real difference is that there are no billionaires supporting them and non billionaires can play the long term game or ever gain enough clout to be borrowed or be treated by governments as a money. So the coin owners the will sell out as soon as they have hit significant enough of a profit. If you look them up they will talk about different technology but the crypto technology is not what creates value its simply a commitment to increasing the value by way of a market that has somehow been given backing as a value setting market.
The DNC voted for Ken Martin when they could have chosen Ben Wikler. Just an unbelievably dumb choice. Look at Ken on national tv. He does not exude innovation or muscularity. His “framework” that he just touted is ridiculous; it would receive a “C” grade in sophomore English. Look at Ben’s record with the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Look at Ken’s record with the DFL. Which one was more transformative in a shorter period of time?
Such truth spoken here. I am still so angry at all the democratic registered voters who did not vote in the election. We need new voices. The baton needs to be passed on to Pete Buttigieg, AOC, Jasmine Crockett, Jamie Raskin, David Hogg to name a few. We all need to find a way to get involved. I’m writing and calling my senators and representatives. I also am writing postcards for special elections. Right now I’m doing them for WI. If we all did something that tsunami we used to talk about might make a comeback.
Also, provide training to help us better prepare our local volunteers across the nation to have deep conversations with voters. At least give us a good model to follow.
We have been having trouble with Facebook since we started. Our Substack is blocked. It has nothing to do with the specific article. Unfortunately, no matter what we do, we can't get off the blocked list.
Hi Kathy. We have been having trouble with Facebook since we started. Our Substack is blocked. It has nothing to do with this specific article. Unfortunately, no matter what we do, we can't get off the blocked list. This has been happening to more and more Substacks. A work around is to paste the entire article in FB without the link
I don't agree with Warner or with Sanders. There is nothing wrong with wokeism because it means standing up for civil rights of every type and an ethical frame of mind. The Republicans use this as a cudgel, and perhaps we could've been more adept at figuring out how to counter their nastiness. As for Sanders, I certainly would've agreed with him pre-Biden, but I was impressed with how Biden passed legislation that was more economically progressive and appointed people to agencies who really cared about all Americans. Would it have been better had he passed major tax reform to target the billionaires? Absolutely. He should've done more to press this case, but he had almost total opposition from the GOP and an unfortunate number of Democrats who were also unwilling to go along.
YES. Your article is the print version of the verbal rants I've been having with my County party leadership, some of whom share our frustration. I want to do two things: 1) Start a Save the Democrats activist group whereby we lean on Party Leadership at the national and state levels (PA in my case) to operate more transparently (and that includes booting out the useless consultants who guided Dems in 2024 to a resounding loss). They can start by publishing their org charts. 2) have our Dem County Chair conduct mini public 'town halls' in red municipalities this year, a listening tour of sorts. Changes are beginning to affect Butler County and all voters/non-voters are starting to see bad things heading their way. I can guarantee the R party will not be asking nurturing questions. And in this way, we can use these turbulent times as an opportunity to set differences aside, because we'll all in this boat now. Thank you for your post Robbin.
I keep asking during the last 10 years what were WE DEMOCRATS doing? Mostly I heard how stupid trump & his supporters were/are. Meanwhile trump & supporters were CAREFULLY mapping out Project 2025.
TODAY I'M STILL ONLY HEARING how awful & stupid & evil trump/musk are. However, IMO they captured congress, presidentacy & as we know, he already had SCOTUS. This us why the #1 post mortem is critical. Can we please stop talking about trump, etc & start talking about WHAT WE ARE DOING?
You are 100% correct. And the postmortem must include an understanding of what they are doing with the stock market. We can no longer just focus on issues. The billionaires are playing the system and do not give a darn about our social issues or project 2025. You need actual experts to help you understand crypto, what the consequences of a crypto reserve would be and why the stock market has tripled since 2017 despite the economy not being great. Once that is done. You will be able to understand that the primary joint issue among people is anti-billionaire wealth multiplication. Making money just by having money. Wealth is not untouchable. Capitalism should reward work and production. Not just having.
Try BlueSky. Zuck is part of the problem now.
Amen to the nth degree!
I want Ken Martin, head of DNC, to succeed. But he needs to do much better than he did on 2 MSNBC appearances. I was particularly aghast at his refusal to answer questions about the D's position on transgender issues. Rather than say that Dems are the party of human rights and elaborate on what that means, he failed to answer the question and repeated 3 times that Americans care most about "kitchen table" issues...a phrase that is feeling old and tired and lacking any bite. He needs to own the successes of the Dem party including Biden's long-term investments while saying that the country is at a crossroads and we need to focus on basic economic inequalities in this country, tax the rich ....and right the sinking ship.
I wonder if we can put pressure on thr creation of a sort of Shadow Cabinet/Opposition Voice. Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Florida Democrat, is becoming a leader to watch in the Democratic Party. The youngest member of the house, he is pushing for democrats to lead not just a minority party, but an opposition party, and to put up an actual fight. Rep. Jasmine Crockett from Texas also shared ideas of having a group of progressive Dems serve as voices of reason and rally citizens. What do you all think? Would love to create a sort of working group with you all!
"We are not questioning the necessity of these jobs." We should be, unless you're making yourself available. Jess Piper here in MO, and David Pepper in OH are two others who come to mind. Your article today is marvelous and should be a wake-up call. While the snooze button is pushed in DC, the rest of us can support AOC, Jasmine Crockett, Chris Murphy, and J.B. Pritzker among too few others who are speaking out. We might also find Tim Walz in whatever windblown pasture he was sent to at a critical point in the campaign and bring him back. If the Republicans were weird then, I'm not sure what word describes them now.
I agree with your post but I don’t think it goes far enough. I am old enough to remember the 1950s. From then through the 70s, an American worker could support his family on one income. The rich and corporations paid their fair share of taxes and the middle class thrived.
I don’t want to sugarcoat that era because there were plenty of social inequities. But a person could get a job at Bethlehem Steel right out of high school and live a decent life.(I picked Bethlehem Steel because I grew up in Buffalo). One income was enough.
It all began to change in the 80s. Reagan started the era of deregulation and anti union warfare. Corporations, following the economic theory of Milton Friedman, focused solely on the maximization of profits. That, in combination with NAFTA led to offshoring of jobs, the downward trajectory of wages, and the need for two incomes for a family to survive.
Now almost all of the wealth is held by the top 1%. In my opinion the underlying cause of the so called working class’ malaise is severe inequality of income, escalating costs of health care, the Walmartization of small towns, and the hollowing out of the social safety nets.
The right has effectively hidden this problem by playing a cynical shell game. Blaming “woke”, transgender people, immigrants and the bogeyman du jour. All of course amplified by the bigotry of right wing magaphones.
The democratic messaging has been sclerotic at best. Addressing that alone is grossly insufficient. The democrats have been complicit in the takeover of America by the oligarchs and the ultra wealthy. To see that all you have to do is look at the Obama years. He appointed Eric Holder as AG. Absolutely nothing was done to punish Wall Street for the economic collapse of 2008. The guilt of Wall Street was obvious. But Obama, Clinton and democratic electeds were supported by Wall Street. Don’t get me wrong, Obama was generally a very good president. And the democrats, in general, are much better than republicans.
My observations are not original to me. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been talking about it for years. The Democratic Party is mostly quiet because they love the status quo. All you have to do is look at their donor lists. Most large campaign contributions come from the well heeled and corporations expecting something in return. My $25 contributions don’t move the needle. Elon Musk’s $250,000,000 buys the presidency.
Unless wealth inequality is addressed absolutely nothing will change. People will get sick of republicans. They will then elect the democrats. Then the cycle will repeat. Merely changing messaging won’t cut it.
I also agree that Wall Street is a scammers paradise. The fact that high frequency trading is legal is proof enough. Don’t get me started on “private equity” and hedge funds. The carried interest exemption for hedge fund managers is an affront to all working Americans. Neither democrats nor republicans will touch this outrage because they are owned by their corporate masters.
Love your message. However, Warren positions create confusion that helps crypto and stock market bros continue their victory dance. Warren for instance hits crypto hard but she does not understand why it is so successful, how it works or who it is hurting. Crypto regulation is a gift to crypto. It further hides the real wrong of crypto. Anything the supports the existence of crypto markets helps crypto value. Anything that would allow certain cryptos to control who can exist as a crypto protects the value of the primary crypto players (bitcoin, ripple, dogecoin, Ethereum) aka the groups that brought trump to victory. Those who are injured by crypto are people who earn actual currency and don't have a major stake in the markets. Allowing valueless crypto to be bought, sold and borrowed on is a wealth multiplier. The markets go crazy as money is reinvested in the markets. The top 1 percent winning trillions. In some ways crypto has helped the US gain wealth verses the rest of the world and our stock market have out preformed the world market accordingly since 2017. Warren goes after side effects of crypto. And i get why it would be damaging to undo the effects of crypto if we now said it was illegal. But it sure seems like they do not even understand it.
I like your post but I do not understand crypto. It seems like it is a fertile ground for fraud. The lost souls who bought Trump’s meme coins after the insiders pumped and dumped got screwed. By the way, don’t understand meme coins either.
If Don the Con thinks meme coins are great then you know it’s a scam.
You seem very smart and probably far more knowledgeable than me in most areas. And I appreciate your pro-people stance and honesty regarding your lack of knowledge of crypto. And that is exactly why I feel the need to scream at democrats that they need to take the time to know what's going on it the stock markets. They need to actually understand crypto. There is a reason well over half of trumps monetiary contributions came from crypto investors. Starting with knowing why the stock market has tripled since 2017 with the rise of crypto. A handful of crypto giants have explained this to Trump.
Crypto is not hard to understand once you realize how simple it is, there is just a lot of noise that surrounds it and the noise that surrounds its connection with blockchain technology. The fact that we have a market for a valueless coin that sets new value for the entire coin by recent purchases is insane. Yet if it allowed to simple set value by transactional agreements and can be borrowed on the losers are those who don't participate. Its such pure profit that the only way it can be stopped is by shutting it down, dilution from competing cryptos or complete hack attack. In fact if the US does buy a bitcoins reserve it would double in a day and potentially rise to tens of trillions in value. The dangers of that are astronomical to the balance of the worlds economies. The impact on inflation and the hard earned buying power of earned monetary currency will be far beyond the unfair wealth multiplier system already in place.
Meme coins are just a simple version of the same grift. The only real difference is that there are no billionaires supporting them and non billionaires can play the long term game or ever gain enough clout to be borrowed or be treated by governments as a money. So the coin owners the will sell out as soon as they have hit significant enough of a profit. If you look them up they will talk about different technology but the crypto technology is not what creates value its simply a commitment to increasing the value by way of a market that has somehow been given backing as a value setting market.
Right on Buzz. Every bit as spot on as Robbin's original.
The DNC voted for Ken Martin when they could have chosen Ben Wikler. Just an unbelievably dumb choice. Look at Ken on national tv. He does not exude innovation or muscularity. His “framework” that he just touted is ridiculous; it would receive a “C” grade in sophomore English. Look at Ben’s record with the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Look at Ken’s record with the DFL. Which one was more transformative in a shorter period of time?
Such truth spoken here. I am still so angry at all the democratic registered voters who did not vote in the election. We need new voices. The baton needs to be passed on to Pete Buttigieg, AOC, Jasmine Crockett, Jamie Raskin, David Hogg to name a few. We all need to find a way to get involved. I’m writing and calling my senators and representatives. I also am writing postcards for special elections. Right now I’m doing them for WI. If we all did something that tsunami we used to talk about might make a comeback.
Amen to this column.
Also, provide training to help us better prepare our local volunteers across the nation to have deep conversations with voters. At least give us a good model to follow.
SURJ national
I tried posting this to Facebook and was blocked - apparently it contains offensive content. Seriously, how else can this piece be shared?
We have been having trouble with Facebook since we started. Our Substack is blocked. It has nothing to do with the specific article. Unfortunately, no matter what we do, we can't get off the blocked list.
I was able to post a post about this substack, very nice, with picture. But couldn't post that particular article. Hmmmm.....
Bluesky is good.
All of this, 1000%!
Right on!
Tried to share on facebook, and was blocked for abusive content!
Hi Kathy. We have been having trouble with Facebook since we started. Our Substack is blocked. It has nothing to do with this specific article. Unfortunately, no matter what we do, we can't get off the blocked list. This has been happening to more and more Substacks. A work around is to paste the entire article in FB without the link
I don't agree with Warner or with Sanders. There is nothing wrong with wokeism because it means standing up for civil rights of every type and an ethical frame of mind. The Republicans use this as a cudgel, and perhaps we could've been more adept at figuring out how to counter their nastiness. As for Sanders, I certainly would've agreed with him pre-Biden, but I was impressed with how Biden passed legislation that was more economically progressive and appointed people to agencies who really cared about all Americans. Would it have been better had he passed major tax reform to target the billionaires? Absolutely. He should've done more to press this case, but he had almost total opposition from the GOP and an unfortunate number of Democrats who were also unwilling to go along.