BOOM! It's An Economic Blackout!

Take a pause for the cause with no shopping on Friday, February 28, 2025.

You can do it! Folks are being asked to avoid non-urgent spending of any money online or in-stores for 24 hours this Friday, in protest of corporate greed and rising prices. There are similar, week-long actions planned in March and April against Amazon, Nestlé, and Walmart.

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I hear 2024 was a good year for the nation’s billionaires. The wealth of the world’s ten richest men grew on average by almost $100 million a day, the number of billionaires rose to 2,769, up from 2,565 in 2023.

The culture of our country has a built-in bias toward the wealthy (success!) and a history of depreciating discussions about class (commies!). We have, however, reached a point where it is increasingly obvious that economic mobility is rigged.

Monopolization and enshittification are the chains that bind, and otherization (racism, misogyny, etc.) are the whips used to keep us unfortunates in line. The nation’s ultra-wealthy have bought-in to the notion that an authoritarian state will be necessary going forward in order to maintain their status.

Overall, 60% of billionaire wealth now comes from inheritance (36%), monopoly power (18%), or crony connections (6%). In other words, y’all didn’t actually earn more than half your fortunes. Research by Forbes found that every billionaire under 30 has inherited their wealth.

In the United States, the ultrawealthy now have a president willing to stack the economic deck even further. The richest guy in America not only spent $277 million to get a President, he’s been put in charge of destroying an administrative state often created in response to greed.

Every move made or promised by the Trump administration and its allies will have the ultimate effect of more wealth to those who already have it and less for those who don’t. The net effect of unemploying tens of thousands of Federal employees, along with more than twice as many contractor employees will be an economic blast basically wiping out what’s left of our middle class.

The faux economy, built around expectations for crypto and artificial intelligence, will stumble, leaving smaller investors holding the bag. A millennia from now, beings probing the remnants of our civilization will find evidence of blockchain technology and be unable to ascertain what its value was. The next big thing in tech amounts to a mirage enhanced by hosts who promise miracles if only they can acquire a few billion more dollars.

(I’m not saying crypto and AI are useless, but I am saying that people are being played for suckers. An investment in Melania “coins” worth $79,000 at issue is now worth $15,000, while the Trump family has made tens of millions from transactional fees.)

The worst effects of this economic fate aren’t here yet. Whatever budget passed by Congress will be mandated to reduce the social safety net and decrease taxes for the wealthy. Don’t look too hard at the numbers being talked about; the cuts will be even deeper and the breaks will be even narrower. No taxes on tips and social security won’t make it, I bet, since the deficit numbers being talked about are even worse if you run them through a calculator.

• Yahoo Finance counted more than a dozen tax pledges from Trump before last November's election. A recounting in recent days has upped the tally to 17 different ideas, almost all of them cuts.

• Even the smallest estimates of Trump's varied tax promises put the tab at about $10 trillion. The higher-side projections amount to much more: almost $18 trillion in new red ink over the coming decade.

• Meanwhile, Johnson and his colleagues are putting aside space for, at most, $4.5 trillion for tax cuts as part of an overall bill that would be paired with about $1.5 trillion in spending cuts.

It takes a while for children to die from lack of medical care. Or for old people to die after being kicked to the curb. Remember, Elon Musk says that “parasites” in government are the problem.

Our political guardrails designed to engender checks and balances are being destroyed even as (most of) those politicians who purport to defend the unentitled stand by and tell people that things will all work out.

The so-called Fourth Estate, the non-governmental window into the deliberations of our elected representatives, is destroying itself as private equity picks over its bones. Trump’s White House has decided that only approved outlets will have access. The administration has made it clear that it will use the resources at its command to punish opinions not in line with MAGA orthodoxy.

The billionaires who control much of the remaining mass media have signaled their willingness to accommodate executive branch orthodoxy. The MSNBC/NBC programming schedule is changing so that non-white presenters are minimized or excluded, along with their staff. The Washington Post has announced that going forward its opinion section will prioritize the viewpoints considered important by its owner. Etc., etc.

All these developments coming early in Trump 2.0 don’t leave much of a path for opposition. If the “leaders” of Democratic congressional caucuses can’t see their way past hand wringing, and the mainstream media is losing its spine, it’s up to people who still possess a sense of empathy and know the difference between right and wrong to step up.

We’ve learned that BIG public displays are easily neutered by reactionaries who utilize fear and falsehoods to divide people.

What is working are the small ball actions that leverage public sentiment and (hopefully) embolden influential leaders to step outside their silos. Dozens upon dozens of picket lines near Tesla dealers can have the effect of lessening Elon Musk’s cash flow, since he basically lives off loans using Tesla stock as collateral. You know it’s working because the conspiracy mongers are already claiming that the senior citizens spreading the word about boycotting Tesla are supposedly Antifa.

There will be other actions aimed at sending economic messages in the coming weeks, and specific constituencies (Scientists, March 7) are planning actions that we ALL should support.

As a society we’ve been conditioned in our culture to expect heroes to appear in times of crisis. After all, portraying solidarity on a screen is beyond the capability of all but the most brilliant creators. In real life, standing together is an infinite number of times better than standing alone.

As David Bowie sang during his 1987 performance of Heroes in front of the Berlin Wall:

We can beat them, just for one day

We can be heroes, just for one day

February 28 is just one day. Let’s all be heroes.

The "Fraud" Fraud - How DOGE Destroys by Timothy Snyder at Thinking About…

• Musk's "fraud" rhetoric is presented as an anti-politics, as something fresh and exciting. But it is in fact a politics, a very old sort, the politics of oligarchy. As he himself has made clear himself, Musk is a politician with a program. It is to disable the rule of law, leaving no barriers to his oligarchical power. In this scheme, the only parts of government meant to function are the ones used to silence people who point out this obvious truth.

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#AltGov: the secret network of federal workers resisting Doge from the inside by Timothy Pratt at The Guardian

• The original #AltGov Twitter accounts were dedicated to “sharing information about what was happening inside government – which usually doesn’t get covered as much, because it usually works”, Sturgill said. Examples included the first Trump administration’s deletion of data and separation of families through immigration policies, she said.

• The people behind those accounts also banded together to “provide services the government wasn’t providing” – like helping coordinate hurricane relief and distributing masks during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Those efforts were often coordinated in Twitter group chats.

• It was “a movement, more than an organization”, Sturgill said – and the same could be said of the current version, which moved its social media presence from X (formerly Twitter) to Bluesky “because of the Elon mess”, said Stahl, referring to Musk’s 2022 purchase of the app. “It’s not safe to organize [on X] anymore,” she added.

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As Texas measles outbreak grows, parents are choosing to vaccinate kids by Erika Edwards at NBC News

• Measles is considered one of the most contagious viruses in the world. It’s spread through tiny respiratory particles that can live in the air or on surfaces for up to two hours after an infected person was there.

• That’s why a mobile health care unit offering measles testing and vaccines for people who are not sick enough to be hospitalized has set up shop in emergency department parking lots in Lubbock and surrounding areas.

• “We’re using the bus to keep them out of the hospital because measles is so contagious and airborne,” Chad Curry, training chief for the University Medical Center EMS, who is overseeing the mobile unit’s operations during the outbreak, said in an interview Tuesday. “We’re trying to lessen the blow.”