What I Learned Reading Saturday's Comments
Akhilleus: "Fat Hitler’s excuse for hitting our neighbors with tariffs, his favorite economic cudgel ... is fentynal.... But there’s something that causes far more deaths per year than fentynal, almost three times as many, but it’s something he and his billionaire bros work hard to make worse on an hourly basis: Poverty." A report in the U.C. Riverside News, which Akhilleus linked, says, "A University of California, Riverside, (UCR) paper published Monday, April 17, in the Journal of the American Medical Association associated poverty with an estimated 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people 15 years and older."
According to this CDC press release (will we be getting reports like this anymore?), 74,702 American residents died of fentanyl overdoses in 2023, a slight decrease from the previous year. So there's the arithmetic.
As for blaming Canada for fentanyl deaths in the U.S., RAS linked this Globe & Mail report: “The Trump administration is using misleading fentanyl figures to justify tariffs against Canada, relying on a dataset that includes drugs traced to Mexico, a Globe and Mail investigation has found. Citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, the White House has asserted that 43 pounds of fentanyl was intercepted at the border last fiscal year, marking a 'massive 2,050 per cent increase' compared with the year prior, when two pounds of the deadly synthetic drug was seized.... Donald Trump has invoked the 43-pound figure as grounds for threats of punishing trade measures.... However..., U.S. border agents confirmed to The Globe that the agency’s methodology for attributing seizures to the northern border doesn’t hinge on whether the fentanyl ... came from Canada. It could have been seized hundreds of kilometres inland, and it may have no ties to Canada whatsoever.” (P.S. If the link doesn't work for you, Google the story. The G&M firewalled me when I tried RAS's link, but Google let me thru.)
Then laura h. linked this New York Times op-ed by Brian Goldstone: “The very phrase 'working homeless' should be a contradiction, an impossibility in a nation that claims hard work leads to stability. And yet, their homelessness is not only pervasive but also persistently overlooked — excluded from official counts, ignored by policymakers, treated as an anomaly rather than a disaster unfolding in plain sight. Today, the threat of homelessness is most acute not in the poorest regions of the country, but in the richest, fastest-growing ones. In places like these, a low-wage job is homelessness waiting to happen.”
My dentist's assistant isn't homeless. But she is a 40-year-old married mother who told me yesterday that for the first time in her adult life she is not holding down three jobs at once to keep her family solvent. A friend of mine is looking for a rental apartment, so yesterday I noodled around the Internet to see what I could find for her. I could not find one place in a fairly wide geographical area that looked both decent and affordable. And I would not say this is a "rich, fast-growing" part of the country. But I would say it's unaffordable. My own house, which I purchased 10 years ago, has trebled in value; I have made some valuable improvements (that is, ones the tax man knows about) but nothing that would even come close to doubling the value of the property, much less trebling it. So "working homeless"? Of course.
Of course, this isn't all I learned in Saturday's Comments. But these three comments fit together in a way that gives us a jarring picture of just how terrible the Trump/Project 2025 policies are. They are designed to impoverish and kill as many people as possible. And of course, they use lies to "justify" the policies and distractions -- fentanyl! from Mexico! and Canada! -- to make sure the dimwits don't notice the damage Trump & the Trumpettes are raining down on them. Democrats sort of know this, but they are remarkably complacent. They should be shouting their objections. They should be educating voters. They should be proposing solutions. They are not. They are not. They are not.
P.S. To add meat to the theme, late Saturday night, Ken. W. added this Reuters story to the Comments: “The Trump administration has pulled the plug on a team of tech-savvy civil servants that helped to build the Internal Revenue Service’s free tax-filing service and revamp websites across government, a spokesperson for the General Service Administration said on Saturday. GSA’s Director of Technology Transformation Services Thomas Shedd notified employees of a digital service team known as 18F that their jobs had been terminated as they had been identified as 'non-critical.' Roughly 90 18F employees were immediately locked out of their devices.... Billionaire Elon Musk ... earlier this month responded to a post on X that called 18F a 'far-left government-wide computer office' by saying the group has been 'deleted.'” As Ken wrote, “Of course they did.” ~~~
~~~ The Musk/Trump administration will do anything to punish, harass and overburden people of low and modest incomes. And, as you can see from Musk's one-word rejoinder, he will carelessly hurt people based on casually-conceived, unsupported rumors. He's a natural sadist.
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Reader Comments (3)
Of course the answer is really educating everybody. Proof of that is that a big part of how we got where we are is due to people being influenced through various forms of the media.
There's the obvious antagonists here, like Fox and all, but there's a lot more when you get down to it. All that advertising that convinces everybody that they "need" a new expensive cell phone every year to make their life more fulfilling is just one example. Advertising for various forms of medication that require a doctor's prescription. The list is really long. All so some company can be more profitable. Is that not really the same thing? They want you to do what is best for them.
None of this is new. There's a great documentary on the history of influencing people called "The Century of the Self". Rather than me providing a link, it's better for you to use a search engine to find it because there's a few places you can watch it for free.
An important thing to note is that the difference between influence and propaganda is very slim.
So, I think this is where the Democrats have completely missed the boat. Rather than calling those who might be considered the opposition demeaning names, like the "deplorables" and the "poorly informed", why not instead help educate them? The GOP has been very successful at that over a very long period, even though their messages are very self-serving and dishonest, at best.
Just because the political right has been doing something doesn't mean that progressives can't use a similar technique. As that documentary shows, people are susceptible to suggestion. So, why not use that for good?
Marie - I agree it is a jarring picture. Given the republican's stated goal for forever has been to shred the safety net, now working in partnership with natural sadists like trump and musk, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to notice they are are pressing toward that goal without regard for larger consequences.
Where are the Democrats? In another essay in his series, Jared Sexton, points at the Democratic party alignment with billionaires for fund-raising: Authoritarian Madness and Authoritarian Action
"They [democrats] have longstanding and deep partnerships with corporations and billionaires, connections that are so essential to their fundraising apparatus that it kept Kamala Harris from even so much as mentioning the power play by Musk and aligning herself with billionaires and wealth class luminaries like Goldman Sachs.What we’re left with are a couple of outliers willing to call this what it is in the form of Alexandria Occasio Cortes and Jasmine Crockett (notable, of course, that these are women of color) and a host of useless, feckless functionaries like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who are more than happy to continue feeding off the fundraising and support of billionaires while 'waiting' on Trump to mess up."
Somewhat related, in an essay by Helen Lewis January 15th, 2025 in The Atlantic writes about MAGA’s Demon-Haunted World
"The venture capitalist Peter Thiel, for example, could not be more of an establishment figure: He was an early investor in Facebook, is now a mentor of Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance, and has strong links to the U.S. defense industry through his company Palantir. But in a recent opinion column in the ultra-establishment Financial Times, Thiel sounds like The X-Files’ Fox Mulder after a long night in the Bigfoot forums. 'The future demands fresh and strange ideas,' he writes....
Until recently, [lewis] had assumed that the anti-establishment sentiments promoted by Thiel and others were merely opportunistic, a way for elites to stoke a form of anti-elitism that somehow excluded themselves as targets of popular rage. Thiel has always made a point of entertaining provocative heterodox opinions, but he has also demonstrated himself to be eloquent, analytical, and capable of going whole paragraphs without saying something unhinged. But reading his Financial Times column, I thought: My God, he actually believes this stuff. The entire tone is reminiscent of a stranger sitting down next to you on public transit and whispering that the FBI is following him."
Surprised there isnt a paywall - we can read the piece for ourselves in the Financial Times - Peter Thiel
A time for truth and reconciliation