My Resolutions For 2026
Plus socialism and stuff, plus music
The photo above is from the evening of New Year’s Day 2016, and it looked pretty much exactly the same ten years on.
Yes, I noticed we blew up a country and carried out a coup by kidnapping its leader, murdering an unknown number of Venezuelans in the process and fucking the Constitution and the rule of various laws national and international every which way. This time we’ve got him for sure; look how Democrats stood up for the rule of . . . wait.
My Resolutions For 2026
Learn enough Japanese that my toddler grandkid stops looking gravely disappointed when I don’t understand what they’re saying, and
Get the fuck outta here.
Help get Steven Thrasher his due.
That’s it. Grandkid understands English just fine, but refuses to speak it other than “cookie” and “ice cream.” As for the GTFOH project, frankly it’s languishing. The target date is August of this year, but anytime before the mid-terms would be good. To get there, we need more subscribers, free or paid. If you’ve not considered subscribing please do so this year. Now, even.
Free subscriptions get everything paid ones do except the grand satisfaction of helping me be a refugee.
Actually that’s not true: Free subscriptions help get the word out and lead to paid ones. So it’s all good, man.
Regarding Thrasher: he’s a brave guy and gentle soul whose early support for and defense of pro-Palestinian protestors put him very much at odds with his employer, Northwestern University, where until the end of this year he’ll be an endowed professor but one who is not allowed to teach. They have smeared him and tried to fire him, but he endures.
For much of the past year he’s been traveling in support of and to chronicle the situations faced by HIV patients and health care providers throughout the world, most recently in Africa but also in, for instance, his adopted homeland in Greece.
Why is Greece Steven’s adopted homeland? Because, based upon his experiences of the past two years, he doesn’t anticipate ever again enjoying the opportunity to make a decent living in the U.S., and whether or not he’s concerned about it, I worry that even trying to get back in the country under the current regime poses a real risk to his safety and freedom.
Inseparable from Steven’s activism is his writing. We first became acquainted via email almost two decades ago when he was writing at the late lamented Village Voice. He’s since written for innumerable other outlets and has become the author of one bestselling book, The Viral Underclass, with another, The Overseer Class, arriving next May and available for preorder now.
Steven is a mensch. Support him however you can.
Socialism and stuff
I don’t have a good theoretical understanding of socialism. I’m not versed in the analytics of it. I only know that what socialism proposes, which is equality of opportunity and for the most part of resources, and the end of capitalism, makes a lot of sense to me and for, I think, everyone who isn’t at the top of the capitalist heap.
John Steinbeck is often quoted as saying the reason socialism never took hold in the U.S. is that people who aren’t wealthy see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” so they support the policies that will benefit them when they’re rich at last.
What he actually said is that we see ourselves as temporarily embarrassed capitalists, the suggestion being that we’re happy to reject a society based on mutuality (as opposed to it being an afterthought) if that ultimately means better opportunities for stepping on more people.
Maybe we do have enough people whose goal is oppressing other people that their weight alone forestalls even modest steps toward a social welfare state, never mind an actual socialist one, beyond those we took through New Deal and Great Society programs. You can see how people would think that, given the numbers who won’t abandon our current regime leader no matter what.
But even those millions can’t outweigh the many more millions who don’t venerate the embodiment of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia and every other rejection of the humanity of people who are different from them.
So you have to look elsewhere for reasons why we’re stuck in what for at least some countries is a distant past where every element of civil society is completely dominated by money and the people who hoard it. It’s a question which mostly answers itself. Socialism isn’t in the news that most people see other than through references to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and, more recently, Zohran Mamdani, whose vision of Democratic Socialism is more aggressive than that offered by his fellow elected representatives of it.
When the topic of socialism does arise outside the lens of personalities, who have through persistence and continued electoral success gained some measure of credibility in the eyes of a personality- and horse race-driven press, the same press and the overwhelming majority of elected officials, all flying the flag of corporate ownership, work hard to demonize the concept, and we don’t hear about successful examples of even the diluted socialism enjoyed by every other developed country.
For instance, the most recent reference we’ve seen to the ubiquity of universal health care in other countries was in a piece by the Washington Post editorial board dishonestly and nonsensically, variously, slagging the UK’s national health service. Yet reporters and editorialists writing on health care in this country have absolutely no legitimate reasons to invariably avoid comparisons with what other countries do. And we almost never hear about universal day care, free public higher education—which used to be very close to a thing here—and other guaranteed social welfare programs enjoyed by every other wealthy country and a bunch of not-so-wealthy ones.
On related and only slightly more arcane subject, a great many countries have sovereign wealth funds through which they pay for social welfare programs. Most of these funds are supported by income from local resources—fossil fuels or minerals or other—and dedicated at least in part to paying for social welfare programs and other public goods, such as infrastructure projects or industrial development and the like.
In the U.S., we rarely hear about these funds other than when they invest in U.S.companies or, as with Jared Kushner, when they’re buying political influence—actions which are not mutually exclusive, obviously.
In all the reading I’ve done for this blog and BTC News, its long-running predecessor, I don’t recall seeing anything about the specific social goods enacted through a wealth fund other than one instance in which somebody predicted doom for Norway’s robust social welfare system (which is an actual comprehensive, universal, integrated system, unlike our “system”) because the sovereign wealth fund that pays for much of it relies almost entirely on fossil fuel production, which at the time, a few years ago when the mitigation of global warming seemed poised to savage the fossil fuel industries, was thought to be a dead-end resource—this despite growing public pressure behind using the proceeds to cushion the shock of transitioning to an oil-free future.
That’s a quarter-century of reading. I’m sure I’ve missed or forgotten the occasional relevant story but they’re so exceptional as to be jarring when they appear.
Some U.S. states have wealth funds built on natural resource exploitation. Alaska’s oil fund, which returns annual dividends to residents, is probably the best known. But our country as a whole, which has been a major fossil, mineral and timber producer for decades and longer, doesn’t have one. We more often subsidize for-profit extraction of our resources than confiscate any of the returns from it for the public good.
This is because corporations and the wealthy write our laws and bribe our lawmakers to facilitate their looting of the country, and our corporate press do not regard this as a scandal. Fossil fuel companies are the worst but every extractive industry has its swarm of lobbyists and bagmen. We could obviously use an independently managed sovereign wealth fund but the days of independently managed government agencies are at an end, and “wealth fund” has generally meant funding corporate and individual wealth, most prominently, in recent days, that of the leader of our current regime.
Speaking of which, the degree to which this low-rent billionaire has subjugated so many much, much wealthier billionaires is remarkable. Cooperation is one thing; cooptation is another; open humiliation is different altogether. I blame social media and professional wrestling.
The point of all this is that although some people among the lesser classes may be opposed to socialism on its own merits, the people who are deadly allergic to it own the laws, the lawmakers, the press and, to an ever-increasing extent, the courts—which together have historically shaped public opinion almost to the exclusion of any other forces at least in the post-World War II era.
It’s a miracle of stubbornness that allegiance to the concept survived even to the limited extent that it did between the end of the war and the onset of the serial crises that have, fatally one hopes but at least to a degree we’ve probably not seen since the Great Depression, damaged young people’s faith in capitalism. Long live the revolution.
Stuff
On a related subject, Andrew O’Hagan writes in the London Review of Books about Walter Lippmann.
Lippmann was called the greatest journalist of his age, but his claims as an original thinker rest on his book Public Opinion, published in 1922. In a way that we might find startlingly relevant today, the book posits that modern man responds not to accuracy but to the power of public fiction, not to real environments but to the invented ones that large numbers of people agree on, common prejudices that become ‘their interior representations of the world’ (such representations might explain Nigel Farage). Individual citizens cling to their fictional environments so thoroughly, Lippmann argued, that they could be living in different worlds from those who don’t share them. ‘More accurately,’ he writes, ‘they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones ... [and] these fictions determine a very great part of men’s political behaviour.’ Lippmann is said to have been the first person to use the word ‘stereotype’ in its modern application, and in Public Opinion he considers the way we seek to have our most beloved fictions reinforced in the public sphere:
If the newspaper gives a satisfactory account of that which we think we know ... it is fairly certain to be immune from violent criticism by us. What better criterion does the man at the breakfast table possess than that the newspaper version checks up with his own opinion? Therefore, most men tend to hold the newspaper most strictly accountable in their capacity, not of general readers, but of special pleaders on matters of their own experience ... The body of the news, though unchecked as a whole by the disinterested reader, consists of items about which some readers have very definite preconceptions. Those items are the data of his judgment, and news which men read without this personal criterion, they judge by some other standard than their standard of accuracy. They are dealing here with a subject matter which to them is indistinguishable from fiction. The canon of truth cannot be applied. They do not boggle over such news if it conforms to their stereotypes.
People reading newspapers, Lippmann observed, were not offended by stories of unfairness and corruption, they were offended by what those stories said about themselves, and taking public events personally proved habit-forming over the 20th century and into the 21st. If you look at the coverage of terrible events that gave rise to a disquiet about the play of fact and fiction in their reporting – from the Soviet famine to Vietnam, from the Falklands conflict to the Grenfell Tower fire – you can feel the imprint of Lippmann’s definition of enhanced opinion and manipulated fact. ‘For one item suppressed out of respect for a railroad or a bank, nine are rejected because of the prejudices of the public. This will anger the farmers, that will arouse the Catholics, another will shock the summer girl ... In that subservience ... is the reason why American journalism is so flaccid, so repetitious and so dull.’ At his peak, Lippmann was writing on three or four subjects a week; he believed, as Tom Arnold-Forster puts it in his biography, that ‘journalism was a vocation with political responsibilities to inform public opinion and help democracy function.’ Lippmann did recognise the increasing capacity of people to select their own facts, a trend which faces us with a large question. As Arnold-Forster puts it: ‘If lying journalism defined the public sphere, was democracy really free?’
It’s kind of a circular argument: where do these preconceptions and the reinforcement of them arise if not from external input? and who controls that input? But it’s obviously relevant to the socialism question; and Lippmann’s century-old description of our press as flaccid, repetitious and dull is equally relevant, although I’d add “frequently malicious” to the litany.
Music
Goldie Boutilier, “The Angel and the Saint”
Pixel Grip, “Reason to Stay” and more
Panic Shack, “Gok Wan”
Girl Tones, “Got It”
Green Tea Bitches, “Bad Taste”
Gini Brown, “Drink”
Tolstoys, “Mad”
Chloe Slater, “Sucker”
Rosa Damask, “The Sun”
Baxter Dury, “Albarone”
And that, Comrades in Camaraderie, is all I got. As always, please share and let me know if you like what I do, and if you got a spare monthly five-spot please consider a paid subscription if you’ve not already so considered. Free ones are gratefully received as well.
Happy new year! Be well; take care.