The corporate Democrats who got rich making a new New Deal impossible made MAGA inevitable - pass it on

The American Federation of Musicians, the major labor union representing professional musicians in North America, is paying tribute to Dolly Parton, who was a member of its Nashville Local 257 for 58 years. AFM says that for decades, Dolly consistently filed union contracts for her recording sessions, live gigs and tours. That meant the musicians working for her were not simply being handed a check as hired players…their work was formally covered under union agreements that can require negotiated minimum pay, pension contributions, benefits and other workplace protections. The union says Dolly “set the gold standard” for supporting the musicians behind her and “elevated our entire profession.”

I think @RoKhanna should be Speaker of the House. Let's make that happen in 2027.

The White House normally gets $2.5 million a year for maintenance. Trump’s team has allocated $875 million.   That’s 350 years’ worth of the usual budget spent by a single administration.

A country that genuinely cared about children would measure its greatness by child outcomes. Child poverty rate. Child mortality rate. Access to healthcare. Access to nutrition. Quality of education regardless of ZIP code. Protection from abuse and exploitation regardless of the perpetrator's institutional affiliation. The United States ranks, among wealthy nations: 33rd out of 38 in under-five mortality. 37th out of 44 in mortality among children aged 5 to 14. Near the bottom in relative child poverty among OECD nations. Below average on key child wellbeing metrics in international comparisons. These rankings do not appear in political speeches. They do not appear in the State of the Union. They do not drive budget negotiations. What drives budget negotiations is the threat from abroad, the competitor on the horizon, the adversary who must be countered. Because the threat from abroad requires no domestic accountability. The threat from abroad does not ask why a child in Mississippi cannot access clean water while the government spends nearly a trillion dollars on defense. The threat from abroad is a very cooperative explanation for why things are the way they are. The children in Mississippi are a very inconvenient one.

Trump isn’t running an administration. He’s running a MAFIA operation. Let me explain: Billions made from selling Venezuela’s stolen oil and it’s all “missing” Banks are shutting down his bank accounts for suspected money laundering A $1 Trillion war budget but runs out of missiles. His entire family is making Billions from insider trading. Truth social now lets you pay to insider trade for 100k per month. Record pardons for financial crimes. This may be the most corrupt presidency in history.

I can’t wrap my head around an economy where nursing homes cost enough to bankrupt families, yet the aides caring for our grandparents still rely on food banks. Or where daycare can consume an entire parent’s paycheck, while the people providing that care still can’t earn a living wage and need a second job. Something about that math just doesn’t add up.

“Respect your elders” doesn’t apply to elders causing active harm and/or preventing younger generations from achieving a better quality of life for themselves

The reason everything feels like it's collapsing is because it is. The social contract was: work hard, contribute to society, and you'll have security. That contract is dead. Now it's: work hard, go into debt, and hope you don't get sick or old because the system has no plan for you.

The government already collects every email/text/phone you make. We’ve been a surveillance state for quite a while & Flock cameras record your every move. We are now China, except with more homeless & street crime, slower trains, & healthcare that bankrupts you:

RT @chiweethedog: no healthcare. no vibrant middle class. crumbling infrastructure. grifters in every office. so all we have are tools and…

Every billionaire arrives carried by roads, ports, courts, cables, schools, hospitals, currency, public order and generations of collective labour. Then the story gets edited down to one heroic entrepreneur. Capitalism does not create alone. It hides the scaffold.

The reason millennials are so nostalgic is that they got a brief taste of a world that wasn’t entirely controlled by the stupidest people who’ve ever lived.

Let me tell you what just got reported, because you will not believe it until you see it laid out. The Trump administration cut a billion-dollar tungsten deal with Kazakhstan. Tungsten is the metal we need for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. Trump himself got on the phone to close it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick worked it from the inside, sending letters, leaning on the Kazakh president, lining up as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing. Within weeks of those negotiations, investors tied to a firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took a 20% stake in an entity connected to the very same Kazakhstan project their father was negotiating. Around that same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run by Lutnick’s own sons, raised $210 million for a partner in the deal and pocketed the fees. The fathers set the policy. The sons cashed in. Six days after the Trump sons and their partners moved their money, Lutnick signed the final deal. The reporting found one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies working with the government on critical mining deals. The total federal funding flowing toward those companies tops $8.9 billion. This is your tax money. It is supposed to secure our supply chains and protect our troops, not pad the portfolios of the President’s children and the Commerce Secretary’s children. This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close. We must keep digging, and keep asking the questions they do not want asked. Republicans in Congress are unwilling to lift a finger. Mike Johnson is running a protection racket. Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us. google.com/url?q=nytimes.com…

You are not crazy for feeling like everything is wrong. You are not dramatic for wondering why everyone is acting like this is fine. You are living in a world where genocides are debated like football scores, where entire nations are punished because they refused to kneel, where the architects of catastrophe retire into foundations and lecture circuits. If you are not at least a little revolutionary inside, you are not sane. You are sedated.

Up until yesterday, this is how people interacted with the reflecting pool, which we all own. Now, Trump will arrest anyone who puts a finger in the water. How exactly is this freedom that the GOP constantly says we have more of now than ever before? Let's get back to the old way

Like Pride Rock after Scar took over 😭😭😭

crazy that JD Vance and the entire Trump administration (and Biden administration) encouraged and approved completely ruining the lives of college students for saying the same thing. ah well, nevertheless

Healthcare tied to employment isn't a policy accident. It's a leash. You cannot organize, cannot strike, cannot quit, cannot risk the job, because the job is the only thing standing between your family and a medical bill that bankrupts you. In countries with national healthcare, workers can walk away from a bad employer because their survival isn't contingent on that employer's goodwill. In America, the calculation is different. Quit, and you lose the thing keeping your kid's asthma medication affordable. Strike, and you risk the coverage that's keeping your mother's chemo paid for. This isn't a side effect of the system. This is the system working exactly as designed. A frightened workforce doesn't need a boot on its neck. It needs a spreadsheet showing what happens if it loses the insurance.