Also would a flat out war have broken out amongst the Democrats. Such as people like AOC, and other more less establishment Democrats going on social media, and on mainstream media and flat out, cursing and condemning the Biden administration?

I can't find anybody mentioning this. Please share far and wide!

Sources:
https://en.ypagency.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/rally.jpg.

https://www.yamanyoon.com/?p=121542

Majlis, a cultural and social space (UNESCO)

Informed/inspired by much of what Kyle's been talking about for years now. Hopefully it can serve as an illustration of just how easy a basic social democratic agenda would be to implement (in principle, at least), a handy reference for anyone who wants it, and/or a coherent sketch showing how much better life could be in this country even before we start considering truly transformative ideas (e.g. worker co-ops).

And yes, I know: "Holy wall o' text, Batman!"

The New New Deal

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering…Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. - Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1936

We are living in a new Gilded Age. Almost a quarter of our people do not make a living wage, and far more than that live paycheck-to-paycheck while billionaire robber barons see their wealth soar to ever greater heights. Over the last 50 years, they have stolen a cumulative $50 trillion from hardworking American men and women. Elon Musk, a Nazi whose family relocated from Canada to apartheid South Africa out of love for racial oppression, is now in the process of dismantling government institutions that safeguard the welfare of the American people, investigate the very corruption that he himself has perpetuated in his business dealings, and distribute life-saving aid to millions throughout the world. In doing so, he makes a mockery of law and justice, ignoring court orders to halt his illegal and unethical rampage.

Meanwhile, Democratic Party members vote to confirm Trump nominees, to pass fascist bills such as the Laken Riley Act, and leadership whines about not being in the majority while ignoring the potential of Tea Party-style obstructionist tactics to slow or even halt the progress of Trump and Musk’s fascist takeover. Indeed, they have responded to a tsunami of calls from constituents demanding more active resistance with scorn and annoyance.

Now is the time for the Democratic Party to return to its roots in New Deal-style social democracy, fighting for the prosperity and well-being of working-class Americans everywhere. Republicans are not the only ones who sell out to wealthy corporate donors and robber barons, as Hakeem Jeffries’ pitiful groveling at the feet of Silicon Valley elites vividly illustrates; Republicans are not the only ones engaged in unethical insider trading, cowtowing to fascists, and showing a reckless disregard for the welfare of their own constituents. If they wish to offer meaningful resistance to the fascist oligarchs and kleptocrats, Democrats must sever ties with such robber barons and reorient towards grassroots movements and small-dollar donations. We have already seen glimmers of the power such a transformation would unleash in the response to the Sanders and Warren campaigns of 2016 and 2020, which thrived despite their reliance mainly on donations under $200.

In doing so, they will be free to name the true enemies in this struggle: not trans people, not immigrants, not racial minorities, all the scapegoats that authoritarian psychopaths have always used to draw attention away from themselves, but the robber barons, oligarchs, and corporations that have been robbing us blind for decades.

They will also need a plan, an answer to MAGA’s Project 2025 as innovative, bold, and inspirational as FDR’s New Deal. Yet it must go beyond the original terms of the New Deal, embracing Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights which included, among other things, the right to adequate medical care, decent housing, and an adequate income for food, shelter, and recreation. Much of this will actually be far easier to accomplish than the American people think, conditioned as they are by the long-running GOP assault on social services and the Democrats’ incessant pooh-poohing of reforms like Medicare for All, using false or highly exaggerated claims of exorbitant costs and rising taxes on the middle class as excuses.

This was never a winning strategy, to say nothing of principled or moral, but at a moment like this, it is imperative that we see through the propaganda and fight for an alternative vision of this country’s future, one free from fascists and oligarchs alike in which happiness, health, and dignity are the rule, not the exception. It is my dearest hope that this can serve as a potent weapon in that fight.

Let’s get to work.

Universal Healthcare

Despite protestations to the contrary, implementing universal healthcare in the form of Medicare for All would be relatively simple and cost-effective. We pay roughly $4.5 trillion in medical costs every year, while analysis 33019-3/abstract)by The Lancet concludes that Medicare for All would shave roughly $450 billion dollars off that tab, all while saving an astonishing 68,000 lives every year. You might pay a little more in taxes every year—or a lot more, if you’re among the ultrawealthy (see below)—but critics of universal healthcare always seem to forget (an innocent oversight, no doubt) that the extortionate insurance premiums you pay every month would vanish into thin air.

That’s just the beginning. A quick overview of the life-changing benefits of such a system:

• All worries about in-network vs out-of-network providers would disappear.
• The government would suddenly find itself with the leverage to negotiate drug prices, so the vile price-gouging schemes for life-saving drugs like insulin would cease to exist practically overnight.
• With just a few minor tweaks to the system, healthcare services would be free at the point of service, meaning you could walk into your doctor’s office, check in, and not pay a dime.
• The days of worrying about the ludicrously complicated health plans you currently receive from your employer, which have the infuriating habit of changing year-to-year, would end.
• Healthcare would no longer be tied to employment, affording workers greater freedom and leverage in dealing with abusive, exploitative employers.

By eliminating the mafia middlemen we call “health insurance companies,” you would pay less for guaranteed healthcare services, and never again have to waste hours of your life poring over convoluted insurance packages, which often don’t cover everything you need anyway. In fact, did you know you actually pay insurance companies twice over under the current system? That’s right, these companies receive a staggering amount of their funding from taxpayer dollars on the back end, and then demand appalling premiums up front.

So-called “moderates” will argue that we need a more gradual transformation of our healthcare system. Enemies of universal healthcare will attempt to negotiate us down to more modest reforms, like a public option, which would preserve these private insurance mafias, afford the government far less leverage in negotiating drug prices, and effectively create a two-tiered health coverage system: the public option for us peasants, and luxurious private plans for the wealthy.

In response to such efforts, we must not compromise. Instead, we should increase our demands, calling for a fully nationalized health system like the UK’s National Health Service, which would eliminate such things as fraudulent claims by shady private clinics. We should call for the nationalization of Big Pharma to remove the profit motive from pharmaceutical research altogether. As long as we keep up the pressure and use every political weapon at our disposal, the way Republicans have for decades, the miraculous changes Medicare for All would bring are our worst-case scenario.

Ending Homelessness

Does ending homelessness seem like a pipe dream to you? Not so fast. The city of Denver recently did an experiment, giving a large number of their homeless people $1,000 a month for a year, no strings attached, using the rest as a control group. By the ten-month check-in period, nearly half of participants had secured housing, and there were far fewer ER visits, hospital stays, and nights spent in a shelter. The reduction in the use of such social services saved the city almost $600,000. Articles covering these (unsurprising) results note that this program’s impact would only become more profound over multiple years.

Contrast this with how California has “handled” its homelessness crisis. Over four years (2018-2022), they spent $17.4 billion to fight homelessness. It didn’t work out well. During that period, the state had roughly 170,000 homeless people, and if they had just followed Denver’s example and given the money to them, it works out to $25,000 per year, per person. So not only did they spend a great deal more than Denver, the problem actually got worse over that period!

The United States as a whole recently experienced a surge in the number of homeless people, rising from roughly 650,000 to 770,000 between 2023 and 2024. Nevertheless, if the federal government simply gave $25,000 directly to each one them, it would cost a grand total of $19.25 billion per year.

The Pentagon’s budget for 2024 was $824.5 billion, not counting discretionary spending. The Pentagon can’t even pass an audit, failing to account for 63% of its assets.

Now, think about what we just learned regarding the yearly savings of Medicare for All (roughly $450 billion every year): we could ensure a basic income for the homeless, reducing and likely eliminating the phenomenon altogether within a few years, 22.5 times over, just with those savings alone. And coupled with other necessary reforms (e.g. affordable housing incentives), “likely” becomes “certainly.”

As if it wasn’t clear enough already, there is no excuse for condemning hundreds of thousands to life on the streets in the richest country on Earth. We could enact such a reform easily and quickly, and suddenly, we would be living in a country that actually takes care of its least fortunate.

I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of country I’d be proud to call home.

Free College

In this day and age, a college degree is increasingly essential for any kind of upward economic mobility. Even relatively “useless” degrees in English and related subjects afford you more employment opportunities than no degree at all does. But the “soft” benefits of education—e.g. intellectual enrichment, an understanding of history, well-honed critical thinking skills—are just as important, as we’re seeing right now at the height of the misinformation crisis and the proliferation of ever more elaborate and insane conspiracy theories. That’s precisely why authoritarian governments of all stripes, and fascists not the least, target academia: to further control the flow of information and erode critical thinking, leaving their people defenseless in the face of lies and propaganda.

How is it, then, that the country which positioned itself as defender of the free world against fascists like Adolf Hitler and authoritarian communists like Joseph Stalin does not follow in the footsteps of every other advanced nation in providing free college education?

As ever, such proposals are met with howls of “How are you going to pay for it!?” from both sides of the political aisle; as ever, this fearmongering is baseless. Estimates put the cost at somewhere between $70 and $80 billion per year…and in 2016 at least, we spent $91 billion on programs that subsidize college! Once again, we’re spending more on arcane, clumsy, inefficient systems of subsidies that don’t solve the problem than we would just sending the money where it’s needed! Madness.

Once more: this would provide yet another key pathway out of poverty for countless people, and for the rest, the days of bankrupting yourself to pay for a decent education would become a thing of the past.

Four-Day Work Week

Compared to sweeping reforms like Medicare for All, a four-day work week might seem small potatoes, but given the epidemic of overwork and its deleterious effects on the social fabric (which I doubt any of us need explained—we’ve all experienced it firsthand), its value should become apparent. Study after study shows that a four-day work week (without a commensurate drop in pay, of course) is positively life-changing, resulting in the same or higher productivity and a massively increased quality of life. Unsurprisingly, the rate of burnout, turnover, and absenteeism also drop significantly. We don’t need to be working as much as we do, and it’s not good for us anyway. Yet as these studies keep coming out, companies keep ignoring them.

So we should just mandate it the way we mandate a minimum wage (we should also raise that, by the way), and the way actually civilized countries mandate maternity leave (we should do that too). It’s a no-brainer, and like the other reforms we’ve discussed, could be implemented in short order.

Taxes on the Wealthy

Remember how the robber barons have stolen $50 trillion from the rest of us over the last few decades? It’s time for them to give it back. We must return to New Deal-era tax rates on the wealthy, which reached 91% on the highest earners (i.e. those making $1.9 million or more in 2019 dollars), rates appropriate for our new Gilded Age. Part and parcel of this sea-change must be the dissolution of the parasitic military-industrial complex, breaking up of big tech monopolies, revocation of big oil subsidies, a refusal to subsidize Big Pharma until they stop price gouging sick Americans, and generally ending corporate welfare across the board.

Some of this money would, of course, help pay for programs like Medicare for All, although as we’ve seen, that would actually be cheaper than our current system in terms of overall cost. However, most of it would go toward the many, many projects I haven’t mentioned here, for lack of time and detailed knowledge:

• Infrastructure renewal and expansion, including shifting away from cars towards mass transit, high speed rail, and walkability.
• Development of green technologies (a field we’ve ceded to China for decades now) and the mitigation of climate change-induced extreme weather events.
• Creating a robust and fair social safety net, to the extent that it would be needed in this revitalized and more equal system.
• Revising, updating, and improving our system of agricultural subsidies, incentivizing sustainable farming practices and ending the stranglehold of corporate seed monopolies.
• Urban renewal in the form of 15-minute city and affordable housing policies.

To name just a few.

Such programs would, in the spirit of the original New Deal, put millions of Americans to work building something new and better, that would give us all sense of pride and purpose and restore trust in our public institutions, in the power of communities over rugged individualism. They would also give us the catharsis (not to mention sense of real justice) of seeing the robber barons destroyed and all their wealth and power put back into our hands.

And Beyond

This is only the beginning. There’s so much we haven’t touched on: a complete rewrite of our foreign policy, creating humane immigration policy, massive campaign finance reform to remove money from politics, slavery reparations, outlawing insider trading by members of congress, and on and on. It goes without saying that the catastrophic changes the Trump regime has wrought on the federal government also need to be reversed. But every movement must start somewhere, and requires a list of demands if it wants to effect real change.

So in that spirit: take this, use it, improve it, and spread it far and wide. Send it to your congressional representatives, and demand that they fight for it. People are flocking to figures like Bernie Sanders, Republican voters are shouting their representatives out of town halls, Elon Musk’s approval ratings are in the toilet, and Trump’s are already slipping. This is fertile ground, and we need to seed it before it’s too late.

I have to admit my personal bias here that AI art just makes me feel gross, but I also think using AI art is off-brand for Kyle. I feel that using AI Art or promoting its use undermines working artists and devalues creative labor. I'd prefer that Kyle keep making his own thumbnails/hiring a graphic designer. It's not a huge deal, but makes me feel slightly less interested in watching the vids if I have to click on slop. Anyone else?