Category: Democracy

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Science Tagged with , , , , ,

HOORAY! The Massachusetts State Senate Transportation and Utilities Committee released its version of the energy bill WITHOUT a loathsome and undemocratic nuclear protection repeal that was in the House version. Our opponents say by opposing the repeal, we’re trying to ban nuclear power. But while banning nuclear power would be a smart thing to do, there’s nothing in the relevant law (Chapter 503 of the 1982 Massachusetts laws) that bans nuclear power, as long as it meets the very reasonable conditions in the law (I list them a bit later).

We’ve been battling the repealers for more than a year and a half. Huge thanks to my own Senator Jo Comerford, along with next-district-over Senator Paul Mark in the Berkshires and Hilltowns and Julian Cyr on the Cape. The three of them led the effort to keep this horrible provision out of the bill.

Thanks also to Senator Michael Barrett of Lexington and Concord (yes, THAT Lexington and Concord—how appropriate as we are weeks away from the 250th anniversary of the birth of the US), who chaired the committee, wrote the bill, and as recently as a few weeks ago was still saying he supported the repeal. Being able to change your mind as you learn the facts is an important skill, and not all legislators or members of the Executive Branch have it.

And of course, big thanks to my dozen tireless colleagues in Commonwealth Coalition for Democracy and Safe Energy—and in the leadership and ranks of the many other organizations who joined this effort, among them the Sierra Club, Indivisible-MA, and Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility. And the dozen or so other orgs I don’t have space to name. But I WILL name Clamshell Alliance, which I represent on the coalition along with two other members. Clam has contacted every Massachusetts resident on its list.

The work is not done yet, though. This victory has to become permanent. We have to make sure the repeal is NOT added back in during conference committee, because the House version includes it. And if it does go forward with the repeal, we’ll need to blanket the legislature and let them know this has to be a deal breaker and MUST be amended out, or else they should vote no on the overall bill.

If you vote in Massachusetts, please convey to the members of the Conference Committee (AND to your own State Senator and Representative) that repealing 503 is unacceptable. Here are the committee members:

Contact all six of them—today!

Sen. Michael Barrett: 617-722-1572 / Mike.Barrett@masenate.gov (Room 312-B)
Sen. Cynthia Creem: 617-722-1639 / Cynthia.Creem@masenate.gov (Room 312-A)
Sen. Bruce Tarr: 617-722-1600 / Bruce.Tarr@masenate.gov (Room 308)
Rep. Mark Cusack: 617-722-2030 / Mark.Cusack@mahouse.gov (Room 43)
Rep. Bradley Jones: 617-722-2100 / Bradley.Jones@mahouse.gov (Room 124)
Rep. Aaron Michlewitz: 617-722-2990 / Aaron.M.Michlewitz@mahouse.gov (Room 243) 

The bill our opponents want to repeal was passed by 67% of voters in every county back in 1982. It requires a permanent waste storage facility, an emergency evacuation plan, and voter and legislative approval. Here are the relevant sections of the law (click here to read the entire law): 

Section 3. No new nuclear power plant shall be constructed or operated within the Commonwealth unless:
(a) construction and operation of the proposed nuclear power plant have been approved by a majority of the voters voting thereon in a state-wide general election; and
(b) the General Court has found, and has so certified by resolution duly adopted by majority vote of the members of each House:
(i) that there exists an operating, federally-licensed facility for the timely and economical permanent disposal of high-level radioactive wastes generated by the proposed nuclear power plant;
(ii) that an adequate emergency preparedness plan for the proposed nuclear power plant has been developed, approved, and implemented by the Commonwealth;
(iii) that effective emission standards applicable to the proposed nuclear power plant have been promulgated by the Commonwealth to protect the public against health and safety hazards of radioactive air pollutants traceable to nuclear power plants within the Commonwealth;
(iv) that there exists a demonstrated, federally-approved technology or means for the timely and economical decommissioning, dismantling, and disposal of the proposed nuclear power plant; and
(v) that the proposed nuclear power plant offers the optimal means of meeting energy needs from the combined standpoints of overall cost, reliability, safety, environmental impact, land-use planning, and avoiding potential social and economic dislocation.
 
Section 4. No facility for the disposal or storage of low-level radioactive wastes shall be constructed or operated within the Commonwealth unless:
(a) construction and operation of the proposed waste facility have been approved by a majority of the voters voting thereon in a state-wide general election; and
(b) the General Court has found, and has so certified by resolution duly adopted by majority vote of the members of each House:
(i) that the particular technology or means to be utilized at the proposed waste facility is superior to all other available technologies or means from the combined standpoints of overall cost, reliability, safety, environmental impact, land-use ACTS, 1982. – Chap. 503. planning, and avoiding potential social and economic dislocation; and (ii) that the site of the proposed waste facility is superior to all other available sites from the combined standpoints of overall cost, reliability, safety, environmental impact, land-use planning, and avoiding potential social and environmental dislocation.
 
Section 5. The Commonwealth shall not enter into any compact or agreement with any other state or states concerning the disposal or storage of low-level radioactive wastes within the Commonwealth unless:
(a) the compact or agreement has been approved by a majority of the voters voting thereon in a state-wide general election; and
(b) the General Court has found, and has so certified by resolution duly adopted by majority vote of the members of each House:
(i) that construction and operation within the Commonwealth of any facility for the disposal or storage of low-level radioactive wastes pursuant to the proposed compact or agreement shall be subject to the conditions of Section 4 of this Act; and
(ii) that the responsibilities and commitments of the Commonwealth under the proposed compact or agreement are no greater than those of any other party thereto.
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thrilled to read that the left-center national Jewish organization JStreet polled Jewish voters and discovered some amazing transformations in Tuesday’s elections in the US: 72% of Jewish voters supported Democratic congressional candidates; 76% disapprove of President Donald Trump’s job performance; democracy and the economy were the leading electoral concerns; 76% support sanctions against violent West Bank settlers; and most amazingly of all, 66% believe AIPAC’s campaign spending against candidates who criticize Israel increases antisemitism in the United States—and 80% believe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank increase antisemitism in the United States.

These are the actual subheads on their results press release, except that I added the phrase “and most amazingly of all” and combined their last two points. AIPAC is the acronym for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby.

The group also raised $13 mm for its candidates. And 98 percent of the ~200 candidates JStreet endorsed won or appear to be headed toward victory!

This is a dramatic shift in the way mainstream Jews view Israel—AND a complete rejection of Trump’s attempts to drive wedges between the Jewish community and other constituencies—as well as a refutation of the despicable argument that any attack on Israel’s policies is antisemitism (especially if that false criticism provides cover for suppressing the speech of Arabs and Muslims).

The credit for that shift is partly the abject horror with which many Jews view Netanyahu’s policies. But it also represents decades of work within the Jewish community: progressive Jewish organizations like New Jewish Agenda in the 1980s and Jewish Voice for Peace in our own day—whose protests have been extremely visible since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas—Jewish-Palestinian partnership organizations like Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam (an intercultural village), Combatants for Peace (joint appearances by speakers who fought on opposite sides), West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (a bicultural youth orchestra), and Standing Together (a solidarity organization), to name a few among many. And this in turn meant that groups like JStreet were not seen as too far to the left, because there were a lot of Jews and Jewish organizations well to their left.

Disclosure: I was an active core member of the Western Massachusetts New Jewish Agenda chapter and of the intercultural Middle East Peace Group and have donated to several of the organizations listed above. And when I was involved with Agenda, which was early to call for a two-state solution, the mainstream Jewish community was openly hostile to us. Now, there are many Jewish and mixed organizations who want to go farther, and many synagogues have had speakers from some of these groups.

 

What this means:

Jews and lawmakers in the US finally have cover to take positions that would have been anathema a decade ago. Israel’s repressive warmongers and racists in government can no longer count on the support of US Jews and the lawmakers of any religion who want to keep that constituency happy. And the new Congress is likely to be a lot less sympathetic to funding Israel’s attempt to dehumanize and destabilize Arab and Muslim communities—not just in Palestine, where the military has stood by while ultra-right Jewish settlers have forced Palestinians from their homes and communities, interfered with the olive harvest, and committed acts of violence—but in Lebanon and elsewhere. It also means T’s dream to wipe out or expel 2 million Gazans and turn Gaza into a fancy beach resort for wealthy people from the US isn’t going anywhere.

So, over the next couple of years, we can expect a significant realignment. Many prominent members of the US Congress have been openly supportive of Israel’s openly racist government—not just in their rhetoric but in their massive funding. Many of those folks felt they had to do this because Jewish voters are a significant constituency that votes in high numbers, and supporting Jewish causes means kowtowing to AIPAC. We who’ve been saying for decades that AIPAC has no authority to speak for the entire Jewish people now have solid evidence that US Jews are willing to be harshly critical of Israel, and those who do will not be ostracized. It might even mean a reluctance to participate in asinine foreign policy blunders of the sort that got us into an unnecessary, completely avoidable, and damaging war with Iran. That war, and both the human and economic consequences, are a big part of the Republicans’ losses this week.

And from my canvassing and door-knocking in the 2024 campaign, I can say with certainty that some people who would have voted for Harris chose not to over the Biden administration’s refusal to hold Israel accountable for the Gaza war. Would it have been enough to prevent T’ second term? We’ll never know?Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Take a Moment to Celebrate! We Saved the Soul of the US
Wow, just wow! Thank you, US voters. Thank you to the thousands of organizers and democracy cheerleaders who have worked their butts off for a year or more to make this happen.
This blue tsunami isn’t just about salvaging the wreckage of an economy that had been the world’s best at the end of Biden’s term. Yes, people are hurting from higher prices, job losses, and stagnant wages. Yes, T has throttled the economy for the people while skimming a lot off the top. But this goes far deeper. T’s own niece Mary put it this way:
“Some Democrats who shall not at the moment be named would have you believe that this election was about affordability. I am not saying it was not also about affordability, but to say that this almost incomprehensible election was only about one thing, in this case the economy, is to miss the point entirely. This election was, I believe, about the soul of America, about who we are and who we refuse to allow ourselves to become. It was a tipping point. It was a massive rebuke. It was a wholesale repudiation of every single thing Donald, the Trump regime, and the Republican Party stand for.” (emphasis added)
I agree. This was an epic battle to save the very soul of our nation. And this repudiation was based in a lot of organizing over a long time. To quote Heather Cox Richardson,
The historic nature of this election cannot be overstated. It is a rejection of Trump, who insisted voters should imagine he was on the ballot. But more than that, it is a rejection of the Republican ideology that has driven American politics since the 1980s: the idea that some people are better than others and have the right to rule…

Trump and appointees like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have purged the government of minorities and women and undermined the health and well-being of nonwhite Americans, immigrants, and women. But rather than benefiting regular Americans, those policies have hurt them. And administration leaders have been quite open about their intention of using the government to loot the country for themselves and their cronies.

In their determination to stop Trump and MAGA, Americans came together across the artificial lines that Republicans have exploited for more than a generation to stand against what the nation’s founders would have called tyranny. The rural areas that have made up the backbone of MAGA support joined more Democratic urban areas to elect Democrats. The racial, gender, and cultural divisions Republicans have exploited to stay in power have collapsed in the face of a rising oligarchy.

Even billionaire Elon Musk’s investment of close to half a billion dollars in Republicans in the midterms could not overcome voters’ frustration with a government that works only for the very wealthy. People across the country, organized in No Kings rallies, along overpasses, in webcasts, and in everything from political clubs to knitting communities, have come together to stand against the extraordinary corruption of the Trump regime, to oppose Trump’s rejection of constitutional limits in favor of autocratic power to declare tariffs and start wars, to demand the government address the needs of Americans, and to insist on the rule of law.

WHY We Won—and Where
As I see it, all that organizing, those millions of people showing up for No Kings rallies, those thousands who stood holding banners at busy intersections and on highway overpasses, those tens of thousands of community members who gave support to their immigrant neighbors in a hundred different ways when their cities were invaded by our own government, those who wrote letters to the editor or took the microphone at a street demo or knocked on doors and wrote postcards to get out the vote—all of that gave a neighbor’s face to the resistance—and gave strength to those who hadn’t felt comfortable resisting publicly to at least get out and vote. It was an effective counter to the narrative in the mainstream media that we were powerless.
It proved that no matter how hopeless and powerless we might feel, there’s always something we can do.
Yes, we lost a few races that we were counting on. But we gained so much more, and we gained a lot of it in places like Texas, Iowa, Kansas—which hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years—and the Carolinas. And we got the happy proof that T’s gerrymanders backfired, as did the racist/misogynistic campaigns of people like Mike Rogers and Vivek Ramaswami backfired big time. Who would have ever predicted that a Mississippi US Senate seat would be essentially a draw (no winner called as of this writing)? Who would have predicted the huge margins of victory for the candidates who faced those onslaughts? (El Sayed was up over Rogers by 7 points, while Amy Acton beat Ramaswami by nearly 8.)
Immediate Shifts Need to Happen
But our work isn’t done! The next steps are to:
  1. Make sure that the Democrats understand that they need to exercise the mandate they just got in the firm repudiation of trumpism to make sure a power-mad would-be dictator can never grab so much power, use the office for personal wealth, and trample so many human rights ever again. Among other things, we need to hold the perpetrators responsible, clean out the incompetents in the Cabinet, and find some way to hold T legally and financially responsible for the abuse of taxpayer dollars, the open bribery and corruption, the destruction of government property without permission, and all the rest of it.
  2. Build the floor back up to support all those who’ve suffered so egregiously under the current regime. We need to undo all the harm created by ICE, DOGE, and the gutting of agencies like OSHA, EPA, and even the DOJ that he turned into his personal vindictiveness machine. We need well-paying jobs that can support a family, housing that people can afford, protections from harassment, energy improvements that lower carbon footprint AND utility/fuel bills at the same time…
  3. Rebuild the shattered alliances with our allies around the world, and put an immediate stop to the enablement of dictators and thugs like Putin, Netanyahu, Bukele, and the rest.
For that reason, I support finding a much stronger Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader than Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. While I respect them both and think they’re well-intentioned, Jeffries, 56, is very much in the tradition of those a generation older who’ve been afraid to take true progressive stands—and unwilling to match action to their rhetoric. And Schumer, 75, is not only part of that older generation that has supported the Democratic Party’s turn away from its labor roots toward its corporate funders, but has been a leader in that effort.
It’s not a coincidence that the pro-Netanyahu organizations (including AIPAC, which has been a consistent apologist for Netanyahu’s worst extremism) have donated $1,1495,512 to Jeffries and $411,980 to Schumer. Jeffries also gets money from a mortgage banking  association and private equity/investment management megafirm Blackstone. Schumer’s top 5 corporate contributors include managed care and pharma companies, Nasdaq (the stock market for new companies and especially tech), and a multi-player game company. This cycle, Jeffries also raised $12.7 million from unspecified individual donors out of $17mm total, while Schumer raised “only” $680k from individuals out of a total $1.2mm.
The Bigger Picture, The Longer Struggle
Getting out from under the thumbs of the oligarchs and major donors is part of a larger process that might include:
  • Embracing the issues of class, identity, environment—but in ways that speak to inclusiveness for ALL and that don’t burn bridges with cultural centrists, that elevate people across all classes, colors, genders, ages, etc. The party has some great models for this, among them Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Yes, I know, Bernie’s actually not in the Democratic Party—but there’s a fair chance he could have won the 2016 election if the party hadn’t put not just a finger but an entire fist on the scale—because his campaign energized a lot of folks who don’t always participate, because the people were so desperate for change that many defected from Bernie to T, and because HRC ran an entitled, elitist, warmongering campaign that didn’t make space for working-class folks and progressives—and I say this as someone who knocked on doors for her.
  • Building—and beginning to carry out—an economic platform that sees housing and healthcare as basic human rights, sets the minimum wage high enough to live on, subsidizes college and public transit, and provides a good safety net for those unable to work—funded by measures such as a millionaires’ tax, cutting fat from the military budget, and ending government subsidies for industries that cause more harm than good. Maybe a slogan like “If [name of country] can afford guaranteed housing, health care, and education, surely we can too.”
  • Transforming our energy and resource use patterns to slash our carbon footprint, provide full employment, and lower our costs (all of which is possible at the same time if approached systemically)—and maybe even cut the work week to 30 hours so there are enough jobs to go around.

In short, we are at a transformational moment. The potential for sweeping change to benefit ordinary people is greater than it’s been since FDR. If we can seize this moment, turn the Democratic Party into a force that benefits the whole society, and finally banish hunger, poverty, homelessness, all types of othering, environmental destruction, and even war and catastrophic climaechange to “the dustbin of history,” we can build a permanent, lasting society that works for the good of all of us (including the nonhumans).Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , ,

Responding to something I posted on Facebook saying the US “has signed a colonialist and exploitative agreement with Venezuela on oil rights (an unsurprising outcome after the US coup against that country some months back),” someone responded, “Yeah, let’s have China control Venezuelan oil.”

This is how I answered:

I’ve got a better idea. How about we let VENEZUELA control Venezuelan oil. And while we’re at it, support the democratic elements in Venezuelan politics (who are not a part of the new T-backed government). And simultaneously with that, let’s get serious already, 40 years behind when we should have, about switching to fully renewable green energy. We have the technology. We know the benefits. And we sure as heck have the sun, wind, and water.

I didn’t get into the weeds about the Venezuelan pro-democracy movement. It’s enough to know it exists and has been heavily repressed by the last several Venezuelan presidents.

But this isn’t the whole story. The comment from this other person reflects a mindset that I find disturbing. If you follow the thinking implicit in that post, it says that the US should control all the important resources in the world.

Historically, most economic or political empires (and in the last 500+ years, especially the US and our European allies) have been exploiters and colonializers of resources that should be under the control of the Indigenous people whose land they’re on—and when our control is questioned, we go to war. Every modern war, and many ancient ones going back at least to Biblical times, is based on wanting resources someone else claims or protecting resources someone else wants. The ethnic and religious cloaks these struggles might be wrapped in don’t change that underlying reality.

In 2026, we are even seeing our own president blowing up decades long alliances that have kept a fragile peace in Europe and North America, because he wants the resources of places like Venezuela, Canada, and Greenland. But in 2026, we are old enough to know better. Diplomacy-based peace and stability are hard to obtain and easy to lose. But the past 80 years have shown they are indeed possible and can spread to other corners of the world—not by force, but by the power of example.

It will take decades to undo the damage T has inflicted, to create better safeguards against authoritarianism here in the US, and to rebuild the shattered trust of the US around the world. It’s difficult—but it’s doable.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics: General, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Trying to make sense of these complex issues isn’t easy. It’s something most progressive Jews struggle with constantly. This is very much a personal piece, based on grappling with this situation since I was a small child. I don’t claim that this post speaks for anyone other than myself.

To complicate things, the words “zionism” and “antisemitism” have wildly different meanings to different people. I define zionism as the tenet that Jews, like other ethnic and cultural groups around the world, have the right to a homeland of our own.

The version of zionism I was raised with was an idealistic extrapolation of this principle that embraced the social experiments in Israel, such as intentional communities (notably the kibbutz and the moshav), women’s equality extending even to compulsary military service, and the commitment to agriculture and reforestation that would “make the desert bloom” as it had in biblical times. This happy, upbeat vision even had a soundtrack: happy, upbeat Israeli songs in Modern Hebrew such as “Tzena, Tzena,” popularized here in the US by the politically progressive quartet The Weavers in 1951.

But it was also rooted in the shameful slogan, “a land with no people for a people with no land”: a racist lie that ignored the thousands of years of Palestinian history dating back at least as far as the Old Testament battles with the Philistines, a lie that was used to justify the Naqba (also spelled Nakba)—the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from what is now Israel—and the continuing oppression of Palestinians both within the Green Line that marked Israel’s 1948 borders and in the West Bank and Gaza, which are still majority-Palestinian but have been under Israel’s control since the 1967 war.

Another myth underpinning the idealistic version of zionism is the idea that Israel, the lone democracy and only non-Muslim country in the region, was our democratic outpost, the only place championing human rights in a region that was openly hostile to Jews and to Israel: the little David surrounded by heavily armed Arab Goliaths who wanted to drive Israel into the sea.

The human rights champion part would be great if it were true. But Israel’s society is stratified. In 1986, when we first visited, there was still a clear prejudice in favor of Jews of Eastern European origin or born in Israel or Palestine; Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal were second-class citizens, third class for those from Turkey, Iran, and the Arab countries, fourth class for those from Africa—and the non-Jewish Arab populations, whether Muslim, Christian, or Druze, were at the very bottom.

The first two classes had integrated by the time we returned in 2014, but the rest of the stratification remained. Discrimination against Arabs and Palestinians remains rampant. From roadside checkpoints to destruction of their villages and orchards, long imprisonments, and more, Israel has fomented oppressive conditions for the populations under its heel.

This certainly didn’t start under Netanyahu, but he has made it much worse, culminating in the genocide of the Gaza war and its continuing aftermath.

Another strain of zionism is the post-Holocaust push for a Jewish homeland so there would always be a refuge for Jews, historically marginalized, ostracized, expelled, and murdered for more than a thousand years—a way of giving teeth to the “Never again” slogan that sprouted as the truth of those awful years started to come out. It was that experience that gave wings to the dream of a Jewish state.

The movie “Israelism” is a really good analysis of how we Jews in the US were raised to believe we were doing good for the world in our zionism—how good a job the propagandists for Israel did at inculcating these messages and beliefs across US Jewish society—even as our heroes from David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weitzmann to Golda Meir secretly embraced ethnic cleansing and driving the Palestinians out.

*                                   *                                   *

Antisemitism is prejudice against Jews. It’s an odd choice of word, because Arabs are also Semitic peoples. For progressive Jews, it is something completely separate from criticism of Israel or sympathy to the Palestinian cause. I claim a right to criticize Israel, just as I criticize the government of my own country (especially in its brutal and disgusting current incarnation). In fact, I’ve criticized and protested against every US president since Nixon, who was elected when I was eleven—yes, even Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. They all did things I thought were wrong, and I wasn’t shy about writing letters or showing up for—or even organizing—demonstrations or lobbying my elected officials to change those policies.

But in the right-wing Jewish world, any criticism of the Israeli government, even the current genocidal one that by comparison makes even the horribly cruel Stephen Miller look relatively tame, is labeled antisemitism. Ditto any endorsement of the Palestinian cause. Somehow, these people can’t envision a world that has room for both Jewish and Palestinian homelands.

These would-be censors have gone so far as to add a rider to a military spending bill protecting Israel from boycotts. This passed the US House last September but, thankfully, as far as I can tell, has not been taken up in the Senate. We’ve also seen the punishment of pro-Palestinian students such as Lebanese Mahmoud Khalil and Turkish Rumeysa Ozturk, imprisoned and deported (Khalil) or threatened with deportation (Ozturk) over their criticism of Israel.

This ridiculous conflation of opposing the Israeli government with hating Jews goes back decades. In the 80s, I was in a group called New Jewish Agenda that advocated a two-state solution. For this, we were ostracized and marginalized within the mainstream Jewish community. We did not get speaking opportunities at synagogues. I am amazed to watch Jewish Voice for Peace emerge from similar marginalization in recent years to become the main US Jewish voice for Palestinian rights. I’ve been thrilled to see integrated Israeli-Palestinian peace groups such as Combatants for Peace and Standing Together get those synagogue speaking opportunities in the last 20 years or so.

And yet that right-wing narrative is so embedded in mainstream Jewish institutions that I know many people who are in pretty much basic agreement with me on so many other issues but can’t overcome their own Islamophobia or anti-Arab bias. They still see any criticism of Israel, especially from non-Jews, as antisemitism. They call NYC Mayor Sohran Mamdani, who constantly makes pro-Jewish statements and has Jewish advisors, an antisemite even as they paint their signs for the next No Kings march—because Mamdani has accurately called out the Netanyahu government’s war crimes, protection of anti-Arab extremists, and oppression of its own Palestinian population.

In fact, this post was inspired by a conversation on Facebook that started with me praising Mamdani for his comment in response to having higher poll ratings than Netanyahu among NYC Jews: “My focus is on delivering for each and every New Yorker, and I’m proud to be the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the country” and pointing out that he has made many pro-Jewish statements in his time campaigning for and serving as Mayor.

That generated two comments from this camp. “I am not at all impressed with him. His stance on Israel and Jews is dangerous and deplorable.” and, in response, “I agree. Look, he’s entitled to his opinion about the Middle East. But keep it to yourself, Zohran. Your job is to make NYC a more liveable city. Focus on that and you’ll get great support. Stop talking about Bibi (who I dislike, too, but for different reasons).”

My immediate response was:

I have actively looked into a bunch of accusations that claim Mamdani is antisemitic. If I could find any, I’d immediately stop supporting him. However, what I find each time are the ACCUSATIONS of antisemitism rather than any actual speech or action that is against Jews. He has been loud and consistent in condemning Netanyahu and Israel’s present government, yes. But that’s not antisemitism. It is condemning genocidal, brutal attacks on Palestinians and Lebanese and claiming to do so in the name of all Jews. Well, I am Jewish and I condemn Netanyahu and his genocide. Just as I speak out as a citizen of the US against the brutal policies of this government and its insistence that the government only has to represent right-wing so-called able-bodied, cis, straight, mostly male Christian Nationalists—who are not Christian, if you read Christ’s words—so I speak out against what is happening in my name over there.
What’s even worse is the way right-wing Jews insist on conflating criticism of Israeli policies with hating Jews. IMHO, that leads directly to more antisemitism, because the haters say, “look, the Jews are telling us that all Jews support Israel’s government and that government represents all Jews. THAT leads to wildly negative outcomes. Ignorant people will ingest that sick messaging and then commit pogroms—just as ignorant people in the US right have attacked immigrants, trans people, and others who got on this administration’s bad side.
This post is a longer response.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, media-general, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Today should have been the joyous 250th anniversary of the world’s first modern-state democracy. (Yes, I know, the structure borrowed heavily from the  Haudenosaunee Confederacy.) Instead, it feels all-too-much like a family gathering at the bedside of someone on life support, someone who may not make it too much longer.

Democracy has taken such a beating in the year and a half since an open fascist, racist, sexist, anti-planet, convicted criminal, self-dealing monster—the greediest and cruelest president in history, a man who has used his office not for good but for personal enrichment and war against his perceived enemies that this anniversary feels like a deathbed watch. He so embodies all the reasons the Colonies left the paternalistic mix of oppression and protection provided by King George that Andy Borowitz wrote this updated Declaration of Independence. Here are the first three of his long list of grivances:

  • He has engaged in corrupt schemes to profit from his office, plunder the Treasury, and steal from the taxpayers.
  • He has desecrated the People’s House and the nation’s capital.
  • He has perverted the Department of Justice to take revenge on his perceived enemies.

But the patient—our democracy—while bleeding profusely and crying out in pain, is not dead. We are in charge of the miracle cure, and it’s called nonviolent resistance.

And this powerful and honorable tradition, which has brought down many governments and reformed many others, goes back thousands of years. The earliest documentation I know of is from Exodus 1:1-19, which tells the story of how the midwives Shifra and Puah disobeyed Pharaoh’s command to kill the Hebrew male babies, telling him that the women gave birth so fast, they couldn’t get there in time. Which is why, today, I chose to wear a t-shirt that proclaims, “Resisting Tyrants Since Pharaoh,” even though the protest march I planned to wear it to was canceled due to an extreme heat advisory.

In recent days, we’ve seen the impact of nonviolent resistance. We’ve seen the impact of mass protests like No Kings in the slow and grudging willingness to resist at least a few of T’s irrational and unconstitutional demands from both the Supreme Court and the Republican majorities in Congress—both of whom could have easily reined in T’s authoritarianism and attacks on democracy just by holding to the settled body of law, as they were more willing to do during his first term. It’s too little and too late, but it’s a sign that the voices of ordinary citizens are being heard even when those in power claim to ignore them.

We’ve also seen the impact of courageous individual actions taken at great personal risk, such as USAF Major Jason Watson, who has 23 honors and decorations in his long military career and was arrested on July 1, in uniform, for holding a sign saying “Impeach Convict Remove” on the steps of the US Capitol. His action could not only cost him his job (three years before retirement). He could also serve considerable prison time and forfeit his retirement pay. Fully aware of the consequences, he carried out the action anyway, in the long tradition of people like Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers, vastly strengthening the peace movement during the Vietnam war) and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Also this week, we’ve had prosecutor Jack Smith finally talking about the cases against T that would have almost certainly resulted in another round of convictions had they been allowed to go to trial. Smith says openly and directly that he “will not be intimidated.” But if the treatment of James Comey, Leticia James, Mark Kelly, and others is any clue, it’s a pretty safe bet that he will be harassed in some powerful way by government stooges who act as if the First Amendment only applies to Trumpistas. The first link is to the video, the second, to a written summary.

These brave actions are perhaps even more important than the mass demonstrations—because they show raw courage and a willingness to sacrifice everything for what’s right. Many have died for these principles, both here in the US and elsewhere. To name four prominent non-US examples: Alexei Navalny in Russia, Salvador Allende in Chile,  Steve Biko in South Africa, Gandhi in India.

This is even more remarkable considering the level of repression this government has engaged in, including:

Yet, we persist. Millions of people in the US have participated in at least one No Kings march or at least one mass organizing call by a broad coalition of progressive groups (among them Public Citizen, MoveOn, Movement Voter Project, 50501, and several others) spearheaded by the Working Families Party. Voting turnouts are high, and many “safe Republican”seats have been switched. Numerous administration policies have been overturned or cancelled under public pressure, though not without doing substantial damage first. Activists from many groups have trained other activists in peaceful protest, nonviolent civil disobedience, finding levers to encourage noncooperation among the officials carrying out these brutal policies, and so much more.

And we have not only inspiration, such as the photos of protests around the country Robert Hubbell publishes daily in his Today’s Edition newsletter (usually a mix of sidewalk and park protests alongside “bridge brigades”displaying banners and signs from highway overpasses.

We also have road maps, such as…

  • An amazing list of 346 nonviolent tactics, the first 198 compiled by Gene Sharp in the pre-Internet, pre-Covid era, and another 148 compiled by Michael Beer of Nonviolence International. Personal note: I’ve been a fan of this list for years and have cited it several times. Two weeks ago, I got to meet Michael, chat with him as we hiked our neighborhood mountain, and have dinner with several others as we hosted a gathering for a mutual friend who was in from California. He told me he could have expanded the list again with many more tactics, but he wasn’t able to keep up with them.
  • The work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, especially Why Civil Resistance Works (Columbia University Press, 2011). This scholarly study compares the success of violent versus nonviolent struggles and provides evidence to explain why nonviolent ones have both a higher success record and, usually, more lasting effects. The above link takes you to the book’s page on Bookshop.org, where your purchase supports the independent bookstore of your choice, instead of the billionaire who continues to be one of T’s most prominent enablers in the second term. I believe in using our economic power to help accomplish our goals, so I avoid shopping at the world’s largest online store, just as I do most of my searching and much of my web browsing on Ecosia.org, a nonprofit which plants a tree for every search (and I think another tree for every tab opened on its browser).
  •  Chronicles of the current struggle, the history of resistance, and of people you may not have heard of but whose contributions matter. A few among dozens: Waging Nonviolence, Choose Democracy, Black Lives Matter, Rebecca Solnit, Heather Delaney Reese, Heather Cox Richardson, Jessica Craven, especially her Sunday Extra Extra good news roundup, the aforementioned Robert Hubbell (link is above), Black History Stories, A Mighty Girl (feminist history), Josh Helfgott (LGBT and political news), Moments from the Past (Black and general history)…
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , ,

This post started on Facebook, as a response to replies to this article by an Israeli expat living in the US who’s an expert on genocide, which I posted on April 22. There’s a spirited discussion going on at that post, which you can read by clicking on this sentence. Be sure to read the replies to the comments, and the replies to the replies—and to make sure that you’re viewing either “all comments” or “newest” and not “most relevant,” which will block some of the responses.

What follows is a response to Richard, who defends Zionism as providing a safe haven for Jews in a world that never had one before, a place where Jews can seek refuge from the pogroms of their particular generation—and to Robert, the person he was responding to, who posted that trauma often begets trauma, unless there is a deliberate effort to “alchemize” it into something positive, and who criticizes Zionism as “designed by colonialist and brutally implemented, and is now more ruthless than ever.” It’s posted there as a reply to Robert

This post is a substantial expansion of what I wrote—with considerable updating here but not in the original response, including several links to back up my claims:

Robert, Zionism had two impulses: One was protection against antisemitic violence, as Richard so eloquently describes in his response to you. The other was the one we progressives were hoodwinked into believing: that this was the chance to create a utopia, a place where women and men were equal, a place to recover a desert “land with no people for a people with no land”—(as I was told at the yeshivas [Jewish day schools] I attended as an elementary school student and again in the meetings of the Jewish Student Union at my secular city-wide high school), a semi-socialist endeavor based on cooperation.

It’s a bit hard to find, but the movie, “Israelism,” has an excellent analysis of how that idealism didn’t match the reality on the ground. Something I don’t remember if the movie addresses is the way the land itself was colonized. In my childhood, we were always sending money to the Jewish National Fund to plant trees in Israel. But just as we didn’t know about the Palestinians forced into exile, we also didn’t know that JNF was ripping out native species to plant non-native pine forests that have not been kind to the ecosystem—and of course, the Israeli government frequently bulldozes Palestinian olive trees in retaliation for perceived injuries, while Israel also often narrows the land of the local Palestnians so the settlers end up harvesting stolen oil.

The racist plans of Golda and Ben-Gurion [Perplexity.ai search for “statements against arabs from David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir made before 1967”, conducted April 24, 2026) were not in the open, and neither was the reality that, ahem, this was NOT “a land with no people.” It was a land whose people had largely been kicked out in 1948. So you had the yin and the yang, protection from evil and creation of good. But the creation of good was largely built on a lie and certainly doesn’t match the cruelty of today’s Israeli government agains tthe people their parents and grandparents threw off their land. Yes, Palestinians within the Green Line can vote and even have representation in the Knesset. But they have been actively discriminated against the whole time, just as Blacks in the US have been. Housing and job opportunities are not equal. Open racism is common.

Richard, I’ve been to Israel twice, in 1986 and again in 2014. Both times, Dina and I have sat and talked with Palestinians—and on the first trip, we interviewed several leaders of different organizations within the Israeli peace movement. We stayed part of the time with a Palestinian family in the Galilee, part of the time with my right-wing settler relatives, and even in an Arab-owned hotel in East Jerusalem. And we visited the ultrareligious Yiddish-speaking branch of my family that had fled to Israel to escape the Holocaust. On the first trip, we stayed in a traditional kibbutz, and on the second trip, a kibbutz for people in the Transcendental Meditation world. My right-wing Orthodox sister made Aliyah [moved to Israel] with her husband and three of their four grown children, who have all had kids born in Israel.

So I have sat down and broken bread with people on all sides of the spectrum—including a man who was ten years old in 1948 when the soldiers told his family they’d be back in their homes in two weeks. That was not a planned encounter; he was conducting a one-person Occupy movement at the one surviving building (the Orthodox church) in his childhood village WITHIN the Green Line, which the Israelis had bulldozed and turned into a national park that he now had to pay to enter.

That interview was conducted in Hebrew and translated for us by our host, a Dutch Holocaust refugee. He and his fellow refugee wife were two of the three Jews in a Druze village (the third was an elderly woman we didn’t get to meet, the last of her line, whose family managed to stay during the Babylonian Exile of 70 A.D. when the Jews were thrown out of present-day Israel). He also took us around to meet a bunch of his neighbors. And this couple were also the custodians of the actual carob tree that sustained Shimon Bar Yochai when he was hiding out from the Romans in a cave, 2000 years ago.

To me, if Zionsm is to remain viable, it MUST “alchemize” into something far more humane—something that would bring reality to the Koolaid we collectively swallowed as the utopian vision that didn’t exist was spooned out to us through a wall of lies, false promises, and exceptionalism. In its current form, not only is it attacking others, it also makes Jews LESS safe around the world. This is in part because conservative elements of the Jewish community insist on conflating antizionism with antisemitism—a conflation that I utterly resist and abhor. This division within the Jewish community is not new. It goes back at least as far as the founding of modern Israel in 1948.

But most Jews who get interviewed on national newscasts—politicians and college presidents, assorted right-wing pundits—claim that any criticism of Israel is antisemitism, and punish anti-Zionists (Palestinians especially, but also groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace). At the same time, the current US government has weaponized false claims of antisemitism to extort money from universities and attempt to control college curricula and suppress student activities—while, ironically, waving a banner of free expression.

These actions from the government and from right-leaning Jewish officials give the real enemies of Jews something to cling to and organize around, and creates a climate where hate crimes against Jews are somehow seen as forgivable because those who attack Jews just because they’re Jews can claim that Jews themselves have said that Jews must support the Israeli government’s vicious actions. We Jews are stereotyped as suppoters of an evil empire, and thus fair game for whatever mayhem comes our way. Thus, they claim they’re just opposing the racist and brutal incarnation of Zionism as conducted by the Netanyahu government.

Netanyahu has given advocates of peace and human rights real things to worry about (e.g., the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and looking the other way when Israeli settlers attack Palestinian civilians in the West Bank or within the Green Line)—never mind that a huge percentage of Jews both in Israel (which has had a massive peace movement for decades, though it had to rebuild after the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023) and in the Diaspora.

It’s important to note that many of these right-wing ideologues spouting this nonsense identify as so-called Christian Nationalists (not Christian at all, if you read Christ’s teachings, as I have). And many have a public history of antisemitism themselves. Here are some of the president’s anti-Jewish remarks and actions. And here are more of them (slight overlap) along with notes on antisemitism from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., FBI Director Kash Patel, and several other appointees.

I condemn the violence on all sides, including the violence of lies that demonize either people.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Innovation, localism/locavore, Mindset, Networking, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

One of the strongest local economy advocates I know is Michael Schuman, who publishes the Main Street Journal. Today, he took on the US president’s attempts to strongarm voters and rig the election. And then he noted that David Plouffe, a key advisor in Obama’s successful “out of nowhere”run for the presidency in 2008, has said that demographically, he can’t win.

Schuman says the way to defeat Plouffee’s defeatism is to get half a million Democrats to move to states where T narrowly squeaked by in 2024. North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana all went GOP by less than 150,000 votes. These states are contiguous with each other—so, if that shift happened, we’d have an entire new liberal REGION bordering progressive Minnesota on the east and with only a thin strip of the Idaho Panhandle separating it from progressive Washington to the northwest. And it’s worth remembering that as recently as 1979, George McGovern—probably still the most progressive major-party presidential candidate in my lifetime—was the more conservative senator from South Dakota.

I agree that Plouffe is wrong. And so are all those pundits who keep howling at us that the Dems need to move way to the right.

But I’m not convinced that Michael Schuman’s solution is the way to get there. First, it’s going to be very hard to find those half million people willing to start their lives over for a hope of shifting their new state blue. Second, it’s going to be even harder to coordinate that effort so that just enough people land in the right districts in each of the swingable states. Third, there’s no guarantee it will work. Republicans would get wind of it and work much harder to get their base out or to recruit new residents of their own.

Fourth, and most importantly, a new culture doesn’t easily impose itself on an already established culture. I am a New York City native living in a rural area, on a working dairy farm in Massachusetts. My neighbors have 600 cows. New YorkCity values and lifestyles won’t work here. You want to build quality relationships with your neighbors, and that doesn’t happen by storming in, taking over, and stomping on the opinions and values of your neighbors. I seasoned for 17 years in a small college town and learned to be “bicultural” before I made the big move to the farm. If the existing communities feel disrespected, there will be no progress.

Here’s what I suggest instead: The Dems could finally figure out how to talk about real issues that working people care about without negating the social equity and environmental justice pieces. They need a lot more candidates like AOC, Bernie, and Mamdani, who’ve shown that we can move mountains if we organize where people are, and we don’t need to sacrifice the justice agenda to do it.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

I sent a shortened version that fit in their contact forms with a copy to my own delegation, but here’s the entire letter. If it inspires you to write your own letter, Jeffries has a separate contact form for non-constituents.

 

Dear Leader Schumer and Leader Jeffries:

Please encourage your caucuses to terminate ICE funding and abolish the agency. The US managed without ICE until 2003. Democrats should be demanding to abolish it entirely—and there is wide public support for this: G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, a data-driven Substack, says it could be as high as 70%. It is the only course that can be morally and politically justified right now.

As a strong Democrat, former member of my local Democratic Committee, advisor to several successful local candidates since the 1980s, business owner since 1981, and immigration justice activist since 2019, may I humbly suggest that THIS is the moment to take a strong stand. ICE has broken so many laws about due process, use of deadly force, profiling, overstepping its legal requirement NOT to do local police work, and much more. It must be held accountable NOW.

  • Public sentiment following Renee Good’s murder is strongly against this rogue agency.
  • The memo just leaked that ICE unilaterally tells agents they don’t need a judicial warrant to break down the door of someone’s home will add to the people’s fury.
  • Even before the murder, millions of people have watched ICE’s brutal violence unleashed against ordinary people with no criminal record on video, and thousands have seen it live on the ground. Just as nightly news coverage of the horror shifted public support away from the Vietnam war, revulsion against ICE has shifted the territory on immigration.
  • We’ve all been affected by this barbarism. Homeowners have lost their landscaping crews, restaurant patrons can’t get decent service because so many cooks and servers have either been taken or are too afraid to come in, businesses are shutting down because they can’t get workers. It would be difficult to find a US resident who is more than two degrees of separation from one of those abducted.
  • US citizens and members of registered Native tribes who have more of a claim on our land than we do have been taken, as have immigrants here legally. Often, they’ve told their captors they have proof, but the agents are far more interested in making quota and having the chance to behave viciously than they are about justice or fairness or legality. And refuse to look at the documents. Sometimes it has taken weeks for the system to release. To name just two among many high-visibility cases, Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Mahmoud Khalil were detained for MONTHS. In Abrego Garcia’s case, the government quickly acknowledged that his arrest, detention, and deportation to a hellhole prison in a country the government was expressly prohibited from returning him to was a mistake. Khalil was here legally until the government unilaterally revoked it with no notice and no appeal process AS THEY WERE ARRESTING HIM. He was obviously punished for his publicly stated and First Amendment-protected political opinions.

THIS IS THE TIME FOR DEMOCRATS TO BE BOLD. In the early days of Trump 2, I kept hearing, “where are the Democrats? Why aren’t they shutting this atrocity down?” ICE is out of control and has ignored its mandated obligations around due process in favor of unchecked violence against the people. “Taco Trump” backs down whenever he faces a real challenge. We’ve seen that many times and saw that again in today’s news of his capitulation on retaliatory tariffs against the eight countries that came to Greenland’s defense. We Dems need to step up and loudly and consistently say to the American people (and vote accordingly):

  • The administration is stealing your healthcare money to fund an illegal and morally reprehensible—and totally unnecessary war—against the immigrants and descendants of immigrants and Native people as well as those who have flooded the streets to protect the first group’s rights who make this country great.
  • Biden, Obama, and Clinton controlled illegal entry without resorting to this disgusting violence and intimidation.
  • It’s becoming more and more clear that Trump sees ICE as his private army that he can use to attack opponents and suppress dissent. We’ve even seen elected officials and faith leaders handcuffed and/or detained, even in cases where they attempted to exercise their right of oversight at ICE and CBP facilities.

These talking points are what is resonating. We’re hearing them from a few individual members of Congress, but from the leadership, we’ve heard far too much about trying to get along and pass some lame bill that barely impacts ICE or Trump. Don’t make the mistake of 2016 when our candidate tried to defend the status quo while the people were crying so loudly for change that they elected a racist, clueless monster because HE was calling for change while she was calling for more of the same.

The working class of the US is in pain right now. We need to tie those economic struggles to Trump’s policies on deportation and a bunch of other things. We need to be loud, strong, and consistent. We need to be making these points in the news media every day—including on Fox. And we can start by supporting the people’s demand to abolish ICE once and for all.

Sincerely,

Shel Horowitz

 

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Mindset, Politics, poverty, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The first thing I do when I get online each morning is read a few things:

  • Poems of the day from Rattle, The Academy of American Poets, and Second Coming.
  • Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Hubble for analysis of the craziness in the US government right now and how people are fighting back.
  • Seth Godin for his deep insight, creative thinking, and common sense in the business and learning worlds, and news roundups from among The Guardian, New York Times, and/or Associated Press. (Disclosure: I donate to The Guardian and Associated Press)
  • Bob Burg, with his daily sermon on succeeding by treating people right, is often on the list.

Today, Godin opened my eyes to a completely new understanding of economics with one sentence:

The price variation in any market reflects not what the market will bear, but what the people in that market can bear to charge.

Brilliant. And I don’t think I’ve come across this anywhere else. It changes everything, doesn’t it?

He backs up his thesis with examples as different as the pricing of luxury handbags and concert tickets. He discusses how rock musicians who allow promoters to scale tickets out of the range of affordability for most of their fans pay a price in loyalty. And he talks about how that particular dynamic came out of outsourcing concert pricing to third party vendors like Ticketmaster who don’t really give a flying f about the fans as long as they can find enough who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars when they could just as easily spend $10 on a movie in the theater or nothing to watch it at home.

I’ve made those choices many times. I paid $6 in 1972, as a 15-year-old without a lot of cash, to see the Rolling Stones in Madison Square Garden. That’s only $46.24 in today’s money. Most of the time, if a concert or theater ticket is more than $100, I will choose a different form of entertainment. I think I have made four exceptions: The Who, my all-time favorite rock band that I had never seen in concert; tickets for touring Broadway productions of “Hamilton” and “Wicked”; also an actual Broadway show, but I’m not sure which one it was.

The three that I remember were actually worth the money and I didn’t regret spending it. But if I had spent that much for some of the mediocre concerts I’ve seen by top acts, I would have been furious, feeling totally ripped off. I saw many of them as either a concert reviewer or an usher, and thus didn’t pay to be ripped off. But it was frustrating even to give up an evening for something that wasn’t worth it and was charging a lot, even though I wasn’t paying. it was an insult to the fans.

But concerts are by definition discretionary purchases. Let’s look at price elasticity in other contexts that Seth didn’t mention—such as necessities.

Many have jumped in price far beyond inflation. Housing is one of them. But housing is something we have to have. Other societies consider housing a basic right. There is no homelessness problem in Cuba. Medical care and higher education, two other sets of services that have shot up in price here in the US, are also provided to everyone there. But they have an authoritarian government and they have deep poverty.

When I visited in 2019, the biggest complaint that I heard, and I heard it from almost everyone I met, is the inability of wages to keep up with the cost of living. Most workers make about $20 US a month. Doctors make $60 or $70. Our guide told us that the only reason his wife is able to afford to be a doctor is because he makes far more than the typical Cuban income from his clients’ tips. Sometimes, it is about trade-offs.

But sometimes, it’s not. Europe proves that decent, democratic governments can afford to treat healthcare as a right and keep higher education extremely affordable as well (housing, not so much). And they’ve also made huge progress in greening the economy.

China also has an authoritarian government. But the streets of its cities are crowded with relatively inexpensive electric cars (which is to say, still totally out of reach for most Chinese—but enough can afford them that massive traffic jams are common). This transition was quite conspicuous between my first trip to China in 2016 and my return in 2024. I rode in several of them and was impressed with how well they seem to be designed. Those stubborn trade-offs with their moral dilemmas.

Yet, for the past year, we have an authoritarian government in the US. The ugliness of its actions and policies would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

But unlike Cuba and China, the benefits are not accruing to ordinary people. This government is about benefiting billionaires and openly, blatantly lining its leader’s and his friends’ pockets while collecting undeserved and insincere tributes from those who understand that they can flatter their way to what they want, even if they want things that are absolutely at odds with the interests of us ordinary people.

Seth’s thesis is not the whole picture, though. It’s a both-and, not an either-or. Price sensitivity is certainly an issue in purchase decisions—but so is sensitivity to what your market could pay without feeling exploited and ripped off. In my own business, I’ve kept my pricing far lower than most, because that makes me affordable to the solopreneurs and microbusinesses I enjoy serving. I don’t want to live in the corporate world enough to charge too much for my preferred clients, and those huge corporations have in-house people who do what I do. I also recognize that money is one means to an end, and there are others—such as what I referred to earlier: volunteering or reviewing instead of buying tickets

It is also quite possible to make a good profit serving the bottom economic tier. I recommend two great books on this: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by C.K. Prahalad (out of print; that’s a link to a used copy) and Business Solution to Poverty by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick. That link takes you to bookshop.org, where your purchase supports the independent bookstore of your choice instead of lining the pockets of an oligarch who has aided and abetted the authoritarian government that has taken over the US.

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