For the last couple of years, I’ve been following a historian and author from the Netherlands named Rutger Bregman, who has focused on the issue of poverty. (His book Utopia for Realists has been translated into thirty-two languages, so it isn’t just me.) Recently, someone shared a recent Ted Talk given by Bregman, in which he began by discussing a widespread view of poor people that I have attributed to America’s bastardized Calvinism--the notion that poverty is evidence of moral or intellectual deficit.
Bregman then explains why that view is not only pernicious, but wrong, and he launches into an explanation of how poverty affects people and society and–more importantly–what research tells us that we can and should do about it.
As our partisan, arguably criminal administration withholds grants and disaster relief funds from the states that didn’t vote for Trump, and engages in other activities meant to reward the states that did, we are hearing more about something called “soft secession”–a term being applied to the various efforts by Blue states to counter what they (accurately) see as an illegal effort to punish them.
No shots have been fired, yet the fracture is real. Across climate policy, fiscal negotiations, and public health, states are filling the void left by Washington. Millions of Americans now wonder why they are paying into a government that does not serve them, or whether the republic that once bound them together still exists in practice.
The United States is experiencing a soft secession: a durable reallocation of governing legitimacy from Washington to regional compacts, accelerated by structural underrepresentation and post-Rucho redistricting incentives.
American governance has always featured a robust federalism. The United States began as a decidedly dis-united and uneasy amalgamation under the Articles of Confederation, and in order for the Constitution to be ratified, the Founders made several concessions to state authority–some of which proved unfortunate. Over the years, as the the Bill of Rights was applied to the states by the 14th Amendment, transportation and communication improved, and commerce became nationalized, most of us came to see ourselves as Americans rather than, say, Virginians or Hoosiers.
The discriminatory deployment of federal largesse to reward Republican states may be changing that.
The linked essay points to the growth of regional alliances to counter areas where Washington is failing. California and Washington state established–and Hawaii joined– a West Coast Health Alliance, pledged to “uphold scientific integrity in public health” to counter the loss of credibility of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under RFK, Jr. As the essay notes, this wasn’t an act of defiance, but of competence. “And competence, when Washington falters, becomes sovereignty by another name.”
We are seeing several other examples of increased cooperation among the Blue states targeted by the Trump administration.
Nearly two dozen Blue states have filed joint lawsuits to block Trump administration vendettas. Blue state coalitions have sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FEMA over rules that tie disaster and emergency relief money to voter citizenship checks and local immigration enforcement, and they have mounted coordinated responses to political assaults on state universities, non-profits, and local municipal funds. Local and state jurisdictions in those states have worked to strengthen local laws that limit ICE access to public property and data.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Colorado Governor Jared Polis launched a private initiative to encourage Blue state resource pooling–a project in which states will share staff, legal expertise, and operational strategies to protect state institutions and coordinate contingency plans against federal pressure. The initiative is modeled on previous reproductive rights compacts in which states shared and stockpiled abortion medication.
The movement toward state-level action can also be seen as a response to a longer-term fiscal reality: Donor states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts send far more money to Washington than they get back. The Rockefeller Institute estimates that New York’s net outflow in 2019 was $142 billion, and that California’s in 2021–22 was $83 billion. Meanwhile, states like Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia are net recipients.
That fiscal imbalance is magnified by representative imbalance.
The House has had 435 members since 1929–meaning that each member now represents an average of 761,000 constituents, nearly four times the 1910 ratio, leaving “districts too vast, voices too diluted, legitimacy stretched to breaking.” The Senate is worse: Wyoming’s 580,000 residents have the same two senators as California’s 39 million—a 70-to-1 disparity. In 2017, the GOP “majority” represented some 34 million fewer Americans than the Democratic “minority.”
And as readers of this blog know, gerrymandering has worsened the imbalance. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to weaponize social policy. Opposition to interracial marriage morphed into opposition to same-sex marriage and today’s Red state restrictions on transgender healthcare and drag performance.
And as the linked essay notes, media has sharpened the Red and Blue state divides. “On Fox, coastal cities become decadent caricatures; on MSNBC, rural states become authoritarian shorthand. Algorithms amplify resentment until Americans know one another less and despise one another more.”
It isn’t just the lettuce. Under the Trump administration, which sees no legitimate reason for regulation or–for that matter–governance, food safety has taken a real hit.
I didn’t realize just how big a hit until I read the opening paragraph from an Arwa Mahdami column in the Guardian. Mahdami was examining a phenomenon that Americans often described when traveling in Europe–they ate as much or more as they did at home, but frequently lost weight, prompting a lively discussion about why that might be. Mahdami dismissed theories about the makeup of flour (!) and suggested that the weight loss was probably due to the fact that a visit to Europe usually involves more walking than we Americans do in our car-dependent home towns.
Be that as it may, it was her first paragraph that grabbed me.
It’s not just the mass shootings you have to watch out for in the US, it’s also the lettuce – a dodgy bit of iceberg could leave you sick with cyclosporiasis. And then there are the frozen blueberries, recently recalled because of a “reasonable probability” they could “cause serious adverse health consequences or even death”. And the alfalfa sprouts that may harbour salmonella. And the fruit bars that may be contaminated with glass. I could go on: there’s been a surge in foodborne illnesses in the US this year and food recalls have been getting a lot of attention.
This growth in food-borne illnesses can be directly traced to the Trump administration’s cuts at the FDA, and its reduced oversight of food production. As an industry publication, Food Navigator, recently reported, deep personnel cuts have resulted in fewer inspections, a loss of institutional memory, and a worrisome increase in food-borne illnesses.
CBS reports that, just so far during Trump’s second term, the FDA has lost about 20% of its staff. The cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are worse; that agency is down 25%. The CDC used to have 11 scientists tracking food parasites; it now has three. The report quotes Susan Mayne, an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Public Health:
“We had a national advisory committee, a committee that advised FDA and USDA on how to prevent microbial contamination in food,” said Mayne. “That advisory committee was disbanded. We used to convene meetings with our Mexican counterparts on how we can work together to improve food safety. That entire team was let go.”
When asked about the cuts, Health and Human Services director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. simply lied. He told reporters the reports of cuts were “invalid.”
Kennedy, of course, is a noted crank who has made the Trump administration a disaster for public health and medical research. Recently, Moderna and Merck announced positive results from a major clinical trial of a cancer vaccine–potentially, an enormous breakthrough. But as the Bulwark and other media outlets have reported, along with the excitement, “there has been concern and even alarm—not about the treatment itself, but about the threat Donald Trump poses to the research ecosystem that made its creation possible.”
The fear stems from the administration’s broad and persistent attacks on American science–including cuts and rule changes that have negatively affected precisely the sorts of grants that financed the research that laid the foundation for the vaccine’s development. As the linked article reports,
The administration has also attacked this specific type of vaccine. The Moderna-Merck treatment uses mRNA technology—as did two of the COVID vaccines—and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has singled out mRNA for particular vilification. Last year, he canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the research and development of mRNA technology, including Moderna’s work on what was supposed to be a new platform for vaccines against influenza.
As the article notes, Kennedy’s animus toward mRNA vaccines is based on wild, unsupported conspiracy theories tying COVID shots to harm and death. Scientists in the field report that Kennedy’s crackbrained hostility is already having a chilling effect on research into mRNA for other purposes, including cancer. Meanwhile, the broader cuts to grant funding made by this administration have set back numerous promising avenues of research.
More interference is on the way. The administration has plans to change the grant approval process to require sign-off from political officials, rather than relying on intensive peer review by actual experts in the field.
There’s a book by Rick Wilson titled “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” Everything, evidently, includes us.
In a recent Substack, Paul Krugman reminded readers that the rise of the oligarchy is closely related to tax policy. He began by referring to his recent explanations of the effects of the huge shift in taxation that has occured over the past several decades–a shift away from taxing capital and towards taxing labor. Among those effects has been a very large decline in the effective rate at which profits are taxed.
It isn’t just the tax rates. It’s also the loopholes. One of the many “in the weeds” tactics pursued by our current, deeply corrupt administration has been the expansion of the provisions–the loopholes–used for years by savvy CPAs and tax lawyers. One of those longstanding loopholes gives them the ability to use accounting tricks to shift reported corporate profits into low tax jurisdictions.
In his Substack, Krugman focused on Malta.
It’s a huge investment destination: There are only a bit over 500,000 people on the island. But it has attracted more than $500 billion in foreign direct investment. At the same time, Maltese companies have invested about the same amount overseas. That’s about a million dollars per man, woman, and child in each direction.
Of course, it’s all fake. What we’re actually seeing is a proliferation of shell companies that are used by companies elsewhere as ways to launder, transfer their profits so that they pop up in Malta, which has a basically zero tax rate on corporate profits.
Malta provides Krugman with examples of the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion. Avoidance makes use of legal mechanisms, many of which shouldn’t be available, but are. Evasion involves illegal shenanigans. Krugman says there’s some of both going on in Malta, avoidance and “quite a lot of actual money laundering and sheer criminal activity.”
The effects of this profit shifting are significant. As Krugman reports,
Estimates for the United States are that we lose probably north of $100 billion a year to companies finding ways to make their profits appear someplace else. If you want a sense of perspective, that’s roughly the entire budget of the food stamp program. It’s roughly the entire amount that Medicaid spends on health care for children.
These are programs that the administration falsely insists are full of fraud, but international profit shifting is fundamentally tax fraud, although it may be legal.
Malta’s use as a tax haven is an example of what Krugman and others have called “the downward spiral of oligarchy.” It clearly demonstrates the power of people with money who are determined to avoid taxes. And–rather obviously– their ability to avoid taxes leaves them with even more money and power, hence the “spiral.”
Krugman notes that there have been tentative moves by the European Union and the US to address the problem–beginning with an international agreement that he characterizes as weak, to the effect that corporate tax rates must not be below 15% anywhere. But–surprise!–Trump withdrew the U.S. from that agreement.
Whenever I read about the unwillingness of the super-rich to pay a fair share of their profits to the country that made those profits possible, I think of Elizabeth Warren’s speech back in 2011, when she pointed out the connection between an infrastructure provided by government and paid for with tax dollars, and the ability of businesses to generate profits. “You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for.”
Some of the ultra-wealthy get it.
Warren Buffett once pointed out that his tax rate was lower than that of his secretary. Billionaire Nick Hanauer warns that–absent reform–pitchforks are coming. And Patriotic Millionaires,an organization of some of the wealthiest Americans, wants to get big money out of politics, pay workers more, and tax the rich. Their website acknowledges that “Wealthy Americans like us have rigged the tax code to give ourselves countless handouts, leaving working people paying higher rates than billionaires.” The organization argues that America needs a tax system that “puts a check on the extreme inequality that threatens our economy and our democracy.”
My favored analogy is simple: if I join a country club, I pay dues for the privilege of using its amenities. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once put it, taxes are the dues we pay to live in a civilized society. Like Elizabeth Warren, I find it inexcusable that billionaires who have benefited most from the infrastructure made available by the taxes paid by those with far less– refuse to pay their dues.
A rising chorus of critics–academics, politicians and media figures–have compared ICE to Hitler’s Brownshirts, the Stormtroopers who were an early paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. Those comparisons have rested primarily upon five elements: concealed identities, intimidating street “theater” meant to be witnessed, “disappearance” tactics, confusion of law enforcement with state terror tactics, and a legal system that fails to prevent the abuses.
ICE, like Hitler’s Stormtroopers, employs public, sometimes dramatic detentions that are intended to intimidate onlookers. (As a coalition of 21 state attorneys general has written, “the imagery evokes comparisons to repressive tactics that have no place in a free country.”) Critics of ICE have highlighted the incidents in which ICE “enforcers” have emerged from unmarked vehicles with their weapons drawn, and other incidents where they have abruptly taken people off of the street and forced them into unmarked vehicles, noting that such tactics are like those employed by German Stormtroopers and the Gestapo.
The goal of ICE increasingly seems to be less about individual arrests–and certainly not arrests limited to “the worst of the worst”–but about creating a generalized fear among American citizens, especially those who are Brown or Black. That fear is heightened by reports of the horrific conditions that are apparently common in the detention centers they’ve established around the country, and by other reports that have focused on the recruitment of out-and-out thugs and “Proud Boys” to fill ICE ranks.
And now–courtesy of American know-how and technological progress– we’re told that ICE is acquiring a new tool of repression. The Department of Homeland Security plans to spend up to $20 million outfitting ICE officers with electroshock “distraction gloves.”
The linked essay accurately explains why this represents a frightening escalation of state over-reach.
In standard law enforcement protocols, the act of reaching for a belt, unholstering a Taser, or brandishing a baton constitutes a clear, observable line of escalation. It alerts observers, signals intent, and creates a distinct temporal beat where both the officer and the subject recognize that severe non-lethal force has entered the room.
Integrating a high-voltage electrical pulse into a standard patrol glove will erase that temporal beat entirely. The equipment involved, specifically the Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (G.L.O.V.E.), operates by delivering electrical charges directly through physical contact. An officer doesn’t need to pause, reach, or display a weapon. The mechanism for inflicting immediate physical pain is woven into the very fabric worn on their hands. Force isn’t a tool drawn in response to a crisis; it becomes an instantaneous extension of a touch in this scenario. When the physical barrier to inflicting pain vanishes, the operational will naturally shift toward physical compliance over verbal de-escalation.
There are numerous ways to tell when traditional non-lethal weapons have been used. They leave markers, physical “signatures” that can be used as evidence by those conducting oversight. These gloves, however, don’t puncture the skin. They “inflict acute pain while leaving minimal to no physical trace.” Oversight becomes nearly impossible. As the linked essay warns,
When a state apparatus shifts its enforcement tactics from visible force to invisible compliance, the nature of authority changes. Visible force carries a heavy political and public cost. It draws cameras, invites judicial scrutiny, and demands public justification. Invisible compliance, on the other hand, allows coercive power to be executed quietly, efficiently, and without generating the visual triggers that normally prompt civic pushback….
We don’t maintain a free society by making state coercion easier, quieter, or less noticeable. We maintain it by demanding that every assertion of physical power remains visible, accountable, and subject to public review. When pain can be administered at the touch of a hand without leaving a trace, the burden of restraint shifts entirely to the goodwill of the state. In a constitutional republic, goodwill was never supposed to be the baseline check on power.
Goodwill, of course, has been entirely absent from ICE–and for that matter, from the Trump administration. For those of us familiar with the history of Nazi Germany and the rise of Hitler, the parallels are chilling. In an essay for Medium, Richard Brody has outlined the similarities, concluding that, “while only time will tell if we allow ICE to become this generation’s version of the Gestapo and Brown Shirts, many of the steps and actions taken to date, are eerily similar to the horrific days of Nazi Germany.”
We won’t avert that descent by giving ICE tools that make oversight impossible.
