PhD candidate @CUHistoryDept @sw_columbia dissertating on the political economy of Wall Street in the 1980s. Words @washingtonpost @theprospect @jewishcurrents
Brooklyn, NY
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Setting all the labels aside it does feel like a progressive consensus is emerging that:
1) big coastal cities have a housing shortage
2) zoning laws exacerbate that shortage
3) rent control should be expanded
4) public housing needs to be expanded
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So many levels of meaning here. Small brain is "take the train," medium brain is "Uber is charging you for the tolls on the driver's return trip," big brain is "Holland Tunnel to Bayonne Bridge to Goethals Bridge is a weird inefficient route," galaxy brain is "take the train."
I just took an Uber from Manhattan to Philadelphia. In one hour and 45 minutes different governments charged me $140 in various tolls and taxes.
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It’s pretty simple: Arabs born in the West Bank and Gaza are not citizens of Israel (even if their ancestors have been living there for generations), but Jews born there are. No amount of handwringing gets around that basic fact.
Here's your reminder that Media Matters, for which this person monitors Tucker Carlson, is a garbage fire. Israel is currently holding its fifth election in four years, in which two Arab parties are currently participating.
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When I see this I think of @triofrancos’s point that there is a difference between a socially necessary amount of rare metal mining for batteries, and an amount that is excessive and having unnecessary costs on the production and consumption end.
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Was on the fence but I'm definitely seeing it now theintercept.com/2023/04/11/…
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If “wokeism” was really hegemonic Biden would be using every tool in the EO book to protect trans kids in Florida, and getting on the bully pulpit every day for Congress to pass federal protections for trans youth and adults. Instead, Washington has effectively surrendered.
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If you really want to get into the fascism question in the US, I don't think you can ignore the growing number of city residents who see increasing homelessness as driving a crime wave, and support measures that could basically be considered concentration camps to deal with it.1/
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An amazing chart. Shows that in at least one important respect, we’re still living in the New Deal order.
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Call me a statist but I still think that parents and the state must share responsibility for children, and a key part of that delicate balance is ensuring all children receive a primary education that meets a minimum standard whether they or their parents want it or not.
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I just don’t get how you can write this without also talking about Felicia Somnez and Wesley Lowery and how editors use social media policies to police the politics of their reporters.
The Washington Post's media critic admitted publicly what many people have told me privately: they didn't criticize crazy left-wing fads because they were afraid for their jobs nymag.com/intelligencer/2022…
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Compact Magazine: “Barbara Eherenreich, Scourge of the PMC”
Barbara Ehrenreich: “It’s interesting, but I hate to see ‘PMC’ turned into an ultraleft slur. We’re going to have to work together! You’re probably college-educated yourself.” dissentmagazine.org/online_a…
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Strikes are definitionally a labor-management dispute, and working conditions are a big part of this strike, but more to the point: industry restructuring is not a neutral event, but a site of contestation of competing visions between workers and management.
I don’t see the WGA strike as a labor vs management dispute so much as it’s a sign that the whole industry needs restructuring in a streaming world — what we probably get is fewer streaming services producing less content employing fewer writers, but where unit economics work.
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If anyone else got killed on the subway, the framing would be "this lawlessness will not be tolerated in our city." But when a homeless person is killed, it's "well if he wasn't homeless he wouldn't be dead!"
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And herein lies the value of the debt ceiling to much of the business community: it is a lever for forcing austerity.
New: How the establishment confounded the White House’s debt ceiling strategy
Biden aides hoped powerful DC groups would help them marginalize what they saw as far-right MAGA demands
Instead, biz groups & budget hawks backed McCarthy’s call for talks
washingtonpost.com/business/…
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This is where the crime and homelessness discourse is heading, and I fear it’s only the beginning.
Breaking News: New York City will hospitalize more mentally ill people involuntarily, in a push to remove them from streets and subways, Mayor Eric Adams said. nyti.ms/3ATuU5v
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Dunk on Tár if you must, but audiences aren’t avoiding The Fabelmans (coming-of-age family story) and Babylon (raunchy Singin’ in the Rain) because they’re too art house
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Absolutely, but there is another element here, which is the denial of agency to Ukranians in WW2 (e.g. one had "no choice" but to join the SS or Soviets). Mark Mazower's review of Timothy Snyder's BLOODLANDS—whose long shadow falls on this whole discourse—is instructive.
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The raid on Mar-a-Lago was based largely on information from a confidential informant to the FBI.
By the great @warkin
newsweek.com/exclusive-infor…
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lmao Bari Weiss sitting in one of those nursing home-looking bedrooms in Twitter HQ deleting the account of everyone with a Palestinian flag emoji in their bio
"Now, Weiss has been given access to Twitter's employee systems, added to its Slack, and given a company laptop, two people familiar with her presence said.
The level of access to Twitter systems given to Weiss is typically given only to employees..."
businessinsider.com/elon-mus…
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The country that really breaks the concept of “the West” is Greece. Cradle of democracy, sure, but also the cultural legacy of Constantinople and the cradle of the Orthodox Church, not to mention geographic location. Had Communists won the Civil War ‘49 it would be seen as E Euro
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I think this chart is very helpful: there is a real decline happening in the 15 years before the smartphone/social media era, but it is much shallower than what comes after.
Teens who meet up with their friends 'almost every day' is down from 50% in the 90s to 25% today.
Falls off a cliff around 2010, alongside the rise of smartphones and social media.
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What’s remarkable is how mediocre satire of the rich has gotten. Sort of like the problem of political satire in the Trump age.
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This, from Brandon Johnson, is noxious, and, worse, dangerous in a political climate where there are actual laws proposed and passed to silence criticism of Israel.
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A 1950s union-buster recruited a young woman to honeytrap a Communist union official. She ended up marrying him.
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Christian Rosh Hashanah falls on their Shabbat this year, a rare occurrence that means many will actually daven shacharit on this yom tov
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Locking for the lamest reason possible: I've gotten invited to the final round of Jeopardy auditions
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But don’t we know that most of the asset industry doesn’t beat the market? In other words, they prove the theory right?
Also a lot of asset management isn’t about beating the market first but managing risk and getting less variability than the market.
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The big picture thing about the decline in humanities majors (philosophy not withstanding) is how students are seeing college, including at elite schools, as pre-professional training. This doesn't have to be bad (it's how most of the world works!) but US system is bad at it.
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You’re probably right but no politician wants to go through a long contentious legal fight with no assurance of victory in which they’re painted as a raving antisemite
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The recent distinction between environment vs climate is analytically important, but can lead to too much dismissal of the former
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Ok I have to put my foot down now. I don’t care if the CIA killed him for going soft or wtvr: JFK brought a bunch of hawks into the WH, he nearly started a nuclear war, and he dramatically escalated the Vietnam War. Gotta put him below LBJ.
ranking of postwar presidents:
1) JFK
Massive gap
2) Biden
Gap
3) Obama
4) Carter
Massive gap
5) LBJ
6) Clinton
7) Truman
8) Ford
9) Eisenhower
10) HW Bush
11) W Bush
12) Trump
13) Reagan
14) Nixon
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Like as a start: shift legal and medical education to the undergraduate level, reorganize public colleges around commuters rather than a residential college experience, force admissions criteria standardization. In other words, Napoleonize? I dunno just spitballing
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Some scuffles on housing Twitter this morning, but nothing some core principles can’t resolve: rent control + increased housing supply = good. Public housing development = even better.
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Yes but 75% of homebuyers are people who live in them. They care about use value, but they also care deeply about exchange value—their retirements are effectively funded by expected appreciation of their home equity. They are the most important bloc in the housing status quo.
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Feels like there’s a Curb bit in here where Larry discovers the museum cafeteria has the best tomato soup so he starts going every day, everyone thinks he’s crazy, then he accidentally spills it on a Van Gogh and covers by going along with ppl saying “oh it must be a protest!”
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I wasn't convinced by Waxman's argument, which is that if it was genocide Israel would have killed way more Gazans by now. This just totally misses that genocide can be done in a way that is somewhat contained so as to maintain deniability. For example, death marches vs execution
Glad that @JewishCurrents published this from @DovWaxman. It's exactly right — Israel is almost certainly committing war crimes in Gaza, but they do not amount to genocide by any reasonable definition of the term jewishcurrents.org/letters/o…
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In this town, everything is a real estate story columbiaspectator.com/city-n…
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What you have to remember is one of Trump’s greatest, most beloved mentors was a Jew who hated other Jews and a gay person who hated other gay people
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Only a week after the announcement of the antisemitism task force and Columbia has banned a Jewish group
NEWS: Columbia University is suspending Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) as official student groups through the end of the fall term. news.columbia.edu/news/state…
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Spoke to someone today, a Jewish Zionist who considers himself progressive, who actually said that the only reason a Dagestan-type program hasn’t happened in NYC yet is because of the NYPD. And I can assure that this nonsensical, racist thinking is exceedingly common.
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I highly recommend this thread from Nathan in which he very patiently explains to me his vision of rent control and how it addresses cracks in the "just boost private sector housing supply" argument. If we all beg Nathan enough he just might do a blog post on this too...
In a wider perspective, income is cash flow+capital gains. You're asking "why not go for cash flow?" without thinking about the capital gains part. The key to understanding real estate is its all about possibility- a "bundle of options" in the finance literature.
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Maybe premature but I’m getting some reverse-PATCO vibes from WGA, SAG, UAW…the message this sends to workers everywhere that the status quo is not unchangeable, that the bosses are not invincible, that solidarity does get the goods.
I met Devin Delliquanti on a picket line in May, and I think his thoughts are worth reading in full. jacobin.com/2023/09/hollywoo…
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Absolutely nuts that, not only does the Hudson's Bay Company still exist, it's the corporate parent of Saks Fifth Avenue
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Just talking about NYC, where I have a better sense of data and convos w people: there's no hard evidence that spike in violent crime is driven by apparently increased street homelessness, and in fact crime AGAINST homeless has shot up. 2/ fair.org/home/corporate-pres…
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“People rarely change,” the mantra of status quo apologists. From 1890 to 1940 the US home ownership rate hovered in the band of 43-48%. Then in the 20 years from 1940 to 1960, it rose to 62%, and has not dropped below that since. Policy can change behavior very effectively!
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Hebraicization of names is a more complicated phenomenon than aping indigneity. For European Jews who lived through pogroms and the Holocaust, rejecting German or Polish and embracing Hebrew was akin to Black nationalists who took African names, an assertion of cultural pride.
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The dam is breaking. But only after 11,000 people died.
Editorial: Cease-fire now. The killing in Gaza must stop (via @latimesopinion ) latimes.com/opinion/story/20…
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Also an intentional ignorance of how working conditions can vastly vary across jobs that pay the same
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I think it’s more about maximizing deterrence against the wealthy without imposing onerous debt on the poor, which I’d a real issue in the current fines and fees regime. But bringing vehicle size into the equation also makes sense.
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HOUSE HOMELESS PEOPLE. Building a funnel for getting EVERYONE sleeping on the street, regardless of their criminal history or drug use, into temporary and eventually permanent housing as well as medical and psychological support and employment, is a MORAL and POLITICAL IMPERATIVE
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But the system we have right now—Oxbridge-lite for a student body that increasingly belongs at polytechnics—isn't working
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Dream syllabus, "Finance and Inequality in American History":
-American Bonds
-A World More Concrete
-Bonds of Inequality
-Sunbelt Capitalism
-Borrow
-The Next Shift
-Fear City
-Pivotal Decade
-Capitalizing on Crisis
-Secrets of the Temple
-Race for Profit
What would you change?
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What gov't does for homeowners:
-Enables 30y mortgages with interest ceiling but no floor
-Home protected from seizure in bankruptcy
-Mortgage interest deduction
-Capital gains exemption
What gov't does for renters:
-sometimes loophole-ridden rent control
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Haaretz is doing great stuff but in Israel it’s viewed today as something akin to The Nation, right? Like it hardly represents a sizable segment of Israeli public opinion, right?
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It is an ongoing horror to see how many Americans have just completely abstracted any humanity away from Palestinians. People who give land acknowledgements and curse Jackson for the Trail of Tears accepting mass expulsions of Gazans to Egypt.
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Predates the invasion, though that has intensified it. The Putin-Trump discourse is what fueled the Snyder-Appelbaum synthesis gaining more widespread acceptance. Though I do think the tinge of antisemitism (and thus the gut hostility from many Jewish liberals) was a check b4 war
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TIL that Disraeli’s father converted to Christianity because he got pissed at his shul to electing him to an admin role he didn’t want and then fining him for declining to serve.
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Hosting American Jews in kibbutzim was the greatest hasbara move of all time. Labor Zionism is falsely taken to be Zionism’s origin and purest expression, erasing not just Revisionism but the self-consciously colonial political Zionism of Herzl.
referring to Israel as a "colonial" project is not new (as others have noted, many early zionists understood it that way explicitly). what's new is that contemporary liberal zionists have internalized the idea that colonialism is brutal, awful, unjustifiable.
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NYC residency audits are so cool. Rich people with pied a terres have to prove they spent less than 184 days in the city or they owe NYC taxes. Auditors pull EZ Pass, credit card records, even cell phone location data. It’s the only time besides TSA they get taken down a peg.
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The sad truth, of course, is that the private universities that have historically had among the largest share of Jewish alums—Brandeis and Columbia—have taken the lead in the new anti-Palestine McCarthyism. This is donor capture, plain and simple.
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Biden is probably so confused that there’s any backlash over this, it’s what American Jewish groups have been saying for decades despite being completely nonsensical.
“Were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world that is safe,” Biden says at the White House Hanukkah party as he reaffirms support for Israel against its war against Hamas.
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I get this point, but the logic here is could just as easily be applied to a music festival of mostly white people in Astoria being massacred by escapees from Rikers. Complicity is a spectrum, and not all forms completely erase one’s humanity.
a rave/music festival of thousands next to an open-air prison of over 2 million people, half of whom are minors, being massacred and taken hostage by the ‘inmates’ is cinematic-levels of “chickens coming home to roost.” it’s the plot of a Jordan Peele movie.
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The twin delusions are 1) the old status quo could go on forever and Israelis in “Israel proper” could expect no more disruption than a week of Iron Dome sirens every few years, and 2) that there is a path to Palestinian freedom that doesn’t involve co-existence with Israelis
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Times like these are when you realize just how powerful the US backstopping of the 30y fixed rate mortgage is ft.com/content/0fb17e89-6d64…
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These antisemitic, violent rioters are terrifying and horrifying and should be unequivocally condemned, but it is also plainly true that Israel’s actions have incited this violence. It is simply a statement of fact that Israel makes Jews everywhere less safe.
In #Dagestan, a crowd stormed the building of Makhachkala airport in search of Jews from a flight from Tel Aviv.
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“Identity liberalism” has been rendered meaningless by what’s happening in Florida. There are no Humphreys, no Reuthers. There is just the left, lonely as ever, and the mass of the mainstream that has no answer to Florida’a exterminationist republic.
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McElwee’s “personal ties to S.B.F., along with his proclivity for betting on elections in which Data for Progress also polled, were putting the firm’s reputation at risk, according to two people familiar with the matter”
SCOOP —
The LATEST in the political fallout from Sam Bankman-Fried's implosion.
Sean McElwee is leaving Data for Progress after his staff confronted him in a no-confidence vote in a conference call ten days ago.
McElwee to exit by end of year.
puck.news/an-s-b-f-ally-in-t…
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They haven’t had a major product line bust since the 90s, right? Since then all I can think of is little things, like the HomePod speaker, the touch bar on the last MacBooks
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Can every American Jew who says they want to get the hostages back actually listen to what families of the hostages are saying??
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This might be too conspiratorial, but it does seem like the reason financial actors are cold on minting the coin (despite not wanting a Treasury default) is that the debt ceiling lets Republicans extort austerity from the Dems
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The idea that the US is uniquely "bad" at addressing climate is quickly going out the window. Rather, the US and EU are bound by different sets of political restraints and, in the current moment, the US is better able to circumvent those restraints than the EU.
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Sometimes it goes too far in a bad way, but I have this theory that you really need secular Jews to be the ones in charge of negotiating the balance of parental vs state authority with Hasidim. Like, a secular jew would never fall for this bs.
Less than 100 years ago during the Holocaust, Jewish people were being all but extinguished. Many have come to New York City not to preserve their way of life, but to revive it. nytimes.com/2022/09/11/nyreg…
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Not great for the Jews that “wealthy Jews push out their puppet for not toeing the pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian line” is a perfect description of what happened at Penn.
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IIRC didn’t Reagan propose fees or fee increases for the UC system for a similar reason?
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Pretty strongly disagree with this historiography, but I see how this is a key foundation for Shorism
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This is actually really fascinating because it turns a key argument against rent control into a key argument for it. And acknowledges rent control as an intermediary to a more efficient approach to housing decommodification (public housing).
rent control also constrains private property value, it plays a bigger economic role in the hypothetical scalability of public / social housing acquisition / construction programs beyond just stabilizing the people in rent-controlled housing
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