Exclusive: Isabella Weber prescribes a common-sense solution to poverty, inequality and fascism – making life’s essentials affordable for all

The trouble with economists, Isabella Weber believes, is they do not behave like dentists. They obsess over ideological purity and are inflexible when searching for solutions, regardless of society’s symptoms. Dentists have no such pretensions – patients have little patience for dogma when in insufferable pain.

John Maynard Keynes, Weber clarifies in the canteen of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin’s Institute for Advanced Study), was the first to draw this dental comparison – and she is running with it. As she sees it, the symptoms could not be more severe. “The status quo for the majority is entirely unbearable,” while extreme inequality and corporate concentration has reached levels “simply incompatible with democracy” worldwide. This is exacerbated by a climate crisis that “generates massive windfall profits” for big business as the “ecological foundations of our lives disintegrate”. All the while the far right is making hay.

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© Photograph: Steffen Roth/The Guardian

© Photograph: Steffen Roth/The Guardian

© Photograph: Steffen Roth/The Guardian

As climate breakdown pushes families to starvation, many feel forced to ‘sacrifice’ daughters to save siblings. Photographer Elise Blanchard travelled the country speaking to girls as young as eight, 10 and 14 who have been engaged or married to repay debts or pay for food

‘I’m not happy about this,” says 11-year-old Khatira, who was sold into marriage to repay debts, sitting in her home in Qala-e-Naw, capital of Badghis province in north-west Afghanistan. “She was healthy before her engagement, now she is worried and cries a lot,” says her 40-year-old mother, Noor Bibi.

When her 20-year-old husband-to-be comes to her home, Khatira runs away. Since her engagement, she has stopped going outside because she “is ashamed of having a husband in front of the other girls”, says her mother.

Shepherds watch over their sheep in the hills of Bala-Murghab, Badghis province, north-west Afghanistan. By March, the pasture was already too dry for the season

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© Photograph: Elise Blanchard

© Photograph: Elise Blanchard

© Photograph: Elise Blanchard

Tom Cruise’s latest film could lose $250m (£190m) – could one reason be that audiences are tired of Hollywood telling them what they already know about the super-rich?

It seems as if nobody can decide who should shoulder most of the blame for the recent box office flop of Digger.

Was it the ousted Warner Bros film executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose love of big-budget auteur cinema usually came with a hefty price tag? Or was it the marketing team, who were responsible for hiding the movie’s biggest swing from all trailers, ensuring many viewers would be left alienated from its early meta-reveal onwards?

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© Photograph: Keizo Mori/UPI/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Keizo Mori/UPI/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Keizo Mori/UPI/Shutterstock

Three decades of work to restore one of Australia's most degraded catchments. Community effort transforms a degraded waterway, reducing erosion, increasing fish breeding and improving the quality of water that flows into the Great Barrier Reef.

For more than a year, The New York Times followed recipients of universal basic income programs, which Elon Musk and other tech leaders have promoted as a solution to A.I.-fueled job losses.

Advocates for Trans Equality has a great slate of candidates running for office. Each of these leaders has demonstrated a deep commitment to the rights and well-being of the transgender community. With 5 federal candidates and dozens of state and local candidates in states as diverse as Massachusetts, California, Utah, Indiana, and Georgia, this list has something for everyone. If you're looking for a little inspiration, or a candidate you can support with some door-knocking or a donation, this list is for you.

Want more? The LGBTQ+ Victory Fund is devoted to electing pro-equality, pro-choice LGBTQ+ leaders to public office at every level. Their massive list lets you filter candidates by office level, state, and party. (Choose Republican and get "There are no candidates at this time. Please check back later.") The Washington Blade has mini-profiles on the LGBTQ candidates running for U.S. House and Senate. Pop quiz: What's the biggest caucus in the House of Representatives? If you guessed the famous Freedom Caucus, or even the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, or the Congressional Black Caucus, guess again:

At the beginning of the 119th Congress, the Congressional Equality Caucus is the largest* caucus in the United States House of Representatives with 191 members, the most the caucus has ever started a Congress with. In the 118th Congress, the Equality Caucus had a peak membership of 195.

(There are 214 Democrats in the House. 191 of them belong to the Equality Caucus.) The mission of the caucus is to work for LGBTQI+ rights. The caucus is chaired by the most senior openly LGBTQ member of Congress and co-chaired by the other openly-LGBTQ members of the House of Representatives. Membership is open to any member of Congress who is willing to advance LGBTQI+ rights. Caucus co-chair Becca Balint talks about what the Equality Caucus can achieve if Democrats take the House, even with a hostile president: Rep. Becca Balint says Dems can slow Trump's anti-trans warfare. But first they must win midterms. LGBTQ Nation, Faefyx Collington This post was inspired by someone who recently received an unwanted check from the government and thought donating to pro-trans rights Democrats would be a fitting use for the money. I hope these links are helpful to any MeFites finding themselves with an unpleasant partisan windfall they'd prefer not to keep. The length of this post was inspired by my admiration for so many wonderful posts by kliuless. This post is dedicated to fabulous MeFite mephron, and also to my personal hero, Montana State Representative Zooey Zephyr. (I have mentioned on MetaFilter that when I'm obsessing about the current horrorshow, I try to steer my thoughts to people who are doing the work to make the world better. Zooey Zephyr is in my thoughts a LOT.) * Some numbers: The Democratic Caucus has 214 members. The Congressional Equality Caucus has 191 members. The New Democrat Coalition has 112 members. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has 99 members (in the House, plus 1 in the Senate). The Congressional Black Caucus has 54 members (in the House, plus 4 in the Senate). The Problem Solvers Caucus has 48 members (26 Democrats). The Freedom Caucus has 31 members (all Republicans; at least 6 will be gone next year).

I was sentenced to three years in jail for insulting government institutions. Now I am free, I will carry on fighting for the women I met in prison

‘Why don’t you just drive your tuk-tuk and do your work?” the judge asked me after videos from my social media accounts were shown during my court hearing. I had spoken on TikTok and Facebook about issues in Somalia that concerned me: forced evictions in the capital, Mogadishu, high fuel prices and nepotism in government.

I had described how, when I applied for work in hospitals and government departments, I was told on three occasions that I’d have to give a sexual favour in return.

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© Photograph: Handout

© Photograph: Handout

© Photograph: Handout

a vast right-wing conspiracy, if you will...
The Future of the Far Right [ungated] - "We misread the far right by taking its discourse at face value. It is an error to believe Trump, Bolsonaro et al when they speak of taking a step back from 'globalism', of returning to a Fordist dream of industrial jobs, turning back the clock on the sexual revolution and re-sacralising the nuclear family and traditional gender roles. These ideas have an obvious psychological appeal to certain voters, but they are not borne out by the actions of the contemporary far right. On the contrary, it is a movement that feeds off the social disintegration produced by decades of neoliberalism, and accelerates that process towards a certain horizon." (via)

In my book, I characterise this horizon as a "privately managed, differentially distributed state of nature": a situation in which the state relinquishes ever more responsibility for mediating social conflict and instead enshrines the rule of brute force. Let me provide one revealing example. In 2019, illegal loggers in the Amazonian state of Rondônia set fire to a fuel truck serving a federal enforcement operation, which then had to be called off; two weeks later the environment minister travelled to the town to meet the loggers and hear their demands. The explicit message was: 'I'm on your side. It's okay if you burn government property, kill the Indigenous people whose land you are logging and collaborate with the drug traffickers who use the same routes – all of that is private enterprise, and we don't interfere with private enterprise.' The same idea informs Trump's relationship with Big Tech. This can take the form of what I have called "overseer capitalism". In plantation economies like Brazil and the American South, policing was a public function that grew out of a private one. The overseer hired to discipline the plantation workforce became, after abolition, the police officer keeping the freed men and women in place. Today that public function is turning private once again. Wagner and Blackwater, the narcos in Mexico, the militias in Rio – such non-state actors increasingly exercise the monopoly of force over the areas they control. Overseer capitalism entails the alliance between capital and these free agents of repression, who join the coalition not merely as guns for hire but as equal political partners. Such a convergence was presaged in the first Bolsonaro government and could easily establish itself under Flávio. It's clear why the powerful would be attracted to such a model that promises them untrammelled enjoyment of power. But why do the weakest also vote for it? Because of the psychological compensations included in the package. The promise is: 'even if you remain hyper-exploited at your job, even if your life expectations are daily shrinking, we will ensure that there is at least one sphere of life in which your power runs free. At home, you can take it out on your wife or your kids, no one will interfere; and no one can tell you not to make jokes about Black people or gay people.'

Crisis unresolved - "One way to understand the class alliance that has coalesced around this project is to think of it as the meeting of those who have given up waiting for the promises of modernization to be realized, and those who have stopped pretending that the promises they made were real."

On one side, there are those juggling several jobs, working informally or in the gig economy, dealing with the economic downturn of the post-2015 period, strained public services and unaccountable institutions. To these, Bolsonarismo offers, if not clear material advantages, the promise that, if they cannot count on the state, the state will at least get off their backs, leaving them free to manage their own risks as they see fit. Bolsonarismo also offers the unhindered exercise of whatever little power they have, in however small a sphere that may be — even if it is just by telling jokes about minorities. To Brazilian elites, on the other hand, and particularly those in agribusiness and extractive industries, Bolsonaro offers the same, but writ large: predatory capitalism outside any control. Between these two groups, there is a middle class that is bitter from losing some of its markers of social distinction vis-a-vis the ascendant poor; from this milieu come some of the most ardent Bolsonaristas and many of the political entrepreneurs that have made a career out of far-right agitation.

Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right by Rodrigo Nunes - "Through the lens of Bolsonarismo, Rodrigo Nunes zeros in on the challenge that the enduring success of the far right forces the left to face, in Brazil and beyond: How do we reckon with the appeal of political actors who promise radical positive change while reassuring their own supporters that they, and only they, won't need to change their ways? To put it in the words of the author, how do bold leftists convince a majority of people that, instead of hating particular categories of players, they should hate the game, when their opponents thrive on telling voters that hating other players can spare them the hazardous work of changing the game? To start answering that question seriously and intransigently, Anatomy of Disintegration is a must read." cf. Frances Fukuyama on 'patrimonial capitalism' - "Megalothymia. So that is the desire to be recognized as greater than other people. I think that this is obviously a threat in a democracy because a liberal democracy is based on the premise that all people, all citizens are essentially equal. But that's not enough for a certain group, a certain subset of human beings. They want to dominate. They want to be more than others. It takes often times a very negative form of political domination. So you want to be a dictator or an autocrat." (The return of "patrimonial capitalism")

EK: Trump appears a couple of times in End of History and the Last Man. But when he emerges into politics, he emerges as something other than simply an icon of capitalist success. He emerges as somebody bringing a renewed nationalism, a renewed belief in borders, a belief in maybe more traditional hierarchies in America. And over time he emerges in your telling as somebody who is either proposing or modeling a different form of government, a different regime, not just a different leader. You've described him as repatrimonializing the government. What does that mean? FF: So let's begin with another bit of psychology. It's not natural to favor a well-qualified stranger over your relatives or your friends. It's a very natural human desire to want to reward friends and family. So most states in human history were patrimonial, meaning that they basically were run for the benefit of the rulers. It was the ruler's household, the friends and family of the ruler that were given privileges and were able to enrich themselves. And the reason you went into politics was to enrich yourselves. And I think that every society that has managed to create modern state institutions that are impersonal has had this constant backsliding temptation because the rulers themselves would like their friends and family to be favored... We're doing that right now. You know, instead of professional diplomats handling our Middle East policy, you get Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, two friends and family of Donald Trump, and you're paying the price for it because a modern state really does need meritocratic, impersonal people running the state apparatus. EK: Are you surprised how easy it was for Trump to begin to build or rebuild that structure in a system that seemed just choked with rules and procedures to keep that from happening? FF: Yeah, I'm totally astounded that the American people don't seem to really care that much. I mean maybe in the fullness of time there'll be some accountability, but yeah, I would not have expected that the degree of corruption that exists in the current administration would have been tolerable to mainstream Republicans.

viz. "This is the apparatus of mass enslavement - here, or abroad. Deportations first, then work camps when the nonprofit organizations that fight for immigrant rights are weakened enough and the press is captured enough and the population is surveilled enough that it won't lead to mass protest in the streets."

Less than a year ago, Gov. Greg Abbott welcomed data centers. Now he is confronting concerns about the projects even among fellow Republicans.

© Paul Ratje for The New York Times

The world reconsiders America - "America is shedding its status as the default choice for foreign governments to park money, buy weapons and send students... Hungary and Poland were the only two of 10 countries polled where majorities still view the U.S. as a reliable partner. Majorities in all 10, including two with right-wing populist leaders, say they lack confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs."

Poll shows rising trust in global institutions, less comfort with US as global leader - "The poll showed that the people surveyed were not comfortable with the United ​States or China as a global leader, and 61% supported countries working together without the participation of either of the world's two largest economies."

Canada received the highest ​level of comfort for taking a leading role in world affairs at 60%, followed by Japan (58%) and Australia (55%). The European Union and Britain were closely behind, with 55% and 54%, while ‌the United ⁠Nations stood at 52%. By contrast, just 39% were comfortable with the United States taking a leading role and 37% with China. Russia was viewed even more negatively, with just 26% comfortable.

• 'Hostile act': Trump threatens EU with tariffs over Canada associate-membership proposal - "Canada is already the only non-European country in the EU's SAFE instrument — an initiative that provides Canadian firms with preferential access to defense procurement — and has a free-trade agreement with the bloc, eliminating tariffs on roughly 99% of goods, though that deal still requires ratification by 10 EU states." (Canada to seek EU Associate Membership)
• EU single market needs 'fifth freedom' to reverse loss of economic dynamism - "Encompassing research, knowledge and talent, as well as an 'approve once, sell everywhere' regime, to help close the widening gap with US and Chinese innovation led growth... The proposed 'fifth freedom' is a nod to the EU single market's foundations' 'four freedoms': movement of goods, services, people and capital."

How Trump's war on EVs derailed America's auto-factory revival - "A wave of manufacturing investment promised to revive struggling heartland towns and build a U.S. supply chain for electric vehicles and batteries. But policy changes since Trump's return to office have upended the boom, costing thousands of jobs." Trump Has Made More Trades Than All of Congress Combined - "Most Americans support a ban on lawmaker stock trading. Trump is in favor of a prohibition that doesn't apply to him." Trump considered dangerous, corrupt by majority in new poll - "A slight majority of registered voters describe President Trump as corrupt and dangerous, a recent poll found, while just 14% say he isn't divisive."

"Corrupt" (53%) and "dangerous" (51%) led the list of descriptors voters applied to Trump in the Sept. 11-14 The Economist-YouGov poll of 1,461 U.S. registered voters.

• Those words were followed by "out-of-touch" (47%), "cruel" (46%) and "bold" (45%).
• Just 18% said they'd use the word "steady" to describe the president.

Democrats are testing an anti-corruption midterm message as Americans' perceptions of government corruption hit a 20-year high, per Gallup's trend, and polls show Americans believe the president has inappropriately profited from cryptocurrency while in office.

• The results broke sharply by party — 91% of Democrats and 62% of independents said Trump was corrupt, compared with 10% of Republicans.
• Republicans weren't universally positive: Less than half (49%) said they'd use the word "honest" to describe the president. Just 10% said it didn't describe him, while 41% had no opinion.
• Similarly, 38% of Republicans said he was steady, while 53% said they had no opinion.

also btw...

• Baal out: Top diplomat's worry about pagan god elicits eye rolls - "The second-most powerful man at the State Department put the brakes on a U.S. international exhibit featuring a bull statue because he worried it might look like Baal, a pagan god some associate with Satanic child sacrifice."
• FBI's Patel defends change in 'bestiality' hiring practice as lawmakers seek answers - "Why would you even get ​into bestiality?"

• Texas nominees' racist, vulgar remarks receive mixed GOP reaction - "Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized."
• Texas Republican's post on Asian Americans at UT Austin sparks accusations of racism - "Hate is one of the easiest means of organizing."

• US billionaires line up to bankroll Republicans' election push - "Ultra-wealthy overwhelmingly back Donald Trump's party over Democrats as money floods into midterms race."
• U.S. Senate Race in Michigan: Full Debate - "While Rogers declined the invite for the debate, El-Sayed showed up."

What's the first thing you do when you get into office should you become a senator? El-Sayed: Work to get money out of politics to end Citizens United. Corporations are not people. Their money is not speech. They should not be able to buy politicians. We need to end that. And then it's working to pass the PRO Act to make sure that we can organize unions in every sector of American life. And finally getting Medicare for All done. So we free people from medical risk.

• Russian businessman financed Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding celebrations - "Umar Kremlev paid for two nights of celebration after the wedding, Donald Trump Jr. and his wife confirm."
• What we know about the Putin ally who allegedly funded Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding - "According to a ProPublica investigation, Umar Kremlev's deep ties to Vladimir Putin allegedly created a personal financial link between President Trump's oldest child and prominent Russians while the U.S. attempts to broker peace with Ukraine."

• Somaliland's president puts everything on the table for Trump - "The breakaway territory is offering Washington access to its port, minerals and potentially military facilities in exchange for recognition."

• The public wants a say in AI development - "Democratic and Republican voters agree that the American public should decide the future of AI development, not billionaires in Silicon Valley, according to new polling shared first with Semafor." (Behind the curtain: It's not too late)
• Scoop: Trump pollster gives GOP a data center survival guide - "This converts the candidate from a defender of technology companies into the person imposing rules on them."
• First, "validate" voters' concerns about higher utility bills, the power grid and water use.
• Second, "draw the line" by vowing not to support projects that force families to subsidize them or allow tech companies to harm surrounding communities.
• Finally, argue that projects should move forward only if companies provide their own power, protect ratepayers and safeguard local water.

• US admission of orbital weapons seen as landmark moment in race with China, Russia - "The U.S. acknowledgment this week that the Pentagon is operating weapons in Earth's orbit marks a landmark moment in space militarization aimed at ​deterring what U.S. officials describe as aggressive orbital activities from China and Russia, officials and analysts said."
• China warns US space weapons could fuel arms race - "China urged the United States to halt its military build-up in outer space after Washington acknowledged it ​has weapons deployed in orbit, while Chinese state media ‌warned the move could fuel a global arms race."

• China imposes new restrictions on overseas travel - "To stop cutting-edge technology and top-flight researchers from leaving, taking a step closer to a regime that had characterized a more closed-off China of decades past."
• Why Seeing China as a Normal Rising Power Misses the Point - "China isn't authoritarian but totalitarian. In an ordinary authoritarian state, however brutal, some independent institutions survive—be they a church, a temple, a nongovernmental organization—so long as they stay out of politics. A totalitarian party allows none of it. Every organization must be controlled by the party."

--- *EK-FF: Why I Can't Stop Thinking About 'The End of History'

As global temperature increase shoots past 1.5 degrees Celsius, the vulnerable countries that fought for that Paris Agreement target face a brutal new reality.

© Olivier Morin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images