Thatcher Bean

Views are my own and recently more fluid than normal.

[Thatcher Bean @thatcherbean]

What is the defense of this project? I'm all for large public works projects that produce value, but I've only seen evidence that this rail project is a massive failure that will continue to be a drag on local and national progressive causes. Instead of snark we should be demanding better administration.

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

Elon Musk Wealth
2012: $2 billion
2026: $1.1 trillion

Jeff Bezos Wealth
2012: $18.4 billion
2026: $262 billion

Mark Zuckerberg Wealth
2012: $17.5 billion
2026: $202 billion

Tipped Minimum Wage
1991: $2.13 an hour
2026: $2.13 an hour

5 words: Tax oligarchs out of existence.

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Today, Elon Musk, a trillionaire, pays the same amount into Social Security as someone making $184,500.

If we end that absurdity and lift the cap on taxable income, we can make Social Security solvent for 75 years and expand benefits by $2,400. My Social Security bill does that.

[Thatcher Bean @thatcherbean]

@matthewstoller I can’t believe they published this…

[Matt Stoller @matthewstoller]

Oh look disgraced ex-prosecutor Ankush Kardori is working with the New York Times to rehabilitate the Epstein class. https://t.co/oqHW6kWqwn

[Thatcher Bean @thatcherbean]

@berkie1 @dwallacewells While it’s only been a few hours, I’d say this is still a contender: https://t.co/GmgwHW2IAm

[Thatcher Bean @thatcherbean]

@matthewstoller Another winner of a piece from khardori: https://t.co/GmgwHW2IAm

[Zachary Hagen-Smith @ZachHagenSmith]

Lefties!! Stop taking this L! Lookin at you @BernieSanders & @abdulsayed. AI is a scam, not a utility. Nationalizing an economic bubble = bailouts for the rich & austerity for the rest of us.
Reform public investment! Repeal Bayh-Dole! Deploy real industrial policy! But not this.

[Matt Stoller @matthewstoller]

When I used the term 'hr lady politics,' I think I made a mistake in using the term 'lady.' I'm trying to combine two basic concepts. The first is that we have a specific legal framework that has collapsed our enforcement of important civil rights laws into the hands of corporate executives and eroded our free society. The second are some problematic resulting dynamics within the liberal establishment about how to understand political identity.

When the civil rights laws were passed and interpreted by the courts, America was a unionized country with competitive markets and access to the courts. Aka there were basic rights to all. It was illegal to engage in price discrimination in most contexts, and it was hard to fire someone without cause. But there was rampant discrimination against women, gays, blacks, and people with disabilities. We passed laws to redress those specific grievances, meant to stand on top of the broader New Deal laws granting basic rights. In the 1960s, when defense contractors had Jim Crow setups in their factories, it made sense to work through corporations.

As those basic rights got stripped through deregulation, de-unionization, mandatory arbitration, and monopolization, the grievance-based supplemental rights were all that was left. It was fine for an airline to price discriminate against customers for any reason to fire someone for any reason *except* identity. So people started to advance identity grievance purely to claim some form of basic economic right that no longer existed. And the conflicts became blurrier as the overt Jim Crow stuff disappeared, but softer forms of discrimination remained.

Where were these questions judged? Mostly not in the courts, but as sociologist Frank Dobbin noted, in human resources departments. The ultimate consequence is that the people making decisions about your economic livelihood if you got pregnant or had some sort of social conflict were corporate executives. Now of course the real power center were the CEOs, but Hr, which used to focus on training a workforce, increasingly were forced to become bagmen for monopolists who hated labor.

The right's approach was to say 'strip those civil rights laws and stop the entitled grievances.' Of course that was not a way of restoring liberty but suggesting a form of equality based on equal subservience to masters. The Democrats focused on protecting the supplemental rights of discriminated groups, rather than the broader loss of basic rights.

In both cases, the CEOs are fundamentally in charge, but their operatives are in the human resources world. it's a terrible setup, bad for everyone.

The second concept is the problematic gender dynamics in the Democratic party. Since the early 1980s, Democrats have done better among women and worse among men. In part, this dynamic exists because Democrats handled important social problems like sexual harassment and assault. My Mom was sexually harassed at work, the stories she told me are awful. Harassment was routine. Just watch an 1980s movie, sexism was simply off the charts and normalized in a way that's virtually impossible to fathom today.

But Democrats were also avoiding dealing with the arbitrary coercion that men faced in an increasingly hostile economy, which were real. And liberals got confused about the point of ending discrimination. Some could not tell the difference between liberating people from arbitrary coercion vs handing more power to authoritarian corporate officers to make social decisions. As they accepted that corporate authoritarian system as the only mechanism to implement a form of political equality, they saw identity grievance instead of citizenship as the route to political legitimacy. This isn't just about gender, Jewish politics became entirely about anti-semitism, black politics became entirely about racism, et al. They didn't see the illegitimate coercion embedded in the system they thought could deliver equality.

This gender gap expanded in the 2010s, and led to such billionaire-friendly phenomena as Lean In and a moral panic moment where accusations against all men were immediately seen as legitimate. It was ok to simply insult men, especially white men, and to call them 'fragile' or otherwise diminish them purely based on gender and skin color. Most men in professional Democratic politics didn't care, since we knew the right coded words to avoid being singled out and were otherwise educated and powerful. It was lower class men that were hit and repelled by these claims.

While I used the term 'hr lady politics,' I didn't mean that only women are the ones doing it. The people who benefit from this authoritarian system are almost entirely white male CEOs, but the bagmen are often the women tokenized into HR departments. I don't know that the Democrats have internalized just how much they routinely insulted men, over and over, for years. Most men aren't sexist jerks, they are just people. But the right's answer of tradwife lunacy is simply trying to strengthen the age old scourge of discrimination, which, while diminished, is certainly still a powerful noxious force. But discrimination cannot be addressed without a restoration of basic rights for everyone. I do think there is a re-gearing of liberal politics, a recognition that we all face a set of dangerous oligarchs who seek to set us upon one another.

We are realizing that it isn't the powerful corporate officer who will bring us a just society, it is the union rep. It is the competitive market that lets us buy from someone else. It is the plaintiff lawyer. It is the coop. It is the honest small business leader. That's what I meant. I will try to be more clear about it going forward.

https://t.co/Cc5xzWKFSv

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

I never thought I’d see the day David Frum started tweeting out the playbook he used to lie America into the Iraq War

[Matt Stoller @matthewstoller]

@FreedZach @jstein_star Or jail.

These guys aren’t making money! Where is the actual value? bailing out a toxic and unprofitable business model is insane. Bernie is being a moron here.

[Thatcher Bean @thatcherbean]

@ZaidJilani Who had been competent since 2008?

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Scalia died in February 2016. It took Obama a full month to nominate a replacement and then he used no leverage and barely lifted a finger for Garland; the party was more focused in the moment at making sure everyone understood how racist and sexist Bernie Sanders was.

Plenty of Obama aides were actually glad when Dems lost the senate in 2014 because they were sick of Harry Reid pushing Obama to be more assertive and fight more.

They lost the Senate in 2014 largely because of Obama’s capitulation to/obsession with austerity and reducing the deficit.

He constantly insisted he had no real power — Neera will probably respond by saying he had no power — which Trump has proved totally wrong.

And when RBG died in September 2020 Trump nominated ACB the next week. They play to win.

But sure, a 5 minute segment from @chrislhayes would’ve made the difference. (And I’m sure he did do a bunch actually.)

[Ben Horne @benjamin_horne]

> be Sam Altman
> see internally that ARR numbers are brutally contracting bc tokenmaxxing era is over + cheaper models are closing the gap on frontier models + LLMs are plateauing and becoming commodities
> see that you are trapped in hundreds of billions of dollars in commitments and circular debt, with no way out
> panic
> see socialist senior citizen Bernie on social media calling for gov to acquire 50% stake in AI companies…
> 💡realize that this is a gift from God: a golden opportunity to offload your bags onto the American taxpayer
> call up the retards at the White House
> tell them you’re willing to donate 50% of your giant AI shitco to the American people for free
> wrinkly old retards at White House and in government fall for your shtick and think you’re being altruistic and patriotic even though you’re just being a con man as usual and dumping your bags
> libertarian wannabe tech oligarchs like @DavidSacks and @pmarca bitch and moan about this under the pretense of “sOciAliSm bAd” but the *real* reason they complain is because more power for gov definitionally means less power for them (but they’re jumping way too far ahead, bc we are still nowhere near AGI)
> gov falls for scam and acquires big % stake in OpenAI
> months later it becomes clear to everyone lab revenue has stalled and AGI is nowhere in sight
> AI bubble bursts leading to massive stock market crash and recession
> you non-chalantly tell the world “it is very unfortunate that this happened” but you don’t actually gaf bc you’re still rich
> you make more vague hollow promises that AGI is still getting closer (this is bullshit and you know it) and say the important thing is that “at least we are aligned now” and “well we had to be supported by gov bc we can’t afford to lose to China” even though profitable companies like Google always had the $ to fund AI research organically without gov support
> Trump is so embarrassed he fell for your con that to save face he uses taxpayer money to pay down all the various debt commitments for you in a desperate attempt to prop up the economy and your shitco, so it doesn’t go to zero (his fam and buddies own lots of shares)
> everyone hates you but what else is new
> Just another day in Scam Altman’s America

[Zaid Jilani @ZaidJilani]

Then politics is not for you Niles you don’t have the stomach for it. When Clinton’s people were smearing every woman who stepped forward in the 1990s…those very same people have the most power in the party today and nobody apologized.

[Jeremy Konyndyk @JeremyKonyndyk]

The closure of @USAID by 20-something DOGE bros (who probably thought "screwworm" was a hilarious joke) will haunt us for years to come.

[Jason Kint @jason_kint]

New from me. Google and Facebook now generate roughly $1/2 trillion in annual advertising revenue - about half the global ad market.

That’s not just a biz milestone. It’s a reminder of how much value has concentrated in a handful of ransacking intermediaries. 1/3

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Powerful piece, highly recommend reading. Democrats need people like Platner if they are going to come to terms with the true nature of our country, with what we have done to people at home and abroad, and pull together the coalition needed to heal and reshape it.

“A tiny minority of Americans (6%) ever serve in the military. Of these, only 40% of veterans have ever deployed to a combat zone. And of those deployed, only about 10% participated in actual ground combat. I am one of those, and so is Platner. His pathology: a combination of traumatic stress, substance abuse, impulsive decision-making in the past, and deep anger at the moral injury he sustained wearing the cloth of this nation, is something this country ought to consider when it sends its young men and women to war. The question before Maine is not whether Graham Platner is perfect. The question is whether the United States Senate, the state of Maine, and the country as a whole would benefit from having his voice in the room when decisions are made. The answer is yes…”

“A democracy that insists on perfection will eventually find itself represented only by people skilled at hiding their flaws.”

[Jedi @dhe3g]

Fun Fact: The war in Iran costs us more in one hour than this program costs in a year.

[Thatcher Bean @thatcherbean]

@JoePompliano If this dystopian ghost town remains the physical & symbolic center of F1, audiences are going to move on from the Netflix bump fast. It’s a cultureless & empty place to park wealth. No underdogs. No stakes. No deeper meaning to the sport. Netflix obscured that but it won’t last.