The Republican and Democratic establishments are very much the same.

Trump - and his Heritage Foundation minders - isn't business as usual.

The Rs and Ds both opposed tariffs and supported free market capitalism. Trump demanded tariffs because he's a boomer, and he wants to go back to his childhood when the economy was based on manufacturing and coal mining.

The Rs and Ds both gave lip service to free speech. Trump has sued universities for allowing protests, deported students for writing op-eds, and is appointing political commissars to monitor major news networks and veto dissent.

The Rs and Ds both believed that unbiased economic data was important, even if they wanted different economic policies. Trump fires people for reporting data he doesn't like.

The Rs and Ds both believed that soft power was as valuable as hard power, and that USAID and PEPFAR and so on were important, not just on humanitarian grounds, but in building support for the United States around the world. Trump and Musk think soft power is for wimps and are viscerally disgusted by helping black people.

Frankly, if there is any genuine distinction right now between the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment, it's because Trump bullied the Republicans into it. And if this country survives it'll be interesting - albeit horrifying - to see if the Rs go back to business as usual or continue their slide into an anarcho-capitalist theocracy.

Bonus:

Yes, and that's why, even in brutal hypercapitalist America, we fucking regulate the free market.

And why we should abolish the free market in the long run, for that matter.

Because having the "freedom" to buy poisonous adulterated foodstuffs, if you're too poor to buy real good food, is like having the "freedom" to accept sub-minimum wages if you're desperate enough for money. Not freedom, but exploitation.

Believe it or not, people on the left have been discussing this for centuries.

The general idea is recognizing a right to "personal property", which you get from using something, instead of the capitalist idea of "private property", which you get from buying something.

Currently in Western capitalist societies, if a rich person buys fifty houses, he owns fifty houses; he can live in one and collect rent from the other forty-nine, or leave the other forty-nine vacant, or tear them down to build one giant fortified survival compound, as he chooses. His property, his choice, whether it benefits the community or not.

In a society without private property, that rich person could only own one house - the house he lives in - because he lives in it and uses it. The people who live in and use the other forty-nine houses would own those. And the land underneath the houses would be owned by nobody, but belong collectively to the community, so no one person or company could accumulate land to the detriment of everyone else.

Landlords hate this idea.

Here's a really super basic summary:

https://www.workers.org/private-property/

And here's a long complicated discussion:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/anarchism-and-private-property

I don't.

I remember when American conservatives in the '60s claimed to support states' rights. But what they actually supported was segregation and Jim Crow. They used "states' rights" as a rhetorical tool to hide their racism behind a facade of principle, just like the Confederacy had a hundred years prior.

Among the American right, only useful idiots (like libertarians) actually believed in states' rights - or small government rhetoric in general - as a principle. It was always empty rhetoric. And now that Republicans are openly supporting Trump's big government authoritarian conservatism, it's become obvious how badly the Ron Paul types were used.

the homeless are more akin to pests as far as the money is concerned.

I'd go one step further. Homelessness, and poverty in general, are necessary to capitalism. If the consequences of poverty weren't so bad, workers wouldn't fear losing their jobs so much. Homelessness helps maintain the authority of the boss over the worker and the corresponding hierarchy of capital over labor.

San Francisco infuriates me. There are activist groups that are made of actual literal unhoused people telling the city what they need and what they want. And the city could just give people the money they need for a fraction of the administrative costs it spins on its non-profits and its government agencies.

But the city says homeless people are drug addicts and criminals and can't be trusted to use money responsibly.

So they funnel millions of dollars to corrupt non-profits and government agencies who promise to use the money responsibly for the benefit of the homeless and they fucking don't. There was a $350K program run by the Salvation Army in partnership with the local public transit agency. One homeless person used their services.. One.

At least government agencies are, at some remove, responsible to the taxpayers and the voters. Non-profits dedicated to "helping" the homeless have a very strong incentive to make the problem worse. Because the worse the homelessness crisis becomes, the more money goes to the nonprofits. So they take government money, give it to their employees, make some sort of pathetic token effort to help unhoused people, and as the crisis worsens they go back to the government and say "the crisis is worse, we need more money".

And civilians look at the amount of money being poured into assistance to unhoused people, and look at the crisis getting worse, and say "more money and services won't help these people, we need to criminalize them". And fucking Newsom is all over that because he's angling for the Presidency and military style crackdowns impress the fascists in red states.

There's a homelessness crisis because of government corruption and incompetence. And the majority of Americans think the solution is to give the government more military power, more police power, and let those same corrupt agencies brutalize the homeless more. It's sickening.

You don't understand. That protest provoked an emotional reaction in me and I didn't like it. Responsible protests don't hurt people's feelings. They went too far.

Here in California, utility companies are "solving" this by instituting extremely high fees for the privilege of connecting your solar power to the grid. If I recall from the last time I ran the numbers, rooftop solar panels no longer make economic sense for the vast majority of residential customers - it costs more money to install me solar panels and pay the monthly connection fees then you'll save by producing energy over the lifetime of the solar panels.

Edit: I just googled and it looks like after public outcry the regulators pulled their really bad fee schedule to replace with a slightly less bad fee schedule. The system works!

Probably the one time in history PG&E tried to fix a problem ahead of time. 😆

AOC is calling for protests. Equating protests to terrorism puts you in the ignoble company of the Iranian government, the Saudi monarchy, and the Georgia cops who charged protesters with felonies for distributing flyers.

Selective enforcement is the core of conservative law making.