Conor here: The author of the following piece wastes a decent amount of space on TDS that weakens a message about solidarity among working class in the face of climate change. That’s unfortunate because the message about survival strategies and projects of the poor is a necessary one, especially in the face of billionaire control of government, which here in the US means both major political parties.
By Liz Theoharis, a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor and We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign. Originally published at TomDispatch.
It was William Shakespeare who, in Troilus and Cressida, wrote, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” And yet, in the polarized news cycle since Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern United States and the hurricanes have kept coming, we’ve heard a tale not of shared humanity, but of ruin, discord, and political polarization.
Hundreds are dead from that storm — the deadliest to hit the mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — hundreds more are missing, and hundreds of thousands of residences are still without power or clean water. And in addition to the staggering human loss and physical damage, a hurricane of misinformation and division has continued to pummel the region.
There’s Elon Musk’s politicized deployment of Starlink satellite internet access, which he’s used to credit Donald Trump less than one month before the November election, while undermining the legitimacy of federal recovery efforts. Indeed, listen to Fox News or read Musk’s claims on his social media platform X, and there’s no mention of the pre-arrangements the federal government made with Starlink through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide internet access — for local governments and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation.
Then, of course, there’s Donald Trump falsely claiming that the federal government’s response to Helene was delayed and insufficient because the funds that might have gone to hurricane victims are instead being used to house undocumented immigrants. (FEMA does spend some money on migrant housing, but through an entirely different program.) With this outrageous fearmongering, he’s fanning the flames of anti-immigrant hate that are already raging during this election season. His racist and xenophobic rhetoric has also forced FEMA and the White House to spend precious time and energy trying to counter his lies, rather than focusing their full attention on saving lives and rebuilding broken communities.
And don’t forget Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who insisted that the government actually controls the weather. This ludicrous claim is taken from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (notorious for arguing that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax), who suggested that the government directed Helene towards North Carolina “to force people out of the region so it could mine the state’s large reserves of lithium, a key component in the batteries that power electric vehicles and store renewable energy.”
Such hateful lies and conspiracy theories (and there are more like them!) conveniently ignore the fact that conservative Republican lawmakers passed a funding bill that failed to allocate additional money to FEMA just days before Helene hit, even though the country was entering peak hurricane season in a time when the weather is growing ever more extreme. And it’s no surprise that these lawmakers are backed by billionaires who own some of the very companies most responsible for climate change. Through their scare tactics and anti-government misdirection, they have also provided rhetorical cover for the Christian nationalists and other extremists who were some of the first responders after the hurricane. The Southern Poverty Law Center confirms reports I’ve heard from local sources that “far-right militias and white supremacist organizations are moving into the region to provide assistance — and, if past disasters are any indication, drum up sympathy for their cause.”
Those Who Are Hit First and Worst
Hurricane Helene (like Hurricane Milton that followed it in a devastating fashion) should be a brutal reminder that none of us are truly safe from the worsening effects of the climate crisis. For years, local officials and real estate developers marketed Asheville, North Carolina, as a “climate haven.” With its temperate weather and mountain vistas 300 miles from the ocean, many falsely believed the area would be shielded from storms like Helene. No such luck.
Meanwhile, the last few weeks have also served as a stark reminder that the climate devastation increasingly coming for all of us is experienced most intensely by poor and low-income communities. Just look at the (lack of) full-scale evacuation plans for Hurricane Milton in Florida and it’s clear that those who cannot afford a $2,400 flight or have access to a car and enough gas money to wait out the massive traffic jams of those fleeing such storms may just be out of luck.
In western North Carolina, as rising waters from Helene consumed entire communities, many had nowhere to evacuate. Poor people living in rural areas, often with pre-existing health conditions and without health insurance, skipped hospital visits in the chaotic days immediately after the storm. Thankfully, some hospitals opened up beds for patients whose homes were destroyed. But those who don’t have flood insurance — and the residents of the areas hit hardest by Helene were the least likely to have such insurance — and can’t afford to rebuild may soon find themselves joining the many others who have been displaced and made homeless by the storm.
Truly, as the experiences of Hurricane Helene — and now Hurricane Milton, Nadine, and potentially others, too — have proven, the economic disparities that are laid bare and intensified by the climate crisis are absent from the supposed “economic populism” of climate-change deniers like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. In fact, it was Vance who called the study and analysis of climate change “weird science” during the vice-presidential debate. He has also praised the lead author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which proposes gutting FEMA, making it harder for states to get disaster relief, and blocking federal agencies from fighting climate change (not to mention 400 pages of other suggested cuts to this country’s social safety net).
And although they claim that the Harris-Walz ticket is looking after the interests and profits of the wealthy, it’s Vance and Trump who have regularly belittled the poor and cozied up to venture capitalists, tech billionaires, and others among the nation’s corporate elite. In fact, the decades-old abandonment of rural Appalachian communities destroyed by Helene has long been justified by the patronizing and classist “culture of poverty” arguments that Vance himself helped keep alive with his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
Storms like Hurricane Helene are a force amplifier of deep societal inequities that will worsen if Trump and Vance are elected in November, but in truth the issue runs deeper than just one political party. Indeed, over the last few years, extreme weather events, pandemics, and other public emergencies have exposed a deep societal disease that has only grown worse after decades of neoliberal policies. Worsening poverty and widening economic inequality should be considered pre-existing conditions that are only magnified during moments of crisis. Manoochehr Shirzaei, an associate professor of geophysics at Virginia Tech, recently put it this way: “The tragic flood event in the southeast U.S. is a poignant example of the confluence of multiple factors, including development in floodplains, inadequate infrastructure maintenance and management, and the specter of climate change, whose compounding effect can amplify the disaster.”
From Mutual Aid to Community Power
In the face of so much loss and destruction, the heroism of impacted communities, which have joined together in extraordinary acts of solidarity, has been tragically underreported in mainstream media outlets. Much of the mutual aid and community support for those affected by the hurricane has come from community members themselves, who are working tirelessly to ensure that everyone in need is cared for. The streets of Asheville and neighboring towns have been filled with cars with out-of-state license plates, as everyday people with various skills have driven in from all over the country to lend a hand. On social media, it’s been heartening to see all of the love and support that has poured into these communities.
In Asheville, the stories of this local solidarity are many. There is the Asheville Tool Library, which, while officially closed, is supporting repair projects, including the fixing of generators and chainsaws. There are medics and doctors running free clinics. There are local breweries that are using their equipment to make sure desperate communities still have clean and safe water. There are young people passing out free gasoline to anyone who needs it and others who are writing out instructions in English and Spanish on how to make dry toilets.
These examples of grassroots leadership offer hope in hard times. After all, this is how bottom-up movements have so often begun throughout American history. In pre-Civil War America, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people smuggled themselves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, forcing the nation to confront the horrors of slavery and igniting a movement to end it. In the 1930s, the hungry and out-of-work began organizing unemployment councils and tenant-farmer unions even before President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal. In the decades before the Civil Rights Movement, Black communities organized themselves to oppose lynch mobs and other forms of state-sanctioned (or state-complicit) violence. And no one can deny the powerful example of the carpools and other community projects of the Montgomery, Alabama, freedom struggle during the 1950s.
Indeed, contrary to media narratives that often paint hard-pressed communities as dangerous and their members as only looking out for themselves, the truth is that people in crisis usually do whatever they can to provide for their communities and protect those around them. Dispossessed people care for one another, share what they have, and lend a hand through mutual-aid networks. Such survival struggles may not be enough on their own, but provide fertile ground for deeper organizing among widely disparate American communities that, through the experience of increasingly common mass crisis events, are being awakened to the need for deeper, systemic change.
The Black Panthers’ Projects of Survival
Consider the free breakfast program organized by the Black Panthers in the 1960s. For many Americans, the enduring image of the Black Panther Party is of Black men in berets and leather jackets carrying guns. The self-defense tactics of the Panthers were an emphatic rebuttal to a society that regularly dehumanized and exacted violence on Black Americans. But in truth, most of their time was spent then meeting the needs of their communities and building a movement that could transform the lives of poor Black people. The Panthers bravely stepped into a void left by the government to feed, educate, and care for the poor. But their survival programs weren’t just aimed at meeting immediate needs. For one thing, they purposefully used such programs to highlight the failures of government policymaking to deal with American poverty. By feeding tens of thousands of people, they also forged community-wide relationships and developed widespread trust among the poor, not just in Black communities but in poor white and Latino communities as well. The Panthers’ survival programs were always meant to be launchpads for a wider movement to end poverty and systemic racism.
Indeed, the Panthers consciously called out the grim paradox of a nation that claimed there was never enough money to fight poverty at home, while it spent billions of dollars fighting distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. (This paradox continues today, as the U.S. has been funding Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza, one of the poorest places on earth, and now its invasion of Lebanon). Their survival programs gave them a base of operations from which to organize new people into a human rights movement, interweaving all of their community work with political education and highly visible protest.
At the time, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI listed the Black Panthers and their breakfast program as “the greatest threat to internal security in the country.” Government officials feared that such organizing could potentially catch fire across far wider groups of poor Americans at a moment when the War on Poverty was being dismantled and the age of neoliberal economics was already on the rise. In that context, the ability of the Panthers to put the abandonment of poor Black people under a spotlight, unite leaders within their community, and develop relationships with other poor people across racial lines was a far more dangerous threat to the oppressive status quo than the guns they carried.
Solidarity Among the Poor
The experience of the Black Panthers features prominently in the anti-poverty organizing tradition that I come from. In fact, the National Union of the Homeless and the National Welfare Rights Union, sibling poor people’s movements that I was part of in the 1990s, used to teach new organizers the “Six Panther Ps” of poor people’s organizing: 1) Program, 2) Protest, 3) Projects of survival, 4) Publicity work, 5) Political education, and 6) Plans, not personalities. When combined, these six principles form a model for the poor organizing the poor that has been responsible for creative nonviolent action that has called America to conscience and for anti-poverty policies that have impacted millions.
Much like recent beautiful acts of local solidarity in the mountains of western North Carolina and Tennessee and in low-income communities across Florida reeling from Hurricane Milton, the significance of the historic work of the Black Panther Party or of unhoused leaders and welfare-rights activists across the decades begins within poor communities themselves, where people are already engaging in life-saving actions. Out of such depths, grassroots leaders find new and creative ways to connect survival strategies and projects of the poor to a wider movement focused on building and wielding political power. From such local struggles come the very policy solutions to a community’s (and even this country’s) varied problems. This is what it means to work bottom up, not top down!
In a world whose weather is growing grimmer by the year, such examples of mutual solidarity and mutual aid are perhaps the most concrete and material form of hope in these hard times. Such scrappy and life-giving action needs more than acknowledgment and appreciation. Those facing injustice, violence, and displacement need more than thoughts and prayers. Rather, to turn the tide on division and lies, as well as deeper impoverishment and pain, heroic and creative community-building — or what I like to call “lifting from the bottom so that everyone can rise” — must be spread, scaled up, and significantly supported by the larger society. Our politicians, news agencies, and larger population must stop paying homage to billionaires who will profit off our predicaments or politicians who will try to capitalize on any crisis. It’s time to see that projects of survival and solidarity among those struggling the most are our only true hope for a future that will otherwise be ever more perilous.
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Thank you for this …
These two paragraphs are immense:
If the majority of Americans understood and accepted what this paragraph is saying, and then fought against the forces who make that grim paradox a reality, there’d be a whole new “American revolution”. The threat is not to “internal security” … it’s to the “architects of internal strife”.
Fred Hampton in particular sought such relationships with non-black People of Poverty, and he in particular was assassinated to stop him from getting further.
This can be connected to a recent link “A Carbon Tax Alone Will Not Solve Climate Change” posted here in October 17th with a critic on a post by Elon Musk in X on February saying that the solution for climate change is simple and he has it: a neutral carbon tax. Read the link, it is a good one. This claim was apparently endorsed by more than 3500 economists. Musk’s post shows he is, unsurprisingly, a libertarian. Besides the belief that the solution to climate change is simple is a dangerous one which only leads to complacency. I can say that this particular billionaire is not going to save us. On the contrary.
Of course people who are under threat band together and drop or at least suppress their love of hierarchy. The problem is what happens when the threat is over. So, yes, billionaires are the problem but the other problem is that we would likely act the same if we were billionaires. As a character states in Renoir’s Rules of the Game: “everybody has their reasons.”
One should also say that western North Carolina these days is no longer the realm of mostly mountain folk and poor people. To the degree that money can solve their terrible situation they have resources. Here in SC I think some of us have still not quite absorbed this sudden disaster and everyone is attempting to carry on with normal acivities. Life itself is a cope.
Isn’t that why the New Deal Era laws and rules were designed to prevent the re-emergence of billionaires?
If we can prevent eachother and anyone else from ever becoming billionaires to begin with, then we don’t have to worry about what we would do if we were billionaires.
But that is past tense now. A New Deal Revival movement would seek to make it future tense as well.
Someone should tell Ralph Nader.
https://www.amazon.com/Only-Super-Rich-Can-Save-Us/dp/1583229035
Re The Black Panthers projects of survival
The reason I am on a one man campaign to get youse all to check out the Irish rap group Kneecap is because, while their film is a glorious black comedy caper – of West Belfast hoods making it big as a band – and easy to follow with subtitles for the Irish sections (and even Belfast English, if you need them), the real band members are totally sincere (if rarely serious) about working class Belfast solidarity and about community organising.
Here’s a video of Mo Chara, aged 17 or 18, before starting Kneecap, with the Glor Na Mona organisation organising free breakfasts in the most deprived part of West Belfast.
https://youtu.be/1QNBgIUebN4 (in Irish, subtitled)
Mo Chara from 1:18, just being himself. He was probably born like that! “Frighteningly articulate Kneecap” as their record label blurb says.
But watch the whole thing and learn about where Kneecap really come from and what real community organising looks like in Ireland today. I was going to write the UK but I don’t see anything like this in Britain. :-(
The film is the best recruiting tool for their music (well, it got me…) but what’s got me hooked on Kneecap is their commitment to people. It has been eye-opening for me to see how the Falls Road Gaeltacht has *organised*. One guy cites the Black Panthers! They totally understand soft power, that a free breakfast from an Irish speaker wins supporters for the language and nationalism and breaks the apathy. They have also created their own paralellel institutions, including media (Belfast Media) and culture (the Culturlann) and schooling (starting community-funded Irish language schools when there was no state provision).
(PlutoniumKun, have you watched the film yet? Come and tell me at http://www.reddit.com/r/kneecap or even join our Discord channel linked from there…)
Thanks for the background and links, I’ll be using them. I had heard about it in a Gaelic language learning group, but I think because there were film awards involved, I tuned it out.
I imagine these kids will get co-opted out of relevance soon enough by becoming part of the entertainment industry, that is the traditional way we deal with uppity kids. Either imprison them or allow them to have fame and fortune. But it would be lovely if they were the vanguard of a new generation turning its back on the current ‘culture’.
First, check out their Twitter/X (Twix?) feed. They are not getting co-opted anytime soon. If the Unionists and the Nationalists have anything in common, it’s “Never! No Surrender!”
https://nitter.poast.org/kneecapceol
They talk at slightly more length about identity in this Vice documentary on Northern Ireland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf3QdYA5DVQ&rco=1
Then, for fun (warning, NSWF), check out their Gaelic for Prods courses (cough).
Gaeilge for Prods
https://www.facebook.com/KNEECAP32/videos/episode-1-gaeilge-for-prods-peadar-%C3%B3-goill-cian-hogan/627674419519077/
Gaeilge for Rangers fans
https://www.facebook.com/KNEECAP32/videos/gaeilge-for-rangers-episode-1-%EF%B8%8F/2814805831994408/
(Serious digression: to be fair to their Unionist detractors, they say a lot of things that thirty years ago would have been unacceptably sectarian. One of their recent tweets is mourning the death of a lovely neighbour – who was also an IRA member who had served the longest prison sentence in the UK for a bombing. But the Provisional IRA accepted nearly thirty years ago that the armed struggle of the Troubles was over and they would pursue their ends through peaceful means. If you accept the peace process and the “parity of esteem” provision for Republicanism and Unionism in Northern Ireland, then those who fought on both sides are legitimate heroes and the dinosaurs on either side who still pursue sectarianism are legitimate targets for ridicule. Which is what Kneecap do: they mock the irridentist Republican paramilitaries in their film just as much as the Unionist police and when they say Tiocfaidh Ar La in their track HOOD (“Our day will come”, Republican slogan), it’s the reported speech of a sectarian hood who gets drunk and provokes the police for a free ride home in the van every weekend (“I’ve lost my bus pass”)).
what the author misses is the reason why we have trump and green, bill clinton declared the era of big government is over, and he turned america over to the billionaires.
it was bill clinton and his uniparty allies that got rid of smoot-hawley and the new deal. creating massive poverty, endless wars for free trade and under investment in america.
Monday morning blues: reading this post along with the link from a couple of days ago, It’s Time to Give Up Hope for a Better Climate, and Get Heroic.
The last couple of years, from the time of the destruction of the Nord Stream Pipelines, which as committed environmentalists we should have been celebrating, but was instead replaced by the more environmentally destructive shipments of LNG from the US to Europe, I have been feeling that the Save the Planet movement has been abandoned, or at least, put on hold until we can declare victory in Ukraine. (Don’t let’s discuss what constitutes ‘victory.’) And, of course, make the Middle East (or, West Asia) safe for Israel. It’s a kind of madness. A last, frantic burst of reckless activity before death.
Watching the light show from afar, I can only hope (if that is still allowed) that our war-mad leaders are marching themselves along a branch that will eventually crack. We are certainly not going to persuade the fossil fuel corporations to give up drilling, or the AI and crypto guys to stop building data centers that use unimaginable amounts of energy to produce …. just what is is they produce? Can we eat it, live in it, wear it?
What’s left is to gather together, on a neighborhood scale, and plan on how to survive. In my part of the world, the Amish communities offer a template. But, people in urban areas will need other methods and solutions. Accept that there are things you can influence and other major things you can not. Accept that the old order is failing, that all things have a life span, and eventually disintegrate, and something new is born from the pieces of the old. But, Winter, the time when the old order decomposes, can be Hell. Or can be a time for hunkering down, reevaluating, appreciating family and friends and neighbors, and sharing the Summer’s bounty.
As Conor notes, the flaw in the article is the vilification of one side of the spectrum. what is most disheartening is that he had to dredge back into the 1960’s to find a counter in the black panthers. Is Mark Cuban at the SEC (I believe that’s the post he’s stumping for) going to rein in the greed?
I think not…
Also, the story of the Panther’s breakfast program, and the Panther’s effectiveness in general, is wildly overstated by contemporary Leftists, presumably because things are currently so bleak and because it still outshines any contemporary efforts.
The Panther’s were, from the beginning, riven with informers, provocateurs and hustler/grifter types who gravitated to the Movement at the time. If you read histories of the era and the Party, not just the current nostalgia-of-people-who-weren’t there, you learn that the Party, due to arrests, indictments and government attacks, was in a constant state of crisis from the beginning. When asked by a comrade how to keep sketchy characters out of the Party, Bay Area Panther leader David Hilliard replied, “When I find out, I’ll let you know.” While many of those sketchy characters were cops and informers, not all of them were, and it had a huge impact on the Party’s effectiveness and longevity since, let’s face it, they were a pretty short-lived phenomena.
I don’t know if it’s still on YouTube, but there’s a video of Adolph Reed, who came of political age in that era, entitled “The Black Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” which gives us a more realistic take on the Panther’s legacy. The fact is that, despite the courage and talent (and let’s again be honest, the Badass style) of many Panthers, they couldn’t save us then, either.
First of all, in defense of Alex Jones, he also predicted 9/11 and was on the fact that, yes, it was conspiracy. Attacking the “right” is also a mistake here. We have, as Gore Vidal noted long ago, one party with two right-wings. I would argue that the Democrat Party is more right wing than the Republican Party. Trump is the Joker of the deck of US politics–don’t trust him, of course, but he is interested in change and the citizens whereas the Democrats are interested exclusively in the donor class in terms of policy as our mainstream Republicans who are, generally, as opposed to Trump as Democrats.
As for the crux of the problem, the author gets it right–we need to cooperate with one another and the beginning of that is to engage with people particularly in person. Most people, in particular Americans, do have a sense of cooperation and helping others–I see this in all levels of people except the ruling class and their factotums in the (cultural) upper-middle-class. The cultural landscape is radically materialistic and anti-spiritual, anti-cooperation, anti-community and, above all, narcissistic. This landscape is overwhelmingly dominated by the finance oligarchs who run the country.
I’m an anarchist by philosophy though I recognize that such a political state of affairs is impossible except in areas hit by disaster. I believe the State is fundamentally toxic but has to be there at some level because of the disease of materialism and selfishness already present. I was part of the hippy days where we naturally trusted each other and experimented in ways of living based on trust and love. Our vision was the vision and still is the vision we ought to be following. Yes, we were into “doing our own thing” but we were also into love and compassion for our fellows healing from the radical materialism we were brought up in. The cool thing is that the political and economic situation at that time (the 60s) was far superior to now so there was room to experiment. Repression soon followed as is natural so that today, there is little chance for those who want to do the hippy thing except in fashion and music even though psychedelics are beginning to filter back into life to point to the fact a deeper level of life is possible when we follow our hearts, so to speak.
If you work for government or the corporate world (at whatever level) then you are part of the problem and that’s the problem you begin to try and solve–things always start with the personal. Stop working for the authorities or work for them when, as does happen, those authorities are humanistic and decent rather than materialistic and greedy. Move in spiritual circles rather than religious and don’t be embarrassed by where it leads you. Only in that way can whatever new sort of morality, or re-interpretation of the old morality, actually emerge–trust your heart in that and stop obsessing about the dollar and stop making bucket lists and start loving your neighbor and maybe even your enemy.
Intentionally or innocently; passively or actively; we have f****d up our priorities.
On a Veterans Outreach project last week in NW. Ashville, I had the recurring thought:
“Money is the means for sure, but the method is Humanity aiding Humanity.”
From the above, this is the nut for me:
Indeed, contrary to media narratives that often paint hard-pressed communities as dangerous and their members as only looking out for themselves, the truth is that people in crisis usually do whatever they can to provide for their communities and protect those around them. Dispossessed people care for one another, share what they have, and lend a hand through mutual-aid networks. Such survival struggles may not be enough on their own, but provide fertile ground for deeper organizing among widely disparate American communities that, through the experience of increasingly common mass crisis events, are being awakened to the need for deeper, systemic change.
This action was the only balm I saw and I heard healing the heartbreak.
Ever an optimist, I think our only hope for the future lies in Crises.
How f****d up is that???
I agree with Conor as well. All to often, and especially during an “election: year, the “compatible left” focus only on the R faction. Juan Cole, Democracy Now, Common Dreams and a whole raft of so-called progressive outlets are telling us to Vote Joyful Genocide. It’s the old bait-and-switch routine they do every 4 years.
On the other end of the hypocrisy scale, we have Judge Nap praising Musk as an advocate of free speech. (Musk, like Bezos, Gates et al. have received billions in subsidies, tax breaks and fat gov contracts and Musk has no problem with monopolies and banning people from XTwitter, more boatloads of BS and hypocrisy)
No mention of Assange, Ritter, Snowden or the dozens of anti-Israel protesters who got the shit beat out of them and their tuition money stolen. No mention of US-citizen journalists murdered in broad daylight, with funding and blessing of the US gov. Free speech is what the oligarchy tell us it is, we can’t think for ourselves.
Instead of worshiping the Neo-aristocracy like Medieval peasants, folks should be threatening to roll out a few proverbial guillotines.
The fact that an oligarchy exists, and the fact that political bribery is legal (aka “political speech”), and that most of all the wealth is hoovered up by the oligarchy and oligarchs etc. should be the elephant in the room that the author of the article needs to see before he is trampled underfoot.
Um, the billionaires have ALREADY saved us.
Don’t feel saved? You weren’t. I don’t know anybody that was, but I just don’t hang out in those circles.
I doubt if anybody that reads this blog runs in those circles.
I’ve worked closely with an Italian family of billionaires. They are atypical of the kind we talk about here. First and second generation wealth, engineers by training, unostentatious, not tax exiles, mostly displaying traits of humanist scepticism like NC readers.
Looking back on it, though, we never talked high politics so perhaps they secretly eat babies. :-)
Oh, I’m not trying to imply billionaires are some sort of secret evil, but they also very logically see no reason to “save the nation” or “save the world”; that’s the role of nation states. They will look after their families as all of us would.
Now the fact that they have a huge sway in how those same nation states are run is where things get complicated. Here also, they will look after their family interests. The rest of us? Maybe not so much.
Well, “my” Italians are Italians so they are not interested in the Nation but they are fully committed to The Chocolate City and revitalising it. But who knows where the limits of loyalty are…?
What is The Chocolate City? Vatican?
I have been guessing that it is one of the cities in North Italy. Beyond that, I couldn’t guess which one.
So, it’s an actual city and not some metaphor, or inside joke. Then, maybe Alba. That’s where Ferrero is from.
It’s Torino/Turin.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10/how-corporate-vehicles-conceal-crime-and-chicanery.html#comment-4119350
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turin#Cuisine
If the first few paragraphs about Trump and Musk are accurate and correct, then where is the TDS?
Accusations of TDS have become a card to play against criticism of Trump in the same way that accusations of antisemitism have become a card to play against criticism of Israel.
Now . . . the first few paragraphs may well be irrelevant to the point of the article. But that is another matter.