Which is it is: (gift link)

President Trump and Congress are neither investing in long-term solutions nor offering short-term relief. If they paid attention to different indicators of Americans’ financial health, beyond top-line growth and other traditional measures of economic success, they might feel more urgency.

So we developed one: a model budget for a family of two parents and two children under 8. We set their annual income at $130,000 — well above the roughly $83,500 national median for all U.S. households, and right in the middle of the income distribution for a family of four.

According to our calculations, the math has stopped adding up for this family over the past 18 months. They had a small cushion in 2024. Now they are in the red after covering just the basics, such as housing, an Affordable Care Act marketplace health care plan and day care. The family has over $1,000 less than it did a year and a half ago. Rising costs have more than wiped out any gains from higher wages and recent tax cuts.

This family would have trouble paying for anything beyond the basics — say, a car breaking down or a kid breaking an arm. It could not budget for any of the things that a typical family might hope for: buying a new car, taking a summer vacation or welcoming a third child.

To mount an effective response, it helps to know what stresses Americans feel most sharply and what action they expect from their elected officials. So we asked people.

By almost four to one, Americans told us that rising prices, rather than paychecks that haven’t kept up, are driving a cost-of-living squeeze. Two-thirds say they are struggling today and need relief they can feel right away. And the most cited concern is grocery costs. Some 35 percent of Americans in our survey, which we conducted last month, identified food as the single biggest source of financial pressure — approximately 15 percentage points higher than the share who named housing, the second-most-chosen option.

Several things are going on here:

First, kids, and in particular small children, are incredibly expensive in this country, because the Bible says that it’s wrong to take money from the rich to help pay the child care costs of ordinary people.

Only slightly less facetiously, I read a piece somewhere recently in which a partner at a big law firm told a woman associate that he considered choosing to have a child like choosing to go on a round the world sailing trip, that is, an act of extraordinarily extravagant consumption. It’s a real mystery why birth rates are now well below replacement level in any country where women have any economic and social freedom.

Second, it’s really hard psychologically to adjust for inflation, especially for older people as I know from experience. $130,000 per year sounds like a really big income to me because 30 years ago it WAS a really big income (equivalent to $282,000 today). But now it’s only the median income for families of four. We’ve discussed the psychology of inflation quite a bit at LGM, and it’s a difficult political issue for all sorts of reasons.

Third, a bunch of expenses that are very heavily subsidized or socialized altogether in the developed world — child care especially, but also health care and higher education — aren’t in the US, because of the Bible and Confederate Jesus and Elon Musk.

Fourth, and related, even people with moderate to quite high incomes in the US are laboring under the constant and growing pressures of economic precarity, because of the Bible etc.

Fifth, housing costs vary wildly across the country, so $130K per year for a family with two young kids might be plenty of money in Ashtabula, but barely middle class in Pasadena (of course you’re living in Pasadena rather than Ashtabula but this is in many cases not really anything like an actual choice given where the jobs that pay that kind of money are).

Sixth, the Bible.

There’s also some interesting discussion in the piece about how the price of meat in particular is a huge burden for many people, which is a problem that has at least a superficially obvious solution, but I’m pretty sure the right to bear cheeseburgers is somewhere in the Constitution so maybe not.

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libraford:

libraford:

libraford:

libraford:

libraford:

Googled something about quick hydration and it suggested big jug of water, couple tbsp pickle juice, dash of lime juice.

Its surprisingly tasty????

Pleased to report that after a day of this i am not longer craving caper brine and my mouth is not dry as usual. There’s some good suggestions in the notes too that I want to try.

-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)

-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt

-ayran: yogurt, water, salt, mint

-Agua pepino: water, cucumbers, lime, sugar, optional mint.

I have been reminded of:

-shrub: vinegar, sida water, elderberry (or other berry), sugar.

I have now been informed of

-sekanjabin: honey, vinegar, mint, water.

“Wow, I wonder why this post was popular this week.”

-sees the reports of the heatwave in Europe-

“… ah.”

Building on Paul’s discussion of Vance embracing Richard Nixon from the other day. A couple of days before that, a friend of mine sent me this Vanity Fair article on the attempt to rehabilitation Nixon through social media. I find it all very strange:

Richard Nixon throws up his hands in exasperation as he addresses the press: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook,” he says in the 1973 clip. “Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”

Suddenly, rapper EsDeeKid’s song “Rottweiler” comes in at full blast.

Okay, yo, ayy
Too much snow, kid, coming like Canada
Got kush smoke all in me lungs, I’m running from plod, but I’m lacking the stamina

More Nixon clips flood in. He chuckles, salutes, and waves merrily to the crowd. In one snippet, he’s swallowed by a crowd of fans. The words “I’m not a crook” flash across the screen. His face lights up with an X-ray filter before the seal of the Richard Nixon Foundation shines on the screen.

The caption reads: “The people have got to know.” The reel, shown below, has been seen over 1.4 million times and shared by thousands of people.

And….

The Foundation appears to at least tacitly go along with this popular rebrand. Tim Naftali, who served as the first federal director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, says that the Foundation has long embraced a conspiratorial view of Watergate, but it’s taken several decades before they could spread their theories to people who may not know of Nixon at all.

“At the time I was the Nixon Library director, they were making the same arguments,” says Naftali. “They’re not new, but they found a new platform, and they’ve found a new audience.”

During his tenure from 2007 to 2011, Naftali oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of documents, nearly 700 hours of Nixon tapes, and the creation of the Watergate Gallery. For years, he has been vocal about the pushback he encountered when trying to erect the exhibit, though the Foundation has long refuted his claims: “Numerous reports about the troubles former Nixon Library director Dr. Timothy Naftali supposedly had to endure from the Nixon Foundation over his more than three-year effort to produce a new Watergate exhibit are entirely unfounded,” they wrote in a statement in 2012.

While Naftali sought to open the exhibit, Nixon loyalists filed a 132-page letter of objection to the National Archives and Records Administration. This held up the opening of the exhibit for months. During one private tour of the facility, Naftali says he was berated by a group of these loyalists—including Nixon’s brother, Edward Nixon. According to Naftali, the group told him to “get the hell out.” The ordeal ultimately took its toll: He resigned as museum director just eight months after the new exhibit finally opened.

Naftali says that young people—especially young, white men—-might relate to Nixon because they, too, see themselves as victims. (“Every disgruntled yet ambitious neurodivergent American man has a bit of Nixon in him,” reads one comment.) The Foundation, he says, is simply tapping into that insecurity.

“It’s zeitgeisty at a moment where we have a president who is the most powerful person in the world, and yet he wants us to believe he’s a victim,” he adds.

One can overstate some things from reading this. First, something being shared on social media thousands of times doesn’t really mean that much today. That can easily happen through the slightest bit of coordination. Second, the number of people paying attention to this–or anything political–in any kind of media is really very small. Remember the poll from recently that showed that 9% of Democrats had even heard of Ezra Klein’s Prosperity Agenda and yet it has consumed so much bandwidth in Democratic online spaces. Third, it’s entirely possible that some young men are seeing this stuff about Nixon and feeling like he’s them, but the chances are very high that if they are getting this far, they are already all the way there anyway.

So, aging, we can overstate it all. But it does tell us one thing very important–today’s right wingers see Richard Nixon as a hero, they want everyone to see Richard Nixon as a hero, and they intend to act like Richard Nixon in the future and they will do whatever they have to do to make this all possible. Bug the Democratic Party HQ? Commit massive crimes? Oh hell yes, that’s the best. Especially when you have the Roberts Court to back you up. That alone should be alarming for their plans in 2028 and beyond. 2026 too, maybe, they are far too disorganized.

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ohcorny:

Wacom recently asked me to talk about why I make queer comics, and given there are multiple bills right now floating around in congress that are effectively “we will kill your livelihood if we get a sniff of queer” I had some pretty strong, simply feelings to relay.

You can read the interview here, you can buy my graphic novel featuring a gay vampire here, and you can call your congressmen about rejecting HR 2616, HR 8705, HR 7661 using 5calls.org (they don’t have these specific bills listed as things to call about, but luckily you can talk about whatever you want on the phone)

In his 1987 book The Game of Words, Willard R. Espy offered a poem of “forgotten positives”:

I dreamt of a corrigible, nocuous youth,
Gainly, gruntled, and kempt;
A mayed and a sidious fellow, forsooth —
Ordinate, effable, shevelled, ept, couth;
A delible fellow I dreamt.

Correspondingly, he pointed out, many common words ending in -less seem to have no opposites ending in -ful:

A tailful dog, one leaf-ful spring
Set out for toothful foraging,
And as he dug in rootful sod,
Paid voiceful tribute to his God.
At which, a feckful, loveful lass,
Whose strapful bodice charmed each pass-
Erby, cried out, “O timeful sound!
O ageful, lifeful, peerful hound!”

This is the grave of Karen Silkwood.

Born in 1946 in Longview, Texas, Silkwood grew up in the conservative Protestant world of postwar east Texas. She was a good student and a member of the National Honor Society but even that didn’t mean an easy way into a good college when you were poor and rural and a woman in the mid 60s. She won a scholarship to go to Lamar State College of Technology (today Lamar University) in Beaumont. But Silkwood didn’t stick with that. She married an oil pipeline worker. He sucked. They had three children in quick succession, but he also had women on the side. He spent all their money on fancy things and the other women as well. She confronted him, he refused to change, and she left him.

Silkwood was now a young single mother without any resources. This was a rough situation. So she worked. She moved to Oklahoma City and got a job in a hospital. That led to a bunch of jobs here and there, trying to find something to make ends meet. Now, at the same, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened up a lot of blue collar hard jobs to women. A lot of people didn’t like that, both companies and the male-dominated unions. But the courts found consistently that, in fact, Title VII was indeed part of the law and that is what Congress had decided. So there was a path for a good income for a woman like Karen Silkwood now. She got a job with Kerr-McGee, working as a metallography lab tech at the Cimarron River Fabrication Site in Crescent, Oklahoma. This was a plutonium production facility.

Despite this being Oklahoma, not only was this plant unionized but by what was just about the best union of the era, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers. Now, the OCAW had a different approach to issues of health and safety than many unions. Most of them took unsafe work as a fact of life, more or less, and imbibed in cultures that came from the workers themselves that prided themselves on dangerous work. So something like OSHA was a good thing, but also not something that they really cared about that much. Some of that was in the OCAW too, but its legislative director Tony Mazzocchi had a different belief. He believed that the workplace was an environment as important as any forest or desert and he believed that workers should use the new laws about safety and chemicals to build power on the shopfloor. Some thought he was a hopeless leftist for this, others saw him, as he has been called as “the Rachel Carson of the American workplace.”

Well, Silkwood soon found her job super dangerous and she didn’t like that. Shortly after she was hired at Kerr-McGee, the workers engaged in a strike over bad workplace conditions. Silkwood participated, learned a lot, and became a committed union support. She also experienced what it was like to lose. The thing about Oklahoma is that it wasn’t that hard for the company to find scabs. Not a big union culture there. The company also tried to get workers to decertify the union. That didn’t succeed, but after 10 weeks, the workers came back, angry and defeated legally but not in spirit.

Then in 1974, with the company seeking to increase profits, it forced workers to labor for longer shifts and safety standards declined even further. And this was a nuclear plant, safety standards had to mean something. Silkwood was first exposed to radiation then, discovering contamination in the emission spectroscopy lab. Meanwhile, the company continued trying to decert the union. At about this time, Silkwood joined the bargaining committee for the union. Her role–and her role in fighting the decert–was to focus on health and safety. And boy did she. She found all kinds of horrible things going on. A lack of showers meant workers weren’t getting radiation off them. Plutonium was going missing, for God’s sake.

It was about this time as well that she got to know Mazzocchi, during a meeting in Washington where she and her committee met with OCAW leadership. He encouraged her to continue. He wanted to use this to fight for the union’s sheer existence at Kerr-McGee. He told Silkwood about the connections between plutonium and cancer–and while you might think, what??, there isn’t really any reason she would have that knowledge. The knowledge of the rank-and-file worker of the shit they were dealing with at the workplace in this era was very, very low. There just wasn’t education and in a lot of cases, workers didn’t even know or have access to knowledge of the chemical makeup of the substances they handled on the job.

Mazzocchi’s strategy then was for Silkwood to continue to gather information and then the union would present it to the Atomic Energy Commission. She wholeheartedly agree. So the company decided to murder her. Now, that’s a big claim and it can’t be proven to the point of charging someone in the legal system. But it’s clear that someone along the line, maybe a foreman, maybe a senior supervisor, maybe someone further up the corporate ladder, decided that Silkwood should be dead. That’s especially true after her and Mazzocchi’s strategy worked and the increased fears of exposure led to workers voting to keep the union in the decert election.

Somehow, Silkwood was irradiated with 400 times the safe limit of plutonium, in a way that had to be intentional. Her gloves at work were not punctured. She discovered this during a self-check that was then confirmed by further testing. It was so bad that her house had to be torn down. This got in the news. The company responded that she contaminated herself to hurt Kerr-McGee, a ridiculous and absurd claim.

So Mazzocchi told her to talk to New York Times reporter David Burnham, who had broken the Serpico case in New York about police corruption. He flew to Oklahoma for the meeting. She had lots of documentation. On the way to meet him, her car was forced off the road, she was killed, and all the documents disappeared. Karen Silkwood was 28 years old. Further analysis showed she had been forced off the road by a car hitting her from behind. This all led to massive media coverage. Kerr-McGee soon got out of the nuclear business entirely, closing its plants in 1975. After a legal battle from her survivors, where in court the company again claimed she was a troublemaker who contaminated herself, Kerr-McGee settled out of court for $1.38 million. Then the movie came, starring Meryl Streep, which was released to acclaim in 1983.

A note: when people don’t trust the return of nuclear energy today, this case is a big reason why. The people who controlled the nuclear industry were awful. The reason Silkwood and The China Syndrome had such power is because the kind of expertise that was said to be able to lead us to some better tomorrow was shown to be totally corrupt, self-serving, and dangerous to the public.

Karen Silkwood is buried in Danville Cemetery, Kilgore, Texas.

If you would like this series to visit other murdered union activists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Abraham Rabinowitz, an IWW member killed in the Everett Massacre, is in Queens. Louis Tikas, the leader of the UMWA in Ludlow during the coal strike of 1914 and whose murder started the Ludlow Massacre, is in Trinidad, Colorado. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

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