This is leaving out the most crucial piece of why that was a normal reality: UNIONS.
Union participation percentage is a measly 10% across all industries for the latest statistics in 2025.
Unions are the ones who could fight against the requirement for everyone and their mother to need a minimum of a bachelor's degree. they could fight for working hours to be properly compensated so that the work week was actually 40 hours or less and everything over was actually paid for.
The reality of the work place and why we work so much more for so much less is because we are not unionized. the reason europeans seem to have it so much better is because of their strong union culture.
there are solutions to these problems and we need to stop obscuring the why.
Ice Berg Slim, whose real name was Robert Beck, is primarily known for his writings, particularly his memoir "Pimp: The Story of My Life" and the novel "Trick Baby". These works, along with others like "Mama Black Widow" and "Long White Con," explored the world of pimps and con men, often featuring gritty, urban settings.
"He is also considered a foundational figure in gangsta rap, as rapper Ice-T and Ice Cube adopted their stage names from him."
Literary Works:
Iceberg Slim's books, including his autobiography "Pimp" and the novel "Trick Baby," became underground hits, gaining popularity outside traditional book sales.
Pimping as a Central Theme:
His writings frequently explored the lives of pimps and con men, drawing from his own experiences.
Gangsta Rap Influence:
Rapper Ice-T and Ice Cube took their stage names from Iceberg Slim, recognizing him as an influential figure in the genre.
Influence on Other Writers:
Iceberg Slim's work also influenced other writers, including Donald Goines, a writer of urban fiction.
Born: Aug 4, 1918, Chicago, IL
Died: April 1992 (73 years), Culver City, CA
Cause of death: Diabetes
#Spouse: Diane Millman Beck (m. 1982–1992)
#Children: Misty Beck, Camille Beck, Melody Beck
Height: 6′ 4″
Parents: Mary Brown Beck
Who was Iceberg Slim's first wife?
One of the film's most significant revelations is an extended interview with Slim's first wife, Betty Beck, with whom he had children. Betty met Slim after he'd already done stints as a pimp, prisoner and drug addict and was trying to lead a more upstanding life. — at Ice Berg Slim c1992.
There is something self-destructive about Western technology and distribution. Whenever any consumer object is so excellent that it attracts a devoted following, some of the slide rule and computer types come in on their twinkle toes and take over the store, and in a trice they figure out just how far they can cut quality and still increase the market penetration. Their reasoning is that it is idiotic to make and sell a hundred thousand units of something and make a profit of thirty cents a unit, when you can increase the advertising, sell five million units, and make a nickel profit a unit. Thus the very good things of the world go down the drain, from honest turkey to honest eggs to honest tomatoes. And gin.
It's gotten worse. They used to be fine with less profit per unit if they were moving so many more units, but that isn't good enough anymore. No, they need to cut corners on production costs until it more than covers the cost of the additional advertising - cut wages, use worse materials, continually charge to rent it instead of it being a one-time purchase. If they're not increasing the profit per unit along with the number of units, they're considered failures. It's capitalism gone cancerous
A quick and easy one pot Taco Pasta Recipe made with seasoned ground beef, tomatoes, chiles, pasta, and cheese. On the table in less than 30 minutes this dish is always a hit!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Comrade Trump continues his unbroken streak of destroying the American empire's grip on the world, hastening the renewables transition, de-dollarizing global trade, and killing the world's suicidal habit of entrusting its digital life to America's defective, enshittified tech exports:
But Comrade Trump's ambitious praxis knows no bounds. Now, he's helping to remake the Democratic Party as a muscular opposition with a serious commitment to workers' interests over billionaires. It's not merely that Trump has empowered the primary campaigns of leftist Democrats facing down corporate, AIPAC-backed sellouts:
He's also stiffening normie sellout Democrats' spines, forcing them to confront the stark choice between socialism and barbarism! And Dem leaders don't come more normie sellout than Cory "Big Pharma" Booker, a disgrace to Corys everywhere:
Nevertheless, that very same (lesser) Cory has introduced legislation to unwind every illegal, corrupt merger that the Trump administration has waved through:
Under the Correcting Lapsed Enforcement in Antitrust Norms for Mergers (CLEAN Mergers) Act, any company that was acquired in a deal worth $10b or more will have to break up with its merger partner if it turns out that these mergers were "politically influenced." "Politically influenced" sums up every major merger under the Trump II regime:
You could be forgiven for assuming that this is just about reining in Wall Street greed, but that it isn't an especially political maneuver. That's not true: antitrust is the most consequentially political regulation (with the possible exception of regulations on elections). Every fascist power defeated in WWII relied on the backing of their national monopolists to take, hold and wield power. That's why the Marshall Plan technocrats who rewrote the laws of Europe, South Korea and Japan made sure to copy over US antitrust law onto those statute-books (that's also why the tech antitrust cases brought in Europe could be re-run in South Korea and Japan – their laws are all substantively similar, because they were harmonized with US antitrust in the 1950s):
Fascism and monopolies go hand in hand, and smashing monopolies is key to the program of fighting fascism. After defeating fascism in the mid-20th century, the Allies oversaw a program of "denazification," starting with the Nuremberg trials:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials
Inspired by those trials, I've proposed that Congressional Dems could form a "Nuremberg Caucus" that would publicly promise sweeping plans to denazify America after Trump and his allies have been swept from power:
The centerpiece of the Nuremberg Caucus playbook is a set of ready-to-file, public indictments against Trump officials who have violated the law, the Constitution, and the rights of the people of the USA. Dems should create and maintain a docket with exhibits and witness lists that gets updated every time one of these crooks runs their big, stupid mouths on Fox News or OANN or Twitter. The Nuremberg Caucus could even set dates for the trials of officials, with judicial calendars for each federal courtroom, starting on January 21, 2029.
The idea here is to both demoralize Trump's collaborators and to stiffen the spines of the Democratic base who will have to be convinced that turning out for the coming elections, and defending them, will mean something, delivering the change and hope they've been promised since the Obama campaign, but which has never materialized.
While trials and punishment for Trump's fascist goons are at the center of the Nuremberg Caucus plan, that's not all of it. The plan also calls for publicly announcing the intention to unwind every corrupt merger that was consummated under Trump. This serves two purposes: first, it promises the electorate that the monopolists who steal from them will face consequences for their crimes; but second, it also puts investors on notice that any gains from corrupt mergers will turn into massive losses once the next administration orders these companies to unscramble the inedible omelets they're cooking up, no matter what the cost.
That's exactly what Booker's CLEAN Mergers Act – cosponsored by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) – does. I don't think that Booker is listening to me, but I do think that Dems who are willing to introduce this kind of legislation can be cajoled, coerced and sweet-talked into more ambitious Nuremberg Caucus actions.
For example, there could not be a better time to announce plans to unrig the Supreme Court, which has just gutted the Voting Rights Act:
The Supreme Court's legitimacy has been burned to the ground, and Trump's chud justices are pissing on the ashes. Packing the court is a very good idea:
Which is why I included it in the Nuremberg Caucus plan. But packing the court is just table stakes. In his latest video, Jamelle Bouie lays out a detailed plan for denazifying the Supreme Court:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRzS61buXkQ
As Bouie points out, "as long as John Roberts has his majority, nothing the left of center in this country wants to do is safe or stable…We can have democracy and self-government in this country or we can have the Supreme Court as it exists, but we cannot have both."
But packing the court – while a good place to start – isn't enough. Per Bouie, the problem isn't just the court's corruption – it's how powerful the court is. Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution permits Congress to "jurisdiction strip" the Supremes: Congress can pass a law taking voting rights and racial discrimination away from the Supreme Court's jurisdiction. Congress can impose ethics reforms on the court, banning justices from taking bribes (I can't believe I have to type these words).
Congress can turn the Supreme Court's current building into a museum and move the Supreme Court back into its original home in Congress's basement. Congress can take away the Supremes' ability to select their clerks or which cases they hear. All the Constitution says is that there must be a Supreme Court, and it must adjudicate "disputes between states, disputes involving ambassadors, impeachments, that kind of thing." Everything else is up to Congress to grant or withhold from SCOTUS.
This is very good Nuremberg Caucus stuff. It would be an amazing campaign promise for anyone primarying a shitty normie Dem in the midterms: "Vote for me, and I will be part of the legislative movement to make the Supreme Court weaker and thus more accountable."
Now, as much as I like this, I'm really holding out for a Dem to go with my big ICE-melting idea: promising million-dollar bounties for ICE officers who rat out their buddies for violating the law:
ICE agents are signing up with the promise of $50k hiring bonuses and $60k in student debt cancellation. That's peanuts. The Nuremberg Caucus could announce a Crimestoppers-style program with $1m bounties for any ICE officer who a) is themselves innocent of any human rights violations, and; b) provides evidence leading to the conviction of another ICE officer for committing human rights violations. That would certainly improve morale for (some) ICE officers.
As I wrote in February:
Critics of this plan will say that this will force Trump officials to try to steal the next election in order to avoid consequences for their actions. This is certainly true: confidence in a "peaceful transfer of power" is the bedrock of any kind of fair election.
But this bunch have already repeatedly signaled that they intend to steal the midterms and the next general election:
ICE agents are straight up telling people that ICE is on the streets to arrest people in Democratic-leaning states ("The more people that you lose in Minnesota, you then lose a voting right to stay blue"):
The only path to fair elections – and saving America – lies through mobilizing and energizing hundreds of millions of Americans. They are ready. They are begging for leadership. They want an electoral choice, something better than a return to the pre-Trump status quo. If you want giant crowds at every polling place, rising up against ICE and DHS voter-suppression, then you have to promise people that their vote will mean something.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of these suggestions, but I do think that the core of it is solid: right now, the Republicans are very unpopular because they keep doing things the public hates, and the Democrats are unpopular because they keep letting the Republicans get away with it. Forming a coalition of Democratic congresspeople who are vocal and willing to ensure that their conservative colleagues don’t get away with this is crucial to victory in the future, and even starting with just a few will form a nucleus that the rest will inevitably start coalescing around.
That being said, I still think that the Democrats, if they take any of these ideas to heart, should not call themselves “the Nuremberg Caucus”. It’s a good, colorful shorthand to get the rest of us excited, but it’s also just a little too blatant for the average American to handle. Argument under the break:
As I laid out in a previous comment a few months ago, the real brilliance of this plan is that it’s a delicious-looking poison for the Republicans — they’re currently trying to find any remaining platform they can use to make themselves look good, and they’re failing hard at it. Currently, their plan is clearly just lying blatantly: they support monopolies while claiming it will provide choice for the people, they gut the Civil Rights Act while espousing how their actions will promote racial unity, and they start pointless wars that they claim are simultaneously over and still happening. But those lies aren’t working anymore, and average Americans are noticing! The Republicans, ironically, are in need of something true to rally around — so if the Democrats start talking openly about punishing their collaborators and prosecuting every crime that’s been committed by these MAGA thieves, they will latch onto that like drowning rats. “Vote for us, or the Democrats will impeach the president!” will become their chief rallying cry, while the Democrats will counter with “yes, we will impeach him, and undo all the harm he’s done!”.
The chief Republican strategy in the time of MAGA has been to target vulnerable communities to put the Democrats on the defensive, then claim that the Democrats care more about minorities than “the real issues” (e.g. gas prices, grocery prices, etc). The Democrats haven’t had a good counter to this, because abandoning those communities will erode their own support, and the Republicans don’t give a shit about protecting anyone other than themselves. But if the Democrats steal the strategy by putting the Republicans themselves on blast, then they’ve got a fighting chance: the Republicans are forced into defending their own actions above all else, and the Democrats can then hammer them on those same “real issues” the Republicans have scuppered with said actions.
My problem with the Nuremberg Caucus is simply that the name is too on the nose: it’s an explicit comparison between Republicans and the Nazis, and that would provide the Republicans with a little bit of live ammo amid a case full of duds. If they can turn the argument from “the Democrats want to put us on trial because of all those crimes we committed” into “the Democrats are calling us Nazis, but we’re not Nazis!”, they can win that debate because, technically speaking, they are NOT the Nazis. The Republicans adore technicalities: they may blindly worship a loudmouth demagogue with a bad haircut, demonized minorities whom they locked up in concentration camps, wear red clothing items to show their support for the party above all else, and had a guy literally perform a Nazi salute at the inauguration… but since they are not literally calling themselves Nazis, they can and will excuse everything to the public as coincidence, and sue anyone who says otherwise. For this to work, the Democrats cannot play the part of avengers or renegades: they need to be concerned citizens, fighting back against corruption out of love for the people of their country.
I don’t really have an alternative name for the caucus, but I have two other recommendations: no cheeky acronyms, and it needs to be called something so blatant that the Republicans sound stupid for fighting it. The congressional obsession with slick acronyms often comes across as unserious, an obsession with political theater above all else, and giving a vital plan such as this one would give Republicans fodder to accuse the Democrats of playing games while providing the Democrats no real benefit beyond smug satisfaction. Drop it. As for the second, the name needs to be something easy to remember that lends itself to ironic headlines as Republicans inevitably rail against it. The Consequences for Corruption Caucus, for instance, could lead to some good ones:
“THEY WANT TO DESTROY US”: Speaker Johnson Rails Against Consequences
TRUMP DEMANDS CONGRESS SAY “NO” TO CONSEQUENCES
See what I mean?
Whatever happens, the Democrats need to start going on an offensive built by the people, for the people. The only way out is together.
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