I really have to take summer break from this website, but the last thing I want to say is that this--the Mamdani campaign, the vision for the city--is about democracy.

Everyone wants to focus on affordability, and that's not wrong, but it's only half. Read his speech: "Democracy has been attacked by billionaires and their big spending, by elected officials who care more about self-enrichment than the public trust, and by authoritarian leaders who rule through fear.

But above all, our democracy has been attacked from within. 2/x

Let me paint you a picture.

Donald Trump wants to engage in more of his terrifying ICE raids in NYC. Cuomo, who told us not to "overreact" to ICE abuses, is Mayor.

Trump threatens Cuomo with prosecuting him for lying to Congress, opening all the Covid books to the public. He also has several more prosecutions in his pocket that are dangerous to Cuomo--all the Buffalo Billion retrials, that the Supreme Court just gave the green light to.

Cuomo softens his already soft stance on ICE, and opens the school doors.

timesunion.com/business/artic…

For next months' Nation column I wrote about how Amazon, Microsoft, and Google control over two-thirds of the cloud, and why we need to think of information technologies in far more physical and concrete terms. They build power by hiding it in abstraction and neutrality. Link: thenation.com/article/societ…

Democratic leadership claims they lack leverage ***as members of Congress** to do anything to stop Musk from plundering government.

I just lay out a fraction of their powers in a new column: Convening power, organizing power, legal power, procedural power. They should not see their power just through the lens of how it has traditionally been used, and they should stop with treating this as a Democratic Party branding moment. Link here:
thenation.com/article/politi…

I have 2 reasons to love Harris' new "A New Way Forward" slogan.

(1) After the big banks crashed the economy, I cofounded and led a group called "A New Way Forward," w/ hundreds of big rallies around the country and lobbied Congressional offices on banking antitrust/reform. (2) JP Morgan's lawyer got in touch with me because they had registered the "Way Forward" trademark and didn't like us using the name. (Much to my disappointment, they decided not to sue.) "A New Way Forward" is not for sale.

A lot of thoughts on price gouging.

First, 42 states have laws against price gouging that have worked well for decades.

Harris' price gouging proposal would close the loophole that allows big corporations to price gouge in state 1 and sell in state 2 and get away with it. The problem with existing price gouging laws is that they don't reach the worst offenders, because they are "upstream" ,taking advantage of big abnormal market shocks to raise prices on necessities, essentially exploiting power unfairly. Harris' proposal would fix that.

There is nothing xenophobic about laws forbidding foreign ownership of critical infrastructure.

It is, in fact, simply rational, flowing from a rational assessment of rational motive and opportunity. It is democracy protecting. Like the Foreign Emoluments clause. If you support the ban on foreign corporate spending in US elections, you should support a ban on foreign government ownership of essential communications facilities.

1/ "It is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments 2/ instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class;