City Light price hike is going to happen. The city council unanimously approved a rate increase of 9.5 percent in 2027, and another 9.5 percent in 2028. According to Seattle City Light, the extra cash is needed to “meet rising electricity demand, respond to climate impacts, and replace aging infrastructure.” As for Mayor Kate Wilson’s modest transit sales taxes, the city council unanimously decided to put it on November’s ballot. The hike would extract something like an extra $29 a year per person from the median household, but greatly improve bus service.
Dear Seattle voter, please consider the high price of gas. And while thinking about that, also consider this report in Reuters: “Four tankers changed course in the Red Sea on Wednesday, with two signalling the Suez Canal as their new destination after Yemen’s Houthi militia warned ships to avoid sailing to Saudi Arabian ports.” Yemen, which was bombed to bits by Saudi Arabia (with Obama’s full blessing), has a score to settle in the Red Sea. Put all of this together, and what you will not see is the price of gas going down any time soon. Now is the time to invest in forms of transportation that are cheaper and less destructive.
Now that the World Cup fans are gone, wildfire smoke is permitted to return to Seattle. The smoke, which is coming from fires in eastern Washington and British Columbia, will, however, remain high in the sky. Also, thanks to the human liberation of carbon, which has turned our atmosphere into a cooking sewer, expect a very hot day, with a high of 94.
What is this? The FBI will no longer investigate ICE assaults on civilians? That’s exactly the immunity Trumps want to grant his private army–one that answers only to him, not to voters. It gets worse. Trump only wants to investigate people who “attacked” his thugs. Nothing about this is right, but it is consistent with an age whose summers are getting hotter and whose skies are frequently filled with the smoke of wildfires.
Let’s put this in plain Marxist terms: The present aggressive and unrelenting restructuring of American society uses old tools to build something that’s unprecedented: subjects who are adapted to accelerating value formation and concentration (the rich making loads of money) in a world whose climate has, because of these rich people, changed dramatically. The gutting of FEMA, weather monitoring, and NASA’s climate science only find their logic in the formation of a population that will be spiritually (which is the same as physically) powerless upon the arrival of a geologic era that demands, if an approximation of a morally adequate response is to be achieved, greater social cooperation and, as a consequence, the deceleration, if not entire replacement, of the dream of endless economic growth. ICE, the brazen shredding of basic civil rights, and so on—clearly, we are being conditioned for the continuation of surplus value accumulation in the aftermath of an ecological catastrophe.
You have had your dose of Marxism for the day. Now, what else is going on around the world?
In Socialism Today: The Mayor of America, Zohran Mamdani, has moved to cut red tape for small businesses in New York City. This includes a number of permits that are required to sell ice cream and cut human hair. He called these barber permits “anti-fade.” (Seriously Katie Wilson, I dig you, but got to get with this program.) This latest move by smooth Mamdani blindsided conservatives. How do you dismiss the considerable reduction of government regulations as communism? What should they do? What side should they take? (I know, it hurts, lord it really hurts.) AMNY reports that one conservative posted this on social media: “It took a Communist to cut government regulation and red tape. Remember that Republicans!!!” Best believe they will not remember that.
But how to make sense of this recent twist: The GOP looking less capitalist than the commie running NYC? The answer is provided by the greatest economist of the 20th century, Michal Kalecki: “[D]iscipline… [is] more appreciated than profits by business leaders.” This is something you will not find in the thousands of pages Marx left the world; he was too Hegelian, too dialectical to point out that capitalism is, in the final analysis, really about controlling a society, keeping it in check. Kalecki’s interpretation is much closer in spirit to Foucault than Marx.
Back to the world of the president of These Yet to Be United States, Trump. Well, the war way over there is not going well for him at all. It’s costing average Americans a fortune, it’s killing Americans, and now it has dragged in Amazon. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards claims it hit “Amazon’s data infrastructure in Bahrain.” So the question is this: Will the billionaire class prefer losses of this kind to the social power they exert by way of Trump’s constant attacks on democratic institutions and laws? Kalecki would opt for the latter.
And how about this line from Maya Angelou’s poem, “These Yet to Be United States”: “Your bombs can change the seasons / obliterate the spring. What more do you long for ?/ Why are you suffering ?”
But what will happen when Donald Trump is finally gone? I think an incident that occurred at the end of the final World Cup game offered a glimpse of this future, which is not that far away. What happened is this: Spain, who won the match against Argentina, were on stage doing their celebration thing. Then Trump walked on the stage to co-present the trophy, but he refused to leave the stage. He just stood there smiling at the cameras. As always, the event had to be about him. But the team needed an official photo of the victorious moment. What did they do? Cropped Trump out of the picture. The future can expect to make a small industry out of this kind of thing. Cropping Trump out, scrubbing him out, removing his name from this and that, repairing shit that was just fine before this billionaire-funded toerag took power.
Last night during a dinner party with my Zimbabwean relatives:
Angela: “I heard that during the casting of Star Wars, George Lucas was big into couch interviews.”
Farayi to me: “What does she mean, couch interviews?”
Me: “In Zimbabwe, they are called carpet interviews.”
Farayi: “Ah, I see. I see.”
Let’s end AM with a South African track that will certainly be a part of my DJ set at a Seattle Art Event in Railspur: “Hamba Nam” by DJ Maphorisa and Tman Xpress.
