Welcome to the Monday Good News Roundup, where yours truly, along with our plucky GNR Newsroom (Bhu and Killer300) come out to bring you the news that will get your week off to a good start. And its extra special because its Labor day. The last weekend of the summer, the welcoming of the autumn months, and a time for working folk to kick up their feet and relax (Not me though, I work in retail so my labor is never ending). But whether you are working tomorrow or not, have a good labor day.
First a little bit of music before we get into the actual articles, I think its appropriate given the day.
Ah yes the union. I’m part of a union, and unions do a lot of good work. We’ve seen what happens to people who work in industries without unions and for companies that don’t have unions, and its not pretty. Which is why some of our stories this week have a union theme to them, so without further ado, lets get to the stories this week.
But some beneficiaries of this system are working to disrupt it, with the help of financial advisers who have a very different outlook from the rest of their profession. They are redirecting this wealth to solve big problems, like climate disruption and racial inequity. And this has created a new ethos among some of the elite and their financial advisers: “wealth minimization.”
Jody Wiser, an investor with inherited wealth from Portland, Oregon, saw a change in culture when her investment advisory firm went through a change in ownership. “I was soured to them when their quarterly podcast began with a CPA who advises clients to move to states with no income taxes,” she says. She told the firm that their anti-tax bias was why she was transferring her assets away from them.
I freely admit, I often read these articles for the first time as I am making these, and this one just knocked me for a loop. I mean one of the main problems in the world is that a small group of rich people have a huge amount of money, more than they will ever need, more than they can even comprehend, and they just keep getting more they don’t need to add to the pile, often for not even doing anything. But here we have a story where some financial advisors are like “Hey, you know those infinite amounts of money you have and don’t need? How about actually using it, to help people?”
Like I hope this catches on, preferably before human civilization collapses. This is great news.
The HuffPost’s Paul Blumenthal summed it up well: all this maneuvering “showed that [Schumer] intends to keep pushing for the bill.” This alone is a major victory for grassroots activists who have been waging an inspiring months-long battle to keep the bill at the forefront of the Senate’s agenda.
While significant hurdles remain over the next month — including getting senators on board with reforming the filibuster — there is a growing sense that the fight for the For The People Act can be won. Democrats are reportedly nearing an agreement on a revised version of the bill — one that will firmly unify the caucus. And moderate senators are increasingly arguing that filibuster reform may be necessary.
Chuck Schumer is still fighting for the For the People act, so don’t believe the bad news spreaders, we’re gonna get this done.
I am from the South. I was born in the South, I grew up in the South, and my entire family lives in the South. I have never in my life seen a racially and politically integrated crowd of people in the deep South, utterly united for a cause, as I did at this rally. The only things that come close are church events or football games, which I would argue lack the socially redeeming qualities of yesterday’s event. It is possible, down South, to get a racially integrated crowd where everyone agrees politically, but to get thousands of Black and white people whose politics range from strongly pro-Trump to strongly pro-Black Lives Matter together in a single place, in total unity of purpose, with virtually no conflict, and without being the explicit result of trying to assemble such a crowd to satisfy some sort of demographic diversity goals — well, that just doesn’t happen that much, ever.
Even radically different groups can agree on one thing: Unions rock.
That’s the idea. In 2019, more than three quarters of U.S. households were holding some type of debt. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, 1 in 4 adults are now struggling to pay household bills. But debt in U.S. culture is typically treated as an individual liability or a personal failure. The idea of a debtors’ union turns that experience on its head — reframing indebtedness as a shared problem and a source of collective power.
Think of a saying attributed to 20th-century industrialist J. Paul Getty: “If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”
Here’s another pretty cool union. As someone who still has massive student loan debts (which are on hold currently because I’m on a Income based repayment plan, but it still looms over me), I can really be down for this.
But some of the tips were a little unexpected.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who was a leading proponent of the abortion law, was a violator, according to some of the tips. The fictional characters from Marvel’s Avengers were also apparently seeking abortions, the reports said. Other tips did not point to individuals but instead contained copies of the entire script to the 2007 animated film “Bee Movie.”
The reports, which were obviously bogus, were the work of activists on TikTok, programmers, and Twitter and Reddit users who said they wanted to ensnarl the site’s administrators in fabricated data.
I believe it was Mr. Rogers who said that during dark times one should look for the helpers. And here we have a good example of that, Tiktok users standing up against the vile Texas anti abortion law by taking down that site they set up to get people to inform on their neighbors.
Speaking of Texas….
A second theory is that conservatives understand the law will be unpopular. This is probably true, and to some extent explains the understated reaction on the right. Polls generally find that 60 to 65 percent of Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade. Although a majority of Texans may support the law, and indeed a majority of voters in other red states, the national political landscape is not so friendly.
For decades, my colleague David Frum writes, “opposition to abortion offered Republican politicians a lucrative, no-risk political option.” Many GOP candidates seemed to adopt the position hypocritically, never wanting such rules to apply to their own wives and daughters, but conscious of the power and money of the religious right. Railing against abortion is easy as long as you assume that no court will actually outlaw it and you won’t alienate swing voters (say, suburban women) who lean conservative but back the right to choose. Now Democrats are hopeful that backlash will aid them in an uphill 2022 midterm battle, my colleague Elaine Godfrey reports. Why would Republicans tout a victory most people will see as a defeat?
Not only is banning abortion outright unpopular, but overturning Roe might be a Pyrrhic victory for the national Republican Party, which would lose one of its strongest wedge issues. The abortion wars would not end (they never will), but the end of Roe would shift the battlefield and might take some momentum away from the right.
Earlier, One of my fellow GNR posted posted the image of the dog catching a car and being like “Now what?” That sums up what’s going on here pretty well. The the GOP actually do overturn Roe, they stand to lose more than they gain. Also I think this might be the final straw that finally turns Texas Blue. Fingers crossed.
And that’s it for this week. Have a good start of September, and a good Labor day. I’m certainly gonna try.