"Say what you want about Trump, but he’s known to speak in simple and plain language. Does this make him dumb? I would counter that it makes him accessible.

Does this mean that Sanders and AOC should stop talking about oligarchy? Among their college-educated base, I see no reason why it’s a particularly bad idea. They understand the language and it resonates with them.

There’s also some polling out there from a progressive polling firm showing that most Americans can identify the definition of oligarchy when presented with a multiple-choice question. This isn’t the best polling design in the world, but it’s possible that Sanders and AOC have had some luck in popularizing the term.

But Democrats and progressives need to stop thinking that everyone in America has a college degree and follows every bit of minutiae in the news. Republicans tend to use simpler language, and it’s no surprise that they’ve won the working class’s votes for several elections in a row now. They speak more like ordinary people than Democrats do.

It’s not dumb to not understand every word in the English dictionary. What would be dumb is politicians insisting that we use words that people don’t understand in order to persuade them."

www.theamericansaga.com/p/do-americans-understand-what-bernie

#USA #Bernie #AOC #Oligarchy #Readability #Trump #DemocraticParty #Elitism #Populism

"Today, a well-paying manufacturing job requires a hard science background, centered around engineering, technical proficiency, or in many cases, wiring and operating complex automated technology.

"We don’t want to bring back the jobs of yesterday — we want to enable the operational efficiency and innovation of tomorrow," Kenworthy says, stressing the need to "skate to where the puck is going" as manufacturing roles continue to evolve.

The exact type of manufacturing the U.S. hones in on will factor heavily as well. Textile and garment industry jobs aren't likely to attract American workers, Kenworthy theorizes, given the relatively low pay, poor hours and high physical demands. The focus instead should be on "anything in the high-tech sector," including the semiconductor sector, pharmaceuticals, automotive and aerospace, all of which beget the need for highly-skilled, well-trained workers with engineering backgrounds.

The problem right now, though, is that the infrastructure to educate and entice these workers simply doesn't exist, and there are currently no plans to build that out anytime soon, all while the Trump administration has sought to deport the very people who would want those manufacturing jobs the most.

"A broad program to empower and build a next-generation manufacturing workforce would be what is necessary to make this effective," Kenworthy posits. "Without that, all this effort to bring manufacturing back to the United States is not going to be effective.""

supplychainbrain.com/articles/…

#USA #Trump #Manufacturing #Tariffs #Protectionism #ClassWarfare

Trump and his MAGA stooges are so dumb that they don't even know that, with today's highly complex supply chains and logistics infrastructures, it's relatively easy to obscure the country of origin of a good... :o)

"Chinese exporters are stepping up efforts to avoid tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump by shipping their goods via third countries to conceal their true origin.

Chinese social media platforms are awash with adverts offering “place-of-origin washing”, while an inflow of goods from China has raised alarm in neighbouring countries wary of becoming staging posts for trade actually destined for the US.

The growing use of the tactic underlines exporters’ fears that new tariffs of up to 145 per cent imposed by Trump on Chinese goods will deprive them of access to one of their most important markets.

“The tariff is too high,” said Sarah Ou, a salesperson at Baitai Lighting, an exporter based in the southern Chinese city of Zhongshan. “[But] we can sell the goods to neighbouring countries, and then the neighbouring countries sell them on to the United States, and it will reduce.”"

ft.com/content/147fddbb-7031-4…

#China #USA #Tariffs #Trump #TradeWar #PlaceOfOriginWashing #PoliticalEconomy

"It should be no surprise that 2024 was among the deadliest for journalists in 30 years. Across the world, we’re seeing a sharp increase in attacks on media pluralism and independence, as governments of all stripes undermine the rule of law and democratic governance, erode protections for whistleblowers, and use dangerous narratives to smear journalists and human rights defenders. In many countries, governments are also passing laws that cite national security as a rationale for silencing speech they don’t like. This is happening in a context where civic space continues to shrink globally; after the U.S. administration decided to suspend funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), dozens of independent media outlets in more than 30 countries were severely impacted.

These are far from the only threats. As we mark World Press Freedom Day 2025, we’re highlighting some of the gravest and most persistent digital threats to journalism: the largely unchecked rise of spyware, persistent attacks on encryption, increased disinformation and abuse on online platforms, and the weaponization of laws to enable the silencing of journalists and human rights defenders. While these threats aren’t new, the current context puts people and communities already at risk in greater danger. Make no mistake: this is a crisis. Governments and all relevant stakeholders must take urgent and immediate action to save press freedom in the digital age."

accessnow.org/world-press-free…

#DigitalRights #PressFreedom #WorldPressFreedomDay #Journalism #Media #CyberSecurity #Surveillance #Spyware #Privacy

Karl Marx in America

Andrew Hartman

(University of Chicago Press)

The vital and untold story of Karl Marx’s stamp on American life.

"To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life.

In Karl Marx in America, historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx’s influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.

After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx’s ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx’s influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future."

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/b…

#USA #Marx #History #PoliticalEconomy #Capitalism

"Ed Martin, the firebrand Republican activist whom President Donald Trump picked to be the top prosecutor in D.C., has a new target: Wikipedia.

Martin, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington and Trump’s permanent selection to serve in that role, sent a letter on Thursday afternoon to the Wikimedia Foundation that alleged it “is engaging in a series of activities that could violate its obligations” under 501(c)(3), a section of the IRS code for charities. It is Wikipedia’s parent group.

The letter, which was obtained by The Free Press, accused the largest online encyclopedia of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.” The Wikimedia Foundation, Martin said, is directed by a board “that is composed primarily of foreign nationals” who are “subverting the interests of American taxpayers.”

The Trump-allied prosecutor went on to accuse the foundation of engaging in activities that are “implicating the national security and the interests of the United States,” according to the letter, which is four pages long and demanded responses to a dozen questions about the Wikimedia Foundation’s operations by May 15."

thefp.com/p/trump-prosecutor-t…

#USA #Trump #Censorship #Propaganda #Wikipedia #Wikimedia

"In Finland, manufacturing accounted for 24 percent of GDP. By 1991, it had declined to 17. In Sweden, manufacturing as a share of GDP declined from 21 to 16 percent during the same period. But by the early 2000, Finland brought its manufacturing share of GDP back up to 24 percent, and Sweden raised its manufacturing share of GDP to 20 percent.

The same trend can be observed in Singapore. Singapore experienced quite a significant decline in manufacturing in the mid-1980s, from 27 percent to 20 percent. But by the mid-2000s, it had recovered back to 27 percent. By the way, Singapore, despite what people think, is one of the most industrialized countries in the world: in terms of per capita manufacturing output, it ranks in the top five globally. There’s an interesting myth about it being a service economy.

The most industrialized country in the world is Switzerland. You think that the Swiss are dealing in the black money from Third World dictators and selling cow bells and cuckoo clocks to American and Japanese tourists. Actually, it is literally the most industrialized country in the world, if you count in terms of manufacturing output per person.

These countries have managed to revive their manufacturing industry, and since then they have declined a bit. But the lesson here is that these countries could do that only because they had a deliberate policy to revive manufacturing. What Donald Trump is trying to do is wishful thinking. Countries that have successfully increased their manufacturing output have deliberate policies to support manufacturing. In the Swedish and Finnish case, it also extended to retraining the workers made redundant because of the decline in traditional manufacturing sectors and then turning them into workers for new industries."

jacobin.com/2025/04/tariffs-pr…

#USA #Trump #Manufacturing #Reindustrialization #Automation #ClassWarfare #Tariffs #Protectionism #FreeTrade #IndutrialPolicy

"Today, it’s increasingly clear that it’s the tech oligarchs — not their algorithmically-steered platforms—who present the greater danger. Their arsenal combines three deadly implements: plutocratic gravity (fortunes so vast they distort reality’s basic physics), oracular authority (their technological visions treated as inevitable prophecy), and platform sovereignty (ownership of the digital intersections where society’s conversation unfolds). Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), Andreessen’s strategic investments into Substack, Peter Thiel’s courting of Rumble, the conservative YouTube: they’ve colonized both the medium and the message, the system and the lifeworld.

We must update our taxonomies to account for this new species of oligarch-intellectuals. If yesterday’s public intellectual resembled a careful archaeologist methodically excavating cultural artifacts for display in rarefied literary journals, today’s model is the demolition expert, wiring entire societal structures with ideological explosives and detonating them from the safe distance of offshore accounts. They don’t write about the future; they install it, beta-testing theories on unwitting populations in history’s largest unreviewed experiment.

What distinguishes them from previous wealth-encrusted elites isn’t avarice but verbosity—a torrential output that would exhaust even Balzac. Where industrial barons funded think tanks to launder interests into policy papers, our oligarch-intellectuals cut out the middleman. Forget steering the algorithms: oligarch-intellectuals steer the conversation itself – and they do it with philosophical meme-grenades. Dropped at 3 AM on X, they invariably become international headlines by breakfast."

theideasletter.org/essay/silic…

#SiliconValley #Oligarchs #OIigarchy #BigTech #Propaganda #ideology

"The European Commission is not backing down from efforts to rein in Big Tech. In a series of press releases today, the European Union's executive arm has announced actions against both Apple and Google. Regulators have announced that Apple will be required to open up support for non-Apple accessories on the iPhone, but it may be too late for Google to make changes. The commission says the search giant has violated the Digital Markets Act, which could lead to a hefty fine.

Since returning to power, Donald Trump has railed against European regulations that target US tech firms. In spite of rising tensions and tough talk, the European Commission seems unfazed and is continuing to follow its more stringent laws, like the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This landmark piece of EU legislation aims to make the digital economy more fair. Upon coming into force last year, the act labeled certain large tech companies, including Apple and Google, as "gatekeepers" that are subject to additional scrutiny.

Europe's more aggressive regulation of Big Tech is why iPhone users on the continent can install apps from third-party app markets while the rest of us are stuck with the Apple App Store."

arstechnica.com/apple/2025/03/…

#EU #Apple #iPhone #Google #Android #AppStore #Chrome #Antitrust #DMA #BigTech #Interoperability #Competition

"Decades later, the Tesla Cybertruck, lately a prime target for protesters demonstrating their dislike of CEO Elon Musk, blurs the boundaries between the battlefield and the public street. When Tesla released the Cybertruck in 2023, its dramatic style polarized the public. Popular theories abounded about its unusual look. Many speculated that its inspiration had come from spaceships of science fiction. In discussing the car’s aesthetic early on, Musk referenced cyberpunk and Blade Runner, a film that features sleek metallic vehicles, though with rounded silhouettes designed for aerodynamic speed. He’s also used the phrase “The future should look like the future”—a reference, his biographer Walter Isaacson said, to a question his son Saxon asked him once: “Why doesn’t the future look like the future?”

Whether or not this was intentional, the Cybertruck’s harsh, sharp edges remind us, instead, of something from the past: the larger armored personnel vehicles that patrolled streets throughout Musk’s youth in apartheid South Africa. In the 1980s, the Casspir proliferated across the country, moving from the battlefield and onto the streets. Initially improvised as a way to circumvent international sanctions against the apartheid government, the Casspir mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle was invented and produced domestically. It was a rugged all-terrain vehicle intended to withstand gunfire and mine explosions. It could drive up to 60 mph and be modified to add artillery functions.

Eventually, the Casspir was deployed to patrol townships, the residential neighborhoods where many Black South Africans lived (...) By the 1990s, the Casspir had become an iconic global symbol of apartheid oppression."

slate.com/news-and-politics/20…

#Musk #Tesla #SouthAfrica #Apartheid #CyberTruck #Casspir

"Building on our previous research, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism conducted tests on eight generative search tools with live search features to assess their abilities to accurately retrieve and cite news content, as well as how they behave when they cannot.

We found that…

- Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
- Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
- Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
- Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
- Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.

Our findings were consistent with our previous study, proving that our observations are not just a ChatGPT problem, but rather recur across all the prominent generative search tools that we tested."

cjr.org/tow_center/we-compared…

#AI #GenerativeAI #AISearch #AISearchEngines #News #Journalism #Media #Hallucinations