Disparate camps review this state of affairs and promote narrow solutions, looking past how they can work together. In this symposium, we pair calls for relaxing zoning rules to expand supply with calls for building tenant power to fight landlord abuse. We have essays about the need to fill a financing gap in housing that’s ready to be built, and essays about the extraordinary recent consolidation in homebuilding, and how it has atrophied the entire process. It’s illegal to build some private housing, and it’s illegal to build most public housing. All these problems must be worked on. Despite the new regime entering Washington, housing is typically regulated and overseen at the local level, so while no national fix is in the offing, there is no reason progress has to be stalled. In fact, there’s no alternative but to get started.
This long-read collection of articles and commentaries on the nation's shortage of affordable housing is a must-read. (I especially recommend the essays on the need for tenant unions and "finance in my backyard" – but read them all.) The authors make a persuasive case that we can and must work together across geographic and political boundaries, reforming decades-old policies that have harmed tens of millions of Americans, undermined civic progress, and – you knew this was coming – further enriched a small clique of financiers and the cartels they operate. The good news is that we can tackle some of this at the local and state level. This kind of journalism is one of the reasons I donate to the paywall-free American Prospect, and I hope you will, too.
Donald Trump’s promise of “mass deportations” looms over millions of people who live in the United States. But the infrastructure to detain immigrants didn’t start with Trump. U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement detains an average of 37,000 people per night, often partnering with sheriffs who hold immigrants in their local facilities in exchange for a profit. For over a century, the U.S. government has relied on local jails to detain immigrants, creating a vast network of incarceration that operates with minimal oversight. Other detention centers, run by private companies, have also proliferated. The incoming Trump administration is likely to tap into this network.
This Q&A from Bolts, which focuses on criminal justice and voting rights from the local level and upward, will help you understand the often opaque network of local jails and for-profit lockups that imprison immigrants. Local governments and private companies are making huge – and mostly undisclosed – amounts of money in a deliberately cruel system that has been operating for many decades. The depressing context for today's expanding mass imprisonment is rooted in our past; what policy makers have learned from our history, as is so often the case, are the wrong lessons.
This legislative maneuver exemplifies a trend of escalating “power plays” in state governments, where officials pursue institutional changes for partisan gain. This Explainer analyzes Senate Bill 382 and seeks to situate it within the broader context of similar efforts in North Carolina and other states. Ultimately, the bill represents one of the most significant lame-duck power grabs anywhere in the country in recent history, rivaled only by similar episodes that played out in North Carolina in 2016 and Wisconsin in 2018.
Republican politicians believe democracy is tool, but only they can use it – to end democracy for the rest of us. And what they're doing in North Carolina is a grotesque example of how they operate when voters have the temerity to prefer Democrats for powerful positions. This detailed explainer by a scholar at an academic research center will help you understand just how malicious they've become. They live by a maxim that should shame them, but instead makes them proud: What's acceptable is what they can get away with.
It’s hardly the first time Manchin and Sinema have aligned to thwart Democratic plans in the Senate. Most infamously, in 2022, they joined Republicans in voting down a proposed one-time change to the filibuster that would have cleared the way for two major voting rights bills. The legislation was aimed at ensuring free and fair elections after Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen led to GOP politicians and officials cracking down on voter access across the country.
Manchin and Sinema are the best evidence you'll ever see that some people elected as Democrats have a way of siding with corporate wealth when it matters. In this case, as the Rolling Stone article explains, they voted to derail Democratic moves to assure that the National Labor Relations Board – would fall two years sooner than necessary under what will surely be a virulently anti-labor Trump regime. The headline is BS, by the way: The corporate-owned senators didn't "screw Biden" – they screwed working people who won't have a shred of protection from the predatory corporations that abuse workers whenever they can get away with it.
This newsletter is a compendium of the reporting and commentary that best explains the America's political, economic, and social conditions – and, most important, how we can find a way back from the dark days ahead. You will rarely find anything here from the New York Times or Washington Post or any of the other Big Journalism companies that failed us so completely during the 2024 elections and are now sucking up – even more than usual – to Donald Trump, his cult, and corporate oligarchs. My focus will be on smaller, more honorable outlets (and individuals). I hope you'll support them with your attention and your money. For more details, please read my About page.
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David Dayen, Robert Cruickshank, Sulma Arias, Ryan Cooper, Tara Raghuveer, Ruthy Gourevitch, Paul Williams
Rosie Gillies
