technocrit

What caused Donald Trump to walk back on many of his tariffs last week was not domestic pressure but a run on the market for US Treasuries led by large institutional savers. If US debt is no longer a safe asset, then American hegemony is also at risk.

“By the way, I have a favorite statistic,” Juliette Michaelson tells me midway through our conversation. She’s a deputy chief of the MTA, working on policy and especially on the rollout of the congestion-pricing toll program. “The city’s 311 collects information about how many people call about what is called ‘excessive car-honking,’” she says. “And the number of complaints about excessive car-honking in January and February was 70 percent lower than last January and February. I just love that, because it’s all-in-one.”

We’re 100 days into the era of congestion pricing, which began with cheers and a few rants very early on the morning of January 5. The statistics from January into March, both all-in-one and otherwise, are rolling in, and they show a trend that is clear and unmistakable: It’s working. There is far, far less traffic on the streets. A group called the Congestion Pricing Now Coalition — made up of a wide array of advocacy organizations that includes the Regional Plan Association, the Riders Alliance, Open Plans, the Nature Conservancy, and Transportation Alternatives — has done a nice job of marshaling the facts, and if you are even slightly persuadable, it makes a strong case. The Holland Tunnel, at rush hour, has 65 percent fewer delays than it did before, and the time it takes to get through is down 48 percent. In those 100 days, 6 million fewer cars drove into lower Manhattan than had done so a year earlier. In March, the decrease was 80,000 per day. In the congestion zone, we’re seeing half as many traffic-related injuries. The bus routes in Manhattan are so much less clogged that the drivers are being forced to slow down to maintain their schedules. (As a rider, I experienced this twice last week, and it was bizarre: a bus moseying along at 5 mph in a wide-open lane. Presumably the schedules will soon be retimed.) The diminished honking is a bonus.

The suspect in the Florida State University shooter, who faces first degree murder charges for killing two and injuring five on Thursday was a member of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, a fascist youth group around the Republican Party, and is a registered Republican voter in Florida. The 20-year-old suspect, Phoenix Ikner, is the stepson of Leon County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Jessica Ikner, who has been with the department for 18 years.

In its coverage of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Trump Tower protest, Fox News obscured the Jewish identity of protesters—while echoing antisemitic conspiracy theories and racist tropes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28433704

The New York Times reported that one of Bukele’s aides planted the tropical-looking drinks on the table to make it look like Abrego Garcia was living large. Van Hollen confirmed this on Friday. “This is a lesson into the lengths that President Bukele will go to deceive people about what’s going on,” he said, “and it also shows the lengths that the Trump administration and the president will go to, because when he was asked … about this, he just went along for the ride.”

Van Hollen added that Bukele’s government wanted the meeting to take place by a pool: “They actually wanted to have the meeting [take place] by the side of the pool in the hotel,” he said. “This is a guy who’s been in CECOT. This is a guy who has been detained. They want to create this appearance that life was just lovely for Kilmar, which, of course, is a big fat lie.”

"Senate Weighs Investing $120 Billion in Science to Counter China," trumpeted The New York Times in 2021. "A New Economic Patriotism Can Help Unite Our Divided Congress," argued Newsweek in 2023. "US cedes ground to China with ‘self-inflicted wound’ of USAid shutdown, analysts say," cautioned The Guardian in 2025.

In recent years, we’ve been exposed to the latest version of a centuries-old geopolitical message: We all have a common enemy, and we all need to unite to fight it by making our own country stronger. That enemy—most commonly China—is threatening to outpace, if it isn’t already outpacing, the US in infrastructural investment, educational programs, technological development, and elsewhere, and we need to devote millions, billions, even trillions of dollars to restoring the vitality of our institutions in order to reverse this trend.

But why must defeating an "enemy" be the justification for policy that has the potential to benefit the public? Why should we just accept the premise that there must be an "enemy" to compete against and defeat? Why can’t policy be enacted for the sole purpose of improving people’s lives? And how does this messaging about the threat of a looming adversary serve the ruling class?

On this episode, we detail the timeworn trope of the common enemy as a "unifying" device, looking at how increasingly so-called progressives are appealing to feel-good sentiments of unity and to the genuine needs for sound infrastructure, robust social safety nets, corporate regulation, and functional institutions in order to sell the idea that there is, and always will be, a shadowy bad guy that must be vanquished.

Our guest is historian, professor and author Greg Grandin.

In 2015, the city adopted Vision Zero, a policy framework from Sweden with the principle that no one should be killed in traffic. Then-Mayor Eric Garcetti set benchmarks for reducing traffic fatalities over a decade, culminating in the final goal of getting to zero traffic deaths by 2025.

The opposite has happened. Since the program’s adoption, traffic fatalities in L.A. have increased. In 2024, 303 people died in traffic fatalities in L.A., according to preliminary LAPD data reviewed by LAist.

In a chilling development, the Trump administration has unleashed a full-scale witch hunt targeting nearly 900 faculty members within the University of California system. Their “crime” is signing open letters on the Israeli assault on Gaza and calling for the protection of Jewish and Palestinian students alike.