You may have viewed Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) offering a mock apology for dismissing a constituent’s complaint that the Medicaid cuts she endorses will cause people to die with the flippant remark, “We are all going to die.” She tied her defense of her callousness to Christianity, inviting all who worried about death to convert so they could enjoy eternal life after death. J.D. Vance, too, has defended sharply limited empathy in Christian terms–a theological view for which Pope Francis admonished him. Part of this attack on empathy stems from the resentment of populist voters who feel that empathy is being extended to the wrong people, that they are the ones who deserve empathy, as opposed to various others they despise–immigrants, foreigners, Muslims, blacks, feminists, LGBT people, poor people, etc. Arlie Hochschild, Katherine Cramer, and Justin Gest have written compelling accounts of this. But what does this have to do with Christianity? What happened to “Jesus is love”? 

Now, according to some Christian nationalist pastors such as Joe Rigney, empathy is a sin. It’s toxic. There is a gender angle to this view: women are purportedly more empathetic than men, which makes them unfit to lead men, a church, or anything else. On this view, Christians need a leader like Trump to deliver them from evil, and pastors who oppose this must be pushed out of the movement.

This wouldn’t be the first time a religious movement has taken a secular leader as their model of virtue. But when the secular leader is a malignant narcissist or sociopath–someone lacking empathy–its members are in trouble. I don’t mean to take away from the damage populist anti-empathetic politics does to marginalized people and to democracy. I do mean to reject the demonization of everyone who has embraced this politics as if they are all sociopaths themselves. This, I think, neglects a critical sociological factor in the interpersonal dynamics driving this politics, which inflicts great damage on its participants, very much including the men among them. Ideology can trap people in self- as well as other-destructive social norms. In short: when people are persuaded that they need to accept a bully as their leader, they have to submit to bullies’ rules. Such submission threatens humiliation, emotional stunting, and loss of intimate relationships.

Empathy is simply human. It’s not the special province of women. To bullies, however, it is a sign of weakness. Now join the leadership of bullies to Christian complementarian gender ideology, according to which empathy is effeminate and hence especially contemptible in men. Then boys and men who aren’t themselves malignant narcissists or sociopaths need to suppress their own empathy, lest they become the bullies’ next targets. Communities in thrall to this ideology will side with the bullies and pour their scorn on the bullies’ victims. Male victims then suffer humiliation and may try to vindicate themselves through gender violence. Empathetic boys and men not only become afraid to show empathy, but may even be bullied against their conscience to bully other boys and men perceived as effeminate, to ward off the charge of effeminacy themselves. They must reject anything deemed feminine in themselves, and hold anyone with those qualities in contempt. Under bullies’ rules, boys and men can’t reveal any vulnerabilities, which are also considered effeminate. This is a formula for a decline of social connection and intimacy, which damages straight men and hence straight women as well, especially those who lack the shields and attractions of wealth and power. 

Many of the wealthiest people on earth hold their wealth in the form of a financial asset, like stock in a succesful company. When it comes to capital gains, there is a choice to be made between a tax on “wealth,” which seeks to estimate the value of these gains whether or not the assets have been sold, and an “income” tax that imposes taxes on capital gains only when they are sold (or “realized”). Florian Scheuer makes the case for the second approach in “Taxing capital, but right: Why realized gains, not asset values, should guide tax policy (UBS Center Policy Brief 1, 2025).

Scheuer focuses on the fact that movements in stock prices are often closely linked to interest rates. After all, the price of a stock is determined by the future stream of profits the firm is expected to produce, but the interest rate determines the “present v value” that an investor will put on that stream of future profits. Lower interest rates will tend to boost stock prices, because it means that future profits have a higher present value; conversely, higher interest rates tend to push down stock prices, because future profits will have a lower value in the present. Scheuer offers this example:

Take a stock that pays a constant dividend of $100 per year forever, and suppose the interest rate is 10%. Then the stock price, which reflects the present-discounted value of the flow of dividends, must equal $1,000. Now suppose the interest rate falls to 5%. As a result, the stock is now worth $2,000: The stock price doubles, a massive capital
gain. But notice that the dividends paid by the stock have not changed at all: They
are still $100 per year. Therefore, the income and lifetime consumption possibilities
for someone who does not sell have not gone up. The capital gains of $1,000 are a pure “paper gain.” Of course, an investor who sells the stock can cash in on the gains, resulting in an increase in consumption. Conversely, an investor buying the stock loses: She needs to pay twice the amount for the same fl ow of future dividends. In sum, sellers gain, buyers lose and those who hold the stock are unaffected. This is why a tax on realized gains is aligned with who gains and loses from asset price fluctuations. By contrast, a tax on unrealized gains (or a wealth tax) would fully tax the “paper gains” of those who neither buy nor sell even though they do not benefit from their capital gains.

Scheuer also points out that paying capital gains tax whenever a sale occurs will tend to lock investors into their existing investments–because they would owe income tax if they decided to sell one stock and buy another. Scheuer argues that sell-and-immediately-reinvest should not be taxed. The result of such a transaction is again a paper gain, rather than actually realized income. And it’s generally a good thing for investors to be able to reallocate their portfolios.

So far, those who would prefer to see a wealth tax or greater taxation of capital gains presumably don’t like what they are hearing from Scheuer, at least as I have described it so far. But Scheuer also argues that perhaps the biggest loophole in capital gains taxation should be closed. I refer here to “step-up in basis at death,” which basically means that if someone dies and passes an asset along to their heirs, the capital gains of that asset are never taxed. Scheuer argues that passing along assets at time of death should be treated like a “realization” of gains.

The capital gains tax systems in the U.S. and many other advanced economies feature a particularity referred to as step-up in basis at death for inherited assets. This tax rule eliminates the taxable capital gain that occurred between the original purchase of the asset and the time of inheritance, thereby reducing the heir’s tax liability. Effectively, it completely exempts from taxation all capital gains accrued during the original holder’s lifetime if she never realizes the gains but passes them along at death. This is considered a major tax loophole, and indeed comparisons between capital gain realizations reported on income tax returns with historical stock market gains suggest that a large share of all capital gains on corporate stock was never taxed purely because of this provision. Our findings imply that this tax rule should be abolished in favor of a “carryover basis” approach, which makes the heirs subject to a tax on the full gains going back to the original purchase price, and which is already used by a number of countries including Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Relatedly, a tax avoidance strategy of wealthy families known as “buy, borrow, die” has received attention in recent years. The idea is to borrow against appreciating assets rather than selling them and then taking advantage of the stepped-up basis at death, thereby avoiding capital gains taxes altogether. Eliminating the stepped-up
basis loophole would also close the door for this avoidance strategy.

Changing the “step-up in basis at death” can be done in two ways. In the version Scheuer describes, the value of capital gains is taxed on those who receive the inheritance. An alternative method would be to tax the estate of the decedent, as if that person had realized the gains at time of death. According to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, either approach would raise tens of billions of dollar per year. However, a tax on capital gains nominally paid by the decedent raises more revenue that a tax on capital gains paid by the heirs, because the income received by heirs is broken up into smaller chunks and taxed at lower rates.

The post Taxing Capital Gains Only After Realization first appeared on Conversable Economist.

When I started paying attention to politics, which was about maybe a year before I started writing about politics,1 I was comfortably in the center. I was, in fact, hated by people who called themselves “leftists.” This was the alt-left before I knew who they were. Back then, they were the firebaggers.

It was weird because we all seemed to want the same thing: Universal healthcare.2 Clean air. Clean Water. Safe food and drugs. Fewer guns.3 Better schools. Tax the rich. So on and so forth. There were differences in the when, the how, and the how much, but the broad strokes were there. This, according to the firebaggers/alt-left, made me a corporate sellout blablabla. But mostly, by my own estimation, I was a centrist. I wanted these things and was willing to compromise with Republicans to get them. It was stupid to think otherwise (at the time).

These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year.

🖕FUCK THE LEGACY PRESS!🖕

Not for nothing, that’s the nature of American politics. Unless you have filibuster-proof majorities, the other party has to get something or they have no incentive to work with you. Of course, those were the old rules. Before Republicans went scorched earth on everything and lurched to the right and then kept lurching on a weekly basis.

But here’s where the really weird thing happened: My politics didn’t really change much. I still wanted that universal healthcare and clean water and clear air and safe food and drugs and and and… yet, somehow, these became “radical” positions. Not in the Democratic Party but according to the legacy press. Asking for this stuff was “wildly out of touch” with the American voter. Except, of course, if you ask the American voter who actually loves all of that stuff, including taxing the rich.

For a long time, I heard “centrist” used as an epithet and I never quite understood why. Being a moderate was hardly a sin. God knows I would sell my left kidney to get some back in the Republican Party. But as the GOP swung wildly to the right, the press kept moving to the “center.”

It’s important to understand that the “center” in this context was not actually the center of an objective political spectrum. It was the midpoint between the two parties. I have repurposed a graph that purported to show the Democratic Party moving right over the years to something a little more honest (apologies for the rough cut and paste). The party has moved slightly to the left over time. Yeah, yeah “neoliberal corporate shills blablabla.” I’ve heard it all before and it’s all bullshit.

Expanding healthcare to tens of millions of Americans is not moving to the right. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like HOW it was done; it happened and a lot of lives were saved. That’s a leftward shift.

Unions are on the rise. Biden was punching monopolies in the nose. The IRS doubled its audits of the rich. Green energy is happening and all the Republican temper tantrums in the world cannot stop it. All of that is a leftward shift. All of it because of Democrats.

Did they go far enough? Nah. But anyone telling you the Democrats are “just like Republicans” is lying to you. Because, let’s be fucking serious, Republicans went from “Hey, the rule of law is important” in 1973 to “Hey, fuck the law. We love fascism!" in 2025.

So here’s what that looks like:

You can quibble about how much the movements are relative to each other. This is a graphic representation of a phenomenon, not an accurate measurement of it.

It’s also important to note here that the press constantly accuses the Democratic Party of going just as far to the left as the GOP has to the right. That is the essence if Bothsiderism and is patently ludicrous. That level of movement would require Democrats to openly embrace actual communism. Even Bernie Sanders doesn’t go that far. It’s all bullshit.

But what about the dreaded Trans rights? Look at how crazed Democrats got over that!!!!

First, they didn’t. Biden and Harris making Trans rights a centerpiece of their campaigns was a rightwing fiction the legacy press bent over backwards to help sell. Second, Trans rights are not “extreme” or “radical” any more than gay rights were in the 2000s or civil or abortion rights were in the 60s and 70s. It was only seen that way because of the explosive rage it produced, and continues to produce, in the ever-shrinking hard right, maybe 25% of the country. Everyone else shrugged and got on with their day.

We’re not supposed to talk about that, though. Ever.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The Ogre talks about it all the time.

So what is the legacy press doing here? Moving the center to accommodate how far the right has moved to the extreme strips “centrism” of its meaning. Especially since the “center” never seems to move in response to the left. That suggests “centrism” is an artifact of the right but a lot of people do not want to admit that because it leaves them in a weird place. One where they would have to criticize the extremism of the right and admit the left isn’t really extreme at all.

Am I an extremist? Not really. Do I want to see Nazis beaten to death? Absolutely. When, exactly, did that become an extreme position to take? America has taken pride in killing Nazis for three quarters of a century. Some of our most cherished movies are about killing Nazis. Some of the best selling video games of all time are about killing Nazis. America LOVES to brag about killing Nazis. Adolf Hitler has been killed on more screens than just about any person in history. Beating Nazis to death is as American as fireworks on July 4th and Mom’s Apple Pie.™

It only became “controversial” to say “I want to see Nazis killed in the streets” when the Republican Party became the home of Nazis. But I didn’t move to the fringe. They did. How is that MY fucking problem?

I also hold the position that pedophiles should be burned alive. In 3 or 4 election cycles, when Republicans have openly become the party of pedophiles, will openly calling for pedophiles to be killed be seen as extremism, too? The answer, of course, is “Yes!”, because the legacy press will have moved the center yet again so openly advocating to fuck little girls is not depraved but “normal.”

This is the game the press plays to protect the Republican Party. As I have said on a number of occasions and will continue to say:

So, yeah, I’m a “radical” now because I want billionaires held accountable for the crimes they commit. I want Nazis beaten to death. I want corrupt public officials to spend decades behind bars. How did I get so off-the-wall extreme?! Did I read too much Karl Marx?! Did I drop too much acid in the 60s (before I was born)?!

Or are all of these completely normal, average political and moral positions that the vast majority of Americans hold? But now they’re frowned upon by the legacy press because they overwhelmingly apply to one party and one party only: The GOP. And when that happens, the legacy press only knows how to respond one way and one way only: Demonize the people who speak the truth as “radicals” and “extremists.”

Yeah. Sure. Whatever. So I’m going to keep doing what I do and ignore the liars and frauds and scumbags telling me that I’ve gone too far. The fuck I have. If you think fighting tooth and nail for the rule of law and a future for everyone instead of just the billionaires is radical but sending the Marines to L.A. is normal, you have no idea what the word even means. Step aside. The grown-ups have work to do and you’re in the way.

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🔥Burn Fascism To The Ground!🔥

Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 146 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

His hair, his business acumen, his golf scores, his stated weight, his claimed 2020 election “win” – everything about Donald Trump is fake except his thirst for power.

Overnight, Trump called up 2,000 more troops from the California National Guard, and there are reports this morning that the 700 active-duty Marines are headed for Los Angeles. Trump has used the demonstrations against ICE arrests that started on Saturday to escalate the situation in L.A. into a crisis. The Hill headlined a story yesterday, “Trump vs. California is the fight the White House wants.”

Here is how Jonathan Lemire put it on Morning Joe: “This is an opportunity for this White House. I heard from a White House adviser just this morning, basically saying, 'We couldn't have scripted this any better.' You're looking to change the topic of conversation from the Elon Musk brouhaha last week, and the ongoing questions about the bill, the 'big, beautiful bill' that's heading to the Senate.”

Lemire added, "This is the turf where they want to fight, and it's California, it's Los Angeles, a deep blue state and city. They're getting those images in that B-roll ... of a masked man with a Mexican flag in front of a car that's on fire, one of those self-driving taxis, probably, and that's what they want to project to their audiences, to their base: 'Look, this is dangerous, that's why we're taking the steps that we are,' and they're setting a trap for Democrats."

Last night, I agreed completely with The Hill and Lemire. I posted a story that the crisis in L.A. manufactured by the White House is all about the midterm elections. Trump wants the photos and tape of the burning cars, the protesters waving Mexican flags.

But it’s more than a White House political strategy. This is the biggest power-grab in recent American history, maybe in all American history, depending on how the situation plays out over the next five or six days. In his Substack this morning, Paul Krugman, the former New York Times op-ed columnist and one of the most sober-sided, level-headed, middle of the road commentators I’ve ever read, reminded his readers of the “sadism” of Trump’s “American Carnage” speech at his first inauguration, and then he wrote this:

“The events unfolding in Los Angeles as you read this and, I fear, the events likely to unfold across much of America soon, quite possibly this weekend, suggest that the motivations of Trump and his cronies go deeper than mere (mere!) sadism. They want to use false claims of chaos to justify a power grab that, if successful, would mark the end of the American experiment.”

Krugman went on to point out that Trump “isn’t reacting to any real threat of disorder in California. No, this is all about finding excuses to use force against Trump’s critics and opponents and justify an anti-democratic power grab.”

I couldn’t agree more. Trump is going to keep escalating in L.A. and now, given the protests there, San Francisco. He doesn’t want order in the streets. He wants more chaos. It’s almost inevitable that a protester will be killed by a member of the police or by a National Guard soldier. But that’s not what Trump is waiting for. He’s sitting there in the White House just waiting for a cop or a soldier he deployed to be killed by a protester. He will use that incident to declare that Governor Newsom has lost his ability to enforce the laws of California and keep the peace, and he will invoke the Insurrection Act.

Here is the language of that law Trump will cite:

“The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it—

(1) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or

(2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.

In any situation covered by clause (1), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.

That is a description of a take-over of a state by the federal government acting on the orders of the President. It is exactly what Trump wants, and what he will do.

Look at that last paragraph: Trump will say that Newsom has “denied the equal protection of the laws” by allowing violent protests to continue. He will use a citation of rights under the Constitution of the United States to take away the right of every Californian to self-government. Invocation of the Insurrection Act will put Trump in charge of enforcing the laws of the State of California. He will be able to use the National Guard and active-duty Marines or other Army units to arrest and detain protesters. Read again the language of the Act: Trump can use the “militia or armed forces” to take over a state if any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy… so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State.

That language, including the word “conspiracy,” is wide open to abuse by Trump. He can define anything as a conspiracy against his authority. Protesters can be acting in a law-abiding manner, not throwing rocks at cops or lighting cars on fire, just standing there with signs shouting slogans. Trump will be able to define this behavior as “rebellion” against his authority, which he will have asserted under the Insurrection Act. He can order the insurgents or those obstructing the enforcement of the laws to disperse, and if they don’t, he will take that as justification to do anything he wants to do, which is the way he has said that he sees his powers as president anyway.

Once Trump uses the Insurrection Act, Gavin Newsom will be powerless to stop him. Trump could even arrest Newsome and charge him with some made-up crime like refusing to execute valid laws or inciting a riot. Trump has already suggested that Newsome be arrested by his so-called “border czar,” Tom Homan, who has zero authority to arrest and detain anyone.

"I would do it if I were Tom. I think it's great," Trump said of the prospect of arresting the governor of California. Note that neither Trump nor any of his minions have asserted that Newsom has committed a crime. Trump realizes that if he invokes the Insurrection Act, he will be the law in California, and he can say what is a crime and what isn’t.

Krugman made the point that with “No Kings” protests scheduled for this coming weekend, Trump will have the opportunity to spread the chaos he has created to other blue states and cities. He’s waiting for a cop car to be set on fire, or some windows to be broken by provocateurs in a blue city downtown, or some looting to take place. Once Trump has the video footage of what he will call “violent leftist thugs” creating a “rebellion” or “insurrection,” he’ll be able to invoke the Insurrection Act in other blue states.

This is indeed the fight they’ve been looking for, and that it’s about immigration makes it all the better for Trump’s propagandists. They can assert that many or most of the protesters aren’t even citizens. They’ll continue to point to Mexican flags. Look at this from Trump’s supposedly former friend, Elon Musk. “This is not okay,” he tweeted yesterday:

They’re all going to get on board, all the fascists like Musk and of course Stephen Miller, and soon, we’ll be hearing from Congressional Republicans, not only standing by Trump, but egging him on.

We are facing an existential moment in our democracy. If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, self-government in blue states where he uses it will be over. Trump will be able to deploy the military anywhere he wants. Every time a cop or a soldier is assaulted by a protester, or even killed, he will use it as evidence that his strongman authoritarian tactics are needed to restore “law and order.”

Yes, the man who has broken the law more often than any president in history, who has been convicted on 34 counts of breaking New York State laws by paying hush money to a woman he had sex with out of marriage, will make himself out to be the president of law and order, when in actuality, he will be the president of fascist order.

I said it last night and I’ll say it again: Democrats had better get their shit together, because Trump will use anything to justify the authoritarian power grab he has been planning for years.

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Democrats had better start getting their shit together. In pitting the National Guard and now the U.S. Marines – he mobilized 700 Marines from Camp Pendleton, CA today – against anti-ICE street protesters in Los Angeles, he created the question that will be asked every time a Democrat steps in front of a camera for the next 18 months: which side are you on, the violent rioters or the troops? Today, Senator Tom Cotton spelled out Trump’s strategy in two sentences: “Americans have a choice between Republicans’ law & order vs. the Democrats’ car-burning, illegal alien rioters. So far, every Senate Democrat who has spoken out has backed the rioters.”

There you go, folks. You can say what you will about Trump provoking worse riots by federalizing the CA National Guard without asking Governor Newsome, but he has framed his politics for the mid-terms. He was always going to use immigration as an issue. Now he can say it’s us against them and point to the riots in L.A. and not just talk about amorphous “illegal immigrants.” Last night on Truth Social, Trump called them “Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers.” At mid-afternoon, returning from a weekend meeting at Camp David, Trump called the protesters “insurrectionists.” The New York Times reported that the word “may become a rationale for him to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act.”

Last night, protests spread to San Francisco, where 150 were arrested in clashes with police. Videos of the protests showed men in all-black outfits, wearing hoodies, masks, and backpacks, breaking the windows of downtown buildings with a hammer and vandalizing a SFPD patrol car.

The video images were almost identical to video taken of the Ferguson riots after the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 showing a man wearing black pants and a black hoodie and a backpack systematically breaking the windows of an auto parts store. He was followed by another man dressed identically who threw Molotov fire bombs into the store, setting it on fire.

In Los Angeles, several Waymo driverless cars were set on fire by protesters. There is one photo (above) of a masked man standing atop a vandalized Waymo car between two burning cars waving a Mexican flag. More photos showed a vandalized LAPD car with a broken windshield surrounded by paving stones that had been hurled at the police cars.

It is obvious, at least to me, that the men breaking windows and vandalizing the police car in San Francisco are provocateurs. Regular citizens don’t go to a protest wearing black hoodies and masks and backpacks, carrying hammers. These people were dressed that way and equipped with the tools they needed to commit premeditated destruction of private and public property.

I’m going into detail about the photos from both riots, because these are exactly the images Trump has been looking for. So far, images of ICE arrests have depicted federal agents kitted out in combat gear and masks handcuffing individual undocumented immigrants. He can’t run on those images. They may seem extreme but they depict lawful arrests. But he can run on the riots, and that is exactly what he is going to do. Trump and Republican candidates for the House and Senate will use still photos and video footage of the riots during their campaigns in midterm elections next year.

In the meantime, Democrats had better start thinking of what they’re going to do at the “No Kings” protests this coming weekend. There will probably be a great deal of pressure to turn the whole thing into anti-ICE demonstrations in solidarity with L.A. and San Francisco protests and other protests if they spread further around the country this week, as I think they are likely to do.

Donald Trump is a master at this kind of provocation-reaction-more provocation stuff. He has already used Title 10 to call out the National Guard. They haven’t announced what law they will cite in the deployment of active-duty Marines to the L.A. riots. But as the Times pointed out, invoking the Insurrection Act is his obvious next step.

Which raises the question I have seen in my newsfeed and am getting in emails and direct messages: Will Trump “declare martial law?” Some people are even raising the specter of Trump using “martial law” to step in and take over elections during the midterms.

The term “martial law” refers to a situation where the armed forces step in and assume not only law enforcement but governance of an area. There is no federal law or provision in the Constitution for the President to declare martial law. Martial law has been imposed by states more than 60 times since the nation’s founding, because of war or invasion, civil unrest, labor unrest, and natural disaster. Abraham Lincoln imposed martial law on the country during the Civil War, from 1862 to 1866. Franklin Roosevelt approved a declaration of martial law for two years over the territory of Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Other impositions of martial law were done by state governors due to riots. Several times, one of them after the Tulsa race riot in 1921, an Army general imposed martial law until order could be restored, which in the Tulsa case was four days.

Trump is of course notorious for ignoring norms and the law and would probably seek to use the Insurrection Act as a de facto imposition of martial law over blue states such as Illinois, New York, California or others. How far he would go beyond putting troops in the streets of cities, such as he has done in Los Angeles, is something we will have to contend with if or when he tries to make it happen. It is unlikely that either federal or state courts would be amenable to having their jurisdictions cancelled or interfered with in an area over which Trump attempts to impose martial law. That would mean military courts or tribunals would take over the judiciary in the states affected, and that military prosecutors would assume the function of a state attorney general and local district attorneys. It would seem to be a bridge too far even for Donald Trump, but he has exploded a lot of bridges over the last eight years, and it would be foolish to suppose that he wouldn’t at least try.

The danger we face right now is if unrest in the streets of L.A. and San Francisco and other blue cities provides Trump with the opportunity to deploy Reserve, National Guard, or active-duty soldiers to quell unrest that Trump can define as a rebellion or insurrection. The images I’ve seen from L.A. and San Francisco are giving him all the propaganda he needs. No matter who is out there demonstrating against ICE or Trump himself, anarchist provocateurs are likely to take this opportunity to sow chaos and cause more violence than the legitimate demonstrators.

This is an ugly situation, it’s likely to get uglier before it gets better, and there is one person we can count on to make sure that happens: Donald Trump.

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A few days ago, I experienced a strange auditive mix-up. My favorite German radio program, Deutschlandfunk, sent a documentary about “platform workers”. Uber, Deliveroo, etc., you might think, but no. This was about workers on oil platforms in Norway: about the oil boom in the North Sea, about the hard work on the oil rigs and as diver, about the many long-term health issues that arouse, and about the long battle for recognition and compensation. The Norwegian parliament has recently set up a compensation scheme for the families of the victims of a particularly egregious neglect of safety standards, which led to the capsizing of a whole platform in 1980, with 123 deaths.

Today, we think of “platform workers” as individuals contracting with online platforms for executing online or offline services, often at lousy pay.

But depending on the alternatives available to them, in times of declining labor rights, platform work may still be preferable to many individuals. However, the companies seem hardly more interested in the long-term well-being of workers than the Norwegian government and oil companies were. In the latter case, workers were at least formally recognized as employees; as is well known, the delivery drivers and cyclists are, most of the time, formally independent contractors with no long-term protection whatsoever.

Beyond the same label, however, there is something interesting in how value gets created in these two types of work. You don’t so much hire workers to produce something by working together, combining different skills sets in a collaborative process (of course, even then the usual question about the “means of production” arises). Rather, there is an independently existing resource, and the platform is created to extract value from it. In the fossil case, it is gas and oil in the ground under the sea, in the case of digital platforms, it is the informational system that allows harvesting purchasing power from customers. What they have in common is that work here “creates values” by tapping into resources that are already there, and that, arguably, belong at least in part to the public. The workers, more than in many other jobs, are the Marxian “appendages to the machines”. As the case of oil rig workers shows, moreover, being highly skilled does little to reduce the dependence.

One might debate whether in the digital case, the resources are as much “given” as in the fossil case. The oil and gas are already there, in the ground, on public land or under the sea. But, it might be said, in the case of the digital infrastructures, the possibility of enabling profitable exchanges would not be visible and, in that sense, not exist, if the apps had not been programmed. True, but then the oil and gas have also remained invisible and untapped for centuries, for lack of the right technology. Moreover, the technologies that make possible digital platform work have not been created by these companies themselves. As Mazzucato and others have argued, much of the research that enabled the creation of the internet was publicly funded. And individuals use their privately owned mobile phones or computers to interact with the apps that organize “platform work”. In that sense, the digital platform companies are also tapping into a public resource that could also have been used rather differently.

The Norwegian oil profits, after all, mostly went into a sovereign wealth fund that has become the largest in the world, from which generations of Norwegians will benefit. Of course, this is no justification for how workers have been treated – neither here nor in the case of digital platform work. But just imagine what it would mean if the profits(*) made by companies that erect platforms onto the public resources that is the internet went into sovereign wealth funds as well! This could happen through taxation or through public ownership of the platforms (depending on where one stands on bigger questions about political economy).

States have often not been better than private companies when it comes to the treatment of workers and other stakeholders in platform cases. Apparently, when an organization, whether public or private, can tap into resources from which value simply flows, by erecting literal or metaphorical platforms, greed is likely to take over.(**) Protecting workers and stakeholders therefore remains an urgent concern, no matter where the profits flow. And yet, this latter question is also one that we should ask with regard to all forms of platform work, on oil rigs, digital apps, and beyond.

(*) Of course, not all of them are profitable and some have gone out of business, etc. But I am here assuming that overall, there is the potential for profit extraction.

(**) The exploitation of the Gas field in Groningen, where the victims were not so much workers but rather local inhabitants who suffer from the induced earthquakes, is a sobering case study in this respect.