Trump-led appropriations bills have also starved maritime capacity. In Trump’s most recent appropriations bill, the Small Shipyard Grant Program, one of the few federal mechanisms for helping grow shipbuilding capacity, received $8.75 million, a record low and less than half of the $21 million it received during the Biden administration.

For shipyards competing against heavily subsidized foreign rivals, these grants often determine whether they can afford to modernize equipment like cranes and welding machines or fall further behind. Demand for the grants has consistently exceeded supply, with applications surpassing available funds by more than five times. Underfunding the program not only reduces its effectiveness but also signals a retreat at a time when foreign shipyards are receiving significant government support.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/10/09/trump-shipbuilding-failure/

«Le fiamme distrussero l’abitazione intera», scrive la premier nella sua autobiografia “Io sono Giorgia”. «No, i danni riguardavano una finestra», dice chi ha comprato l’immobile subito dopo. I ricordi del portinaio: quando arrivarono i vigili del fuoco lo trovarono con una pompa in mano mentre era intento a disperdere il fumo, le fiamme erano divampate solo nella cameretta e rovinato la finestra. Forse una porta.

https://www.editorialedomani.it/fatti/meloni-io-sono-giorgia-incendio-casa-roma-underdog-governo-y8v9ogjo

In Chicago, former Harold Washington ran on a very similar social democratic platform during his 1983 mayoral campaign. Once he assumed office, Chicago’s business elite blocked his attempts to expand public programs and redistribute wealth. He eventually compromised with capital in hopes that maintaining investment in the city would generate a large enough tax base to fund a robust social safety net.

Young argues that progressive parliamentary politics cannot meet the challenge of capital strikes without the support of a militant working-class movement on the ground. For Mamdani to implement even part of his agenda, the Left will need to mobilize ordinary New Yorkers on a mass scale. As a member of NYC-DSA himself, Mamdani has a background in democratic movement politics, and members of DSA and the broader left helped propel his campaign to victory over Cuomo. He may be able to lean on these organizations for political capital — for instance, to build and mobilize support across the city for his agenda in the face of opposition by “moderate” local and state lawmakers.

Bernie Sanders, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, was essentially forced to construct a “parallel city government” to counteract a hostile city council’s attempts to undermine his ability to govern. Mamdani and his supporters should take lessons from Sanders’s mayoralty to heart; a recent rally in Brooklyn with Sanders suggests that the would-be mayor is doing so.

But this is only half the battle. Because of the threat of capital strikes as well as the influence of corporate lobbies and the large donors who fund most political campaigns, political and economic elites only begin to accept significant popular reforms when discontent with the status quo reaches a critical level. Socialist organizers and politicians can help channel discontent into tangible demands, like those in Mamdani’s platform, and as mayor, Mamdani can use his institutional platform to give these demands greater political legitimacy.

Grassroots organizations like DSA can, in turn, give him leverage in negotiations with the state legislature and the governor through strategic demonstrations, legislative pressure campaigns, and primary challenges against intransigent lawmakers. This dynamic can create a mutually reinforcing relationship between Mamdani’s office and his grassroots supporters.

Organized labor can also play a critical role in creating bottom-up pressure, despite the preemptions of post-Taft-Hartley American labor law. While unions are legally barred from engaging in strike activity as political advocacy, it hasn’t stopped labor from using its collective power to push for political change. Cross-union coalitions like Labor for Palestine, for example, are currently mobilizing members to pressure their unions to divest their pension funds from Israeli apartheid. And networks of union members can organize and participate in mass demonstrations in support of progressive policy issues — just last year, UAW Labor for Palestine members participated in mass protests against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress.

Unions also often mobilize their members to pack city council meetings as a pressure tactic to win stronger statutory protections for workers’ rights.

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/mamdani-nyc-mayor-labor-dsa/

- residents are distributing “Know Your Rights” information and our regional ICE-sighting hotline number through door-to-door canvassing
- Our Northwest Side Rapid Response group, a coalition of neighborhood-based organizations, elected officials, and area residents, has formed patrols and teams that monitor and respond to immigration enforcement activity in our neighborhoods
- responding to ICE presence in their neighborhoods, protecting immigrant day laborers and street-food vendors, supporting families impacted by deportation, and creating community alert systems for ICE sightings. When immigration agents started operating near our schools, hundreds of volunteers stepped in to accompany families during student drop-off and dismissal. Recently our groups have created whistle kits to provide to community members so that they can alert their neighbors when they spot ICE.
- Mayor Johnson created the Office of Immigrant, Migrant, and Refugee Rights to coordinate citywide support for immigrant and asylum-seeking families and expand access to legal aid, housing, and health care. Recently he signed a series of executive orders to strengthen Chicago’s sanctuary protections and push back against federal immigration overreach and the deployment of the National Guard. One of these executive orders is the new “ICE Free Zone” order, expanding on the “Protecting Chicago” citywide campaign. The order establishes mechanisms to prevent federal immigration agents from using any city-owned property for their operations, a response to recent incidents where ICE agents used Chicago Public Schools parking lots and other city facilities as staging areas.

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/chicago-ice-response-trump-authoritarianism/

1. Strong economic populism has broad and deep support. Economic populist messaging yielded net support of +45 points (defined as the percentage of respondents who support minus those who oppose).
2. The Democratic Party’s brand is a major liability. In head-to-head tests, Democratic candidates underperformed their independent counterparts by more than 8 points, even when delivering the exact same economic populist message.
3. Voter disillusionment with Democrats is more about failure and less about ideological extremism. Across Democrats, independents, and Republicans, many described the party as corrupt, out of touch, unwilling to fight for working people, and not a party for working people. While some of these critiques bled into broader claims that Democrats are focused on the wrong priorities, only small minorities cited “wokeness” or extremism (3% of Democrats, 11% of independents, and 19% of Republicans).
4. The most popular economic policies are bold, tangible, and grounded in fairness — and can unite voters across class and partisan lines. Across twenty-five ranked proposals, policies that reduced costs, curbed corporate abuse, and held elites accountable (capping drug prices, taxing the wealthy, and even enacting a federal jobs guarantee) consistently performed best
5. Even an unfamiliar, ambitious proposal to ban mass layoffs by federal contractors enjoys strong support.
6. Independent populist politics may offer a credible path forward. Across the four Rust Belt states we surveyed, 57% of respondents supported the creation of a new Independent Workers Political Association (IWPA), with especially strong enthusiasm among noncollege voters, renters, voters of color, and the economically insecure. The idea of an IWPA drew significant support from Republicans and independents as well — suggesting a realignment opportunity grounded in economic populism.

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/economic-populism-rust-belt-report/

A first lesson is that authenticity cannot be bought from a public relations consultant. There is a truism often repeated in electoral politics and policy advocacy that you must speak authentically to the people you want to represent — that they must feel that you are one of them. And yet, no amount of messaging and polling is enough to make Kamala Harris feel genuine. Hakeem Jeffries has put on hoodies, Nancy Pelosi has knelt in a Kente cloth, Andrew Cuomo took off his tie and filmed himself in a park in Manhattan, but their efforts never seem to achieve what they are seeking to achieve.

What is it that makes someone like Pepe Mujica different? What makes them feel authentic?

Pepe showed that the real substance of authenticity lies in the politics themselves — in the work, the commitments, the choices. Miss that, and you end up with a generation of Barack Obama knockoffs, a parade of shallow imitations.

The second lesson to learn from Pepe is about how to ensure that personal commitments become political outcomes. It is difficult to maintain genuine accountability to the working class and social movements in modern democratic systems. Time and time again, activists have placed allies in office only to see them caving to corporate and neoliberal pressures. Or conversely, they witness leaders trying to establish control over a political system who end up turning toward authoritarianism. There are too few institutional mechanisms that allow elected officials to avoid these paths and assert a consistent progressive mandate, especially when facing sustained resistance from the media, corporate interests, and the political establishment.

Exceptional political talent is not enough. Without structural support, the likelihood of disappointment is high. Without a durable, independent structure behind electoral efforts, accountability cannot be guaranteed.

No doubt Pepe Mujica was an exceptional political talent, but it was the unique structural accountability of the Frente Amplio that allowed him to stay steady and responsive to his base. It stands as a key institutionalized example of a true mass party in Latin America. Through its creation of mechanisms to keep it beholden to the interests and concerns of its grassroots supporters, the Frente is a uniquely valuable instance of participatory politics.

Electoral structures in the United States make this hard to replicate, but activists can take steps in this direction by codifying the internal democracy of organizations that make up the wider ecology of progressive electoral efforts. We can ask: In what ways are these groups — beyond electoral efforts — formalizing their accountability to social movements?

This is a crucial lesson for social movements seeking progressive change: having allies in office, even a president with deep political commitments to regular people, is not enough. Social movements drive political possibility, expanding the Overton window and forcing elected officials to move beyond their comfort zones. Political power, even when wielded by well-intentioned leaders, is constrained by institutional inertia, competing interests, and the limits of political will.

Uruguay’s story underscores the importance of sustained pressure, strategic agitation, and public engagement.

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/pepe-mujica-uruguay-movements-strategy/

what made Lincoln great was that he understood that, in the end, there would be no establishment of the rule of law until justice had been served and slavery abolished. There could be no refusal of violence that would stick, that would be anything more than the blandest sanctimony, the emptiest piety, until the underlying social violence — the combination of the “Negro question” and the “labor question” — was resolved, through concerted action by the state.

What makes today’s calls for reconciliation and pleas for recognition of everyone’s humanity so formulaic, even feckless, is that they are severed from any sort of action or social awareness. At best, they rest on a studied inattention to the underlying social and economic roots of the problem. At this point, the politicians who speak this way sound like the very abolitionists who were rightly derided as crackpot utopians for their naive belief that moral suasion, without state action, could somehow win the day against slavery.

The difference is that those abolitionists had no power. Many of these politicians do.

https://jacobin.com/2025/09/lincoln-slavery-abolition-polarization-reconciliation/

EU strategy to face narratives against democracy - with a focus on the external dimension

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/754484/EXPO_STU(2025)754484_EN.pdf

Not to be dramatic, but between the far-right media consolidation and the acquisition of Dominion Voting, democracy is dead in the US

https://www.axios.com/2025/10/09/dominion-voting-machines-sold-elections

If we look at not only the energy requirements, but the whole lifecycle of the data centre, including the embodied carbon in their construction and the manufacturing of components, the situation worsens. For the whole world, Morgan Stanley predict that data centre CO2-equivalent emissions will triple by 2030, rising to equivalent of 40% of the US’ total emissions, once account is taken not only of electricity use but also data centre construction. This rapid increase is, they estimate, about three times worse than it would have been without the arrival of AI. Only approximately 60% of the total emissions are due to the operational power requirement, the rest being embodied carbon in the manufacturing and construction of the centres.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64871f9937497e658cf744f5/t/682e0081bd6dc64bb45fcb1d/1747845250339/Data+centres-+how+soaring+demand+threatens+to+overwhelm+energy+systems+and+climate+goals.pdf

For example, after October 7, the army authorized soldiers to kill up to 20 civilians in order to assassinate a suspected low-level Hamas operative, or hundreds of civilians when targeting more senior figures. The vast majority of these assassinations occurred in civilian homes where no military activity was taking place. But for most of the soldiers I spoke to, the mere existence of an alleged military target, even in cases where the intelligence picture was murky, justified virtually any resultant death toll.

In another investigation, a soldier described to me how his battalion used remote-controlled drones to fire on Palestinian civilians, including women and children, as they tried to return to their destroyed homes in an area occupied by the Israeli army, killing 100 unarmed Palestinians over the course of three months. The goal, he explained, was not to kill them for the sake of it, but to keep the neighborhood empty and thus safer for the soldiers stationed there.

Another soldier recounted participating in the shelling of an entire residential block, comprising more than 10 multi-story apartment buildings and one high-rise all packed with families. She knew beforehand that in doing so she and her crew would likely kill some 300 civilians. But the operation, she explained, was based on intelligence suggesting that a relatively senior Hamas commander might be hiding somewhere beneath one of these buildings. Without more precise information, they destroyed the entire area in the hope of killing him.

The soldier conceded that the attack amounted to a massacre. But in her view, this was not the intention; the goal was to hit the commander, who may not have even been there.

This mission-oriented framing played a crucial role in enabling ordinary Israelis to participate in genocide — perhaps more than obedience alone, which is usually assumed to be the primary motivator in such contexts. By understanding each act of violence as a discrete task, from targeting a Hamas operative to securing a perimeter, soldiers could avoid confronting their role in the mass slaughter of civilians.

[...]

The tendency of perpetrators of genocide to invoke “security” as a justification for mass violence is well documented, rationalizing acts of brutality within a broader framework of self-defense. But whatever flimsy excuse is given in each case, Israel’s attacks were undeniably carried out in the full knowledge that they would lead to the destruction of another people. The result is a Palestinian death toll that is thought to exceed 100,000, and the near-total obliteration of the Gaza Strip.

https://www.972mag.com/israelis-logic-gaza-genocide/