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**JANUARY 13, 2025**
On the Prospect website
Labor's Prodigal Son Returns [link removed]
SEIU rejoins the AFL-CIO, even as arresting labor's decline remains a daunting challenge. BY HAROLD MEYERSON
Q&A: Taking On the Biggest Problems and the Biggest Companies [link removed]
An exit interview with Jonathan Kanter, Biden's head of the Justice Department Antitrust Division BY DAVID DAYEN
Suicide by Rental Truck: America Gets Another Violent Wake-Up Call From Vets in Distress [link removed]
Twenty years of war has created tens of thousands of broken men and women. BY SUZANNE GORDON & STEVE EARLY
Kuttner on TAP
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The catastrophic L.A. fires will cast a harsh, clarifying light on Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Most Americans outside Los Angeles are experiencing the horrific fires with compassionate empathy. What would it be like if I had to flee my home on an hour's notice, lose all my family treasures, have to figure out where to live, how to get my mail, pay my bills, file insurance claims, and school my kids?
But Donald Trump doesn't do compassion. It's simply not part of his character or his political repertoire. Human catastrophes are only interesting to Trump as political opportunities.
After he used the tragedy of the fires to single out his nemesis, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for blame and scorn, Trump's next comment, on Truth Social, was perfect Trump pitch. "Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost," he wrote.
How like Trump. His focus was the real estate, especially the upscale mansions, not the human tragedy. While Biden is using his last week to get as much of FEMA's available $27 billion out the door to L.A. as soon as possible, Trump is being cagey about whether he will provide any aid at all.
Trump and Musk have also used the tragedy to bash the Los Angeles Fire Department for having some female firefighters. Musk actually tweeted "DEI means people DIE."
Something tells me this will not play well. It's one thing when Trump is disdainful toward suffering impoverished refugees who come from what he delicately called shithole countries. It's another when he displays no compassion for middle- and upper-class Angelenos who played by the rules and lost everything.
The estimated economic damage from lost homes in L.A. stands at a high of $150 billion [link removed]. How much is $150 billion? One way to look at it is that it's about one-third of Elon Musk's fortune.
In other words, Musk could cover all the costs of the catastrophic damage to L.A., and still have $300 billion of his fortune left. He could pay for all the transitional housing expenses for residents who lost their homes, share the costs of compensating other losses not covered by insurance, and pay for the other losses from depressed economic activity.
But, like Trump, Musk doesn't do compassion and he doesn't do charity. He'd rather use his political influence to cut people's Medicaid.
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Large-scale calamities like this one cry out for moral leadership. But Trump and Musk are not moral leaders, they are moral monsters.
Musk, to use an old-fashioned word, is a miser. The word is doubly appropriate because it comes from a Latin root meaning wretched or miserable. It later came to mean miserably stingy.
The ancients treated apocalyptic events as portents. The L.A. fires portend far worse under Trump.
In the Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. As punishment, Zeus condemned Prometheus to an eternity of being chained to a rock where an eagle would peck out his liver.
For now, we seem to be condemned to an eternity of Trumpism, with worsening fires and floods that are the consequences of another useful Greek concept, hubris. Trump and L.A. both epitomize two hubristic faces of climate denial-Trump by mocking the science, L.A. by continuing to build.
But the broad public, increasingly terrified of deepening climate disasters, is likely to grasp that Trump, and his partner in disdainful grift, Elon Musk, are exactly the wrong leaders in this deepening crisis. Trump and Musk will facilitate that understanding, because they can't help themselves.
If the political opposition to Trump does its job, the public will also grasp that the hyper-concentrated wealth of today's capitalism, epitomized by Musk but not limited to Musk, and the neglect of public needs, are two sides of the same coin.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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