One student learned animation THIS semester and made a 8 minute film entirely using GRAINS OF SAND on a glass screen. I was shooketh! She made something like 1000 images for the film, moving sand around by hand. These storytellers are next level.

Invite me to the strategy session for getting financial and other reparations for ICE terror. An actual opposition political party would be calling people together now to work on this. They would be preparing the public for this now.

Burnout and depression stem from the struggles of poverty and trying to make ends meet. They lead to brain fog, unresolved health issues, and distractedness. Behaviors escalate because you're not at your best and children can sense the uncertainty.

Researchers often approach early learning outcomes from the perspective that early educators are inadequate and could always be doing more emotional labor, noticing more, reacting faster in addition to carrying out lesson plans.

The "everything is gender" meme should be a rallying cry for funding higher ed

Inter-agency coordination is how public finance always works. The question is whether those public coordinations are used to produce an image of market discipline and unaccountable private intermediaries, OR if they're made transparent, revisable, and democratically accountable.

It’s truly remarkable how, after being convinced by MAGA to abandon “wokeness” Democrats feel they have no compelling tools or analyses to counter MAGA

The exposure of far right anti-intellectualism as a disaster for governance should be a golden age for Democrats defending higher education—especially disciplines that the far right has attacked, from the humanities to public health.

You never know what you’re prototyping

But yeah the fact that we have an elite culture that is at best hesitant to defend the idea of Black representation as a good in and of itself is a big part of how we got here.

Some of you have internalized austerity. Free yourselves.

Thing is he became the choice in the primary because “Kenyatta isn’t viable against Dr. Oz” was the talking point so miss me with this.

So “checks and balances” seem to not happen automatically. The standard deconstructive move would be to say the constitutional system doesn’t coincide with itself. Its universal language depends on discontinuous executions, interpretive gaps, procedural fictions, and unstable sites of enforcement…

Checks and balances are not self-executing. The constitutional system is executed discontinuously, through offices, procedures, interpretations, enforcement choices, and gaps that can be abused. Defending democracy means strategizing against those openings.

It’s been hard for me to accept this bit of Twainian wisdom, but it’s paramount. If you’re winning most of the fights you pick, you’re either picking the wrong fights or you’re picking the wrong side.

✨ New transcript! ✨ moneyontheleft.org/2026/05/02/g... Do you hate using your ears?👂 Well then this transcript from our latest episode is for you! 👩‍💻 Happy reading! 🙌

Activism in constant communion with history. It is the collectively creative art of old strategies and experiences in new combinations.

Memory-holing mass protests because they didn’t work (whatever that means) is central to Fascism. It is literally Social Darwinism: we are encouraged to forget the movements that “failed.”

People have already memory-holed how critical #TeslaTakeDown was. It was the earliest decentralized set of protests in the second term as early as Feb 2025 at a time when most people were shell-shocked and Dem leadership was cowering and capitulating. And it pushed Elon out of the WH.

The aesthetic and systemic design of monetary systems are not inevitably exclusionary. Can you imagine what alternatives might look like?

it is just absolutely unfuckingbelievable that bernie sanders hired this unemployable nazi to be his press secretary

New in my newsletter: A major civil rights protest took place in Alabama today in response to the SCOTUS decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act

There's a major civil rights protest taking place in Selma, Alabama, right now in response to the SCOTUS decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act and the ongoing attack on Black Americans’ political power (video: defiancedispatch/IG)

This is great, but you're still $97 million short of the funding you campaigned on (at 0.5% of the City budget), Mayor Mamdani. Please keep your promise to the people's libraries! @nycplan.org

Thousands are marching in Selma calling for a full restoration of the voting rights act.

We cross this bridge yet again In 1965, civil rights leaders marched from Selma to Montgomery to demand equal voting rights Now civil rights leaders are back to fight for the very VRA freedoms SCOTUS just dismantled. We will not stay silent – this is the time to act!

I’d love to see these headlines inverted as a bit: “Young Voters ‘Tired’ of Waiting for Better Democrats. These Women Agree.” “At Queer Board Game Night in Philadelphia, Anxiety About the Courts Looms Large”

one of my favorite things about visiting dc as a native is reacquainting myself with my favorite type of tourist: the Meltdown Dad

DSA is about to get a free ad campaign

If you’re a Trump voter, you are the imagined base of both major parties

"Yeah of course I read the news" the news:

At its best, public finance would be about making money too—but that money would be PUBLICLY owned from its inception. The more publicly owned money we create + spend to fund new business/activities to meet everyone's needs, the more we also reduce the private finance sector's capacity for grift.

Money doesn’t merely represent or reflect the world, it organizes the making of it.

Mr. Robot said: "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime; that is the corporate motto of these United States. You wanna oink-oink with all the other capitalist pigs? It’s not about how much money; it’s about robbing money itself." Subjecting public budgets to private bond markets is robbery.

The recursive quality of this is important. Those of us @moneyontheleft.bsky.social thinking through public finance could only dream that the legal architectures we are learning from would later be revisited and extended by people who helped build them in the first place.

Traditional wisdom says the Federal government is the currency issuer whereas the states and municipalities are currency users Forget all that and issue your own currency, extend your own credit

When the legislative body of the monetary sovereign is derelict in its duty, you take matters into your own hands

It's pretty cool when people you actually think deeply about and understand the law you wrote!

While my monetary policy is too shaky for me to fully understand this or stand by it (yet), this thread is grappling with the most important question of urban governance and dreaming big and I love it

@moneyontheleft.bsky.social has a great new article out! "...we demonstrate that capitalization and reserves are not separate stumbling blocks to be surmounted, but deeply interrelated operations that—when designed in tandem—create a mutually reinforcing engine for public provision..." #It'sOurMoney

Today’s tradeoffs, relative scarcities, etc. reflect the planning of yesterday’s elites. The horizon of leftist politics cannot just be flat redistribution within a political economy meant to be insufficient and exclusionary. Intertemporally, there is no scarcity. We’re doing this for the future.

I get that ya got to plan and work for a future 50 years from now or whatever but driving a municipal govt like you stole it might be the way to not only get big wins, but expand the horizon for the next chump to become mayor.

Rebuilding and repairing the wreckage currently unfolding at all levels of governance in the US will require thinking expansively about how we mobilize and expand mechanisms for organizing our collective (re)productive capacities the debts are owed to us!!

The (neo)liberals in Z's electoral majority may need to hear about balanced budgets to keep the faith, but the Left must remain deeply discontent with our current public budgeting capacities at both the city and state levels. For us, the standard of responsible budgeting is fully funding all needs.

Balanced public budgets are unbalanced household budgets.

Balancing city budgets might be narrowly good for satisfying legal-accounting frameworks that require balanced city budgets, but in every other way it is horrible and destructive. Less money spent into the economy than taxed out means households turn to speculative assets and loans to compensate.

In preparation for Mamdani’s mayoralty, a chorus of left wing political economy experts published warnings that he must not under any circumstances issue bonds. That was neoliberal ideology speaking through Marxism and progressivism. Here’s a proposal for public banks that can buy and hold munis⬇️

It's extremely important that the left not replicate the loyalty-based pathologies of both MAGA and neoliberal democrats, where public criticism is seen as damaging to an overall with/against alignment.

Dying to put this Far Side cartoon on a critical media history syllabus