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austerity
Mamdani's Win Is Proof That an Organized Public Can Defeat Organized Money
The most consistent project of elite politics is to cultivate resignation: Nothing can change, no one like you can win, best not to try. When that illusion breaks, even in a single city, it sends tremors outward.
Nov 06, 2025
Zohran Mamdani’s election in New York City is not simply a local upset. It is a breach in the ideological dam that has kept American politics safely contained for generations.
This victory is historic not because one office suddenly overturns entrenched power, but because it demonstrates that such power can be overturned at all.
For decades, political life in the United States has functioned as a managed marketplace in which both parties advertise different brands, yet deliver the same fundamental product: deference to private wealth, hostility to social investment, and a belief that the public should expect very little from its government beyond punishment and surveillance.
On Tuesday, that spell cracked.
Zohran's win feels like the beginning of the first meaningful challenge to the neoliberal consensus in a generation.
Mamdani won not by courting the wealthy, not by flattering real-estate interests, not by running a campaign tailored to the comfort of cable-news pundits.
He won by naming the obvious: that the city belongs to its people, not to absentee landlords; that housing, transit, childcare, food, and dignity are fundamental rights, not privileges; that a budget is a statement of who matters in society—and it’s long past time a city as wealthy as New York put working people first instead of billionaires and real-estate developers.
The bipartisan establishment will attempt to minimize this moment. They will continue to fund hysterical hit pieces designed to make people afraid of those challenging their rule. But their real fear is that this victory might prove contagious.
If New Yorkers can elect someone who openly challenges concentrated power, asks the wealthy to pay their share, and speaks in plain moral terms about economic justice, then perhaps Los Angeles can. Perhaps Cleveland, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Kansas City.
The danger, from the perspective of those who currently command the political economy, is that people elsewhere may decide to stop begging for crumbs and begin organizing for a real seat at the table.
Power relies on a population convinced of its own helplessness. The most consistent project of elite politics is to cultivate resignation: Nothing can change, no one like you can win, best not to try. When that illusion breaks, even in a single city, it sends tremors outward.
Across the country, millions watching the election results saw something rare in American politics: Proof that a campaign rooted in solidarity can beat one rooted in capital. They saw a future in which the public is not a spectator to its own dispossession. They saw permission to believe in their own power.
They saw that politics need not be reduced to a stage-managed rivalry between corporations wearing different campaign colors.
As someone who saw this possibility in the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, who saw our movement defeated by this same bipartisan establishment, this moment gives me a renewed faith in America's capacity to fight back against oligarchy. Zohran's win feels like the beginning of the first meaningful challenge to the neoliberal consensus in a generation.
And that is why this victory matters. Not because one candidate triumphed, but because a barrier was crossed. The belief that the public must endure austerity while wealth accumulates above it has lost its inevitability. The idea that the mass media can manufacture consent for a Wall Street-approved candidate every time has shattered.
The attacks on Mamdani were relentless these past few months. But their hollow and desperate efforts failed. The majority didn't buy it, and they went to the polls to send Andrew Cuomo packing.
For the first time in a long time, the message is simple and electrifying:
The people can win. And if they can win here, they can win anywhere.
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Dismissing Concerns of US Farmers, Trump Claims Argentina 'Dying' to Justify $40 Billion Bailout
"If you're the President of Argentina, Trump gives you a $20 billion bailout. If you're an American whose health care premiums are about to double? Tough luck."
Oct 20, 2025
President Donald Trump's allegiance to Argentina's right-wing government is appearing to undermine his signature claim—for those who ever believed it—that he always puts "America first" in his policymaking, as critics continue to bash the Republican leader for his outsized support for Argentina's failing economy compared to the suffering of US consumers, farmers, and workers.
Asked by a reporter aboard Air Force One on Sunday whether he was concerned about US farmers who feel a $40 billion bailout he has helped orchestrate for the beleaguered South American nation "is benefiting Argentina more than it is them," Trump was dismissive of the reporter and the question.
"Look, Argentina is fighting for its life, young lady," Trump mansplained to the female reporter. "You don't know anything about it—they're fighting for their life. Nothing's benefiting Argentina. They are fighting for their life. You understand what that means? They have no money. They have no anything. They're fighting so hard to survive."
After slashing billions in foreign aid around the world this year, cuts that experts say are costing real lives in some of the poorest nations on earth, Trump went on to claim that it was his duty to help struggling Argentina, currently governed by his far-right friend and ally, President Javier Milei, who has driven the economy into a tailspin with his chainsaw-inspired austerity.
Q: What do you have to say to farmers who feel that the deal is benefitting Argentina more than it is them?
TRUMP: Look, Argentina is fighting for its life, young lady. You don't know anything about it. You understand what that means? They are dying pic.twitter.com/1DMyaHtcTR
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 20, 2025
"If I can help them survive in a free world," Trump suggested he would do just that for Argentina. "I happen to like the president of Argentina. I think he's trying to do the best he can. But don't make it sound like they are doing great. They are dying, alright? They're dying."
Trump admitted last week during a cabinet meeting that the $40 bailout is aimed at helping what he described as a "good financial philosophy" of Milei, the far-right libertarian who has slashed pension payments for retired workers, trashed regulations, and eviscerated public spending in deference to corporate and capitalist profits.
Writing for Jacobin, Branko Marcetic argued earlier this month that what it boils down to is that Trump will find funds to salvage the failed policies of Milei, but not healthcare or other needs for American workers or their families.
"In other words," wrote Marcetic, "Trump is sending billions of Americans’ dollars to a foreign country to prop up a failing president who has run his country into the ground by following Trump’s own policy preferences. If Milei fails, Trump’s own, very similar austerity program will take a major blow too.
Soybean farmers across the US have been outspoken about how much Trump's tariff policies have harmed them this year, with China—historically the largest importer of US soybeans—shutting them out, even as they scooped up Argentinian soybeans at bargain prices earlier this year after Milei cut his nation's export tax.
Trump has promised soybean farmers a bailout of their own, but that process has stalled amid the ongoing government shutdown, which Republicans in control of Congress have maintained despite furious calls that doing so puts the healthcare of tens of millions of Americans at risk of soaring premium hikes or lost coverage.
Leading the charge for Trump's policy on Argentina—including $20 billion in US taxpayer funds to stabilize the nation's currency as well as creating a separate $20 billion fund of private investments—is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has said supporting Argentina is vital to US interests and will continue.
However, underneath the administration's support for Argentina lurks the presence of high-profile US investors, some of them closely connected to members of the administration, including Bessent allies and Wall Street players who have backed Trump.
Popular Information's Judd Legum has reported extensively on the financial interests benefiting most from the bailout scheme— and it's not US farmers or consumers. As Legum noted last week:
While farmers struggle to survive and the federal government is shut down, Milei is riding high thanks to the cash infusion from the Trump administration. “There will be an avalanche of dollars,” Milei said in a radio interview shortly before traveling to the White House. “We’ll have dollars pouring out of our ears.”
Speaking with The New Yorker's John Cassidy, former IMF chief economist Maurice Obstfeld explained that one "worrisome" dynamic when it comes to the Argentina bailout is that Bessent is repeatedly saying we will be there for the long term and we will do whatever it takes. He is effectively saying to foreign investors, ‘You will be able to get out whole.’”
As $20 billion has quickly morphed into $40 billion in financial backing of the flailing economy led by the slash-and-burn ideology of Milei, Trump said the US government is also considering buying up beef exports in an effort to control the price for US producers.
“We would buy some beef from Argentina,” he told reporters aboard the Sunday flight on Air Force. “If we do that, that will bring our beef prices down.”
However, with the government shutdown ongoing and Republicans refusing to budge on Democratic demands that healthcare costs be contained, there's no end in sight for relief when it comes to American families facing massive spikes in monthly premiums or loss of health coverage completely.
As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) noted last week: "If you're the President of Argentina, Trump gives you a $20 billion bailout. If you're an American whose health care premiums are about to double? Tough luck."
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American Soybean Farmers Sold Out by Trump While Argentina Gets Bailed Out
"The farm economy is suffering," says the head of the American Soybean Association, "while our competitors supplant the United States in the biggest soybean import market in the world.”
Oct 14, 2025
Trade policy isn’t sexy, but it is weighty, economically speaking. Jobs and wage-income are at-stake. Take President Trump’s trade policy, notably his fondness for tariffs, a tax on US imports that businesses and workers pay.
We begin with the Trump administration’s decision to provide a $20 billion “swap line” (currency exchanges between central banks) with the government of Argentina. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is the point man for the White House on this financial and political issue. Behind Bessent is a Wall Street hedge fund manager, Rob Citrone, a major foreign investor in Argentina, CNN reported.
The Latin American country is in financial distress over its issuance of foreign bonds since President Javier Milei slashed public spending to spur economic growth. Such economic policy goes by the name of austerity.
However, Milei’s so-called pro-growth approach has had the opposite effect. Hunger and poverty among the Argentine working class are up. Workers’ household income is down.
“Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Javier Milei’s presidency,” reports The Guardian, “offering the first hard evidence of how the far-right libertarian’s tough austerity measures are hitting the population.”
What in part preceded such measures slamming the Argentine people was inflation, a general rise in prices.
In the meantime, the Milei government cut the export tax on soybeans. Chinese buyers jumped at this opportunity, reportedly purchasing some 20 shiploads of soybeans from Argentina.
That tax holiday cut revenue to the Argentine government, and created the trade conditions for lower export prices for foreign buyers. That arrangement didn’t fix the tax revenue problem for the Argentine government, however.
Meanwhile, American Soybean Association President Caleb Ragland shared this statement on some impacts of Trump’s trade policy of tit-for-tat tariffs between the world’s two biggest economies:
US soybean farmers have been clear for months: the administration needs to secure a trade deal with China. China is the world’s largest soybean customer and typically our top export market. The US has made zero sales to China in this new crop marketing year due to 20% retaliatory tariffs imposed by China in response to US tariffs. This has allowed other exporters, Brazil and now Argentina, to capture our market at the direct expense of US farmers.
According to Politico, the use of tariffs in China-US trade is having far-reaching effects on American agriculture generally. “The 20 percent retaliatory tariff that Beijing has imposed on US imports hasn’t just pounded soybean producers. All agriculture exports to China were down 53 percent in the first seven months of 2025, compared with the same period last year, according to USDA data.”
Ragland, head of the ASA, continues his criticism of Trump’s trade policy on American soybean farmers. “The frustration is overwhelming. US soybean prices are falling, harvest is underway, and farmers read headlines not about securing a trade agreement with China, but that the US government is extending $20 billion in economic support to Argentina while that country drops its soybean export taxes to sell 20 shiploads of Argentine soybeans to China in just two days.
“ASA is calling on President Trump and his negotiating team to prioritize securing an immediate deal on soybeans with China. The farm economy is suffering while our competitors supplant the United States in the biggest soybean import market in the world.”
What will the White House do to relieve the pain from the decline of demand from China for American agricultural products? Well, the president is considering a $10-$15 billion bailout for agriculture commodity producers.
Wait. There is a federal government shutdown. In other words, the allocation and distribution of a federal bailout for farmers experiencing a shortage of buyers from China will have to wait for the government shutdown to end. Your guess is as good as mine when that happens.
Such contradictions of economics and politics drive history, according to Marx. The federal government shutdown over health care spending while US Border Patrol agents and National Guard troops deploy on the streets of American cities for reason of so-called public safety are two cases in point. Trade policy that harms domestic agriculture generally and soybean growers particularly is another.
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