Latest news with #Reaganomics
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
a day ago
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: Sizing up the present and prepping for tomorrow
Have you noticed how a good tailor doesn't just note down size. They examine the grain of the fabric, test its stretch, study how it drapes and where it may crease. Precision in measurement matters, but it's the understanding of the material that determines how well a garment fits in motion, not just on paper. Much like today's world where the complexities don't lie in their surface figures, but in the hidden tensions, subtle shifts, and structural weaves beneath. Stitching the world together requires more than tape measures, it demands feel and a keen eye for detail. Let's dive in. Take Donald Trump's proposed second-term economic plan, for instance. On the surface, it's just another size-too-big tax cut, but Kenneth Rogoff reminds us the fabric is strained, federal debt is at 122 per cent of GDP, interest payments outpacing defence spending, and the bond markets growing increasingly restless. The stitchwork that held Reaganomics together no longer fits. Yet both parties seem reluctant to tailor in tighter fiscal seams, even as the dollar's credibility frays. In Tamil Nadu, Kamal Haasan's foray into politics reveals the limits of star power when not matched with political grain. Aditi Phadnis traces his trajectory which contains flashes of brilliance but little drape with the electorate. His alliance with the DMK may buy him a Rajya Sabha seat, but it's clear that charisma alone isn't a cut above unless it's lined with deeper grassroots stitching. Sandeep Goyal draws the contrast between Zeenat Aman's nostalgia-laced but weak Netflix return and Bobby Deol's sharply recut villainous turns. Reinvention requires understanding not just the old silhouette but today's fabric. Campa Cola nailed that, relaunching not with sentiment but with savvy pricing and strategic placement, showing us how legacy can be re-tailored to fit modern demand. Meanwhile, Shekhar Gupta threads through the geopolitical shift along India's borders. Pakistan's brief military flare-up wasn't a standalone patch, but a piece from China's strategic pattern. The drape of conflict has changed, subtle, layered, and stitched from multiple fronts, with Beijing quietly trimming the edges. And finally, Jyoti Mukul brings us to a repair shop in Gurugram where old gadgets are being brought back to life. Sunil Kumar's soldering iron is perhaps the truest metaphor, a reminder that good fixes aren't about replacing parts, but respecting the integrity of what's already there. With India's new Repairability Index and global moves toward circular economies, we're slowly learning to value mends over disposals. Stay tuned, and remember, true mastery lies in seeing how the cloth looks when worn in the real world!
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Real Reason We Want to See MAGA as a Cult
It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the word cult affixed itself to Donald Trump and his movement. It may have been as early as 2016, when, weeks before the Iowa caucus, Trump declared with god-man-like aplomb that he could shoot someone in Times Square and not lose a vote. It may have been mid-2018, when Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, fretted as he left office about the 'cultish' turn in the party. Or maybe it can be traced to a New York Times editorial board op-ed, published a few days before Corker's comments made the news, which nervously noted the rapid transformation of the Republican Party into a machine for devotion to a single mortal. Certainly, by January 6, 2021, and the mouth-frothing fervor of Stop the Steal, cult had gone from being a political jab to a term of art, widely employed to describe the apparently invincible thrall in which Trumpism holds millions of Americans. The impulse to understand MAGA this way is owing in part to the efflorescence of stories about cults across pop culture. From Wild Wild Country's account of the rise and fall of the self-styled free-sex guru Rajneesh for a generation of wealth-seeking believers in Reaganomics to The Vow's portrayal of NXIVM's transformation from corporate management seminar to sex-trafficking ring; from Warren Jeffs's polygamous Latter-day Saints–offshoot commune in Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey to the charismatic hold of spiritual influencer Teal Swan in The Deep End, thirst for tales of charismatic leaders, secret rituals, and salacious scandals seems unquenchable. Between the major streaming platforms, Netflix, Hulu, Max, Disney+, and Prime, more than five dozen cult documentaries are currently available in a panoply of flavors: sex, UFO, meditation, doomsday, and on and on. We are in a billion-dollar cult culture boom. As a mass delusion fueled by charisma, shared grievance, aspiration, and a stubborn rejection of inherited truths, Trumpism bears no small resemblance to these insular, shadowy communities of faith and heterodoxy that have enthralled and entertained us. Over the past near-decade, people across the otherwise fissured political spectrum have become armchair experts in strange but potentially revolutionary groups, their imaginations caught up in escalating radicalism. And across dozens of stories, they are hooked by a single enticing promise: All cults fall. In TV cults, the skeptic is always vindicated. This, in fact, is the real satisfaction of the cult narrative: the reinforcement of the fantasy that we who watch are different—better, smarter, and more equipped to hold power and influence—than those who believe. Having spent hours engrossed in the details of being in a cult, we imagine ourselves to have understood a dangerous phenomenon without ever having been subject to that danger. Not only might we glimpse that elusive Secret, we see the invisible wires and sleights of hand and, maybe most importantly, the way it all turns out. We already know that it is doomed. We are the new prophets, gifted with future sight. In the waxing days of Trump's second presidential act, this is the true appeal of seeing MAGA as a cult: It's an alibi for liberals who are less trying to fathom the reasons for the man's return than dreaming of his movement's catastrophic collapse. The same combination of moral superiority and narrative certainty that foresees the imminent end of Heaven's Gate as they look to the sky for escape also fuels the internet's hunger for signs of #MAGARegret and makes the gleeful schadenfreude of 'FAFO' (fuck around and find out) a new political rallying cry. As the Democratic Party continues to wring its hands in meek and ineffectual dismay over the Trump administration's daily onslaught, its base has discovered the illiberal pleasures of scrolling TikToks that stitch videos of Trump supporters weeping over slashed farm subsidies or shuttered businesses against a gospel choir chorus of 'I never thought the leopards would eat my face.' Sadism, reveling in the suffering of others, is—as a rule—frowned upon, but when its satisfaction is turned toward a cultural phenomenon we have been told is too extremist or dangerous to exist in the mainstream, it comes to be a salutary violence. For their own good. Hard lessons, like a sharp slap to interrupt a hysteric outburst, school people back into good behavior. Except when the finding out doesn't seem to having been told for so long that they were wrong—uneducated, impolite, fanatical, gullible, racist, backward—MAGA supporters ascended to the highest ranks of American politics. From inside the Oval Office, they hear their own rageful, incoherent sputtering at the injustices of the Deep State and The System issuing from the mouth of the most powerful man in world. It's heady, it's fortifying, it's vindicating. This is the part of the cult narrative where the tearful pleas of loved ones to come home bounce back 'Return to Sender.' This is also the part that devotees of cult media and Trump opponents struggle to come to terms with: People don't want to leave what has given them such psychic and social gratification, especially to return to what didn't serve them in the first place. So we wait, with unconcealed anticipation, for the MAGA faithful to suffer the same fate as the brainwashed devotees of Mother God, who were arrested for carting their leader's mummified body through the desert in hopes of finding the salvation she promised, or of Charles Manson, whose 'family' followed him all the way to prison for life. Meanwhile, Trump supporters seem to remain impervious to the lessons they were supposed to have found out. And indeed, the more they refuse to repudiate the president and their own beliefs, or admit the causal connection between his policies and their tribulations, the more the left fantasizes their misfortune. We crave their reckoning as the satisfying (and promised) final act in the real-life docuseries we've been mainlining since before the pandemic. But what if the arc of history doesn't bend toward justice so much as turn back in on itself? What if the story of cults that so tidily predicts the end of Trump is as anesthetizing and deluding as the ideology it claims to oppose? It's gripping entertainment, but cult media's promises of guaranteed closure are not so much real as a compensation for what we already know. After the cameras stop rolling, after scenes of comforting closure are edited together, the story of a cult goes on. It continues in the courtroom, as undaunted adherents of Warren Jeffs crowd the spectator box. It continues as millions of Americans keep flocking to Rajneesh's Indian ashram. People continue to believe. Cults don't just die, they shift so that they can meet new social and psychic needs. Cult documentaries can't tell us what happens next because their power lies in their endings—the fiery siege, the tearful confession, the moment of brutal awakening—endings that are designed to produce social repression. Repression, Freud says, is the 'relaxation of the censorship—the formation of a compromise.' Everyone gives up a little (or a lot) of what we want in exchange for the muffled security of being 'normal.' A standard assumption about groups that share unconventional beliefs and rituals is that, by declaring them a cult and pushing them outside the bounds of acceptable society, we can curtail their influence. Indeed, that is precisely what these documentaries aim to do; to show and then contain the dangers that cults pose to the social compact. The truth is that when we've agreed to live within the safe strictures of normativity, it is almost unbearable to see people living beyond our psychic means. We must believe there's a cost. Crafted to impress upon everyone who tunes in precisely what the price of straying outside the bounds of decorum and constraint is, cult media has inadvertently written a new coda. That final episode is the beginning of the story's second life: the memes, the merch, the folklore, the obsession. Jonestown didn't end with the Kool-Aid; it became a metaphor for not heeding caution. Manson went to prison but became a cultural icon. Stalin was embalmed, but his political blueprint persists—in India, in Turkey, in America. The cult documentary's finale is just the opening act of its cultural immortality. Our hunger for the collapse of Trump's movement isn't just about justice—it's about the thrill of witnessing a story we know how to consume. But history doesn't follow scripts. Faith and loyalty are not so easily shaken. What appears to be the end of the story is, in fact, often a lesson against the calculus of consequences. Cults don't disappear; they go viral. And the reckoning we're waiting for? It might just be the prologue to something we don't yet know how to fear. After all, 30 years after the fiery siege in Waco, the scene of the inferno out of which abandoned followers of David Koresh staggered blinkingly into federal custody, Donald Trump held the first official rally of his second presidential campaign there. One end, another beginning.
The Guardian
13-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
From sleeping in doorways to reporting on homelessness: the journalist chronicling an American crisis
Veteran journalist Kevin Fagan spent decades covering homelessness for the San Francisco Chronicle, reporting on a crisis that persists despite billions poured into housing and services and years of political debate. The issue is personal for him. Fagan was episodically homeless in his youth, sleeping in his car and camping outside while he attended college and later in doorways abroad as a traveling musician. Over the course of his career, he's kept a relentless focus on what really matters: the people living outside. Now in a new book, The Lost and the Found, Fagan argues powerfully that the 'atrociously unforgivable' poverty in the US continues to stymie efforts to alleviate the situation. He dives deeply into human stories, exploring the paths of two people who wound up living on the streets of San Francisco: Rita Grant, a mother of five from Florida, and Tyson Feilzer, a charismatic young man who grew up in an affluent Bay Area community. Both reconnected with loved ones who found them through Fagan's stories in the Chronicle, and Fagan tells of lives ravaged by homelessness and addiction and their families' tireless efforts to help. The Guardian spoke with Fagan about homelessness and what's changed in the decades he's been reporting on the issue, and why there is still reason to be hopeful. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It just got more calcified. I started as a paid daily newspaper reporter the year Ronald Reagan got elected. I watched homelessness explode through the 80s. The root of it all, it seemed clear to me, was the decimation of social aid programs under Reaganomics. And in the late 70s and early 80s when mental institutions were pulled down through an effort by both the left and the right. Liberals thought that it was compassionate to close institutions – which had problems – and put patients into board-and-care homes. The right thought 'we can save a lot of money'. The trouble was government didn't follow up adequately with funding, so we wound up with a lot of mentally ill people in the streets. Through the 90s, the country discovered supportive housing was a terrific fix for the most severely troubled people. You bring them inside and then deal with the problems that put them out in the street to begin with. As the years have gone by, there's been a lot of effort put into supportive housing, but it's expensive. The problem that has consistently stood out for me as a reporter for the last 45 years is poverty. Affordable housing has disappeared in large numbers. My research, which I put in the book, shows that about 30% of the country lives right at or below poverty level, if you take the cost of living for the individual areas and demographics into account. When you have that amount of poverty and people struggling, you're not going to get rid of homelessness. You need to attack it at the root, but we're treating it on the other end with Band-Aids for people who've been ruined who shouldn't have been ruined to begin with. I don't think it would be different. The number of homeless people is about the same today as it was then. The main difference is that people use tents. Back in 2003, it was mostly tarps draped over shopping carts and cardboard and shacks. Other than that, you have the same dynamics: poor people who can't afford a place to live and wound up disabled in one way or another. These are the long-term chronically homeless. We concentrated on the chronically homeless because that's usually about 30% of any city's homeless population but it's the most visible. They are the most desperate and dysfunctional folks. We wanted to figure out what was going to help them. It's the same fix today as it was then – supportive housing, outreach, counseling, drug rehab, mental rehab, healthcare. Today a lot of us have done stories about the scourge of fentanyl. Fentanyl is horrible, but, frankly, heroin was killing people by the droves in 2003, in the 90s, in the 80s. Fentanyl kills quicker and is more volatile. But you still have a very similar dynamic of desperation and fear and mental trauma and addiction today that you did 20 years ago. A lot of people think people are homeless by choice. It's not a choice. No one wants to be homeless. People get stuck in their survival modes. They wind up in the street unable to pull themselves off or to find a way off. The most severely troubled become addicted, which then starts this awful cycle. You're stuck and it becomes scary to think of giving up your survival routine to go into a shelter when you hear bad things about shelters. No one wants to sleep outside. It's hard, it's cold, it's dirty. You put cardboard down to keep yourself from getting too cold. People can come by steal your stuff, beat you up, especially if you're sleeping alone, which I did a lot of in my young life. That's no way to be. People want a door that they can lock, and a bed they can sleep in with a roof over their heads. The other thing is most cities believe people are pouring into their city from outside. That is way overblown. Only 30% of homeless people in San Francisco came from outside the city. The rest were housed before they became homeless. The prime example of that is veteran homelessness. Over the last 10 years, veteran homelessness has been cut in half, at a time when homelessness overall has risen. The reason that worked is the VA [US Department of Veterans Affairs] and HUD [US Department of Housing and Urban Development], those two in particular, teamed up to address chronic veterans homelessness. The advantage was the VA could supply healthcare and in combination with HUD special housing vouchers and those could be used in independent housing or in supportive housing contexts. A lot of housing was created for homeless veterans both as complexes and individually, and healthcare was key to helping them. It showed what can happen if we as a society put enough of the right kind of resources into the problem. Support programs that work. Pay attention. And that's hard. Most people are working their jobs, taking care of their families. But be an informed citizen. Read stuff like in the Chronicle, in the Guardian, that examines programs in a journalistically objective way, trying to show what works and what doesn't. On a personal level, it's really good to volunteer at soup kitchens, food banks. They always need to help because everyone is underfunded. On the most personal level, walking down the street, when you pass by homeless folks, be kind. Stop and talk. With the range of difficulty that a chronically homeless person has, having someone just have a conversation and treat you with dignity and make you feel seen for a few minutes, that's a gift. That having been said, if you walk by someone shooting up, acting out with a mental episode or dopesick, those kinds of behaviors you're not gonna wanna stop and talk because a lot of times you'll be talking to the behavior not the person. Stop and talk to people who are rationally available for a conversation. Cutting social services to the bone probably won't lead to anything productive in terms of alleviating homelessness. I think that could lead to a more punitive approach. We'll see where the federal government hits. State and local governments are gonna have to react in their own way as resources dwindle. Whatever it is, it's gonna be tough. A lot of cities have been under a ton of pressure over the last several years, as the street population has become more visible, to erase it. The public goes through these periods of compassion fatigue, and we're in a heavy one right now. The general feeling is: 'OK, just make it go away.' So you see people being swept to the edges of town. In the case of San Francisco, the city doubled the number of shelters, vastly increased the amount of supportive housing, so a good number of people are going into facilities. But there are still people being swept off to other neighborhoods, which is how it's always been. Stories like Rita's give me hope because Rita blossomed into the person she should've been. She became a health nutritionist and a licensed massage therapist. She was a delightful person, street smart, and just enjoying the hell out of life. The possibility was always there when she was in the street. Watching her reconnect with her sisters and her kids was wonderful. They came to appreciate each other again in the way that you can when someone's not in distress on the street. It's really inspiring to see how someone can become restored.
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Kendrick Lamar's unlikely journey to Super Bowl halftime headliner
At the 2016 Grammy Awards, as the cry 'Black Lives Matter' was still reverberating across the world, hip-hop star Kendrick Lamar, who took home five Grammys that night, used a masterful performance to call out America's history of racial violence. He appeared chained outside a prison cell before leading a chain gang to the center of the stage. His performance of 'The Blacker the Berry,' where he was accompanied by Black warrior women dancing around him, was followed by 'Alright,' the unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement with its powerful mantra 'We gon' be alright!' It's not easy to put together a meaty stage performance that leaves people talking, but the Compton-born Kendrick has masterfully met the challenge throughout his career. Not only did he stand out at the 2016 Grammys, but he also shined in a performance with Beyoncé at the 2016 BET Awards and again at the 2018 Grammys with U2 and comedian Dave Chappelle. What's remarkable is that an artist whose work is so deeply political and who hasn't chased pop stardom was picked as the artist for Sunday night's Super Bowl. It would have been far easier to imagine Drake, the perennial hitmaker who's the subject of Kendrick's ubiquitous Grammy-winning diss track 'Not Like Us,' being picked for the Super Bowl halftime stage. But Kendrick comes from a particular tradition of MCs who have achieved commercial success while opposing America's racist machine. It's likely that Jay-Z, executive producer of the NFL halftime performances and entertainment strategist, intentionally chose Kendrick because of his opposition to anti-Blackness, a stance Jay-Z has consistently taken. In fact, Jay-Z joined forces with the NFL to contribute to the league's activism campaign called Inspire Change, which addresses criminal justice reform, educational outgrowth and police reform. 'Kendrick Lamar is truly a once-in-a-generation artist and performer,' Jay-Z said in a press release. 'Kendrick's work transcends music, and his impact will be felt for years to come.' Kendrick appeared on the national scene in 2011 with his debut album, 'Section.80.' Much like Jay-Z's early music did, Kendrick's criticized Reaganomics for its role in institutional racism, and shaping the self-hate, nihilism and drug culture seen in his neighborhood. While 'Section.80' was regarded as a solid debut album, it was Kendrick's 2012 album 'good kid, m.A.A.d city' (GKMC) that cast him into the best-rapper-alive conversations. Subtitled 'A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar,' GKMC is one of the greatest conceptual albums. The events he raps about — witnessing a friend's murder, breaking into someone's home, being passed PCP-laced marijuana — take place in one day. The events on GKMC mirror actual events in Kendrick's life: witnessing two murders, being shot at, experiencing two raids by the Los Angeles Police Department and being beaten by a crew of teenagers in front of his mother. The commercial success continued with his 2015 album, 'To Pimp a Butterfly,' where he metaphorically tells the story of America pimping Black men for their artistic talent. His commercial success peaked with the 2017 release of 'DAMN.,' where he wrestles with faith in God and America. 'DAMN.,' which won the Pulitzer Prize for music, the first recording that was not jazz or classical to do so, solidified Kendrick's place in hip-hop as a lyricist and performer who can deliver politically charged messages in a digestible manner. Jay-Z choosing Kendrick to perform before millions of viewers speaks to Kendrick's ability to tell stories about racism, politics, religion and DEI for a mass audience. This is not an easy feat to accomplish. When asked by Apple Music commentators Ebro Darden and Nadeska Alexis in a Wednesday news conference what to expect during his Super Bowl LIX performance, Kendrick said, 'I think I've always been very open about storytelling throughout all of my catalog and my history of music. And I've always had a passion about bringing that on whatever stage. I've always had a form of that sense of making people listen, but also see and think a little.' Kendrick's masterful storytelling put him at a distance from other hip-hop artists. The 37-year-old rapper's genius is his ability to use his experiences to critique — and negotiate — America's oppressive machine. Stories told on records like 'Keisha's Song,' 'Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst' and 'Black Boy Fly,' among others, bring to life the day-to-day experiences of mostly poor Black people living in neglected neighborhoods. Kendrick's storytelling isn't limited to songs and conceptual albums. As he's shown, his stage performances are just as evocative. During the 2016 BET Awards performance with Beyoncé, he again called out America's wrongdoing. While running through the lyrics to their collaboration, 'Freedom,' a song from Beyoncé's album 'Lemonade,' the stage methodically flooded with water, fire and smoke, alluding to the residue of war. In the 2018 Grammys performance, he called out America's hypocrisy for its conflicting ideals of freedom and violence while performing his song 'ELEMENT.' We see on that video an American flag flying in the background, and after he raps the first verse, the song abruptly ends with a gunshot. We see dancers dressed in army fatigues as Kendrick raps through the second verse, which also ends abruptly with a gunshot. Chappelle appears onstage to say that an honest Black man can be frightening to America. By the end of the performance, dancers, dressed in blood-red bodysuits, all fall down at the sound of gunshots. With each gunshot sound, Kendrick called out a term: integrity, job, children, land, preacher, brother, feelings, morals, comfort, culture, neighbor and equality. Kendrick isn't the same performer he was in 2018. He's much better. During his 2023 'Big Steppers' tour, promoting his fifth studio album, 'Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,' the 20-time Grammy winner used a piano, a white silhouette, beams of light and the voice of British actress Helen Mirren to tell the story of someone working through addictions, distractions and fruitless passions. Kendrick cannot separate his experiences with incarceration, violence, murder and racial exploitation from his craft as a rapper and performer. Each performance is like one piece of a puzzle that, when complete, will tell a full story: Hip-hop is spiritual for Kendrick and has been the medium to help him face and quell his addictions and everyday distractions, and to critique America's racist machine. In Kendrick's world, hip-hop saves lives. A week ago, Kendrick Lamar took home five Grammys. He won song of the year, best rap performance, best rap video, best rap song and record of the year, all for 'Not Like Us.' Whether he performs the song — which Drake has claimed in a lawsuit amounts to character assassination — remains to be seen. But I'm guessing that Kendrick, with what will likely be his only time performing for a Super Bowl audience, doesn't want to be remembered as the 'Not Like Us' rapper and won't perform that song. This article was originally published on
