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Erik Loomis

@erikloomis.bsky.social

15K followers 410 following 9.3K posts

Labor and environmental historian. Writer of books, teacher of American horrors, talker on labor movement. Beer, country music, and football are not just for the right wingers. Cats. The West. Music. Graves. Writes at https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/

www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3h

I continue to stand by my argument that liberals VASTLY overrate the impact of the MSM on contemporary politics, but my god the idea that only Dems have agency to end the shutdown makes me want to throttle some people at the Times.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/u...

These Democrats Could Hold the Key to Ending the Shutdown

www.nytimes.com

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 2d

Halle Butler's Banal Nightmare really sums up both Ginsburg and the Kavanaugh hearings in one righteously beautiful paragraph that I agree with in pretty much every way.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

Back Thursday to discuss the Highlander Center.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

George suffered a stroke in 1890, recovered enough to campaign for William Jennings Bryan in 1896, and then died of another stroke in 1897, a week before another mayoral election in New York where he became a candidate on an anti-Tammany Democratic ticket.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

George slowly migrated to the Democratic Party in the last years of his life, supporting Grover Cleveland because they both opposed high tariffs.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

Specifically, it split over socialism in 1887, with the expelled socialists creating an alternative political party. The ULP tried to revive in some form for several years, but it never again made a serious run as a real labor challenge to the 2-party system.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

This was an auspicious start for an independent labor political movement, but, like most 3rd party challenges in American history, it was made up of diverse forces that collapsed almost immediately after the election.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

In the end, Hewitt won with 41 percent of the vote. George finished second with 31 percent and Roosevelt trailed in third with 28 percent.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

The Democrats responded the George threat with Abram Hewitt, who attacked Roosevelt as a tool of the plutocrats and set himself as a responsible working class voice, claiming that socialists and anarchists controlled the ULP.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

George faced a rising Republican by the name of Theodore Roosevelt, a man who also stood for reform, albeit of a different kind.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

The United Labor Platform also had a provision against police interference in strikes, a reaction to police repression during the Haymarket violence, not to mention the remembered police violence of Tompkins Square a decade prior.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

His mayoral campaign generated a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. His campaign lasted less than a month, but he gave over 100 speeches around the city.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

George had moved to New York in the early 1880s and became an obvious candidate when laborites and socialists decided to form a working class challenge to the duality of Tammany Democrats and plutocratic Republicans who both disdained a strong labor movement.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

George’s ideas quickly spread beyond the U.S. and were especially popular with the English and Scottish working classes, as well as the Irish resisting British domination.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

At its core was the idea that people earned the value of own their own labor, but that land was a common resource for all and should essentially be quasi-socialized with very high taxes on large landowners.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

In 1879, George published Progress and Poverty, arguing for the Single Tax as the surest way to bring corporations under control. The single tax was a basic property tax.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

George started his political life as a Lincoln supporting Republican in the Civil War but soon came to criticize the growing system of industrial capitalism, especially the dominance of railroads over American life, as well as the perfidious influence of Chinese labor on white wages.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

Henry George made one of the most important forays in solving the problem of industrial capitalism.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

Obviously Marx and Engels, not to mention many other socialists, had developed far more complex analyses of the problems of capitalism, but those would not become prominent in the U.S. for another decade, as they tended to arrive with the waves of immigrants that would begin in the 1880s.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

As the analysis of capitalism was not very sophisticated among most native-born Americans, the solutions to these problems tended to focus on the one thing that we could do that would fix everything. That could be the 8-hour day, Chinese exclusion, Bellamyism.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

Into this void came many ideas. Most Americans believed the system of capitalism worked, but that it just needed a single tweak to reconstitute the equality of opportunity they believed it would bring.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

The promises of free labor ideology turned out to be lies for most Americans, as the power of corporations to control all aspects of American life meant that both factory labor and farm labor were denied the fruits of their work.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

The rise of industrial capitalism after the Civil War disturbed many Americans, not because they opposed capitalism but because they thought it was going to create a relatively fair system.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 3d

This Day in Labor History: October 5, 1886. Henry George accepted the nomination of the United Labor Party for the mayor of New York City, part of his reform campaign to raise the working class through the Single Tax. Let's talk about this interesting moment!

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 5d

Good day for California Uber Alles to come up on my music shuffle.