TATIANA, RENEE, ZOHRAN . . . AND DYLAN
On December 30, 35-year-old Tatiana Schlossberg passed away.
The daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Ed Schlossberg, and the granddaughter of Jackie Onassis and President Kennedy, Schlossberg was a young but accomplished journalist who succumbed to a rare form of leukemia.
A month before her passing, on the anniversary of her grandfather's assassination, Schlossberg disclosed her illness and impending death in a piece in The New Yorker entitled "A Battle With My Blood".
Anyone who read it was in tears by the end.
Her leukemia was discovered over a year ago immediately after she gave birth to her second child.
Literally.
Three hours after giving birth, she was told she had leukemia and moved to another floor in the hospital as her parents, husband and son all said goodbye.
What followed was a year and a half of chemotherapy; two stem cell transplants that did not work; a clinical trial of Car-T-cell therapy; months-long hospitalizations at Columbia_Presbyterian and then Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK); constant outpatient treatments at MSK; and too much time to think.
But think she did.
About the daughter and son who will not (or will hardly) remember her.
About the"handsome genius [she] managed to find", her "perfect" husband "who did everything for [her] he possibly could" and with whom she won't "get to keep living this wonderful life".
About her mom, the Kennedy for whom tragedy never skips a generation, the mother she always tried to "protect" but who now must cope with a "new tragedy" she could do "nothing . . . to stop".
And, finally, about her cousin . . .
The one who "during the Car-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, . . . was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services".
The one, she wrote, who was "an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family" and who, "in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed . . . despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government".
The one who "cut nearly half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institute of Health, the world's largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings."
"Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials," she wrote, "were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients. I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission."
"Early in my illness," she continued, "when I had [a] postpartum hemorrhage, I was given a dose of misoprostol to help stop the bleeding. The drug is part of medication abortion, which at Bobby's urging, is currently 'under review' by the Food and Drug Administration."
"I freeze," she concluded, " when I think about what would have happened if it had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve."
In the end, it was a tale of two cousins.
The older forgot Bob Dylan's best advice.
The younger -- in her life and certainly in her last act -- actually lived it.
On Wednesday morning in Minneapolis, a federal ICE agent killed 37-year-old Renee Good.
She was a single mom of three, one of whom -- her six year old son -- is now an orphan.
She was driving her car away from the agent when he shot her through the windshield of her car.
She was not trying to run the agent over with her car, which was moving away from him.
After the shooting, her car careened to the left side of the street and was stopped as it struck the back of a parked vehicle.
A bystander asked another federal agent if he could go help her.
That officer said no.
The bystander told the agent he was a physician.
The officer said "I don't care."
A couple of hours after the shooting, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the victim was "wealponiz[ing] her vehicle" and "attempting to run a law enforcement officer over."
This assertion was refuted by the video evidence of the entire encounter.
That afternoon, President Trump said the victim "behaved horribly. And then she ran [the federal agent] over. She didn't try to run him over. She ran him over."
This assertion was also refuted by the video evidence.
Trump's so-called "border czar”, Tom Homan, declined to weigh in. Instead, he said "Let the investigation play out and hold people accountable based on the investigation.
On Thursday, however, Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) Superintendent Drew Evans said BCA was "reluctantly" withdrawing from that investigation because the federal government "had reversed course" and would not give BCA "access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews." Instead, the investigation will now be done by the FBI, which is headed by Trump-loyalist Kash Patel.
Also on Thursday, Vice President Vance called Good's shooting "a tragedy of her own making."
That too was refuted by the video evidence.
Good was apparently part of a group of neighbors watching masked ICE agents and whistling their presence as a warning to those the masked agents might seize. If she violated any law, and this is unclear, she did so either in diagonally stopping her car so that those behind her had to go left to get around her or in refusing to exit her car when a federal agent ordered her to "Get out of the fucking car".
Though unmarked ICE agents were behind her, it is not clear she was trying to impede them. At least one report had her car so configured on account of the snow and ice in the road. Others reported she was actually asking those behind to go around her. Though she did not exit her car, she did attempt to drive away from the agents and was not running anyone over when she was shot.
Trump's enablers -- Noem and Vance -- immediately trotted out the false story that she was attacking the agents and was a "domestic terrorist" radicalized by "the left".
In a presidency that regularly substitutes false sound bites for fact-based analysis, this is almost certainly false.
According to Associated Press, Good described herself as a "poet and writer and wife and mom" and her ex-husband said "she was no activist and . . . had never known her to participate in a protest of any kind. He described her as a devoted Christian who took part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland when she was younger."
Whether she was monitoring and/or warning of ICE's presence (which appears to be the case); obstructing the agents (much less likely given her effort in asking those behind to go around her); or refusing to follow ICE's profanity-laced demand that she "Get out of the fucking car" (both of which -- her refusal and ICE's cursing -- are true), the shooting was plainly illegal.
No federal agents were in danger nor was anyone else.
And under the law, cops don't get to shoot in that situation.
At Old Dominion University, where she completed her degree while raising children, this poet, writer, wife and mom won the American Academy of American Poets prize.
Her felt-need to oppose ICE-masked tyranny was sincere.
The Dylan in her was real.
Yesterday, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and NY Governor Kathy Hochul met to discuss Mamdani's plans to bring universal child care to NYC.
Doing so would almost certainly require some kind of tax increase, and because New York City does not have the independent power to tax, any such increase would have to be approved by the state.
In the past, Hochul has called Mamdani's proposed tax increases dead on arrival, and inasmuch as this (for her) is an election year, the betting was that Zohran's "socialism" would thus die in Albany.
Yesterday, however, the Governor appeared to be saying "Not so fast."
With Mamdani at her side, she announced plans to ask the state legislature to spend $4.5 billion on child care in the upcoming fiscal year. Some of the money would come from existing funds, some from tax increases; the relative shares were not reported and apparently are not set.
According to The New York Times, the proposal would allow the state "to vastly expand free and low cost child care throughout the state over the next several years, and put New York City on track to become the first city in the United States to provide free universal child care."
Rising economic inequality has made affordability a front and center issue for the middle class in today's America, and for his part, Mamdani has rejected the notion that "big government" has no role in curing it.
In his Inaugural Address on New Years Day, he was adamant: "To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this -- no longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers' lives."
The question, of course, is how to do this.
As a matter of American history, it has been done in the past in only two ways.
The first was in the form of the American west.
So long as farming was America's principal venture, and the frontier remained open, (most) anyone with two feet could improve their lot by walking west, seizing available open land and getting to work.
Millions accepted that invitation.
In 1862, Abe Lincoln even formalized it.
Signing the Homestead Act, his administration granted 160 acres of federal land to anyone willing to farm it.
The second came in the form of FDR's New Deal
Once industrialism arrived and the frontier closed, Lincoln's remedy no longer worked.
America's first Gilded Age produced enormous wealth gaps, regular recessions and, ultimately, two Depressions, the first from 1873 to 1896 and the second in 1929.
Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932, and his successor Truman, who became president in 1945, created and then continued the New Deal to combat inequality and end depressions.
They did so with the big government.
First, they radically reduced inequality with a series of laws that effectively redistributed national income from the top to the middle and the bottom. Social Security provided old age insurance; the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) empowered unions to negotiate wage and benefit increases for their members; an alphabet soup of agencies (like the NRA and the CCC) provided emergency employment; and the later GI Bill paid veterans to get college degrees (and thus higher paying jobs) in the post-World War II world.
Second, they regulated the financial markets to end the schemes that had either caused or facilitated depressions. The Securities Exchange Act made illegal the financial frauds that had actually led to the 1929 Depression. The Banking Act created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that insured customer deposits and stopped bank runs. The Glass-Steagall Act separated commercial and investment banking. This made it illegal for securities firms and investment banks to take deposits. It also made it illegal for Federal Reserve member banks to deal in non-government securities, invest in non-investment grade securities for themselves, underwrite or distribute non-government securities or affiliate with those doing so. Collectively, these new laws protected depositors, curtailed the reach of speculators and ended outright fraud.
In his Inaugural Address, Mayor Mamdani remembered that past.
"Here," he said, "where the the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home." In his version of a (limited) 21st century New Deal for NYC, the cost of child care does not stop "young adults from starting a family", a rent freeze ends "the dread of the latest rent hike", and the buses (at a savings of $6 per round trip) will be "fast and free".
"For too long," he argued, "we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public."
For him, those days need to be over.
And . . .
Unless the free marketeers and ostensible centrists who decry him as a socialist can come up with some better ideas -- for the last thirty years they haven't -- maybe those days need to be over for the rest of us too.
In discussing her apparent embrace of the new Mayor, Governor Hochul said "I enjoy him immensely."
As The Times put it in capturing the moment, she was "singling out the mayor's positivity. She noted that her own children are close to the mayor's age, and that she enjoys working with younger people, because, she said, 'it's just more fun.'"
Score it as one for Mamdani . . .
And one more for Dylan.
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