183 Comments
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Kelly Eggers's avatar

Thank you for this important and terrifying truth. What do we do as ordinary citizens? We support you and other Dems. We stay informed, volunteer, give money (small amounts not millions of course), we try to live decently and with compassion and love for others, we protest illegal and immoral laws but that brought us here… so we won’t give up hope for our country or our countrymen/wonen. But what can we do? Please give us specific ideas. Thank you.♥️

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Sara Frischer's avatar

Senator Murphy, your strong voice is needed now more than ever. The US Crypto Reserve to be proposed in an executive order is the biggest grift into the U.S. Treasury.

Dr. Timothy Snyder shared a consolidated form of On Tyranny, today in his Thinking About. I share it here. Glad you are here on Substack. https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/twenty-lessons-on-tyranny?r=fa5ey&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

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James Utt's avatar

Thank you Senator Murphy for candidly treating this perilous time with the seriousness that it deserves. Too many of your colleagues are seemingly oblivious.

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henry sholar's avatar

bBecause the corporate media is bending its knee to trump (and they will continue to bend to his lies, perhaps more and more) it is on us to document the lawlessness of this incoming regime it is up to us to list every crime by every single one of trump's thugs and spread the word.

no one is coming to save us. this is all on us. document and defy this corrupt criminal syndicate masquerading as the US gov't, effective noon in DC.

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Linda schreiber's avatar

Take photos

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Susan's avatar

And a more disgusting pack of human flesh cannot be found anywhere on the planet.

Pleas pass on the message to the to Senate Dems and House Dems that they need to disconnect to the elders in our party and support our younger members. That Nancy Pelosi is jealous of AOC reflects badly on the entire party.

Also Dems in both senate and house need to clean up their social media. I’m one of many who will be deleting my Instagram after the break this week. People should make themselves easier to find here on Substack and Bluesky (bsky.app)

Thanks for all you do in speaking out against the current fake administration which will destroy the US if the Dems don’t get their acts together and find the courage and creativity needed to govern in the dark moment we find ourselves. I’ll not support any Dem who aligns with the GOP. Or remains a member of AIPAC. So maybe the party is already dead 💔

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Nancy J Mattox's avatar

Me either!!!

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Jan's avatar

Thanks for speaking out. You are one of the very few electeds who are. Dems in the congress must be a united front, in my opinion, to deny as much as possible. Not be a rubber stamp, particularly on the nominees in front of the Senate. That Hedgeseth, RFK, Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, and so many of the worst of us, find “common ground” with any Dem voting on their nomination, is disgusting. Dems need to get loud on issues and accomplishments that are being trashed by the incoming regime, and stop assuming that citizens know that the Dems will save them from themselves.

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Lorila01's avatar

Yes, both of my senators voted in favor of Stephen bessent Who gave Elon carte blanche access to our treasury!!

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Bruce H's avatar

You are making concrete Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” concerns. Let’s hope it can be stopped before it becomes permanent.

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Laurie's avatar

Please use your position as senator to try to rally the other senators to act as an opposition party. So far many do not seem to be up to this task. One example is supporting the Laken Riley Act.

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Moon Cat's avatar

Exactly right. All Democrats should have opposed that.

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Laurie's avatar

I enjoy reading your posts. Based on the number of comments you don't seem to have a very large audience. You should consider posting or podcasting on a bigger platform such as Bulwark, Contrarian or Pod Save America. Please continue to be vocal about what's going on and how we can oppose Trump.

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Wes Hurd's avatar

Sen. Murphy,

Respectfully, I think the question in actuality around regulating tech is not "whether government regulation favors one player over another", but whether the government will even "regulate" whatsoever, in a meaningful sense, and will that regulation be remotely sensible for a vision of flourishing and a 'common good'?

But also, didn't the economic and fiscal policies in the Biden admin. sort of set us up and provide a macro backdrop to get us to this point?? Particularly the easing, so-called Inflation Reduction Act, response to the SVB "crisis" in early 2023, accelerated the trends that find increasing wealth and power in the hands of a few.

It seems that Democrats haven't been nearly sufficiently self-introspective on how their consensus policies and technocratic fiscal administration of government policy brought us here, let alone about why they keep losing national elections.

I've lived and tried to thrive in the DC area for over ten years now, and at this point I'm pretty convinced from both personal experiences and seeing how things have played out at a macro scale, that institutions embedded in the DC ecosystem are structurally degraded and incapable of self-introspection; hell is more likely to freeze over than institutions in DC and institutional leadership adopting a posture of humility and self-assessment regarding how their intentions and agendas lead or contribute to certain (negative) outcomes.

Anyways, best of success to you with your efforts in the 119th Congress.

Best,

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Erica Etelson's avatar

Can you say more about how the Inflation Reductoin Act contributed to wealth consolidation?

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nedweenie's avatar

In order to build wealth you need to be able to own assets that provide income streams or that you can buy low and sell high later. The people who already own assets benefit in an inflationary environment because inflation raises their asset's value (and/or performance). They can sell their old assets at a higher inflated price and make a bigger profit. They can also use them as collateral for loans to buy more assets, etc. Those who don't already have assets but want to own them to build their own wealth can't in an inflationary environment because they're priced out of the game. And they're getting downsized by paying higher prices for the basics. In an inflationary environment the really wealthy get wealthier, the middles anxiously tread water and the not so wealthy get downsized. Because assets.

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Erica Etelson's avatar

Thanks for that! How do you parse how much inflation was caused by IRA vs supply chain or other factors? What would have been more effective ways of curbing inflation?

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Laura's avatar

I don’t believe the IRA contributed personally! I believe that companies realized how much they can take advantage of consumers during COVID and they haven’t looked back. Corporate greed…

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nedweenie's avatar

You're welcome. I'm no economist, or policy wonk, so I'm unable to answer your first question. There are plenty of learned opinions on that online. But with the second, I would guess that an ounce or two of prevention would have been worth a trillion pounds of cure.

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Wes Hurd's avatar

Ms. Etelson,

It's not definitive, but I based that claim on listening to commentary from Michael Cembalest who is a JP Morgan strategist. I would also second the other comments here - higher interest rates + elevated prices leading to record corporate earnings are good for those who already have assets.

I think Matt Stoller has also talked along these lines.

Whether inflation was mainly caused from supply side, demand or something else like IRA, it seems like the consensus fiscal policy of Biden (and Obama before him) did not set up for a very good situation.

Also, it's sort of self-defeating when on the one hand there was the Lina Khan FTC + Rohit Chopra CFPB, while on the other hand Yellen's policies. It seems like the previous admin. was disjointed and incoherent, too much contradiction.

Like it or not this is something where the current admin. is probably more consistent and coherent, even if their policies won't be good. But at this point it might be 'moot', as they say.

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Aravind Narayan's avatar

"keep losing national elections" .

They don't. This is false. In a polarized environment, with the electoral college, and Senate map biases ..they've actually performed relatively well in terms of election results. Complete failures in passing big ticket legislative it's that are necessary, though. Legislative filibuster must go, and PR, Guam , US Virgin Islands must be added.

Adding DC will have constitutional issues in the borderline Trumpist court.

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Christina Newhill's avatar

Thank you Kelly - your post reflects my thoughts exactly. Today, what specific action can I, as an individual American citizen, take to combat the oligarchs and maintain democracy aside from the actions Kelly identifies?

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Chris Hanrahan's avatar

You’re one of the few in the Democratic Party with the ability to clearly articulate what Trump and the tech bros are trying to do. The rest of your party appears supine or asleep at the switch.

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Kathleen A Dwyer's avatar

Are the elected Democrats going to fight for us.

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Janis Lentz's avatar

They damn well had BETTER fight for us! This is WAR!!!

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Get It Right's avatar

Lying to a federal Judge today should buy that ticket back to Africa for him and his anchor babies

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Debra Solomon's avatar

Oh god would that it be true !

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Cathy Nuzum's avatar

Yup… and the poor suckers who voted for Trump have absolutely no idea they did this to themselves and people will suffer.

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Elizabeth Behnke's avatar

It is so sad that this is how democracy dies: at the hands of an overly wealthy but sadly insecure bunch of SKIPPING DIPSHITS…🤔🙄🙄🙄

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