CEOs Stole Your Wages with This One Weird Trick
Hi!
I hope you’ll forgive a little bit of self-promotion up top. I’m excited to announce that this month I published a new comic book as part of my day job at Civic Ventures that is free to read. It’s called Trillion Dollar Heist, and it explains a very real trick the super-rich use to steal trillions of dollars from the paychecks of working Americans.
Trillion Dollar Heist tells the story of Marta, a janitor who steps in to stop a CEO from siphoning billions of dollars away from workers and into the coffers of the wealthy shareholder class. Along the way, Marta explains how the richest people in the world have sucked over $70 trillion from the pockets of the American middle class using a method that was completely illegal until the 1980s. You can read it for free on Bindings, a super-cool new site that helps comics creators share their work with readers with a slick interface.
The comic is drawn by my old pal Alan Robinson (who worked with me on my first comic, Planet of the Nerds,) edited by the great Sarah Star Litt, colored by Pippa Bowland, who also did marvelous work coloring Peter Krause’s art in our short comic about cryptids in the Washington woods last year, and lettered and copyedited by Andworld Design. It’s a beautiful package that is, again, completely free to read. And if you want to download it in PDF form and share it that way, I’ve also got you covered.
I’ve never written a comic about real-world issues before, and so this book was a fun challenge. I’m excited to make some more comics about economic issues in conjunction with my other comics work, and I hope if you like Trillion Dollar Heist, you’ll share it far and wide.
I’ve Been Writing
It was a lot of fun interviewing Rick Steves and learning all about his successful travel business, which is based up in Edmonds, Washington. Steves is a dynamo, and we talked about topics ranging from the colonialism of travel to his plans for the future of the company that bears his name.
I’ve been going to comic book stores my whole life, but even I have to admit that the experience of shopping in them isn’t great for people who just want to browse: They’re often crowded and hard to navigate. So for the Seattle Times I wrote about Phantom Zone Comics, a comics shop in Lynnwood that is owned by a man with lots of experience at clothing retailers like Eddie Bauer. He’s brought that experience to comics retail, and the result is a brightly lit, nicely spaced-out comic shop that is a true pleasure to browse.
I’ve Been Reading
In the middle of this month, I was hit hard by what I suspect is the flu. Even though I got my flu shot in the fall, it was still kind of a doozy. For more than a week, I didn’t have the mental capacity to read or listen to a sustained narrative, so a few poetry books entered the rotation.
I really enjoyed Caleb Femi’s The Wickedest, a book that documents one wild night out at the clubs—a celebration of youth and hedonism and dancing. Eve Ewing’s book Electric Arches features a few poems that start out typewritten and then transform into the author’s handwriting—a neat trick that I’d never seen before, and which works perfectly in book form. Watchmen author Alan Moore wrote a book-length poem about the history of same-sex love called The Mirror of Love that was illustrated by José Villarrubia. It was my least favorite of the three, but yet again I’m in awe of Moore’s wide-ranging talents.
And then I read three books by young novelists. Maggie Su’s Blob: A Love Story is about a woman who finds a mysterious blob in an alley and trains it to become her boyfriend. It’s a fun but slight book—the kind of novel that keeps you locked in but quickly fades away once you put it down.
I was similarly half-engaged with Virginia Felto’s Victorian Psycho, a novel about a woman who goes on a killing spree in Victorian times. I’m far from a Bret Easton Ellis fan, but I do think if your novel’s title evokes American Psycho you’d better follow through with some satire or sharp comedy or something interesting. That said, I was not at all surprised to hear that this one is already being developed for a film starring Margaret Qualley, and I could see this being a case of the movie improving on the book.
Sara Siligar’s Vantage Point focuses on a vaguely Kennedy-esque wealthy family that lives in Maine. They’re confronted with a series of jarring personal attacks involving embarrassing videos and negative press attention, and everything comes undone in dramatic fashion. I do want to warn anyone thinking about reading this one that a character in the book is wrestling with disordered eating, and the passages describing her emotions and actions would definitely be triggering for people in the wrong headspace.
In My Ears
Last month, I wrote about moving from Spotify to Apple Music and I lamented the fact that while I was enjoying Apple Music, it wasn’t as great at recommendations as Spotify used to be. Well, a reader of this email who works for Apple reached out and directed me to this Reddit thread that explains all the different ways that you can find similar but fresh music. And as I’ve been playing with Apple Music in the month since, I’ve found some other neat discovery tools, including a handy pull-up menu that helps you find other songs to add to your queue. After a month of playing around with it, I think I can say that Apple Music is at least as good at recommending new songs as Spotify was back in its heyday, and I’m starting to think it might even be better at recommendation than Spotify ever was.
And Finally...the Politics
I don’t know if I have too much to add to the daily chaos of politics this month. I’m watching and waiting to see how much damage Trump’s appointees are doing, and what I’ve seen so far has been exactly as bad as I was worried it would be. And as far as foreign affairs go, the administration has successfully accomplished a heel turn, completely reversing our standing in the international community. It would be almost impressive how quickly we allied ourselves with our former enemies and alienated our allies, if the implications weren’t so scary.
One thing I’m encouraging myself to do is to make a mental list of people and organizations who have been unnecessarily complicit with the Trump administration: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Target, Tik Tok, etc. I’d encourage you to do the same. And then the most important step is to never forget that these people happily rolled over for Trump. No matter what: Don’t forgive them, and don’t forget, and always speak loudly and repeatedly about what they did. Trump is not going to be in power forever, but the cowards who aided and abetted him should be shamed and shunned and ostracized long after he’s gone. This is the time to cultivate grudges.
I do think the Trump administration is about to hit some brick walls. People are losing jobs all over America, and even Fox News pundits are basically begging Trump to reverse job cuts that affected their friends. Politics hits differently when it stops being about scoring outrage points on social media and starts actually affecting people in your lives.
But the one wild card in the Trump chaos for me is Elon Musk. Musk is already doing an incalculable amount of damage to the federal government, of course. But the most worrisome part of all this is that he’s not an elected official and he has a seemingly bottomless reserve of resources that he can use to ensure that he has access to the levers of power for decades to come. If Musk plays his cards right, he could basically be a major player on every single Republican ticket for the next twenty or thirty years, ensuring that we’re never fully rid of him.
Luckily, Elon Musk is an idiot and a narcissist who needs to be at the center of everyone’s attention all the time, and people are getting sick of him. It’s very possible that he could wind up becoming the most unpopular man in America over the next year or so. But the problem is that the world’s richest man ultimately doesn’t have to care that much about what the hoi polloi thinks of him.
That’s why I think #teslatakedown, the rolling protests of Tesla dealerships, is such a great idea. Musk’s immense fortune is still largely anchored by Tesla’s outsized stock valuation, and if we can successfully turn Tesla into a toxic brand that people are embarrassed to be affiliated with, Musk will still be incredibly wealthy but he will no longer be richest-man-in-the-world wealthy. Losing that title would be a catastrophic blow to his power and to his self-image.
I genuinely think speaking out against Musk and his products is one of the most important pieces of political action that we can take as individuals right now. So if you are the kind of person who goes to protests, maybe you should participate in one of the many Tesla protests happening around greater Seattle tomorrow:
And if you’re not comfortable attending protests, think about how you can help transform Tesla and Starlink and SpaceX and Musk into toxic brands. Maybe you can make t-shirts or stickers. Maybe you can share an original song or a video to social media. Maybe you have friends in your life you can talk to about shunning all things Musk. Every little bit of social action helps. He’s currently the single biggest threat to our democracy, and we all can do our part to help make it absolutely embarrassing for anyone to have their name identified with him.
In order to save democracy, let’s all give that goddamned Nazi the biggest metaphorical atomic wedgie the world has ever seen.
That’s all for this month. The next time you receive this newsletter, the days will be longer and the weather will be nicer. That’s something to look forward to.
—Paul