Bill Hogseth

Before the wave hits: Rural Wisconsin organizes against the One Big Beautiful Bill • Wisconsin Examiner Congress unleashed an economic earthquake, triggering a tsunami of devastating after-effects soon to crash down on our rural communities.

On our Commentary page, from @billhogseth.bsky.social ... Before the wave hits: Rural Wisconsin organizes against the One Big Beautiful Bill

“An unwavering commitment to big tent politics and multiracial solidarity is how we defeat the divide-and-conquer tactics this administration relies upon. Building trust and power across differences. Listening for common ground, shared humanity. Seeing every person as a potential ally, not an enemy”

“This fight will not be won by politicians, consultants, or pollsters. It will be won by regular people who have decided to build a movement town by town, county by county, state by state… A new political coalition will be necessary, one big enough to include anyone who isn’t a billionaire.”

There's been a lot of discussion about the echoes of the civil rights movement in the protests today, with people obviously drawing comparisons between the strategies, tactics and coalitions that were vital then and are still vital now.

But this post has me thinking about a different echo ...

Opinion | I’ve Covered Police Abuse for 20 Years. What ICE Is Doing Is Different.

“The lies this administration is telling about Ms. Good [and Mr. Pretti] aren't those you deploy as part of a cover-up. They're those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything.”

A temperature of around minus 10 degrees did little to slow Minnesotans around the Twin Cities on Friday, with businesses closing, workers and students staying home, and demonstrators demanding that federal immigration agents depart. nyti.ms/3Zu4tiB

They are never, ever going to win in Minnesota.

How did MLK Jr. Become a Socialist? A forgotten network of radicals helped teach King how to organize—and how to link civil rights to economic redistribution for all

Many sympathetic “radical King” accounts still cling to a American fairy tale—the Great Man who had it in him. But MLK Jr came up inside a web of socialist organizers who treated racial & economic justice as inseparable & treated organizing as a teachable craft

www.laborpolitics.com/p/who-taught...

It was 10 degrees when they did this.

Video Analysis of ICE Shooting Sheds Light on Contested Moments

Important work here from the NYT. Ross wasn’t run over. He dropped his cell phone, which he had shifted to his left hand to draw his weapon. And then he shot and killed a person with the gun in his right hand.
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/v...

Great stat from Joe House on Bill Simmons’ podcast: Teams that play on Thursday after playing an OT game are 6-25 against the spread since 2000.

Lions defense played over 37 minutes vs the Giants. Packers didn’t even play 23 minutes.

That’s half a game difference on a short week.

Scientists capture the crackling sounds of what they believe is lightning on Mars Scientists have detected what they believe to be lightning on Mars by eavesdropping on the whirling wind recorded by NASA's Perseverance rover.

Scientists have detected what they believe to be lightning on Mars by eavesdropping on the whirling wind recorded by NASA's Perseverance rover.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Is a Big Corporate Cash Grab Here’s a look at the industries that won in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” and one that didn’t quite get everything it wanted.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Is a Big Corporate Cash Grab
substack.perfectunion.us/p/the-one-bi...

We cannot afford HR1.... While western WI counties brace for reduced support to essential services, the bill simultaneously delivers substantial tax benefits to the super rich.

HR1 delivers $1T in tax benefits to the top 1% of earners, as counties absorb cuts to the budgets for basic programs.

AI rivals like OpenAI, Nvidia, and Oracle are collaborating to build ‘Stargate’—but a Yale expert says it violates 135 years of antitrust law | Fortune Six AI leaders are uniting to form a single company. How is this possibly legal, asks Madhavi Singh of Yale’s Thurman Arnold Project, an initiative dedicated to antitrust issues.

“The latest and most flagrant example of the government’s enabling private sector companies to expand and entrench their power under the guise of protecting American tech supremacy was the launch of Project Stargate,” Singh’s writes. trib.al/5ZCV68J

Meanwhile, the top 1% of earners get $1T in tax benefits. This is the real tragedy of HR1 - regular people shoulder deep cuts that take food off tables, strain our public health nurses, and threaten our nursing homes so that the wealthiest people in our country can get showered with benefits.

As more people are uninsured, they will turn to county funded behavioral health, public health, or emergency response for care. Sheriff's deputies will see an increase in the number of mental health crisis calls and long transports to Winnebago.

In Amery WI, Golden Age Manor nursing home could lose up to $220,000 a year. Dunn County could see over 400 neighbors lose Medicaid. Families across the region could face $1,500–$1,700 spikes in insurance costs.

It was passed in Washington, but HR1s effects will be felt right here, in our beloved nursing home, in our human services departments, and in the sheriff’s office that responds to mental health crises across our counties.

HR1’s cuts to SNAP/FoodShare, Medicaid & ACA will ripple through our counties. If counties cannot absorb these costs, delays will grow, case backlogs lengthen, more families will fall through the cracks before they can access nutrition assistance or services like crisis care funded by Medicaid

This month, our members stood up at county budget hearings across four counties in western WI to warn how HR1 (aka One Big Beautiful Bill) will create a fiscal crisis for our county govts and threaten the local services our loved ones rely on every day. Western WI cannot afford HR1.

"The Axios Show": Sanders says OpenAI should be broken up His comments signal that antitrust scrutiny of AI giants could become a key dividing line in 2028 politics.

EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Bernie Sanders says on The Axios Show that OpenAI should be broken up.

He is the first prominent Democrat to suggest that the government should intervene in OpenAI, potentially opening a key fault line in 2028 politics.

“The answer to federal threats is municipalism. Doubling down on protecting our communities and making sure we have the resources to keep our neighbors safe”

One of the most brutal days in American history, on the brink of 17M losing Medicaid, 3.2M losing SNAP, massive wealth transfer to billionaires, 20x expansion of ICE.

But the National Apartment Association (landlord lobby) celebrates this cruel bill as a "95% win for the housing industry."

Big Tents and Collective Action Can Defeat Authoritarianism The journey from individual angst to collective action takes time, vision, and commitment. It is also the pathway to victory.

“It takes more muscular forms of protest and noncooperation, like walkouts, labor strikes, and economic boycotts, to stop autocrats in their tracks…. Coordinating mass action, including organized noncooperation across different sectors and pillars, takes a commitment to big-tent organizing.”

156. Federalizing the California National Guard President Trump's Saturday night "memorandum" federalizing 2000 California National Guard troops is a tentative step toward abusing authorities for domestic use of the military, but a dangerous one.

Via "One First," my quick write-up of President Trump's "Presidential Memorandum" purporting to federalize 2000 California National Guard troops; the relevant legal authorities for doing so; and how the move is both a modest *and* dangerous escalation of what's going on in and around Los Angeles:

Jun. 7, 1920 | Ku Klux Klan Mounts Publicity Campaign to Attract Members Learn more about our history of racial injustice.

On this day in 1920, the Ku Klux Klan hired publicists to grow membership for the white supremacist organization. Within 16 months, nearly 100,000 new members had joined, and by 1924, there were three million active members nationwide.

Why the ‘Pro-Democracy’ Center Can’t Save America Donald Trump is back in the White House, and the “pro-democracy” movement that emerged during his first term is warning once again that America is on the brink.

The pro-democracy establishment talks about threats and norms, but rarely about the material conditions people are living in.

This piece isn’t an attack. It’s a structural critique of a system managing decline while blaming the public for noticing.

www.compactmag.com/article/why-...

Learning how to practice democracy at a small scale can teach us how to rebuild it at a large scale

Yesterday, over 30 people in Menomonie WI gathered to discuss, plan & commit to win tenant protections in our town

This is what it looks like to build an independent political home in your backyard

That means we must recalibrate what we expect going forward. The political conflict isn’t over, nor is the outcome determined, or democracy destined to be extinguished for good.

But let’s finally discard whatever residual notion of “It cannot happen here” is still floating around.