Seth Sandronsky

February 28, 2025
In A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby (Monthly Review Press, 2024), author and English professor John Marsh unpacks culture and the economy over a century through the lens of Fitzgerald’s novel. As month two of the Trump 2.0 era careens forward, reading Marsh’s book is a wakeup call to systemic themes and trends.
In a Prologue, Introduction, four chapters and Conclusion, he revisits an influential work of fiction around an enduring “po...

February 21, 2025
My parents, Alex and Sylvia, grew up as Jewish Americans in NYC during the Great Depression. The Bolshevik Revolution had in part shaped the tenor of that era, but socialism had been popular in the USA before this revolutionary change. In the depression era, FDR, responding to the working-class ferment that swept up folks like my mother and father, critiqued elites as economic royalists. Later as adults, my parents held labor union jobs and voted for Democrats, due in the ma...

February 14, 2025
Randell Leach is the CEO of Beneficial State Bank, a regional community bank based in Oakland, CA. He and I conducted via email the interview below about the ongoing shutdown of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and what it means for both the financial sector and consumers.
Seth Sandronsky: Generally, what do you think about the head of Office of Management and Budget calling for the CFPB to cease investigations and end the beginning of new rules?
Randell Leac...

February 7, 2025
It is a new day for federal immigration enforcement in the USA. The Donald J. Trump administration’s recent announcement on immigration enforcement is ending the longstanding “sensitive locations” policy, and allows federal immigration arrests at schools, churches and hospitals. This big change will have immediate impacts on immigrant communities in California, America’s most populous state of 39 million people.
This is why. “California is home to 10.6 million immigrants—22% ...

January 24, 2025
Georgia’s Department of Agriculture on January 17 announced a suspension of all poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets and sales due to the detection of a case of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza at a commercial poultry producer. A month earlier, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a State of Emergency to “streamline and expedite the state’s response to Avian influenza A (H5N1),“ or bird flu, in the Golden State.
In Georgia, bird flu infected commercial poultry. Bird...

Cristian Gonzalez for Solving Sacramento
By Seth Sandronsky, Solving Sacramento
On a Sunday afternoon, Rafael Lopez works on a synthesizer and drum machine inside MusicLandria’s Makerspace. The space features electronic equipment for musicians to create, practice and record music.
“That sold it for me here,” said Lopez, a sound engineer and producer. “The price to buy such equipment is several thousands of dollars, and excludes me.”
Located at 808 O St. in Sacramento, MusicLandria is a nonpro...

January 17, 2025
Awareness of eco-social conditions in the United States is growing as the LA wildfires spread death and destruction. This disaster, for example, comes on the heels of Hurricane Helene that tore through southern Appalachia last September. The Earth System and people are in trouble.
Weather-related loss of lives and property is fast becoming the new normal. Just ask the home insurers fleeing the Golden State’s wildfires. Profit is the motive for this move away.
Further, damagin...

December 20, 2024
In his new Netflix special, entertainer Jamie Foxx shares that he suffered a debilitating stroke. The $4.5 trillion U.S. health care system at first failed to give him helpful treatment, which Foxx eventually received at a hospital in Atlanta.
Think about the class dimensions of his experience. Foxx is a multimillionaire who in his time of medical need got a cold shoulder from the American health care industry.
Where does that leave the majority of the U.S. working class who...

December 13, 2024
Watching season two of “Sprint” on Netflix recently, American sprinter Noah Lyles says from the 2024 Paris Olympics that the covid pandemic is over. For him, it’s the place and time to run fast and self-promote faster.
He does both. First, Lyles wins the 100 meters dash in a photo finish. His performance before, during and after winning this gold medal shows that it’s not bragging when an elite athlete predicts a victory and achieves it.
Later, things change. Lyles contracts...

Chiwetel Ejiofor, the British actor and screenwriter, hits a home run directing “Rob Peace,” a gripping biopic streaming on Netflix now. This film is based on a 2014 biography, “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.”
The storyline is linear. As a youth, Peace becomes a high-achieving student. He excels in math and science.
Peace overcomes the adversity of class and skin color to achieve educational and, later, occupational success. We see an individual defying the odds, making choices th...

November 8, 2024
The late István Mészáros analyzes political theories from the ancient Greek philosophers forward in Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, ed. and introduction, John Bellamy Foster (Monthly Review Press, 2022), 482 pp. The author’s premise is that the state and capitalism dovetail to exploit people and Mother Nature for profit, a contradiction humanity must overcome to build a sustainable society.
This is a systemic dilemma pushing humanity and the ecology to the brink. Tra...

September 27, 2024
The essays in A New Global Geometry? Socialist Register 2024, an annual publication, unpack a wide range of anti-capitalist analyses on past and current political and social contradictions and relations. The contributors’ field of inquiry ranges from China to Germany, India, Japan, Latin America, Turkey and the US.
The volume under review maps global capitalism’s ebbs and flows during and after the years between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Ja...

Press freedom struggled when a federal tax agency looked into The Davis Vanguard, a community news outlet based in Yolo County, one of 58 in California. Just ask David Greenwald, founder, editor and executive director of The Davis Vanguard, https://www.davisvanguard.org. In 2021, a private attorney who attended law school with the Yolo County District Attorney filed an Internal Revenue Service complaint over the new outlet’s coverage of the race involving this public official, according to Gr...

By Seth Sandronsky | Solving Sacramento
A cinema project from Justice2Jobs aims to spur community conversation about the “adultification bias” of Black girls; the harmful expectations and stereotypes that distort and shorten their childhoods. To this end, the new documentary film “Essence of Black Girlhood” premiered at The Guild Theater in Oak Park on Sept. 1 to act as a jumping off point for further discussion.
One stereotype the film points out is that Black girls should have an adult-like...