What people call “wild,” we’ve called home for thousands of years

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated on Tuesday. I now have more than 1000 days of data. This is not good. The last few peaks in new cases per day are 1320, 1091, and 1617. That’s definitely going in the wrong direction. The number of deaths per day remains in the 10-30 range. Peter Hong for Capital and Main of Daily Kos held a discussion with Rick Wartzman, who is also a part of Capital and Main and wrote a book about Walmart titled Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism. There are two basic ideas from the book and from this discussion. First, since 2015 Walmart has improved the pay of its workers by quite a bit. Second, it’s not enough, especially from a company as prominent and as rich as Walmart. As to the second point, the average Walmart workers make less than $29K a year. That’s not a living wage anywhere in America. Many still need Medicaid and food stamps to get through a month. Choosing between food, medicine, and rent is an awful choice in the richest country on earth. As for the first point, yes, since 2015 Walmart spent over $5 billion in higher pay and better benefits. But on the day that was announced the company’s stock price dropped, losing $20 billion in value. And also since 2015 the company has bought back $43 billion of their own stock, which benefits the shareholders. Many companies that improve the fortunes of their employees get punished by Wall Street. Wartzman says corporations will never go far enough to meet the needs of their employees. That means the government must mandate a much higher minimum wage. The current federal minimum is under $8 an hour. There is a campaign to raise it – a Fight for $15. But it really needs to be $20. Mark Kreidler, also for Capital and Main, discussed the compensation packages of corporate leaders. The big example is the package for Tim Cook, CEO for Apple. Back in 2021 it was nearly $100 million. The Board of Directors awarded that package even though a shareholder advisory firm recommended against it. This is 1,447 times the median pay of Apple employees. I did the math. It shows the median pay of Apple employees is about $69,000. Compared to what I was paid when I retired as a computer programmer 15 years ago, this isn’t much. And a great number of Apple employees are paid quite a bit less. My math leads to a question I’ve heard many times. Let’s compare Cook’s compensation to $69,000, that of the guy in the middle. I’ll assume that person worked a full 40 hour workweek. Did Cook, who likely put in a great deal of time beyond 40 hours, still work 1,447 times harder? Is he 1,447 time more important than that middle worker? More important? Yes. 1,447 times more important? In my understanding, no. Kreidler discussed a new report by the Economic Policy Institute on CEO compensation packages. Between 1978 (before Reagan’s infamous tax cuts) and 2021 the CEO packages at the top 350 US corporations grew by 1,460%. In that same time the compensation of typical workers rose by 18.1%. Only about 10% of a top CEO’s compensation is in salary. The rest is stock awards. So don’t congratulate a CEO who declares he’s forgoing a salary. Also, taxes on capital gains on stock sales are much lower than on salaries.

But it’s in the fundamentals that the CEO pay system looks truly broken. While few people would argue that top executives of growing and profitable companies shouldn’t be well compensated, the question of how much is enough—and how much is way too much—is almost never asked.

Another question that isn’t asked is whether the company – and the society as a whole – would be better off if a lot of a CEO’s salaries were instead paid to the workers. The average CEO package is $28 million. Would a CEO not work as hard if paid half that, only $14 million? Is the bloated deal necessary to keep the CEO from jumping to another corporation that pays more? There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of CEO talent. What can be done? Where a company’s workers are unionized their CEO packages tend to be reined in because it is debated during labor negotiations. Also, EPI recommends higher tax rates and increased corporate taxes when there is a high ratio between CEO compensation and worker pay. And shareholders should ask whether they’re getting good value for that CEO’s pay. Joan McCarter of Kos discussed:

The slow-rolling demise of Twitter has proven more clearly than anything that out of control wealth is toxic. For no other reason than he could, Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter and then proceeded to burn it to the ground. Because he could. That’s the extreme version of billionaire psychopathy and everything wrong with wealth distribution in our society, so it makes a handy jumping off point for this discussion: how much richer the rich have gotten in recent years and how wide the income gap has become even since the Trump tax scam. ... “Million dollar and up positions are the fastest growing jobs in America both in growth rate and pay,” Johnston found. “And the rate of growth is accelerating.” In 30 years, the “executive class” making more than $1 million has grown 325%, while the rest of the job force has increased by just 33%. The rich aren’t just getting richer, they’re multiplying. Last year—just last year—those $1+ million jobs grew 95 times faster than all the rest of the jobs. That’s while the rest of us are facing an erosion of the purchasing power of our wages because of inflation. ... Fixes to the tax code can’t happen with a House GOP, but Democrats can and should be laying the groundwork for doing it when they get a governing trifecta again. And then they should just f---ing do it.

In a post from last Friday Dartagnan of the Kos community reported that Elon Musk will begin reinstating Twitter accounts of those who had been banned. Yeah, these are the people who had been banned because of violent threats, harassment, and misinformation. Yes, this is quite dangerous for marginalized communities, especially the LGBTQ community. The news since then has confirmed that has happened. Dartagnan quoted an article by Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post:

Alejandra Carabello of Harvard law school, also interviewed by Lorenz, says that the impact to those at the mercy of autocratic regimes will be devastating: “You have journalists, activists in authoritarian regimes in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who are now even at the mercy of even more vicious trolls with no ability to fight back,” said Caraballo. “It’s literally life or death for people.’ ” ... By announcing that he will reinstate nearly all banned accounts (excepting only those who have “broken” some unspecified country’s “law” or engaged in “egregious” spamming), the billionaire has practically ensured that the only hope of keeping the platform afloat will be either through autocratic (e.g., Russian or Saudi Arabian) petrodollars, funding from others similarly situated, or through his own money, as advertisers are simply going to exit en masse.

That raises an intriguing question. Is Musk being paid to end Twitter, or at least turn it into a site that only far right people use, because autocratic leaders are paying him? Since a great number of protesters around the world have been communicating and organizing through Twitter, killing the site will remove a way for protesters to demand their human rights. The situation is getting bad enough that there are calls that Apple should ban Twitter from its app store because all this hate speech violates Apple’s terms of service. Some European nations are beginning to talk about banning Twitter because it violates their laws on hate speech. Two days ago David Neiwert of Kos reported that while Musk has opened Twitter to all the far right garbage he has started suspending progressive voices. It isn’t because any of their content violates Twitter’s terms of use. It appears that Musk is suspending them because a far right buddy or two pointed a finger, claiming they are antifa and calling for violence, even though it isn’t true. Those so suspended appear to have nowhere to appeal the decision. A couple weeks ago Sarah Kendzior tweeted:

When Twitter debuted, it offered an alternative and challenge to MSM. But that media world is dead -- local news gutted, websites paywalled, cable news siloed into paid streaming outlets. Twitter is where people go to work around a media designed to keep people uninformed. If Twitter collapses, news gathering will collapse to an extent, because this site is where people go to elude paywalls, debunk propaganda, find primary sources. It's an archive. A very messy, flawed archive. But an incredibly valuable one, esp when the old world is dead.

Mark Sumner of Kos wrote an essay with a few interesting comparisons, especially for me, a guy who reads Science Fiction and enjoys (some) Science Fiction movies.

The very first episode of the latest Star Trek series, Strange New Worlds, does something extremely clever. In the midst of one of those bog-standard Star Trek speeches, as the captain of this particular Enterprise is talking down an alien culture from the brink of disaster, he explains to them why the Federation is the way that it is. Why are they so concerned about cooperation and the greater good? Why are they so willing to put themselves on the line for others? Why are they just such a dedicated, altruistic, eternally optimistic pack of do-gooders? The answer is: Because they went the other way first. The Federation is as it is, because first Earth disintegrated into fascism, racism, sectionalism, and global war. Then another war. Then another. It’s a speech that draws on all of those bits of faux-history that have been mentioned over the course of seven live action series and a brace of films, but it’s also one that extends directly from where we are today — including showing footage from January 6 as an example of where things fell apart. The world of Star Trek is a post-scarcity society, one in which there is no money and no one need work to have essentially anything they need. However, it’s also a world in which thousands of people voluntarily engage in years of labor, subjugating themselves to an organization that’s a bizarre mix of the military, Greenpeace, and the State Department in an effort to ensure that things stay nice. Dammit.

Star Trek doesn’t explain everything. If one has a can-do-anything life, why would they spend it as a waitress? Even so, it is effective in highlighting social issues of our own society and has done so since the original series. That’s in contrast to Star Wars, which is a dystopian vision of an evil Empire of marching space Nazis, pampered nobles and orphans raised in scrapyards. “It’s all the worst aspects of both feudalism and capitalism. With space ships.” Sumner then discusses The Culture as presented in books by Iain M. Banks. I haven’t read these books and from this description I won’t. The books describe a society also without much need, but also with no laws. And that brings out the worst in people. They may not attack each other – the AIs running the place mostly prevent that – but they don’t sound like people I’d want to spend time with.

However, in many ways it’s a vision of humanity’s future that’s more welcoming, more diverse, and more celebratory of individual differences. Except that The Culture ceased to be a human civilization almost from he moment it was created. It’s a machine society, in which human beings are absolutely dependent on he benevolence of the AI that is many generations removed from, and many orders of magnitude beyond, its human creators. And now you know why Elon Musk is so intent on making Teslas drive themselves. ... Even when it comes to Twitter, Musk has described his latest acquisition in this way “Because it consists of billions of bidirectional interactions per day, Twitter can be thought of as a collective, cybernetic super-intelligence.” He’s not just a fan of The Culture. He’s trying to build it. ... Just be glad he didn’t like Star Wars. Because that place sucks.

Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that the Cochise County, Arizona, board of elections, has not yet certified its more than 47,000 votes. It has been so long Katie Hobbs, current Secretary of State and soon to be Democratic governor, sued them for refusing to do their job. Kori Lorick, the state Elections Director, says there is no evidence of impropriety. The board is MAGA controlled and, yeah, that’s expected. What isn’t is the voters are mostly conservative. And if these votes aren’t certified they aren’t included in larger totals, which must happen by next week. If that happens one US House seat and a state schools chief could flip from Republican to Democrat. Is the explanation that they don’t trust computers make sense? Whatever the reason we have the case of a Democratic Sec. of State suing Republican county officials so that Republican candidates will properly win. Sheesh. I’ve since hear a court has ordered the certification to happen. Pakalolo of the Kos community reported on a study by the Columbia Climate School. That report was about the heat dome that settled over British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon in 2021. Temperatures got up to 121F. The report essentially says this could not have happened without climate change. The combination of weather events that created the heat dome and parked it over the region for many days was a series of coincidences. But they were driven by climate change. McCarter reported on the work of Chuck Sams, the director of the National Park Service and the first Native person in that job. Sams has been in that role for almost a year. McCarter quoted High Country News discussing his philosophy in guiding the NPS. One particular bit caught my attention.

As I go around the country and have conversations with folks, I remind them that wilderness is a colonial, Western European ideal. What people call “wild,” we’ve called home for thousands of years.

His own people don’t even have a word that means “wild.” When I was young I was a big fan of the Peanuts comic strip. One time our small town grocery store had a display of Peanuts books and I somehow convinced my mother to buy all the books all at once, rather than one at a time. As a freshman in college I played Charlie Brown in a production of You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown directed by a student (it was my last attempt at acting). My mother even made me a shirt with his zigzag stripe. Even now I have a gifts of a Charlie Brown doll and a Snoopy doll (playing handbells) on top of my desk. Sitting above my computer screen is a Christmas ornament (though I think it is too heavy to hang on a tree) showing Snoopy directing a bell choir made up of Linus, Sally, Lucy, Charlie Brown, and Peppermint Patty. I have a Christmas nativity set with the various Peanuts characters playing Mary, Joseph, shepherds, wise men, and with Snoopy as one of the sheep. Of course, I’ve seen the Halloween and Christmas TV shows, though it has been many years. Somewhere, maybe I’ve loaned it to Brother, is the book The Gospel According to Peanuts. My favorite characters are Schroeder, Linus, and Snoopy. So I paid attention when several programs, including a couple on NPR, marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz this past Saturday. I listened to one show replay an interview with Schulz as I drove to visit Niece on Thanksgiving Day. Schulz died back in 2000. He and his children said that no one else would be allowed to take over the strip when he no longer could draw it. Alfredo tweeted an image of Linus and Franklin shaking hands. Along with it are the words:

When Charles Shulz’s distributor pressured him to eliminate Franklin from “Peanuts” because he might offend pro-segregation Southerners he told him: “Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that.” Inclusiveness is what makes America great.

This is my performance group’s concert weekend and Brother is coming for a visit. So I may not post for a few days.