A nation of private opulence and public squalor

I finished the book To Be Taught, if Fortunate by Becky Chambers. I’ve read several of Chambers’ other science fiction books and enjoyed and wrote about them. This one is a novella, only 140 pages. The title comes from words by UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim that went on the Voyager Golden Record in 1977 saying that humanity (or at least its artifacts) leave the solar system...

to teach, if we are called upon; to be taught, if we are fortunate.

The story is of four astrobiologists who go to another solar system to study four planets that might have life. That is wrapped up in a report they send back to earth. The story isn’t so much conflict and resolution, but a description of what an astrobiologist might do in their setting and how they would go about doing it. I enjoyed the story and if this kind of science fiction is your thing, you might enjoy it too. A week ago Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported that Democrats in New York have reached an agreement to tax multimillion-dollar second homes. The money raised, perhaps up to a half billion will help pay for the affordability issues Mayor Mamdani wants to address. He announced the plans for the tax in front of the $238 million penthouse owned by billionaire Ken Griffin. Of course, Griffin and other billionaires had a few things to say. They described Mamdani’s words as “Just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs.” That it’s a message to “resent success rather than trying to emulate it.” They called Mamdani a communist and un-American. I see that phrase “resent success” and think Mamdani isn’t resenting success as he is opposing the oppression that billionaires do to get that much money, then refusing to support the society that helped them get it. This past Monday Willis reported on words by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the response by Jeff Bezos, the guy made rich by Amazon. AOC had said:

You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.

Bezos replied through the editorial board of the Washington Post, the paper he owns and has bent to his will.

If someone becomes a billionaire selling expensive shoes, it’s because people want and are willing to pay for them. That’s something to celebrate, not admonish. ... To say that it’s impossible to legitimately earn a billion dollars is to put an arbitrary limit on human potential.

I’m amused that the Post editorial board included the word “legitimately.” Bezos certainly got his billions legally. But he did it by overworking and underpaying the people who work for him. That’s ethically wrong. Also, the editorial board sidestepped the possibility that a company can sell shoes, even expensive ones that people will pay for, and then make sure all the employees and suppliers are paid well, even if the CEO doesn’t reach the billion dollar level. Every Thursday Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quotes a bit from the late columnist Molly Ivins. Today, Bill posted:

The conservatives have been preaching this Me First stuff as though life were a race to the finish and the only object is to pick up as much money as you can. It doesn’t work—not even if you wind up with a lot of toys. As another noted economist said, we are becoming a nation of private opulence and public squalor. Look, we all do better when we all do better. You raise the minimum wage, it works for everyone. —May, 2006

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Bob Flaherty of The Bulwark. The topic is the “autopsy” of the 2024 campaign that the Democratic National Committee shelved. It was said to be a detailed assessment of the Harris campaign. Flaherty wrote:

My understanding—based on Dem-world hearsay—is that the truth is stupider than the fiction: No autopsy was released because there is no actual autopsy. The members of the “autopsy team” were in over their heads and struggled to put the thing together.

Flaherty added that he wonders what an actual 2024 autopsy would have said. Yes, 2024 was the year that incumbents around the world were thrown out of office.

We underestimated then—and are underestimating now—just how disillusioned people are. There was and is a pervasive sense that nothing works and the institutions holding us up have failed. Media, government, business—no one trusts anyone anymore. For reasons both of Democrats’ own making and from simply being incumbents, the Democratic brand sucked.

I think people are disillusioned because Democrats seem to be beholden to billionaires as much as Republicans are. Historian Timothy Snyder, in his “Thinking about...” Substack discussed Superpower Suicide. The war with Iran, which is utterly unethical and utterly self-destructive, suggests the nasty guy’s foreign policy is superpower suicide. I think Snyder came up with the term and readers asked him to spell it out.

Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.

To explain Snyder listed thirteen traditional bases of state power and what the nasty guy has done with them. Here are some of them. Of course, Snyder has a much fuller explanation. 1. A superpower must be a state. It has institutions of law and other things. But the nasty guy sees it as a commercial opportunity. (Or a grifting opportunity.) 2. The power must be used for the good of the people. The nasty guy sees the power to be used for the good of himself. 3. The state must be able to maintain itself, to have a line of succession. Democracy can provide that. The nasty guy has declared he wants to stay in power indefinitely. 4. The right people have to be in charge. There is a tension because those who gain authority want to pass it to their children, which is why Roman Catholic priests are celibate. The source of qualified people is usually civil service or the military. The nasty guy gutted the first and is firing the competent ones of the second. 5. Education is the way to refresh society and help citizens understand the challenges of the world. The nasty guy is attacking them. 6. A great power forges an alliance with science. The nasty guy is shutting down research. 9. A great power practices diplomacy to understand other countries. The nasty guy trashes it. 10. A great power has allies. They may change as national interest changes. But the nasty guy damages alliances based on personal whim. 12. A superpower tends to win confrontations. The nasty guy loses a lot and others see his actions as loss (see: TACO and then Iran).

After a year of Trump, we face a situation where reform and repair are not the relevant categories. And, in a certain sense, this is useful. The fact that we reached this point, the fact that just a year of Trump could bring superpower suicide, shows us that the prior status quo was unsustainable. The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.

In Sunday’s pundit roundup Kev quoted Michael McFaul, writing for his own Substack, about the growing cracks in Valdimir Putin’s rule of Russia. The top reason is his failure in Ukraine. That war has now lasted longer than the Soviet’s war against Nazi Germany. I hear he’s losing ground. He hasn’t achieved regime change. Instead of stopping NATO expansion he hastened it. The Russian economy is stagnating, a combination of recession, inflation, and budget crisis. The lifting of oil sanctions in response to the closed Strait of Hormuz won’t produce enough cash to make enough of a difference. The military is eating too many resources. Demographic challenges are worse because so many young people have fled or have died in the war. How long until this might remove Putin from power is not discussed.