Today honors Dr. Martin Luther King for his role in protecting the civil rights of every American. His genius was in understanding his audience. When he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC in August 1963, he knew that his primary audience was white Americans and his objective in the speech was to make civil rights palatable to those who refused to grant equal rights to black Americans.
The speech came in two parts. The first was written out and he followed the script, laying out how the idea of equal rights was the bedrock of the Constitution even though the actual text of the Constitution institutionalized slavery. It is a careful and patient outline of how the black population has been denied civil rights by segregation and Jim Crow laws. This part of the speech was to make universal civil rights consistent with the values and ideals of the United States. Because it was written out, the first part of the speech relied upon logic and evidence and suffered from the typical flaws of a speech that was read and not delivered.
The second part was not written out but was a speech that he had often given to black Americans and it begins about 10 minutes in the video below. This part of the speech demonstrated the power of the spoken word and the full meaning of rhetoric. Mahalia Jackson, a gospel singer and close associate of King, encouraged him to leave off the logic and to rely upon the emotions that flow from a sense of liberation. She gave King the license to treat white America to the true feelings of black Americans:
“The story that has been told since that day has Mahalia Jackson intervening at a critical junction when she decided King’s speech needed a course-correction. Recalling a theme she had heard him use in earlier speeches, Jackson said out loud to Martin Luther King Jr., from behind the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” And at that moment, as can be seen in films of the speech, Dr. King leaves his prepared notes behind to improvise the entire next section of his speech—the historic section that famously begins “And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream….”
The result was one of the most powerful speeches in American history and a genuine turning point in the fight for civil rights. And the speech led to the Civil Rights Act of 1965 which laid the foundation for a more substantive understanding of what rights are. Those rights have since been extended to the rights of women and the gay community. More work needs to be done enhancing the rights of transgender individuals, disabled people, immigrants, and refugees. But King made these developments possible, and Americans should be grateful to King, and all those who supported him, for leading the way.
President Biden, in his final address to the nation as President, warned citizens against the danger of living in an oligarchy: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” He was not the first President to warn of this danger. John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, wrote the following:
“9 July 1813
“Your “” [aristocrats] are the most difficult Animals to manage, of anything in the whole Theory and practice of Government. They will not suffer themselves to be governed. They not only exert all their own Subtilty Industry and courage, but they employ the Commonalty, to knock to pieces every Plan and Model that the most honest Architects in Legislation can invent to keep them within bounds. Both Patricians and Plebeians are as furious as the Workmen in England to demolish labour-saving Machinery.
“But who are these ““? Who shall judge? Who shall select these choice Spirits from the rest of the Congregation? Themselves? We must first find out and determine who themselves are. Shall the congregation choose? Ask Xenophon. Perhaps hereafter I may quote you Greek. Too much in a hurry at present, english must suffice. Xenophon says that the ecclesia, always chooses the worst Men they can find, because none others will do their dirty work. This wicked Motive is worse than Birth or Wealth. Here I want to quote Greek again. But the day before I received your Letter of June 27. I gave the Book to George Washington Adams going to the Accadamy at Hingham. The Title is a Collection of Moral Sentences from all the most Ancien[t] Greek Poets. In one of the oldest of them I read in greek that I cannot repeat, a couplet the Sense of which was
“‘Nobility in Men is worth as much as it is in Horses Asses or Rams: but the meanest blooded Puppy, in the World, if he gets a little money, is as good a man as the best of them.’ Yet Birth and Wealth together have prevailed over Virtue and Talents in all ages. The Many, will acknowledge no other ““. Your Experience of This Truth, will not much differ from that of your old Friend.”
Most Americans are unfamiliar with the word “oligarchy” since the Republic has tried very hard since its inception to convey the sense of equality best expressed in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. It would be years before any American President emphasized the idea of equality over that of freedom. Lincoln did so in his second Inaugural Address. For the first time, an American President declared that slavery was incompatible with the values of the American people, notwithstanding the inclusion of slavery in the Constitution.
An oligarchy is a political system in which the wealthy direct the machinery of government to protect and enhance their interests as opposed to the interests of the citizenry. Brooke Harrington, a Sociology Professor at Dartmouth College wrote this for the Washington Post at the beginning of Trump’s first term:
“There are no laws against a president and his super-wealthy Cabinet using their power to benefit their own class. There is nothing that compels them to look beyond their privilege to address the needs of the citizenry.
“The problem with these prospective leaders is not their money. It’s that they — like Trump — seem more interested in what their country can do for them than in what they can do for their country.”
The concentration of wealth in the second Trump administration is staggering. The following table gives an idea of how concentrated wealth has become in recent years. Many of the people listed, like Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, have actively solicited Trump on various matters and represent business interests that clearly constitute conflicts of interest with a number of important policy issues like freedom of speech in a digital world.
Source: Bloomberg, “Bloomberg Billionaires Index”, 18 January 2025, accessed at: Bloomberg Billionaires Index, on 19 January 2025
Many of these people have contributed a great deal of money to Trump’s inauguration and several of them have been quite visible in the upcoming Trump Administration. We also have a hard time realizing exactly what these numbers represent: a billion of anything is far removed from anything we come into daily contact. One way to comprehend these numbers is to translate them into more accessible terms:
If someone made one million dollars a year, they would make about $480.77 per hour and $3,846.15 per day.
On the other hand, making a billion dollars per year would mean about $480,769 per hour and $3,846,153.85 per day.
These 20 individuals possess more wealth than most countries in the world. Indeed, there are only 7 countries with GDPs larger than $3 trillion:
There are 186 countries in the world with GDPs less than $3 trillion. The combined population of these countries comprises 56% of the global population. But 20 people have more wealth than each of the 186 countries.
Concentrations of wealth lead inevitably to a distorted political system. Adam Smith was well aware of the dangers of concentrated wealth to the public interest:
“Not only the prejudices of the publick, but what is much more unconquerable, the private interests of many individuals, irresistibly oppose it. Were the officers of the army to oppose with the same zeal and unanimity any reduction in the number of forces, with which master manufacturers set themselves against every law that is likely to increase the number of their rivals in the home market; were the former to animate their soldiers, in the same manner as the latter enflame their workmen, to attack with violence and outrage the proposers of any such regulation; to attempt to reduce the army would be as dangerous as it has now become to attempt to diminish in any respect the monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained against us. This monopoly has so much increased the number of some particular tribes of them, that, like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature. The member of parliament who supports every proposal for strengthening this monopoly, is sure to acquire not only the reputation of understanding trade, but great popularity and influence with an order of men whose numbers and wealth render them of great importance. If he opposes them, on the contrary, and still more if he has authority enough to be able to thwart them, neither the most acknowledged probity, nor the highest rank, nor the greatest publick services can protect him from the most infamous abuse and detraction, from personal insults, nor sometimes from real danger, arising from the insolent outrage of furious and disappointed monopolists.”
This pattern was present as the Roman Republic began its descent into dictatorship. It was also evident in 13th Century Venice and in late-19th Century America. It is happening again, not only in the US, but in India, Russia, China, the low-population oil producers such as Kuwait, and Brazil. It is difficult to see how democracy can persist under these conditions. Active steps must be taken to create a more just distribution of wealth globally.
Last June, the US house of Representatives banned the State Department from using death statistics published by the Gaza Ministry of Health. The amendment was supported by most Republicans and many Democrats but the Senate has yet to pass on the legislation. The rationale for the amendment was best expressed by David Adesnik, Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the conservative think-tank, Fund for Defense of Democracies: “It’s a complete abdication of responsibility for the Biden administration to say it trusts the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers because the UN considers them trustworthy. We’ve seen that the UN puts blind faith in the ministry’s numbers even when they’re completely implausible. As a result of trusting numbers from a Hamas-controlled entity, the Biden administration has become more focused on the restraints it can put on Israeli forces than how it can help accelerate Hamas’s defeat.” Israel has also criticized the Ministry’s statistics. The Anti-Defamation League published this analysis of the Gaza Minitstry of Health:
“ADL calls on all news organizations to properly caveat data and information cited from the Gaza Health Ministry with clear mention that it is controlled by Hamas and that it has shared false and misleading information in the past. Journalists and news organizations must acknowledge when their sources may be unconfirmed or unreliable.”
It turns out that the Gaza Ministry of Health undercounted the casualties (it only counts bodies that are visible, and does not search through destroyed buildings to find bodies that are covered by rubble). The amendment to legislation was According to the Lancet, one of the world’s premier medical journals, the death toll in the war against Gaza has been significantly undercounted. The study was limited to the period 7 October 2023 to 30 June 2024 so it does not include any reported deaths since July. The Lancet study came to this conclusion: “We estimated 64 260 deaths…due to traumatic injury during the study period, suggesting the Palestinian MoH under-reported mortality by 41%.” The Gaza Ministry of Health currently tallies about 47,000 deaths. If the undercounting of 41% holds from the period of 1 July 2025-11 January 2025, then a straight extrapolation would suggest a death total of about 67,000.
The Lancet study only looked at deaths attributed to military action. The report states that “our findings underestimate the full impact of the military operation in Gaza, as they do not account for non-trauma-related deaths resulting from health service disruption, food insecurity, and inadequate water and sanitation.” It is extraordinarily difficult to make precise estimates of these deaths (called “indirect” deaths in the literature), but the Watson Institute at Brown University has done a solid study. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has also done a report on the long-term effects of such conditions in Gaza.
It is very clear that we lack knowledge of the actual conditions in the Gaza Strip. But we should be extremely wary of attempts to undermine the credibility of sources by parties which have a vested interest in particular conclusions. It appears as if the Gaza Ministry of Health was, and is, the most reliable source in this dispute.
The Paris Agreement of 2015 set a goal of keeping global temperatures below pre-industrial levels, and determined that the appropriate goal of reaching that objective was to keep global temperature increases below 1° Celsius. The year 2024 saw the first time in human history that that objective was surpassed. The BBC reports:
“The planet has moved a major step closer to warming more than 1.5C, new data shows, despite world leaders vowing a decade ago they would try to avoid this.
“The European Copernicus climate service, one of the main global data providers, said on Friday that 2024 was the first calendar year to pass the symbolic threshold, as well as the world’s hottest on record.
“This does not mean the international 1.5C target has been broken, because that refers to a long-term average over decades, but does bring us nearer to doing so as fossil fuel emissions continue to heat the atmosphere.
“Last week UN chief António Guterres described the recent run of temperature records as climate breakdown'”.
“‘We must exit this road to ruin – and we have no time to lose,’ he said in his New Year message, calling for countries to slash emissions of planet-warming gases in 2025.”
The goal was reached long before the date most climate models predicted. Zeke Hausfather, a climaste scientist, pointed out: “I think it’s safe to say that both 2023 and 2024 temperatures surprised most climate scientists – we didn’t think we’d be seeing a year above 1.5C this early.” The last ten years have been the hottest years on record. The report by Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitor, outlines the significance of these developments in terms that affect human habitation.
It is impossible to connect directly weather events, such as wildfires, droughts, and heavy rains to climate change. But the evidence does suggest that climate change played a key role in the current wildfires in Los Angeles. According to the Yale School of the Environment, the connection is strong:
“As the planet heats up, rainfall is growing more erratic over much of the globe, leading to wide swings between wet and dry conditions. So-called ‘weather whiplash’ is ramping up the risk of wildfire in California, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
Last year, Los Angeles saw record rainfall, which fueled the growth of grasses and shrubs, but so far this winter the city has gotten a fraction of its usual rainfall, leaving dense vegetation to dry out. In light of the arid conditions, federal officials warned of ‘significant fire potential’ in the region.
Making matters worse, the region is seeing unusually strong Santa Ana winds, which bring hot, dry air from the mountains out to sea during the winter months. There is little evidence that warming has made the winds more potent, Swain said, but with climate change, California’s dry season is extending into the early winter, when the Santa Ana winds typically take shape. This, he said, ‘is the key climate change connection to Southern California wildfires.’”
And yet, President-Elect Trump blames the wildfires in LA on lack of forest management, water management, and disaster preparation. According to the New York Times: “In his post on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said: “I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!” I am not an expert on wildfires, and I suspect that there is probably a lot Los Angeles could have done to mitigate some of the destruction. The underlying conditions–months without rain and hurricane force winds–would probably have overwhelmed any response.
More importantly, perhaps it is possible to face the underlying conditions with more stored water, more firefighters, and airplanes capable of accurately dropping fire retardant in hurricane force winds. And maybe it is possible to control floods such as those caused by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. Who is going to pay for all these preventive and remedial efforts? This question is critical since we will have to pay for climate change in some way (money or lives) at some point (unpreductable).
But Trump is only raising the issue to divert attention from the issue of climate change which he described as a “hoax”. Instead, he wants to “drill, drill, drill”, a policy that would only accelerate climate change. He will likely pull the US out of the Paris Agreement (as he did in 2017) thereby compromising international efforts to control climate change.
Curiously, however, Trump apparantly does believe that climate change is real. His interest in purchasing Greenland stems from his belief that Greenland is going to be crucial as climate change creates a reliable northern passage for container ships. Moreover, Greenland is reputed to be a storehouse for minerals essential to a green revolution. The Economist reports: “….Greenland’s resource wealth is immense. It has known reserves of 43 of the 50 minerals deemed ‘critical’ by America’s government, including probably the largest deposits of rare earths outside China. These are crucial to military kit and green-energy equipment.”
If Greenland remains frozen, it would remain irrelevant to Trump’s aspirations. Unfortunately, climate change does not give us the ability to choose which outcomes we prefer.
President-Elect Trump’s press conference yesterday was an excursion into the mind of a seriously deranged individual. National Public Radio reports in an interview with Laura Barron-Lopez of NPR:
“And in it, the president-elect talked about using force to gain control over countries and territories. He raised the possibility of using military force to secure Greenland and the Panama Canal. He also talked about using economic control to pressure Canada to acquire it.
“And he said that — as you played there, Geoff, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. And he also said that — quote — “all hell will break out” if Hamas doesn’t release hostages by the time he takes office.
“In addition to that, he said that he wants to use tariffs at a high level against Denmark to try to pressure it to cede control of Greenland to the United States. And on that idea of the annexation of Canada, Geoff, outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that — just outright rejected it on X, saying that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that it would happen.”
One never knows whether Trump is actually serious–he has a long history of making outrageous statements and never following through on them. But the mind-set revealed in the press conference is straight out of Nineteenth Century Europe when the balance of power was the operating system of global politics and manifested most dramatically in the carving up of Africa by the colonial powers. The period from 1870 to 1914 is commonly known as “The Scramble for Africa“.
After World War II, the US tried to create a different system, based upon multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, NATO, and various other organizations. The aspirations for this system were quite simple. Instead of the system of power politics characterized by Thucydides as one in which “The strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must“, the hope was that international politics could be governed by rules and norms agreed upon by the major powers. That aspiration was never realized, and it seems clear that Trump intends to govern US foreign policy by the maxims of power politics and to return the world to the 1800s.
Trump should read some history. He would find that the US did in fact invade Canada in 1812 and gained nothing from that war (forget the Battle of New Orleans and focus instead on the British burning down the White House). He should also learn that the Gulf of Mexico was named the Gulf of Mexico long before the US was even a state. He also needs a refresher course on what it means to be an ally–if Russia or China would dare to invade Greenland, the NATO treaty would obliged the US to defend the island because Denmark is a member of NATO. THe US does not need to “own” Greenland in order to defend it.
What is deeply troubling is that Trump uses the phrase “national security” to justify his fantasies in such a sloppy manner. He seems to be worried that Chinese companies on each end of the Panama Canal gives China a strategic advantage (conveniently ignoring that China is 6000 miles away from the Panama Canal while the US has easy access to the canal). China would have the same problems defending its troops that Russia had when it tried to place nuclear missiles on Cuba in 1962. When confronted with American military power in the Gulf of Mexico, the Russians had no choice but to capitulate.
Unfortunately, Trump seems to be following the policies of Putin and Netanyahu: grabbing land when it appears to be a task with few immediate downsides. Both Putin and Netanyahu seem oblivious to the long-term costs of being an imperial power: the immense cost and the serious damage to the reputation of their states. Randy Newman wrote a song about the phenomenon which is macabrely funny:
And while we are at changing names, Trump should now start thinking about purging foreign names from American geography. We should call Los Angeles the City of the Angels, Baton Rouge should be called Red Stick, and by all means we should get rid of Native American names like Massachusetts (“Large Hill Place”) and Connecticut (“Long Tidal River”). I am not sure I can survive this stupidity for four years.
President-Elect Trump has nominated a distinctive group of individuals to serve in his Cabinet: With some exceptions, they are all wealthy individuals with little or no government experience but a lot of experience as hedge fund managers. We will have to wait to see how these individuals fare in the confirmation process, but their nominations suggest that Trump believes that such people will manage the economy well. That assumption will likely prove to be very wrong.
We have historical examples of similar decisions. For example, Venice was once a powerful city-state and a dominant force in the global economy in the 13th-15th Centuries. That wealth was based upon international trade and Venice’s ability to link Europe to Asia through the Silk Trade routes.
“This brings us to the great puzzle of Venetian history. During the period 1297–1323, a defining epoch in Venetian history known as the Serrata or “closure,” Venetian politics came under the control of a tightly knit cabal of the richest families. It was, in Norwich’s (1977, p. 181) words, the triumph of the oligarchs. Furthermore, by the early 1330s this political closure had spilled over into an economic closure that excluded poorer families from participation in the most lucrative aspects of international trade. Finally, by 1400 the political and economic closure had created a society characterized by a new emphasis on rank and hierarchy. In short, after 1323 there was a fundamental societal shift away from political openness, economic competition, and social mobility and toward political closure, extreme inequality, and social stratification.”
Ultimately, more dynamic economic centers emerged, such as Portugal, Spain, the Dutch, and Great Britain, finding a way to bypass the Venetian chokehold on the Silk Trade by finding alternative routes to Asia. Venice lost its economic vitality and declined into nothing more than a footnote in the history of the global economy.
The argument is straightforward: rather than continuing to innnovate under the pressures of competition (such as the need to find a sea route to Asia), wealthy individuals tend to use political power to protect their interests through laws. That political power is then used to insulate existing techniques and technologies from externally induced change. Those industries become less efficient over time and economic growth slows as a result.
That same process seems to be in play in the US today. Robert Reich outlines the process in the YouTube video, “Wealth Inequality Explained”:
The composition of Trump’s Cabinet fits into this mold perfectly. In a broader cocntext, the process seems to be affecting many different countries in the world, as globalization produces distorted economic outcomes. Trevor Jackson describes the dynamic in his recent essay on theNew York Review of Books:
“For decades now, the ideology of free-market liberalism has obfuscated the ongoing distributive conflicts of the world, but it has not blunted the material suffering of the people on the losing end. Since the 2008 crisis, the reality of ruthless distributive conflict has become impossible to ignore, but the failure of market liberalism to reconcile political equality and economic inequality has produced a global crisis of legitimacy and a growing constituency amenable to antiliberal figures like Trump, Orbán, Modi, and Bolsonaro.”
The anger against the prevailing patterns of wealth distribution is not only found in political outcomes. The astonishing amount of support for the alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, reflects the degree of animosity toward the “undeserving” rich. If the Democratic Party needs to make a decision about how to orient its platform for the future, it would be well-advised to concentrate exclusively on the process of redistributing wealth and breaking up the political power of economic interests.
The last post held that much of modern life occurs at an arms-length for most US citizens. We have so distanced ourselves from the actual processes that govern our lives, that we must rely upon experts to fix problems. That procedure allows for greater expertise, but it also means that most people now must rely upon someone or some institutions with authority to make sure that everything moves seamlessly. I think that it is fair to say that one hundred years ago, most Americans were familiar with most sources of relevant authority: the local grocer, the local doctor, the mayor, the school committee, and most of their neighbors. Today, all these people and institutions are less connected to their localities, and most of our interactions are with anonymous people on the telephone or the internet.
Attenuated authority is difficult to assess, and becomes even more so if there are competing authorities. And most people lack the ability to make rigorous assessments. Just think about how people assess the veracity of their news sources. Is CNN reliable? Fox News? MSNBC? And over the last 8 years, Americans have been subjected to a withering barrage of criticisms about eacsh source. How does one go about finding a Medicare Supplement Plan? There are numerous insurance companies which want your business, but the plans are complicated, opaque, and, in many cases, misleading. Under such circumstances, many people will defer to someone they think is trustworthy to make the decisions for them.
We actually know a great deal about why people defer to authority. The Milgram experiment suggested that a commanding percentage of people would engage in activities that their senses and experience clearly indicate a high degree of harm to others. The Zimbardo prison experiment indicated that many people behave quite differently than expected when cast into roles that demanded harsh treatment of others. Erich Fromm’s desire to understand how the Holocaust could occur led to his superb work, Escape from Freedom. But the most compelling analysis of deference to authority is Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In one part of the book, Dostoyevsky imagines that Jesus returns to earth during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The religious authority in Seville (The Grand Inquisitor) has Jesus arrested in order to prevent Jesus from undermining the authority of the Catholic Church. What follows is a monologue by the Inquisitor (Jesus says not a word in the excerpt) outlining a criticism of Jesus by giving people the freedom to choose between good and evil. The Inquisitor argues that the Church has corrected that error by taking away that freedom:
“No science will give them bread as long as they remain free, but in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us: ‘Better that you enslave us, but feed us.’ They will finally understand that freedom and earthly bread in plenty for everyone are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share among themselves. They will also be convinced that they are forever incapable of being free, because they are feeble, depraved, nonentities and rebels. You promised them heavenly bread, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, eternally depraved, and eternally ignoble human race? And if in the name of heavenly bread thousands and tens of thousands will follow you, what will become of the millions and tens of thousands of millions of creatures who will not be strong enough to forgo earthly bread for the sake of the heavenly? Is it that only the tens of thousands of the great and strong are dear to you, and the remaining millions, numerous as the sands of the sea, weak but loving you, should serve only as material for the great and the strong?”
The argument is straightforward: people will defer to authority when they feel vulnerable. This statement is similar to the Hobbesian state of nature: if you want power over a people, make them know fear. Our feelings of vulnerability are not unique, but they can be amplified, manipulated, and directed. The fears of the French after the Revolution led them to embrace Napoleon. The fears of the German people after World War I and the punitive terms of the Peace Treaty, made them embrace Hitler. The American people have not suffered similar calamities, but their sense of vulnerability is heightened by their inability to live out the American dream of the rugged individual. We are acutely aware of the fact that we have little direct control over some of the things that are necessary to survive in such a complicated, overly technological environment. The American people have become alienated because of the growing discrepancy between what they can and cannot explain and that uncertainty has made them susceptible to easy and direct answers.
Unfortunately, those easy and direct answers do not really address the real issues. It is undeniable that the American working class suffered a great deal due to globalization which sent many jobs to low-wage areas such as China. But the decisions that led to those job losses were not made by the government; they were made by private corporations whose job is to create profit for their shareholders. Attacking the government is purposely misleading. But the distraction does not end with attacking the government. Somehow, many people in America believe that their economic misfortunes are due to undocumented immigrants, or gay or transexual individuals, or diversity initiatives. The tactic is familiar to those who study historical and contemporary despots, and should be threadbare by now. But it seems as if it is still resonating all over the world as evidence by recent events in France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
The proper political response is to highlight the systems that lead to economic decisions that harm people. One should focus on the processes that allow the accumulation of wealth, such as the taxation rules, the disregard for markets overwhelmingly dictated by oligoplies, such a petroleum and agriculture, the willingness to tolerate the hiding of wealth in offshore banks, and the insane neglect of the global environment. Unfortunately, political decisions in the US now seem to be determined by unregulated campaign contributions. Elon Musk invested $280 million in the re-election of Mr. Trump; his wealth since 6 November has increased by about $200 billion–an obscene commentary on the state of democracy in the US.
The last post outlined a clear pattern in the presidential election of 2024: people who lived in areas that received large transfers of money from the Federal government preferred Mr. Trump, while those who lived in areas that received less from the Federal government preferred Vice-President Harris. Given that Mr. Trump favored policies that would reduce employment (deportation), increase inflation (tariffs), and reduce revenues for the Federal government (tax cuts), that pattern seems inconsistent with the interests of those who rely on transfer incomes.
While curious, this pattern is not unique. For example, some Marxists use the concept of “false consciousness” to explain this self-defeating behavior. Britannica defines that concept this way:
“…false consciousness, in philosophy, particularly within critical theory and other Marxist schools and movements, the notion that members of the proletariat unwittingly misperceive their real position in society and systematically misunderstand their genuine interests within the social relations of production under capitalism. False consciousness denotes people’s inability to recognize inequality, oppression, and exploitation in a capitalist society because of the prevalence within it of views that naturalize and legitimize the existence of social classes.”
The concept does not seem relevant to the election of 2024. My own view was that there was a great deal of resentment against “elites” in campaign rhetoric, although support for a person who regularly bragged about how rich he was is inconsistent with that assessment. Moreover, false consciousness begs the question: it does not explain why people fail or refuse to act on evidence and logic to protect their interests.
I also have not fully answered that question, and the purpose of this post is to afford me an opportunity to clarify my thinking as well as to elicit other ideas from the readers of this post. What now follows is a wild tangent that I hope is ultimately relevant to an explanation.
My suspicion is that the failure to protect one’s own interests stems from the growing inexplicability of the world to most people. There is a growing discrepancy between what we can and cannot readily explain, and when the number of inexplicable events or processes occur, humans will often resort to myth or magic to explain what they cannot account for. It really did not matter whether one believed that the Norse god Thor was responsible for thunder and lightning or whether one believed that thunder and lightning was caused by friction of particles which create an electrostatic charge–thunder and lightning were going to occur no matter which explanation was proffered. But the question of why we believed what we believed is crucially important.
The mythological explanation for thunder and lightning required someone or some institution to legitimize the myth of the god, Thor; the scientific explanation required a process (something we call the scientific method) that neccessitated a broad agreement among those who come to conclusions based upon evidence and reasoning. Both the shaman and the scientist are authorities, but the shaman relies upon faith and the scientist relies on evidence. There is a profound difference in determining what constitutes a true statement between the two approaches.
Over time, the scientific method gained greater legitimacy as scientists such as Galileo and Newton carefully explicated the observations and subjected those observations and conclusions to review by those who accepted the method. Indeed, the increased rigor of the scientific method utlimately led to the pivotal role of “right reason”, or rationality, in the movement that we call the Enlightenment. Science emerged as the most effective way to resolve such problems as transportation and health, and I have no hesitation whatsoever in asserting that the scientific method became the most readily accepted basis for resolving questions about the efficacy of competing approaches to public policy. More importantly, the scientific method is responsible for the dramastic increase in public welfare thast has occurred since the early 19th century.
The price for this progress, however, was to deepen the ignorance of private citizens about how the increase in welfare actually occurred. It was fairly easy to correlate a horse with better transportation than walking–one fed and cared for the horse so that it could perform that essential role; it was less easy to make that same correlation to the automobile–what is a carburetor? How does one refine petroleum into gasoline? Do I really have to answer those quesitons to use a car? The same is true of virtually every aspect of modern life: every day we use things, like a computer, that we really do not fully understand, take medicines to which we have no personal connection such as the bark from a witch hazel tree, eat food that we could not produce for ourselves, wear clothes that we could not make for ourselves, and receive bills with charges that make no sense, only to find ourselves in a phone tree that is impossible to navigate, talking to a person (perhaps) who really does not care if our problem is resolved. Paradoxically, science has produced an environment whose existence might as well been created through sorcery.
Many generations have faced this conundrum, and usually there is a difficult period of transition between our understanding of the universe and our means of assessing that understanding of the universe–think of the Luddites. During this transitional period, shamans will exploit the gap between knowing and believing. In the present, that gap is huge. And since no one really knows how the whole system works, any explanation for its working becomes plausible. And it appears as if even preposterous explanations (“we will build a wall to prevent illegal immigration, and Mexico will pay for it”) can be readily accepted.
The next step in this process is to create a mythological reality which diverts attention from scientific reality. Since the 1980s, the mythological reality of the movement that ultimately led to the election of Mr. Trump in 2024 has been clear and best articulated by one of the gods of that movement, Ronald Reagan: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” How this myth distracted us from the fact that the real source of the economic dislocations of the globalization at the turn of this century was private corporate behavior will be the topic of the next post. End of tangent.
The Economic Innovation Group has published a new study entitled “The Great Transfer-mation” which is a report decrying the dependence of US citizens on income transfers from the government. There are many points in the report with which I strongly disagree and I found it personally useful to go through the mental exercise of critiquing flawed arguments and evidence. But the report does provide some information which I found quite interesting, the most important of which was the correlation between getting transfers from the Federal Government and votes in the recent presidential election in the US.
According to the report, in 2000 about 10% of counties in the US received significant income from the government; by 2022, that percentage increased to 53%. Those counties tended to be rural with a significant population of elderly people and considerably poorer than many other counties in the US. The transfer programs idenitified in the study include:
● Old age supports such as Social Security and Medicare
● Medical supports to low-income households such as Medicaid
● Veterans benefits
● Poverty alleviation and income maintenance supports such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
● Unemployment insurance (UI) compensation
● Education and training supports, such as Pell grants
The report is trying to make the case that the only way to address the growing dependence of Americans on income transfers is to stimulate economic growth through lower taxes and reduced regulation–in other words, a stronger commitment to the “trickle-down” myth of modern capitalism (despite all the evidence suggesting that that ideology is fundamentally flawed). But I found the link between income transfers and voting to be highly intriguing as reflected in the following graph:
The graph shows that those most dependent on income transfers were more likely to vote for Mr. Trump and that those who are less dependent on income transfers were more likely to vote for Vice-President Harris. That conclusion is not surprising and comports to my own understanding of why Trump was able to secure a popular majority.
The question is why were people who relied so heavily on aid from the Federal Government were so willing to back a candidate who made such an issue of government deficits and the need to control the Federal budget. The answer is that Mr. Trump was able to make the case that Federal aid was going to the “undeserving” poor (“illegal” immigrants and people who benefit from discriminatory DEI programs) and that he would protect the income transfers to those that truly “deserved” the support. Presumably, those Americans who voted for Trump obviously believed that they deserved those transfers.
The Harris campaign tried to refute those assertions, but many people were not persuaded even though the idea that undocumented individuals without social security numbers could ever receive aid from the Federal Government was clearly ludicrous. The question that nettles me is why it was so difficult for so many Americans to clearly assess their own self-interest.
The question is important to me because I dedicated much of my life to a process that demanded close attention to evidence and logic and I am now confronted with the possibility that many people no longer believe those standards are valid. Give me a few more days to think this over, and I will post those thoughts in a few days.
The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria is rapidly changing the geopolitics of the Middle East. The Assad family had ruled in Syria for 50 years, but its collapse only took a few weeks. At this time, I would not hazard a guess about who will rule Syria in the future, or even whether Syria will remain a nation-state or devolve into mini-states ruled by different factions.
In reality, Syria fell apart 13 years ago as a popular movement known as the “Arab Spring” swept through many states in the Middle East in 2011. The Assad regime barely survived that movement and has been propped up by both Russia and Iran since that time. Russia, weakened by its war against Ukraine, and Iran, weakened by the Israeli attacks against its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, were unable to maintain that support as a rebel group in Syria, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, seized control of Damascus. But there are many groups within Syria, as described by the BBC:
“Among these groups – some now in Damascus – are rebel factions that once operated under the banner of the Free Syrian Army from southern towns and cities that had been dormant for years, but where the spark of rebellion had never entirely been sniffed out.
“Over to the east, Kurdish-led forces have benefited from the collapse of the Syrian army to take full control of the main city, Deir El-Zour. In the vast Syrian desert, remnants of the so-called Islamic State could also look to take advantage of the situation. And in the far north along the Turkish border, the Syrian National Army – backed by Ankara – could also prove to be a significant player in what happens next.”
In terms of the geopolitics of the region, the big losers are Russia and Iran. The big winners are Turkey and Israel. Turkish ambitions might be stymied by the strong Kurdish community in Syria. But the Israelis have taken advantage of the power vacuum in Syria by launching military assaults against virtually every Syrian military installation. Mondoweiss reports:
“Even as Bashar al-Assad was scrambling to get out of Syria, Israel was mobilizing its military to take advantage of the power vacuum that Assad’s ouster had created. After five decades of a low-level conflict between the two countries, Israel saw an opportunity to change the calculus, and it seized it.
“As of Wednesday, Israel had struck Syria nearly 500 times. Their goal with these attacks has been to essentially destroy Syria’s military capability, and they have already succeeded. Reports by Israeli media claim that well over 80% of Syria’s weaponry, ships, missiles, aircraft, and other military supplies have been damaged or destroyed.
“In essence, Israel has rendered Syria completely defenseless. “
Moreover, Israeli Defense Forces have seized territory in Syria which includes Mount Hermon, which offers Israel a critically important strategic location giving it the ability to monitor activities in Lebanon and Syria with great accuracy. The map of Israeli occupation is striking.
Israel has ordered the IDF to maintain its control of Mount Hermon throughout the winter and has suggested that its occupation is temporary. But, given its strategic significance, it is unlikely that Israel will return control of the mountain to Syria. Indeed, some in Israel have proposed that Israel should annex the terriroty, as reported by the Middle East Monitor:
“Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli yesterday called for Israel to occupy the summit of Mount Hermon in Syria.
“Chikli said: ‘The events in Syria are far from a cause for celebration. Although Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham and its leader, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, portray themselves as a new product, ultimately most of Syria is now under the control of affiliate organisations of Al-Qaeda.’
“’The good news is the growing strength of the Kurds and the expansion of their control in the northeast of the country,’ the Likud Party member said, noting that ‘Israel must operationally renew its control at Mount Hermon [in the occupied Golan Heights] and establish a new line of defence based on the ceasefire line of 1974 [with Syria].’
“Chikli’s statements come despite a call by the office Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, not to make statements about developments in Syria, while the Likud Party asked its members in the Knesset not to conduct interviews about Syria without the approval of Netanyahu’s office, according to reports by the Israeli public radio yesterday.”
Israel has now seized territory in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Syria. This is unquestionably a war of conquest.
” [aristocrats] are the most difficult Animals to manage, of anything in the whole Theory and practice of Government. They will not suffer themselves to be governed. They not only exert all their own Subtilty Industry and courage, but they employ the Commonalty, to knock to pieces every Plan and Model that the most honest Architects in Legislation can invent to keep them within bounds. Both Patricians and Plebeians are as furious as the Workmen in England to demolish labour-saving Machinery.
a Collection of Moral Sentences from all the most Ancien[t] Greek Poets. In one of the oldest of them I read in greek that I cannot repeat, a couplet the Sense of which was
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