gracchusdixit

The recent sacking of the executive editor of The New York Times by its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., nicknamed “Pinch,” ignited a storm of frenzied speculation and lamentation among the chattering classes.  Since the editor he fired, Jill Abramson, was the first woman ever to have held the job, many asked:  was the decision sexist?  Because her removal was merely the latest in a series of turbulent departures in the upper echelons of The Times, others wondered:  is the problem at the very top, with the management skills and style of the publisher himself?  A few suggested that “Pinch” Sulzberger is somehow a lesser man than his venerated father, Arthur Ochs Sr., a.k.a., “Punch”.

One reason media pundits were so obsessed with this story is the simple fact that they are part of the same business.  The other reason is their unexamined assumption that The New York Times occupies a unique position in the world of journalism and thus a  high-level change at The Times has uniquely momentous consequences.  One of the many obsessed observers went so far as to call The New York Times “the most important media institution in the world”.

Such people need to sit back, take a deep breath, and take a close look at reality.

The New York Times is a fine newspaper, and it has played a significant role in our public life for a long time.  But to call it “the most important media institution in the world” is hyperbolic at best, ignorant at worst, and in either case woefully out of step with reality.

Of course, it all depends on what is meant by “important”.

If “important” means “influential,” then I suppose there is a case to be made.  The Times has, among other things, won more Pulitzer Prizes than any American newspaper.  On the other hand, can its journalistic influence seriously be compared with that of, say, the BBC, which operates four television networks and a dozen radio networks, provides news to an international audience in more than 28 languages, and has more correspondents and news bureaux than any other journalistic entity on the planet?

If “important” means reach—i.e., the number of its readers—The Times doesn’t come close to being the “most important media institution in the world.”  There are dozens of newspapers that are read by millions more than ever glance at a copy of The Times.  Newspapers in Japan and India have larger circulations by several orders of magnitude.  The circulation of Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid, The Sun, dwarfs the readership of The Times, and that in a country less than a third the size of the United States.  Even in the United States itself, another Murdock enterprise, The Wall Street Journal, has a substantially larger readership.  Although the digital edition of The Times now has a bigger footprint than its printed pages, more people turn to CNN’s website for their news, not to mention the millions more who trawl for news video on You Tube.

If “important” means sheer size, then The New York Times Company doesn’t even make the list of truly consequential media organizations.  CBS makes twice as much money in a single calendar quarter, and Disney makes ten times as much.    Indeed, one cable news channel, Fox, generates as much revenue, and far more profit, than The Times and all its entities put together.

The Times is not only smaller than many of its counterparts and competitors, it is becoming still smaller.  The company used to own nine television stations; they’re gone.  For 65 years, it owned a radio station in New York City; that’s gone.  It bought The Boston Globe; that’s gone too.  It purchased The International Herald Tribune from another troubled newspaper, The Washington Post, then merged it with the mother ship and shut it down.  All of this is reflected in the stock price of The New York Times Company, which is a fraction of what it was just ten years ago.

The New York Times has a venerable past.  Whether it has a future is more doubtful.  What isn’t in doubt is that it no longer qualifies, if it ever did, as the “most important media institution in the world”.  The fate of its former executive editor is therefore a footnote, not a headline, in the story of American journalism.

Karl Rove, the man who got George W. Bush elected President of the United States, recently insinuated that Hillary Clinton had suffered brain damage as the result of a fall in 2012.  When challenged on the facts, he tried to fudge his errors and denied that he had ever used the words, “brain damage”.   The latter may be true in a strict sense, but it scarcely matters.  What Rove said was:  “Thirty days in the hospital?  And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury?  We need to know what’s up with that.”  Perhaps Rove sees a distinction between “brain damage” and “traumatic brain injury,” but it is doubtful that anyone else does.  The implication is identical, and the purpose is clear:  to suggest that mental incapacity may disqualify Hillary Clinton from becoming a Presidential candidate.  Indeed, Rove later said as much:  “This is going to be an issue in the 2016 election, whether she likes it or not.”

Rove’s insinuation is not only disgraceful but ridiculous on its face.  Whatever Hillary Clinton’s flaws may be, a lack of mental capacity isn’t one of them.  Moreover, for such a slur to come from a Republican political operative is deeply ironic.  It may be unkind to say so, but mental acuity was not George W. Bush’s strong suit, and Ronald Reagan’s mental lapses were the butt of innumerable jokes during his presidency—jokes that tragically morphed into reality when he succumbed to dementia after leaving office.

Much has been said about Rove’s long history of dirty tricks, but this is merely the latest iteration in a long tradition of Republican dirty tricks.  It was Richard Nixon who embraced slander and personal sabotage as a political philosophy and ultimately had to surrender the Presidency because of it.  It was Lee Atwater, the elder Bush’s campaign manager, who cooked up the infamous “Willie Horton” ad that dishonestly ended the candidacy of Michael Dukakis.  In slandering Hillary Clinton, Karl Rove is walking down a familiar road.

There is, nonetheless, something different about this particular dirty trick.  What makes it different is the sheer desperation it reveals.  Whether Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, whether she even wants to become President, is still anyone’s guess.  But the Republicans are scared to death of the possibility.

There are three reasons for their terror.

First, if Hillary Clinton runs, she will be a formidable, perhaps an unbeatable, candidate.  The Clintons are the most popular political figures in the land, and no attempt by the Republicans to derail them has worked.  The “Whitewater scandal” turned out to be an empty fraud.  The soap-opera impeachment of Bill Clinton merely served to make him more popular.  And the only people paying attention to the endless drumbeat about “Benghazi” are crazy conspiracy theorists who believe the attack on the World Trade Center was engineered by the CIA and the Apollo 11 moon landing was filmed on a Hollywood sound stage.

Second, the Republican Party has no plausible candidate of its own.  Chris Christie, until recently the great white hope of the party’s big financial donors, may face criminal prosecution or impeachment before the next election.   Jeb Bush will never satisfy the spittle-spewing, government-bashing, minority-hating, and immigrant-loathing Republican “base”.  And the residual suspects—Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio—will never appeal to the general electorate.  Paul is a libertarian loon, Cruz is transparently ambitious demagogue, and Rubio is a damp dishrag who flits from one wishy-washy position to another.  The election is still two years off, and someone more credible may yet emerge.  But it seems unlikely.

Finally,  the Republican Party itself is intellectually bankrupt.   Its worn-out ideology of low taxes on the rich, no regulation on business, and no concessions on even the most obvious and pressing issues no longer convinces anyone.  Its refusal to acknowledge, let alone confront, climate change, income inequality, stagnating wages, and rampant gun violence has become a shameful embarrassment.   The simple truth is, the Republican Party ran out of ideas for solving the nation’s social and economic ills long ago.

What, then, are brainless Republicans left with as they face the prospect of a Clinton candidacy,?  Slander, innuendo, and character assassination.

One should never underestimate the gullibility of human beings, and it may be that these old tricks will work their dirty magic once again.  Somehow I doubt it.  The real brain damage in all this belongs to the man they once called “Bush’s Brain,” Karl Rove.

For its speedy decision to ban for life Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, the National Basketball Association was instantly and almost universally praised.  Sterling had, of course, been “caught on tape” making blatantly racist remarks regarding African-Americans, who, unluckily for him and his fortune, comprise the overwhelming majority of NBA players.  The players were outraged, and so was nearly everyone else.

The NBA’s decision was not only quick, it was sweeping.  Along with the ban came a steep fine and the announcement that Sterling may be compelled to sell the franchise to someone else.  Whether this will eventually happen, we do not yet know, since it is likely that Sterling will oppose such a decision in the courts when, or if, it comes.  Nonetheless, the announcement itself was greeted with widespread approbation and relief: the NBA had acted decisively, it had acted quickly, it had done the right thing.

We have subsequently come to learn that the NBA may have had little choice.  It seems that the players were determined to act if the NBA itself did not.  They were prepared to walk off the court just as the end-of-season play-offs were about to begin.  If that had occurred, the economic damage to the owners, to the television networks that broadcast the play-offs, and to the advertisers who support those broadcasts, would have run into many millions of dollars.  It now seems that the NBA’s action may have been less the result of virtue than of economic calculation.

Imagine for a moment how things might have turned out if one of the Walmart heirs had been “caught on tape” voicing similarly racist views.  Could that heir have been fined and, if so, by whom?  Could that heir have been “banned for life” from participating in the management of Walmart?  Can we even conceive of the possibility that he (or she) could have been compelled to sell his (or her) interest in the corporation?  The answer to all these questions, of course, is no.

Which raises an infinitely more important question: why, in the face of blatantly unacceptable behavior, can the owner of an NBA franchise be dealt with decisively all the while we cannot even imagine a similar outcome for the members of America’s corporate elite?

There are three answers to the question.

The first—most obvious—answer is that the business of professional sports is uniquely public and therefore publicly exposed.  When the owner of a national sports franchise is revealed to be a blatant racist, trouble inevitably follows.  What we are prepared to accept or overlook in the world of “private” business, we are less prepared to countenance in the public world of professional sports.

The second—and equally obvious—answer is that professional athletes are a rarified breed who bear no resemblance to the powerless and anonymous greeters, checkers and stock clerks who work for a company like Walmart.  Athletes are highly, albeit narrowly, skilled; they are in some cases famous; and they are, one and all, precious economic commodities.  That gives them clout, and the risk of offending them carries a high price.

The third—but largely overlooked—answer is that professional athletes are unionized.  Not only are they unionized, but they belong to arguably the most effective and powerful unions in the country.  Without a powerful union to back them, it is highly unlikely that America’s professional basketball players would have been able to persuade, let alone compel, the NBA to act as it did.  For all their wealth and fame, the players of the NBA would have been as powerless as the wage-slaves who work for Walmart.

There is, in this, a lesson for the rest of us.  In the last 30 years, unions have been demonized, diminished, and all but destroyed by Republicans espousing their free-market ideology.  They have told us that unions are single-handedly responsible for the decline in our country’s manufacturing base, the exportation of millions of jobs, the purported deficiencies of our public education system, and just about every other evil known to man.  The truth is otherwise.  Without strong unions, workers cannot negotiate “freely” with monolithic employers, they cannot defend their human dignity or preserve their self-worth, they cannot get even a fair hearing.

The unionized players of the NBA have shown us what it is like for employees to be able to act with integrity and without fear.  We should pay attention and learn from their lesson.

The Supreme Court of the United States recently upheld an amendment to the Michigan state constitution, barring affirmative action in university admissions.  There was nothing surprising about this outcome.  It was merely the latest in a long series of decisions that all point in the same ideological direction.   In virtually every clash between the privileged and the powerless, the Roberts Court has taken the side of the privileged.

Justice Anthony Kennedy tried to justify this decision by denying that it had anything to do with affirmative action itself:  “The question here concerns not the permissibility of race-conscious admissions policies under the Constitution but whether, and in what manner, voters in the States may choose to prohibit the consideration of racial preferences…”

With a good deal of high-sounding language about “rational, civic discourse” and the “capacity of voters to debate and then to determine,” Kennedy came down squarely in favor of states’ rights and majority rule—lovely ideas as long as you belong to the majority and don’t live in states that have a long history of disenfranchising minorities.

In a concurring opinion, Antonin Scalia was characteristically less delicate and more sarcastic:  “In my view, any law expressly requiring state actors to afford all persons equal protection of the laws does not—cannot—deny to any person equal protection of the laws, regardless of whatever evidence of seemingly foul purposes plaintiffs may cook up in the trial court.”

This is classic Scalia:  clever, slippery, and dismissive.  If you swallowed his bogus logic, you’d have to accept the proposition that any attempt to eradicate centuries of racial discrimination is itself a form of racial discrimination as wicked as the evil it is trying to redress.

Indeed, he came very close to saying precisely that: “As Justice Harlan observed a century ago, ‘our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.’  The people of Michigan wish the same for their governing charter.  It would be shameful for us to stand in their way.”

The problem, of course, is that, while our Constitution may be color-blind—a dubious proposition at best, given the fact that many of the Founders were slave-owners—our society is not.  The real blindness is to pretend otherwise and, by using cynical Constitutional arguments, to treat remedies as maladies.

As I said, none of this should surprise us.  Before joining the Court, Chief Justice Roberts spent most of his legal career doing the bidding of big money, and his radically conservative colleagues—Scalia, Alito, Thomas—have never been coy about their intentions to roll back civil rights protections, eliminate affirmative action, and advance private interests at the expense of the public good.

In the end, the only surprising and hopeful thing about this case was the remarkably direct dissenting opinion of Justice Sonia Sotamayor.  In 58 relentless pages, she laid out our country’s long, lamentable history of institutionalized racial discrimination, demonstrating how persistently “states rights” and  “majority rule” have served to perpetuate prejudice.  Along the way, she took direct aim at the hypocritical piety of the conservatives on the Court and in particular at the Chief Justice himself:

“My colleagues are of the view that we should leave race out of the picture entirely and let the voters sort it out.  We have seen this reasoning before:  ‘the way to stop racial discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race’.  It is a sentiment out of touch with reality, one not required by the Constitution, and one that has properly been rejected as ‘not sufficient’ in cases of this nature.”

The “sentiment” she attacked had been expressed by none other than John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United States.  Needless to say, this did not sit well with the Chief Justice, and he weighed in with a pompous rebuke:  “People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.”

Roberts can pontificate all he wants, but Sonia Sotamayor finally did what has long needed doing.  She called out the conservative cabal on the Court for being the “bad faith” connivers they truly are.

She was right.  They are out of touch with reality.  Unfortunately, they are also in charge of the highest court in the land.

To listen to the hubbub surrounding CBS’ decision to replace the retiring host of its late night show, David Letterman, with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, you might be forgiven for  imagining that some earthshaking event has occurred, that a watershed moment in the cultural and political life of the whole nation has been reached and crossed.

The pundits and celebrity gawkers announced the change in awestruck, slack-jawed, wide-eyed wonder.  They have lavished Letterman with praise: as an innovator, a comedic pioneer, a daring astronaut of the entertainment universe whose years of cracking jokes in the wee hours constituted a giant step forward in the all-important business of amusing mankind.

As to Colbert, the fawning and gushing have been boundless.  “I never imagined he would go so far,” said one.  “The question everyone is asking,” said another, in a sycophantic, reverential hush, “is what he will do with this new big platform.”  To hear such people talk, we might be witnessing nothing less momentous than the election of a new President or Pope.

Colbert himself has done nothing to dampen the hyperbole, saying, among many other things: “Simply being a guest on David Letterman’s show has been a highlight of my career.  I never dreamed that I would follow in his footsteps, though everyone in late night follows Dave’s lead.”  With Colbert, of course, it’s never easy to tell whether he’s being serious, or sarcastic, or merely self-serving.  He is quite clever enough to be all three at once.

At the other, distinctly less clever end of the babbling spectrum, however, the conservative media reacted to the news with instantaneous and unbridled rage.  Colbert made his bones at Comedy Central by cracking his jokes “in character”—a character loosely modeled on Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly.  Colbert’s particular inspiration was to have mocked O’Reilly merely by impersonating him, and he played the character so well that the funniest joke on his show was invariably the character himself.  To people on the right, CBS’ decision to hire Colbert was thus another illustration of the “mainstream media’s” treasonous liberalism.  The ultimate right-wing gas-bag, Rush Limbaugh, went so far as to say: “CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America.”  He proceeded to add, with a characteristic lack of delicacy or grace, that he was “pissed off”—a fact that, if true, has its own comedic value.

What is missing, and has been missed, in all this hot air is the bracing, cold air of reality.  The reality is that the world of late night television talk shows hasn’t been a “big platform” in many years.  Perhaps it was when Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon ruled the roost on the Tonight Show, or when Saturday Night Live—a distinctly “political” show if ever there was one—first burst upon the scene.  But that was a very long time ago.  Jimmy Fallon, proclaimed the “new king of late night” by the unstoppable publicity machine of the television business is, in truth, the monarch of a small duchy located somewhere high up in the Bavarian Alps.

Today, the late night shows on the so-called “big three” television networks are watched by scarcely more than ten percent of the audience still capable of propping its eyelids open at midnight.  The remaining ninety percent are watching something else, though it is hard to imagine how they have the energy to watch anything at all.  Indeed, the audience that watches Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central is only fractionally smaller than the audience that will be watching David Letterman when he says goodnight for the last time.  That is why the last host of the Tonight Show, Jay Leno, chose to retire when he did.  Being no fool, he saw the graffiti scrawled on the wall.  Better to leave when there was still somebody around to notice your departure.

Rush Limbaugh should therefore rest easy.  If CBS has in truth “declared war on the heartland of America,” it is about to have a tough fight on its hands.  It isn’t easy to win a war without bullets.

Scarcely two years after French voters elected Francois Hollande, a socialist, as their President, the French electorate have given the man and his party a resounding rebuke.  In nationwide municipal elections—which, in some ways, are the French equivalent of our mid-term elections—voters rejected more than 150 left-of-center mayors, a clear signal that the French people are fed up with the way their country is being governed.

Americans are notoriously indifferent to, or ignorant of, events in other nations, and it is unlikely that very many are even aware of what just happened in France.  Nonetheless, this remote French election is one that we should all pay attention to—for it is a signal of what may soon be coming our way.

France’s socialist government did not suffer a rebuke, because the French people suddenly became more conservative.   The rebuke came, because voters on the “left,” who have for decades comprised a majority of the French electorate, didn’t bother to show up at the polls.

France’s first socialist prime minister in 17 years was ushered into office in 2012, when impatience with his conservative predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, reached a boiling point.  Sarkozy’s free-market policies had done nothing to save the French economy from imploding in 2008 or to recover thereafter.  The fiscal austerity and business-friendly regulations he championed had neither balanced the budget nor created jobs.  Francois Hollande promised “change.”  He promised to roll back austerity.  He promised to protect the social safety net.  He promised to stem the inequalities of wealth and income that are growing in France no less than in the rest of the world.

What Hollande delivered, however, was much of the same thing.  Apart from tepid and largely symbolic nods to socialism, there has been little to distinguish his policies from those of the conservative he replaced.

The reason is that, like his predecessor, Hollande is a creature of the “neo-liberal” economic system that is now accepted as holy writ by governing elites around the world.  Globalized financial markets, free trade, cheap labor, low taxes, balanced budgets, and secure returns for investors—that is the catechism of the “neo-liberal” model.  Instead of challenging this mindless cant, Hollande has cow-towed to it.

This is partly the result of the peculiar role that France played in the creation of the European Union and the “euro”.  Both of these were primarily French ideas.  Consequently, it has been all but impossible for French politicians to distance themselves from the worst aspects of the system they invented.

But the problem goes deeper.  It doesn’t really matter whether members of the governing elites are “left” or “right,” liberal or conservative, socialists or libertarians.  They are, one and all, beneficiaries of the same system, and their ability to question its fundamental premises is exactly zero.  In the end, such people will compromise with, rather than challenge or change, the system to which they belong.

French voters, on the other hand, have never been enamored, let alone persuaded, by the “neo-liberal” catechism.  They realize something that their leaders cannot, or will not, accept: the fact that system simply doesn’t work.  It doesn’t produce a better life for the majority of people.  It doesn’t even produce “jobs” or “growth,” which are its core promises.  It merely concentrates wealth and income in the hands of fewer and fewer people—including people like Francois Hollande.

If all this sounds familiar, it should.

Six years ago, Americans elected a President who also promised “change,” but, in the end, preferred “compromise,” indeed, praised compromise as if it were a personal and political virtue rather than a means to an end.  Some people say that he had no choice.  Others argue that his pallid compromises were better than the radical alternatives.  There is truth in all that.

But the ultimate truth is this: if the Democratic Party is trounced at the polls in November, if progressive ideas are defeated, if the country steps even further back than it already has, it won’t be because Americans have become more “conservative.”  It will be because an American President, like his French counterpart, has failed to live up to his promises.  It will be because the voters who believed his promises don’t bother to show up.  And who could blame them?

One of the country’s richest men chose the week of the President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address to complain that progressives, when they worry out loud about the growing level of income inequality in our society, are engaging in a form of persecution against what he called the “successful one percent”.  He went so far as to compare this supposed persecution with the fate inflicted on the victims of the Holocaust.

All comparisons with the Holocaust are inescapably tasteless, because that uniquely dreadful event is commensurable with nothing else.  This particular comparison, however, was worse than tasteless.  It was a grotesque juxtaposition of two things that are not only unrelated but at opposite ends of the moral spectrum: at one end, a true and terrible tragedy; at the other, a trivial and pathetic expression of self-pity.

It took the clueless billionaire who made this gaff several days to realize his mistake.  He apologized in the end, but he did not retreat from his basic point.  Hard as it is for most of us to believe, “persecuted” is precisely what he believes himself and his billionaire buddies to be.

The rationale offered by the whining wealthy for this self-serving claim is almost as grotesque as the impulse to compare their situation with that of the millions of helpless Jews who went to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis.  The rich contend that any attempt to raise their taxes is a form of class warfare, waged by greedy and resentful “takers” against hard-working and productive “makers”.   They dismiss the motives of those who make such proposals as a “politics of envy”.

Let us be clear.  There are, without doubt, Americans who have made their money by dint of talent, hard work, and entrepreneurial skill.  Such people deserve to be rewarded.

Let us also be clear about something else.  Most of the top one percent do not come close to meeting that threshold.  Few of them are particularly talented.  Many of them have never worked a day in their lives.  And whatever entrepreneurial skills they may possess have been directed toward persuading and, on far too many occasions, bribing public officials to do their bidding.

In the last regard, America’s rich have succeeded fabulously, because, since the election of Ronald Reagan, they have been subsidized by government to a fabulous degree.  The percentage of income they pay to fund Social Security and Medicare is no more than the poorest of their workers.  The money they make from financial investments rather than real work—and virtually none of their money comes from real work—is taxed at a lower rate than simple wages.  Many of the businesses they run or own would not exist, let alone make a profit, if the government didn’t underwrite the inadequate medical care their employees get, the education they receive, or the unemployment benefits they are paid when they are, all too frequently, laid off to boost profits even further.

Corporate executives—who now constitute a majority of America’s wealthiest people—“earn” nearly four hundred times the average income of the people who work for them, and their compensation rarely has anything to do with the profitability or investment returns of the companies they manage.  Hedge-fund managers, who contribute exactly nothing to the real economic productivity of the nation, are allowed to treat their multi-million-dollar bonuses as capital gains, a tax dodge that no sane or responsible person has ever pretended to justify.

We subsidize the rich even when they are dead.  Thanks to our rigged tax code, they can park their money for eternity in trusts and foundations that pay no taxes, and even without such subterfuge, we allow them to leave vast sums to their worthless children, without those children ever having to pay a penny.

As if all this were not enough, the poor, pathetic, persecuted rich now want us to feel sorry for them.  I suppose that, no matter how rich you are, there’s never enough; you’ll never be satisfied until you get it all.

The two biggest blabbermouths of right-wing talk radio, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, recently accused the new Pope, Francis the First, of being a “Marxist”.   When asked about this accusation, the Pope responded with a characteristically self-effacing smile, saying that, although he disapproved of Marxist ideology, he knew several Marxists who were decent people and consequently wasn’t offended by the comparison.

It scarcely needs saying that there is a world of difference between the Christian charity espoused by Pope Francis and the economic views of Karl Marx.  For Limbaugh and Beck to claim otherwise is, of course, ridiculous and reveals yet again (as if further demonstration were needed) that they and their ilk are little more than idiotic bullies.

Nevertheless, there is one thing the Pope and Marx do share:  a recognition that capitalism has failed to provide a decent life for the vast majority of mankind.  The Pope is calling upon the world to confront a truth that Christ proclaimed two thousand years ago—the truth that money and morality cannot coexist.  Christ may have proclaimed this truth, but it was Marx who analyzed it more exhaustively than anyone before or since.

When Marx’s reputation went into a steep decline after the collapse of the old Soviet Union, we were told that his assessment of capitalism had been rendered obsolete.  History, it was said, had declared a winner.  Laissez-faire capitalism and the two countries that most embodied it, the United States and the United Kingdom, were now the undisputed model of success.  Follow their model—the “neo-liberal” model—and the world would become a better  place for everyone.

But the Muse of History is a fickle creature, and she seems to delight in fooling us.   Today, scarcely more than 20 years after the Berlin wall came tumbling down, the underpinnings of global capitalism—the banks that feed it, the corporations that profit from it, the political institutions that support it—have lost their footing and their credibility.  All around the world, thousands of ordinary people have taken to the streets to protest governments that have betrayed them and an economic system that has failed them.  Suddenly, the verdict of history seems less certain.

None of this would have surprised Karl Marx.  On the contrary, he saw it coming.

It was Marx who first observed that the theory of capitalism is starkly at odds with its reality.  Although capitalism claims to benefit everyone by creating competition, it does precisely the opposite,  creating monopolies and oligarchies, which concentrate money and power in the hands of the few.   This, Marx foresaw, leads to inescapable social conflicts between those who possess wealth and those who do not—conflicts that can tear societies apart.

He also saw that capitalism is plagued by inherent and self-destructive contradictions.  To sustain profit, it demands endless growth and technological change, producing more and more goods at cheaper and cheaper prices.  This is a Catch-22.  Those who do the work are also the people who do the buying.  When their wages have been slashed or their jobs eliminated, the shelves fill with goods that nobody can afford.  The results are overproduction and collapse—a recession when we’re lucky, a depression if we’re not.  The financial collapse of 2007-2008 and the stagnation that followed it wouldn’t have surprised Marx.  They are merely the latest in capitalism’s long history of economic and social disasters.

Finally and most tellingly, Marx divined that the engine of capitalism—money—completely changes the fundamental relationships between human beings.  When a person’s work can be purchased in the marketplace, like a lump of coal,  human relationships turn into transactions, devoid of any moral content.   Human commitments turn into heartless “contracts”.  Thus do considerations of right and wrong, of fairness, of basic justice fall by the wayside.  Thus can corporations fire people, uproot their lives, and send their jobs packing to third world countries without a qualm.  Marx called this the “cash nexus”.  The Pope calls it “the idolatry of money”.  The words may be different, but the underlying truth is the same.

And the truth, no matter what you call it, is this:  capitalism is a moral and practical failure.  It isn’t just.  It doesn’t work.  And it never will.  The father of communism saw this clearly two hundred years ago.  The spiritual father of millions of Christians around the world sees it today.

Republicans in Congress have just all but eliminated funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known once upon a time as “food stamps”.  This program helps more than 40 million Americans—the poor, the unemployed, thousands of disabled veterans as well as active servicemen and women—to buy food they otherwise could not afford.  To Republicans, however, it is just another give-away that encourages people to stay home, sit on the couch, and do nothing—another “entitlement” for the shiftless and the lazy that deserves to be eradicated.  Leading the fight for “entitlement reform” is Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, whose various “Ryan budgets” have tried (among other things) to abolish Medicaid, slash Medicare, and privatize Social Security.

It may surprise you to read in these pages that Paul Ryan is right:  “entitlement reform” is both needed and long overdue.  But alas, the most necessary reforms do not appear anywhere on the Congressman’s list.  For instance:

(1) The United States has nearly a thousand military installations here and abroad, far more than the British or Roman Empires when they ruled the world.  Since we are not an “empire,” or at least do not suppose ourselves to be, why do we need to pay for all this expensive real estate?  Many of these installations are little more than “entitlements” for the global corporations whose interests they protect or for the otherwise unemployable inhabitants of the largely “red states” in which they are located.  Let’s cut back this “entitlement” by shutting down every army, navy and air force base that doesn’t actually make the American people safer.  Apart from saving a great deal of money, their closure might have the salutary effect of causing the flag-waving citizens of the heavily “entitled” red states to think twice about the “evils” of government.

(2) We tolerate and subsidize the inefficiencies and cost over-runs of more than a hundred major corporations in the armaments, aviation, energy and “security” industries.  Former military officers and government officials, like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, have long felt themselves “entitled” to employment by these corporations after leaving office, just as the corporations themselves feel “entitled” to feed at the public trough.  Let’s cut back this “entitlement” by canceling their bloated contracts.  Let’s go even further by demanding our money back.  Maybe the Chinese or the Koreans or even the French could do the work less expensively and more efficiently.

(3) We indemnify a handful of agribusiness conglomerates—Cargill, ADM, and others—against the risk of market and price fluctuations.  We put a floor under their crop prices.  We insure them against the vagaries of the weather.  We subsidize the price they pay for the water to irrigate their fields and charge them not a penny for dumping their swill in countless rivers and streams across the land.  In the spirit of true free enterprise, it is only reasonable to ask why such companies should be “entitled” to make money no matter what the markets and Mother Nature decree.  Let’s cut back this “entitlement” by cutting them loose.  Let them compete, pay a fair price for the resources they consume, and take their knocks in the “free market” like everyone else.

(4) For a pittance, we allow major pharmaceutical companies to market the drugs discovered and formulated by the scientists at the National Institutes of Health, at the Center for Disease Control, and in the government-funded laboratories of countless major universities—which is where nearly all truly beneficial new drugs come from.  Why should drug companies be “entitled” to twenty or thirty percent profit margins at the public’s expense?  Let’s cut back this “entitlement” by keeping the patents on the government’s books.  Better yet, let’s sell the drugs, at cost, directly to the citizens who paid for their development in the first place.

(5) We lavishly subsidize the richest corporations on the planet—the big energy companies.  We let them drill on public land; we let them blow up mountains and tear down forests; we let them build pipelines that deface the earth, poison the water, and devastate whole communities.  We let them get away with unconscionable negligence and punish them with a slap on the wrist.  People like the infamous Koch brothers, whose incomprehensible wealth bankrolls the entitlement-hating tea party, are the beneficiaries of the biggest “entitlement program” in human history.  Let’s eliminate this “entitlement” altogether.  If energy companies want to drill and spill, let them do it on their own nickel.

(6)  To fund Social Security, we tax all Americans at the same “flat” rate, whether they make ten thousand dollars or ten million.  Even worse, we cap Social Security taxes, so that income over $113,000 a year doesn’t contribute to funding the program.   Worst of all, we distribute Social Security benefits to everyone, whether they need the money or not.  A friend of mine always chuckles when this subject comes up.  “My mother-in-law,” he once quipped sardonically, “uses her Social Security check to pay for a second country club membership.”

If Paul Ryan and the Republicans really want “entitlement reform,” perhaps they should start with the country club memberships.