Money Talks, Big Time

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Despair about the state of our politics pervades the political spectrum, from left to right. One source of it, the narrative of fairness — we all have an equal opportunity to succeed if we work hard and play by the rules; citizens can truly shape our politics — no longer rings true to most Americans. Recent surveys indicate that substantial numbers of them believe that the economy and  political influence are both rigged, and that money has an outsized influence on politics. Ninety percent of Democrats hold this view, but so do 80% of Republicans. And careful studies confirm what the public believes.

None of this should be surprising given the stark economic inequality that now marks our society. The richest 1% of American households currently account for 40% of the country’s wealth, more than the bottom 90% of families possess. Worse yet, the top 0.1% has cornered about 20% of it, up from 7% in the mid-1970s. By contrast, the share of the bottom 90% has since then fallen from 35% to 25%. To put such figures in a personal light, in 2017, three men – Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates — possessed more wealth ($248.5 billion) than the bottom 50% of Americans. (Rajan Menon, Tom Dispatch, April2, 2019)

Back to the gilded age.  At least the super- rich at the turn of the 20th Century, had some style, even if they were hard, grasping people for whom it was impossible to have enough money.  And in due course their monopolies were broken up and some of the men themselves set up huge charities that are still disbursing money today to help the less fortunate.  Bill Gates is following that path; Jeff Bezos is a different matter.  He could start by being more generous to his own employees.

But this is chump change – you have to tax them and tax them, and break up all the burgeoning monopolies, whatever the industry.   The current situation cannot stand for long; it is shameful and self- defeating. I wish Americans learned history, for at this rate they will repeat it for sure!

Disappearing Louisiana

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Since the days of Huey Long, in the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles. If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory, the U.S. would have only forty-nine states. Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. Every few minutes, it drops a tennis court’s worth. On maps, the state may still resemble a boot. Really, though, the bottom of the boot is in tatters, missing not just a sole but also its heel and a good part of its instep.  The problem is climate change and the actions of the Mississippi.

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication (excessive richness of nutrients in a lake or other body of water, frequently due to runoff from the land, which causes a dense growth of plant life and death of animal life from lack of oxygen) –   these are just some of the byproducts of our species’ success, and they show up most notably in the delta area of the Mississippi river.   The most recent equivalent disaster was  the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs sixty-six million years ago. Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analogue ecosystems, a whole no-analogue future. There  are so many of us—nearly eight billion— that solving a problem so huge seems impracticable.  (a small section of a New Yorker article, 27 March 2019).

Meanwhile, one would have had to be asleep for months, like Rip van Winkle,  if you have not been aware of the recent hurricanes, the flooding , the weird and increasingly sudden temperature changes .  It suits the oil and coal people to pretend this is all a hoax, or only temporary..  But no, it is not temporary and will not go away, and it’s going to cause mass migration, violence, homelessness, food supply problems and disruptions to life we haven’t yet imagined.   We can put up memorials to the. naysayers ( this was all z ‘s fault) but that will do no good.  It is the young I worry about.  Meanwhile, I am walking everywhere I can.  It’s the Epicurean thing to do, despite the vehicle emissions from, yes, fossil fuels.

Time off in Greece

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Kefalonia

 We came, we saw, we sunbathed

 Odysseus, who came from Ithaca, just next door,
Found Kefalonia a bore.
No dragons, no beasties, no Charybdis or Scyllas,
Just a load of young Brits drinking beer in their villas.
From the earliest moment when he was a boy,
He wanted adventures, like leveling Troy.
But although he had traveled quite a lot,
He seemed to ignore this particular spot.

Here people are friendly, the climate sublime,
The countryside scented with sage and with thyme.
The olives are ancient, the beaches are sandy,
The food is so-so, but the markets are handy.
But except for Corelli and his mandolin,
There is little to stimulate adrenaline.
It’s an excellent place to just lie in the sun,
But nothing occurs here, when all’s said and done.

No, history’s passed by this particular isle – –
A backwater now, as it’s been for a while.
Top Romans arrived, found the island quite pleasant,
But generally gave it away as a present.
The Venetians came by and proved a mild menace,
But the wine wasn’t good, so they went back to Venice.
The odd conqueror conquered, but promptly departed;
The British came too, but were rather half-hearted.

No sign of a palace of mythical kings,
No civilizations or mystical springs.
No rivers to hell and no acropoli
To attract foreign visitors happening by.
The hire cars are hired, but most sit in the sun,
For where would they go if they went for a run?

No wonder the Italians and British all choose
The beach and the poolside, banter and booze.

To see British politicians as others see them

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 Bloomberg reports this comment from Germany’s deputy foreign minister:
“The U.K. government consists mostly of clueless boarding-school graduates.
“Brexit is a big shitshow, I say that now very undiplomatically,” Michael Roth said at an event of his Social Democratic Party in Berlin on Saturday. He accused “90 percent” of the British cabinet of having “no idea how workers think, live, work and behave” and said it would not be those U.K. politicians “born with silver spoons in their mouths, who went to private schools and elite universities” that will suffer the consequences of the mess.
“I don’t know if William Shakespeare could have come up with such a tragedy but who will foot the bill?,” the German diplomat said. His comments come just days after hard-Brexit champion Jacob Rees-Mogg, who attended Eton College and studied at Oxford University derided a fellow Conservative lawmaker for having graduated from Winchester College during a crunch debate over the country’s withdrawal from the EU.”
Regrettably, I wholly agree with Germany’s deputy foreign minister.  I would only comment that not everyone who graduated from Oxford University is quite as stupid as he says, although I myself wouldn’t know how to get out of the Brexit mess, either.  But then I wouldn’t have got us into it.