The Worst Leader

Who is the worst leader of a major power today? With the weekend’s series of surprises now behind us, the results are in. The “winner,” by unanimous consent, is . . . Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Over his twenty-three years in power, Putin has proved himself competent at only three things: deception, intimidation, and assassination. Let’s look at the record.

In 2001 Putin gave a speech before the German Bundestag (Parliament), in fluent German. He promised a peaceful trading zone from the Atlantic to the Urals. He later deceived virtually everyone, from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to yours truly, by embarking on a policy of paranoia and enmity toward the US and Europe and supporting butchers like Assad in the Middle East. Worse yet, he weaponized gas and oil—among modern Russia’s few genuine assets—thereby destroying Russian business’ reputation for reliability as a business partner.

Putin similarly deceived his own most competent and internationally focused business leaders, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2003, he summoned them to a meeting in the Kremlin, ostensibly to figure out how to convert Russia’s economy into an engine of private entrepreneurship like China’s. When Khodorkovsky and others complained of corruption, Putin turned on them, later jailing and exiling Khodorkovsky as an example.

Putin also deceived our own (admittedly not too bright) forty-third president, Dubya, by the simple expedient of wearing a crucifix to their first meeting. That and a few proper words helped convince Dubya that he could see into Putin’s “soul.”

For all his faults—and they were many—Bill Clinton reportedly saw through Putin in their first meeting [Set the timer at 7:40]. He warned the then-declining leader Boris Yeltsin that Putin would lead Russia away from the democracy that Yeltsin appeared to be trying to establish. Whether Yeltsin rejected the advice, or whether the processes of succession and Yeltsin’s personal decline were already too far along, is unknown. Our former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, described Putin as “almost reptilian.”

On intimidation and assassination, the record is clear. Putin or his minions reportedly assassinated Alexander Litvinenko and tried to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Britain, using radioactive polonium. He or they likely maimed Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian president and democrat, with dioxin, and evidently poisoned the now-jailed Russian liberal democrat Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent. Boris Nemtsov—the able and extremely popular Mayor of Moscow, and perhaps Putin’s most credible political rival ever—was gunned down on a major highway within sight of the Kremlin, at the very moment when a passing snowplow blocked the view of a surveillance camera.

As for journalists, their regular demise from violence in Russia is a global disgrace. During Putin’s first two terms alone, 88 journalists were reportedly murdered in Russia. That appalling number included the famed Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building after publishing numerous reports and several books about Russian atrocities in Chechnya.

The modern Russian Constitution is a fine legal document, filled with the collective democratic wisdom of our age. Even after Putin changed it to keep himself in power, it has some features that other nations could well adopt. They include a provision—notably absent from our own Constitution—making Russia’s foreign treaties automatically enforceable under domestic law.

But the many assassinations and attempts on dissenting voices, both at home and abroad, make clear that the Russian Constitution is not the supreme law of Putin’s Russian Federation. That place belongs to The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli, written over five centuries ago. That, in practice, is what rules Russia today. You displease the prince: you suffer or die and are lucky to survive in exile.

By no other country on Earth today have so many politicians, democrats, and journalists—let alone outside the country’s own borders—been assassinated or maimed in assassination attempts. Not China, not North Korea, and not even Saudi Arabia can compare. One can only conclude that Russia under Vladimir Putin has become a poster child for medieval brutality in the twenty-first century. The closest Russian analog to Putin is Ivan the Terrible, who is said to have put out the eyes of the architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral so he could never again create anything as beautiful.

Now let’s look at results. According to the World Bank [Click top of GDP per capita column to see rankings], Russia ranks 65th in the world for GDP per capita, behind all of the G-7 nations. Russia has barely more than one-third of the GDP per capita of Italy, which has the lowest of the G-7.

More galling yet, the principal losers in World War II, Germany and Japan, have vastly outstripped their pyrrhic victor, Russia. They have, respectively, over 4 and 3.5 times Russia’s GDP per capita.

Even with Russia’s larger population, Germany’s and Japan’s total GDP outstrips Russia’s by more than three times in Germany’s case and four times in Japan’s. In 2017, Russia ranked 11th in total GDP in the world, even before its atrocity in Ukraine, despite its huge land mass and enormous natural resources.

And then there is Putin’s incompetence in war. Not only did he start his brutal war in Ukraine on delusional pretexts. He self-evidently failed to prepare and plan competently for it. The Russian juggernaut that had beaten back the formidable Nazis and had broken the Siege of Leningrad over eighty years ago was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a one-time cook and previously jailed felon named Prigozhin was tasked to lead a suicide assault by 20,000 recruited convicts merely to take ostensible control of one small town (Bakhmut) near the border of previously Russian occupied territory. And even he complained of running out of ammunition.

None of this is the Russian people’s fault. Over the history of post-enlightenment Europe, Russians have held their own in virtually every field of human endeavor. Mendeleyev invented the periodic table. Pavlov’s name is synonymous with conditioned reflexes. Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet nuclear physicist, won the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting human rights. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in part for describing the dismal features of Soviet life. My American graduate school in physics used to assign a text by three Russians on basic nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. And the names of immortal Russian writers (Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Nekrasov, and Tolstoy) and composers (Mussorgsky, Skriabin, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky) are so well known as hardly to require mention.

I know the Russian people better than most Americans, for I spent four months in Moscow as a Fulbright Fellow in the spring of 1993. During the promising “spring” of “glasnost’ and perestroika” (openness and restructuring), I was the first American law professor to teach in the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (Russian acronym MGIMO), at which Putin had studied years before. The hat-check babushki made sure that I, a California native then living in Hawaii, put on my hat when going out in the cold. My Russian colleagues accepted me readily, and I formed a friendship with one. I attended a conference on “Power, law and the Press” with twenty Russians and two Germans, where the yearning of educated Russians to join the civilized world of modern commerce and free interchange was palpable.

All that, it seems, has vanished under the brutal, kleptocratic, Machiavellian rule of one man.

But it’s not for us outside Russia to provide a solution. Putin has portrayed and will portray every outside countermeasure to his brutal kleptocracy as an assault on Russia. And Russia, which is the most battered nation in modern history, will respond by closing ranks. So the antidote to this incompetent, monstrous, modern counterpart to Ivan the Terrible has to come from the Russian people themselves.

We outside Russia must be patient, wise and strategic. Russians came late to freedom: the vast majority of Russia’s people were serfs until freed in 1861. That was a mere four years earlier than we “freed” our slaves, whose descendants today comprise only one-eighth of our population.

Yet even today, 148 years later, our descendants of “freed” slaves are still not fully free. Russia’s serfs, in contrast to our slaves, were the vast majority of Russia’s people. So of all people, we Americans ought to be patient; we ought to know how hard freeing a whole people is.

At the end of the day, the Russian people are cautious. At least the so-far “peaceful” resolution of the standoff between Putin and his warlord-vassal Prigozhin so suggests. After all, the Russian Revolution was perhaps the most brutal of its kind in human history. Maybe in that cold country it takes a lot to make the blood hot, but when it heats, it boils over. Maybe that’s what ordinary Russians fear most.

Perhaps Russia’s best hope—and the world’s—lies in the self-exiled Russian oligarchs and young people who have fled this brutal tyrant’s rule, not just to escape his ghastly war, but also to escape his medieval tyranny as it grew over the last two decades. This self-exiled group, no doubt, includes many of the best and brightest Russians.

The most recent Ukraine-war exiles also include some of the youngest. Large numbers of recent emigres—both Russians and Ukrainians—appear to have settled in Bali, where both sides seem to get along, perhaps because both abhor the war and sought to flee it.

It’s such people, I hope, who will eventually find a relatively peaceful way to “fire” Putin and put Russia back on the track to peace, prosperity and modernity. Only they can insure that the next Russian “revolution” bears little resemblance to the one that was “Red” in both ideology and human blood.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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How Software Bullies Beat You Up for Change

Over the next few years, you’re going to hear a lot about Lina Khan, the Chair of our Federal Trade Commission. One of her jobs is to protect you against the software bullies who beat you up for change.

Sometimes they do it so cleverly that you don’t even know you’re being had. How so? Read on.

But first I’d like to set a bit of background. I’m no “radical left-wing socialist.” Nor am I a knee-jerk corporation basher. Fifteen years ago, I wrote a paean to corporations and their effects on human history so far.

Ever since the British East India Company helped discover and exploit America, corporations have brought innovative and powerful change to human life. I predicted their rise to dominance in economics, social life, and eventually politics. I thought and think that eventually they will eclipse governments, just as governments (at least in the West) had replaced the Church’s deadening autocracy during the first millennium. Collectively, I wrote, corporations could replace both church and state as the most powerful institutional influences on human life.

Little did I foresee how quickly it would all happen. Today, corporations provide virtually all of our necessities and luxuries, except for water, power, trash collection, protection against crime, and national defense. Through their little “click here to sign up” contracts—which most customers never read—they’ve replaced the entire Anglo-American legal system with a system of contractual “law” that they themselves have written.

Not surprisingly, their system favors them in both subtle and dramatic ways. Legal scholars call these little agreements with consumers “contracts of adhesion.” Why? They are the fly paper and you are the fly. If you “click here” to “sign” them, they mostly strip you of all your rights under the British and American common law built up since Magna Carta in 1215—over eight centuries.

If you have a dispute with the corporation, for example, the flypaper usually strips you of the right to a trial by a jury of your peers that our Constitution ostensibly guarantees. Far less do you get a class action—the right to combine your suit with those of other consumers similarly aggrieved, so as to make suing for small amounts worth while for you and the lawyers who might represent you. Instead, you get secret arbitration, sometimes with a gag order, before an unknown (to you) professional arbitrator who, as often as not, makes his/her living protecting the “rights” of corporations. Even if you win, you can’t say a word to encourage others similarly harmed. You must enjoy your measly personal recovery in secret.

But that’s just the bare beginning of corporate power in modern America. Today corporations have co-opted, if not utterly taken over, our political system and, increasingly, the world’s. When I wrote my first general analysis, I pointed out that Apple Computer had more cash reserves than France. Today, the US government is $31.4 trillion in debt. In contrast, US corporations collectively earned $2.3 trillion in profit for just the first quarter of 2023. That’s an annualized profit of $9.2 trillion, based on a down quarter!

So US corporations, collectively, could pay off the entire US national debt in less than four years, without losing a dime. That’s economic power!

As for politics, you don’t have to ask who controls us. Through their so-called “conservative” Federalist Society, the corporate oligarchs have utterly co-opted our Supreme Court. They've turned it sharply to the right, in a country where the Republican candidate for president has lost the nationwide popular vote in all but one of the last nine presidential elections.

This ostensibly “legal” coup d’etat, wrought with the help of our own Demagogue, has given us a radically reactionary Supreme Court. Among many other things, it has: (1) declared money “speech” and therefore “soft” bribery (in the form huge and dark-money contributions) constitutionally protected; (2) gutted the Voting Rights Act, thereby making voting much harder for citizens, especially minorities; and (3) taken away a Court-granted right of women to enjoy bodily autonomy in reproduction. Affirmative action in education and the right of the “administrative state” to have Ph.D.s and other experts make decisions that require expertise are even now on its chopping block.

To call these results “conservative” is a misnomer. Far from “conserving” what we as a nation have had, they are giving us an entirely new regime of money, politics and basic human rights. In that regime, money doesn’t just talk; it rules. And the millennial commands of near-obsolete religions have risen from their graves to rule us once again, here in the US, in the twenty-first century.

Next to these dismal megatrends in our declining nation, the examples below may seem trivial. But they set a tone. Little things add up. In this case, they add up to a picture of uniform, increasing and deeply troubling corporate oppression of individuals. All of that might pass itself off as perfectly legal, but for Lina Khan.

Khan’s most recent effort was outlined in today’s New York Times. She’s suing to stop Amazon from making it confusing and hard for customers to cancel their $139-per-year Amazon Prime subscriptions. Amazon reportedly made $31 billion on these subscriptions in 2021—separately from all the profit on its sales of goods and streaming video. According to Khan’s suit, Amazon “defends” this easy money by using all the tricks of clever and even deceptive programming to deflect and discourage consumers who want to cancel their subscriptions from doing so.

Worse yet, according to the NYT article, Amazon apparently changed some of these tactics in response to pre-suit pressure from Khan. But how, for how many customers, in what markets, and how permanent were these changes? Finding the answers to those questions will require extraordinary investigation, on the part of Khan and her small team of lawyers at the FTC, into the Internet’s operation and recent history.

And therein lies the rub of all government enforcement of this sort. A software monopoly holds all the cards. It controls what the software does, where the customer’s and the corporation’s data are stored (here, abroad, and in what state), and how long they are stored. It controls whether incriminating evidence lasts long enough for enforcement, or even for outside review.

As Internet-law guru Larry Lessig is reported to have said, “The code is the law.” What he meant was that, whatever the law says, the computer code determines what actually happens in interactions of software firms with their customers. And the code and its process can be changed in an instant, even to hide or exacerbate illegal or immoral behavior or to delete code once used for immoral purposes or evidence of that use.

Today AI can make the hiding, exacerbating or deleting automatic and nearly instantaneous. So now it’s cops versus AI robbers, and the latter can respond to threats of legal sanctions in milliseconds.

Amazon’s reported maze to cancel Prime membership doesn’t bother me yet. I use its Prime free delivery at least a couple of times a month, and its video streaming often enough to justify the $12 per month subscription fee all by itself. But that’s not the point. My wife and I have duplicative subscriptions, and someday we might want to cancel one. Anyway, other customers who find a Prime subscription uneconomic or useless shouldn’t be forced to continue it by software that’s coercive, confusing, contradictory or simply hard to use. What’s a small burden to one consumer may be a bigger one to another; a mega-corporation should not be entitled to maintain a $31 billion annual windfall by bullying ordinary people.

Just recently, I discovered another, similar scam by Google. My wife and I have houses in different states, and I “commute” between them often. A few years ago, I abandoned an outmoded Apple Macbook Air as my portable computer for a Chromebook using Google’s Chrome operating system. I liked Chrome’s relative simplicity, speed and inter-browser-tab security. But I’m an old school kind of guy, having first worked with and programmed digital computers in 1961. I like my storage local, and my backup storage also local, all completely under my control.

Unfortunately, Google’s business model is based on Cloud storage, and it’s constantly dunning me to buy more. It makes it hard, although not impossible, to store data locally, whether on the Chromebook’s ample internal storage or on an external thumb drive. But lately I’ve noticed a new scam. Whenever I move the laptop, Google asks me to sign in again, on a screen with a microscopic password field that won’t let me view the password as I type. Then, quite recently, it began asking me for my old password, as a condition for reactivating my local storage on the Chromebook itself.

I keep a special file with hints about my passwords, in a foreign language and with abbreviations known only to me. But I tried all the old ones I could resurrect, and none worked. So Google gave me a choice of continuing and losing all my local Chromebook storage, or waiting until inspiration about my old password struck.

I could almost hear a voice saying, “That’s a nice bunch of local storage you had there, kid. Too bad you can’t remember the password that we think is your last one, so you’re gonna lose it all. You’d be better off if you’da put all your data in our cloud. Heh, heh!” For this and other reasons, I’ll soon be switching back to Apple for my next laptop, despite Apple’s relentless feature bloat and tendency to make laptop computers work like phones, which they are not.

There are countless similar things that seem less like deliberate pressure to increase the software monopolist’s bottom line and more like deliberate neglect of things that would make customers’ lives much easier but don’t produce much profit. Playing fast and loose with customers’ privacy—especially children’s—probably falls in the category. So do myriad features that would be easy to make easy but tend to be programmed by complexity or confusion engineers. Once or twice I’ve had to send a message directly to the maker or distributor of a product sold on Amazon; despite over sixty years experience with computers, software and the Internet, I found the messaging process so obscure and circuitous that I had to write down the steps, in detail, for a possible next time.

Among examples of this sort of thing are the placements of “sponsored” ads in search results. This happens on Amazon, where providers of goods or services apparently can command higher placement in search results by paying for that privilege. Whereas once the top user-recommended products appeared first on Amazon, now you have to scroll down half a page or more to get to the items most highly recommended by actual users. Several “sponsored” products, with lower user ratings or none at all, often appear first. This makes searching for what you need more complex, annoying and time consuming.

My impression is that all this happened after Jeff Bezos, with his obsessive focus on customer ease and satisfaction, retired from active involvement with Amazon. Thus can the tawdry profit motives of lesser underlings destroy the legacy of a visionary leader who, with his “many to many” communication of product reviews by actual users, broke the age-old sales model of “caveat emptor” (let the buyer beware).

Anyone who’s computer savvy and has worked with most of the big software monopolies has seen countless examples like these. In some universe of corporate-oriented legal interpretation, they may even be lawful. But moral, ethical and user-friendly they are not.

Should legal authorities like the FTC pursue stuff like this, at least when perpetrated by corporate monopolies to which there are few or no viable alternatives? I think so. At the end of the day, modern corporate “morality” treats customers and employees as nothing more than cogs in a profit machine. Despite some pathetic and ineffective countertrends, like the Business Roundtable’s recognition of corporate employees and customers as “stakeholders” a few years ago, business schools and the investment community encourage this trend relentlessly. They give lip service to human values, but in practice only the bottom line counts.

In our modern world, corporations have a far greater and more direct effect on our people and their quality of life (or lack thereof) than government. Corporations make, sell, promote, repair and improve our homes, cars, computers, phones, clothes, food, drugs, kitchenware, appliances, luggage, planes, trains, books, newspapers and all our information sources. So why shouldn’t they be held to a standard that puts people, if not first, at least in contention? And why shouldn’t the people whose human needs they consider include both employees and customers?

I’ll close with two simple anecdotes from my own life. At the beginning of the pandemic, my wife and I relied a lot on restaurant-delivery services to bring food to our door without risk of contagion. Then we read of the cost to restaurants, including fees that take up to 30% of restaurants’ profits, in an already low-margin business. We also read of mistreatment of drivers as expendable peons with no control over their working lives. So we started skipping ordering online and began ordering by telephone and picking up the food ourselves. In that way, we helped maintain our local restaurants’ meager profit margins, plus a human relationship with the owners. (Even so, the local restaurants in our neighborhood were decimated during the pandemic.)

Something similar happened to us with ride-sharing. As far as I can tell, Uber and Lyft are nothing more than elaborate Internet scams to make money by circumventing the labor laws that protect people who drive for a living. The convenience and ubiquity of the Internet helps them ignore or circumvent laws regulating wages and hours and requiring things like health insurance, vacation days, and reasonable schedules of work. By circumventing these laws, the Internet-based firms make more money for their bosses and (occasionally, depending on Internet-based markets) provide lower prices for passengers. But for me, the most visible results were: confusion, extraordinary waits for rides, occasional instances of drivers dropping us at the last minute for higher fares, and cars that ranged from dirty and dilapidated to downright dangerous.

Over the last several years, we’ve established a customer relationship with an Afghan refugee who has a large immigrant family in the US and Canada. He drives his own car and has contacts with other drivers. He (or a colleague he asks) takes us to the airport and picks us up. He has waited patiently for traffic and baggage delivery without charging us extra. He’s reliable and trustworthy, drives reliable and safe cars, and, although a bit more expensive than Uber and Lyft at their cheapest, has never let us down. Isn’t that how a driver-customer relationship should be?

The antitrust and consumer-protection laws that the FTC enforces are, of course, just a small part of the universe of law that Internet monopolies tend to thwart. But enforcing them rigorously would be a good start. No matter how profitable they may be, and no matter how high their share prices might fly, Internet monopolies won’t get us to a more human economy, a more equitable distribution of wealth and accurate information, or a more smoothly functioning society, any more than the railroad, steel and oil monopolies did in their day.

Nearly alone among our high government officials, Lina Khan seems to recognize the threat to consumers’ welfare and autonomy that the big software monopolies and the intended and unintended consequences of their behavior pose. So I await her next move with eager anticipation. I consider her appointment to be one of President Biden’s key achievements in setting our nation’s economy and democracy back on track. Unrestrained corporate power has never been good for Americans or America. I doubt it will be better in the Internet Age.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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Making Reparations Work

I’m a 78-year-old white man. Ever since I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ path-breaking 2014 essay in The Atlantic, I’ve been thinking about reparations and how to make them work.

Why? Because I think our society and our democracy are sick. And I think the root cause is failure to deal effectively with four centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, racial division and discrimination. Over our nation’s history, and even today, innumerable white and other non-Black people have exploited and are exploiting these social evils for financial and political gain.

Think about that. The Demagogue—unquestionably the most evil and twisted character of any American president—could still win again. He might take our democracy down with a “culture war” most, if not all, of which is based on “race.” The driving force of his demagoguery relies partly on economics: the insanity of leaders’ failure to note that selling 60,000 factories offshore also sold jobs, dignity, family support, the reliability of supply chains, and progress in science and engineering. But a lot of it is also based on the insane notion that people who (and whose ancestors) have been getting the short end of the stick for four centuries are now getting too much, and that the alleged unfairness of it all is hurting the rest of us.

I won’t try to refute that nonsense analytically. It’s self-evidently wrong, factually, economically, historically, socially and scientifically. It’s a lie put forth by evil men to cement their advantages, dupe the rubes, and subvert our democracy.

But I will say this. For the last several years, I’ve been contributing more to political candidates and causes than I ever have before. In the last presidential election cycle alone, I contributed enough to buy a small car.

Why do this, when I’m nearing the end of my life and, although comfortably retired, I’m by no means rich? I think our great nation is sick and in crisis. I would like to know, before I leave this world, that it has a chance to survive the crisis and realize its potential. I would be happy to pay an equivalent amount in taxes—say, five thousand or so a year, for the rest of my life—to ensure that outcome.

But how can we best use the money? Read on.

1. The Goal. In my mind, the goal of reparations is clear and limited. We must mend the demonstrable consequences of slavery, Jim Crow, repression, discrimination and racism, to living and future descendants of victims. And we must do so as quickly and effectively as possible.

The goal is not to cure past harm. That’s impossible, if only because tens of millions of those harmed are already dead and past caring. Even for those still living, we have no time machine to cure their past harm, and trying to assess it quantitatively would be wasted effort. (I also believe it would be impossible to achieve any accurate measure of past harm; but that’s another story.)

The goal is certainly not to cure white guilt, if only because some of that guilt is well deserved. The goal is to cure our sick society, as quickly as humanly possible. Once we do that, white guilt will recede, or will have receded, of its own accord.

2. The Measure. How can we measure how sick our society is? When a patient is sick, we turn to practical, scientific means. We take temperature. We take blood samples. We make a white blood count. We assess the quantity and balance of proteins, enzymes and other components of blood. We ask the patient about nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, pains in extremities, “brain fog” and other practical symptoms.

We know now that, regardless of his owning slaves, our hypocritical Founder Thomas Jefferson was right in the most important thing he ever wrote. He left us with the simple message that “all . . . are created equal.” (He left out women, but now we know better.)

Science tells us that all of us are 99.9% identical in our DNA, which determines our genetic heredity. Science only developed to this knowledge after we Americans had passed our key civil rights laws in the mid-1960s. So our moral understanding preceded the scientific.

But now we know, as well as we can know anything in science, that there is no such real thing as “race.” At least there was and is nothing with greater meaning than minor differences in personal appearance. Like the infamous “one-drop” rule, “race” was and is a fiction, invented for the sole purpose of keeping human beings and their progeny as property, or in subservient positions. It was and is an excuse for discrimination and exploitation, nothing more.

“Race” was a fiction, developed and refined over generations, for the purpose of perpetuating and justifying slavery and later exploitation. We know now that the color of one’s skin, the width of one’s nose or lips, the shape of one’s eyelids, and all the other indicators of “race” have no more cause-and-effect influence on a person’s intelligence, creativity or character than hair color, eye color, height, or body-mass index.

But unlike “race,” racism is as real as war and famine. So the question before us is: how can we cure the disease of pervasive and institutional racism and its many social, political and economic consequences? How can we even measure the extent of the disease and its cure?

The answer, as in medicine, is that we measure the consequences. We measure the known disparities between people who self-identify as Black and other people in income, wealth, health, family net worth, per-capita incarceration rates, education, housing, nutrition, neighborhood pollution, access to healthy food and health care, and longevity. When objective measures of these real disparities among the roughly one-eighth of us that so self-identify fall below the noise levels of rational measurements, we can declare ourselves “cured” as a nation. We have a long way to go.

3. The means. Understanding what a “cure” means gets us halfway to understanding how to effect the cure. We must mend the consequences of four centuries of terrible, systematic mistreatment of people (and their ancestors) who now amount to one of every eight of us.

Just stating that goal makes one thing clear. We are not going to do this with a single grant of money, let alone to people who have given little or no thought to how to spend it.

It took us four centuries to get here. Even if you subtract the lean twelve years of Reconstruction and all the sixty or so years since passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the mid 1960s, that’s nearly 330 years of going in the wrong direction. So we’re not going to fix this overnight. If we’re serious about curing the patient, we’re going to need the stamina for a work of decades, maybe even half a century.

And please don’t cite the reparations for Japanese Internment as a counterexample. Although those reparations were also well deserved, their precise means was a mistake. Some Japanese-Americans lost businesses, land and assets acquired and built over a lifetime. Some, especially the young, lost only time. So the “one size fits all” amount was an insult to some and a windfall to others.

While teaching law in Hawaii, I met a young man of Japanese descent. His father had spent his life building a Zen Buddhist temple and monastery in a beautiful valley on the Windward Side of Oahu. He had attracted and kept a congregation to fill them. Then the father had lost this property and his congregation due to his Internment. His son spent over a decade trying to recover the land through legal action. In this case, the $20,000 “reparation” was no more than a down payment of compensation for an horrendous loss.

As horrible as it was, the Internment lasted, at most, four years. Three centuries of systematic mistreatment is another story altogether. To fix that will take a long time and sustained effort. No serious effort can come in a single decade, let alone a single year. And taking the necessary time will have a coincidental benefit: it’s easier to pay a big bill in installments. The nation of Germany has set an example by paying a total of 80 billion Euros—over $ 85 billion—to Holocaust survivors over a period of 70 years.

4. The Plan. Money alone is not the answer. There must be a plan. If money is given to people with no plan, some will inevitably use it unwisely. They will buy fancy cars and clothes, or (as did my impecunious sister after receiving a legal settlement) go on a cruise. The right wing will demagogue this incessantly, and reparations will lose whatever little political support outside the victims’ communities they may enjoy.

So there must be a plan. To effect a real cure of our sickness, there must be thousands of individual plans, funded carefully and intelligently over decades. In order to have such plans, there must be: (1) an animating mechanism; and (2) a means of funding them.

The animating mechanism, I think, is simple: put Black people in charge. Here the progress of our armed forces under President Biden is exemplary. After 75 years, Harry Truman’s 1948 desegregation of our armed forces has produced a true color-blind meritocracy. Just recently, that meritocracy has given us two superbly qualified supreme military leaders, former General Lloyd J. Austen III as Secretary of Defense, and Charles Q. Brown Jr. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs nominee. Both are Black.

As a cure for right-wing extremism and white supremacy in our armed forces, this leadership structure is sheer genius. (I have no inside knowledge whether this was part of its purpose; I write only of obvious cause and effect.) What better way to cause extremists and white supremacists to leave our armed forces voluntarily, of their own twisted accord, without interminable disputes among lesser leadership, or (as is our national wont) interminable litigation?

So can we translate this stroke of genius and real progress from our armed forces to our civilian economy? I think so. The key is much the same: make many more smart and skilled Black people leaders by giving them capital to start businesses, or simply to improve the condition and prospects of themselves and/or their families.

Here are just a few examples of how this might work:

A group of Black developers creates a gated community on a desirable hill near town, with award-winning housing design, plenty of open space, bicycle and pedestrian paths, good local restaurants, and top-notch healthy grocery stores, all within walking distance of the homes. To promote racial harmony, they impose a requirement to “pass” a race-neutral test for minimal unconscious bias. The group also funds low-polluting public transportation to where the jobs are.

A Black entrepreneur opens a healthy restaurant or grocery store, or both, in a so-called “food desert.”

A Black entrepreneurial educator opens a private school dedicated to rigor and equality, in a location accessible to poor people who need them.

A Black-led construction company conceives a beautiful and climate-friendly means for re-connecting Black and other parts of a city divided by a polluting highway.

A Black family whose child is gifted, but for some reason cannot get scholarship money, gets a grant to attend a private preparatory school, or an Ivy League or other “elite” college.

Black non-profit entrepreneurs form a private NGO to get ghetto kids employed in trades or into college, to provide health care or advice in poor communities, or to advance voter education and empowerment in the ghetto.

A Black family whose parent or parents have good jobs gets a grant to help the family move out of the ghetto and closer to the parents’ work.

Black parents with a sick kid get a grant to travel to and access the nation’s best health care for the kid’s particular condition.

(In all these examples, I use the term Black as a generic adjective, meaning people who self-identify as such. Whether the program would limit reparations to descendants of slaves or take a broader approach would be a matter for discussion and debate. But I think the program’s leaders, at least, should be distinguished descendants of slaves. That would emphasize the goal: to erase the long shadow of slavery and the centuries-long failure to expunge its consequences.)

These examples are reasons why, in an earlier essay, I suggested that reparations be not lump-sum, single-time grants, but a national program of applied-for grants, to be used for curing our national disease, administered by a distinguished panel of descendants of slaves. The panel, including educators, economists, health experts, and scientists, could accept applications for grants and fund those most likely to help cure our national disease. All together, the grants would form not just “a plan,” but the thousands of small plans needed to cure a disease four centuries in the making.

In my earlier essay, I also suggested that the distinguished panel itself decide when to end the program when the grants began to look a bit like the white privilege they are supposed to cure. But on further reflection, I now think that criterion is both insufficient and too subjective. The panel should be authorized and required to end the program when key national objective measures of inequality among the eighth of our population hobbled by four centuries of mistreatment—such as income, net worth, housing value, educational achievement, etc.— reach rough parity with the same objective measures for the rest of us.

What “rough parity” means and how it should be measured the governing legislation should spell out. But science and quantitative measures, not subjectivity, should be the test of a cure.

With good will and some money, we can do this. It won’t be cheap, and it won’t happen overnight. But we can never succeed unless we start. If we can truly put “culture wars” behind us, we can cure the lingering disease of our Founding, cage the kind of demagoguery that helped kill Rome, and reach for Mars and the stars. We can also defang the cause of the Mother of all American Culture Wars: racism against Black people based on the biologically meaningless but socially devastating concept of “race.”


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