How “Market” Nonsense is Killing our Economy and our Democracy

Remember Adam Smith? Modern, right-wing ideologues have perverted his brilliant, path-breaking analysis of economic markets into a fairy tale. All the little farmers sell their apples or oranges in nice neat rows, in a marketplace compact enough for every shopper to visit every one of them and compare the quality and prices of their produce. It’s a nice, simple picture fit for grammar-school kids.

But the tellers of this fairy tale leave out some important stuff. They forget Smith’s assumption that all products are “fungible,” meaning practically identical in size, appearance and quality. They ignore his underlying assumption that all buyers have all necessary information about all sellers and their products, the so-called hypothesis of “perfect information.”

In what practical universe, and on what real planet, are these assumptions generally true? even reasonable approximations of reality? As this essay will show, not many. In the case of today’s Internet-based economy, maybe not even one.

So hold onto your hat. I’m going to show you that, most of the time, in the real world we inhabit, the fundamental assumptions that so-called “conservative” economists have used to bedazzle, mislead and dupe the average Joe and Mary are simply and badly wrong. And, in the process, they do Adam Smith a grave injustice, for he was much smarter and more honest than that.

Before we start, I’d just like to remind you of one modern catastrophic market error. Remember Alan Greenspan? As Chairman of the Federal Reserve, he was charged with the ultimate authority of regulating America’s banks, as well as with the better-known tasks of taming inflation while insuring full employment.

He failed miserably. In fact, he and his fellow true believers in “classical economics” failed to stop a grand stampede of banks offering home loans to millions of people who visibly couldn’t afford to pay them back. Some banks even broke their own, internal, written credit standards just to join the stampede to grant ever more supposedly profitable home loans. Some bankers actually encouraged “liars’ loans” to people who had lied on their loan applications.

Why did Alan Greenspan, then the “high priest” of American economics, let all this go by? Because, he said, he relied on markets to self-correct automatically, rather than on regulation, which was his job. After the ax fell, when the so-called Crash of 2008 was already under way, he confessed error before Congress.

We are still recovering from that Crash and the more-than-decade-long spell of ultra-low interest rates that it took to fix it. The global economy is just now adjusting to basic interest rates in the 5-6% range, where they had been for most of modern economic history. (And BTW, that entire history is less than three centuries: Adam Smith coincidentally published his seminal work about markets, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776, the very year of our nation’s founding.)

As this essay will show, today the assumption of well-functioning markets is, in many important cases, a myth. It’s more religion than science, for the simple reason that modern economics’ broad assumptions, such as perfect information and markets self-correcting, are intrinsically untestable hypotheses.

It’s worth noting again that none of this is Adam Smith’s fault. His famous work actually enumerated several ways that his so-called “perfect” markets could fail. Two that he laid out explicitly—sellers’ collusion and imperfect information—are rampant today. Another, corruption, is gaining steam, and Smith’s work deals with it implicitly. As one of the greatest thinkers in human history, Smith was no fool. His name is just being used in vain by many devious ideologues to dupe other fools.

So don’t blame Adam Smith. Blame the modern economists, like Alan Greenspan, and virtually every Republican pol, who have made “free markets” a religion and an ideology, instead of what Adam Smith meant them to be: just conceptual starting points for painstaking, detailed analysis. Let’s take a look.

1. Imperfect Information. In theory, the Internet could provide the “perfect information” on the prices, features and quality of products that Adam Smith assumed for his “invisible hand” theory. Maybe it did at some time early in its less-than-thirty-year life. But it doesn’t today. The reason is incessant and rampant self-promotion, which tramples “perfect information,” let alone market efficiency, underfoot like so much used Kleenex.

Here’s a concrete example. I have a Whirlpool WHER25 reverse-osmosis water filter for drinking water in my house. I’ve installed one in three houses where I’ve lived and even gave one to a friend whose kids have allergies. If memory serves, I’ve installed and used these devices for at least two decades.

I’ve also used the Internet since its inception in 1996 (27 years ago). I spend hours per day online, and once taught a course in Computer Law with a unit about the Internet. So you might think that I, if anyone, would know how to get the best price for the filter elements (one RO, two carbon) that have to be replaced every six months or so. Not so.

There’s a high-pressure promo firm called “Filters Fast” that operates on the Web. A few years ago, I fell prey to the convenience of using it to order my replacement filter elements online. In the interim, this firm has become one of the highest-push self-promoters on my Web: I get several unsolicited promo e-mails from it every week. (I haven’t yet unsubscribed because of past purchases. I should and probably will.)

So I was recently about to “click here” to buy the two carbon-filter-element replacements from Filters Fast for about $75. Then I thought, “Do I really want to wait several days for delivery when I might get them from Home Depot today?”

I went online and discovered that Home Depot offered the very same filters for around $50—a 33% discount. All I had to do was drive into town, in my solar-power-driven electric car, to pick them up. That I did. The story doesn’t end there: Home Depot put the wrong stuff in a box labelled for my pickup, so my wife returned the wrong product and picked up the right stuff a couple of days later. For this trouble, Home Depot gave us another $25 off the price, bringing our total discount to 67%.

The moral of this story is threefold. First, the Internet’s value as a tool of “perfect information” for retail buying is, as Mark Twain might say, “greatly exaggerated.” From the beginning, it worked that way only if you were an expert user and spent all the time and effort to do your own full, “due diligence” for every online purchase, usually visiting several separate online sites. How many people actually do that, let alone all the time? How many just go online to Amazon, Walmart or their favorite big-box store because doing so is simple and quick?

Second, as you may have noticed, the honest, old-fashioned “free-market” Internet is a shadow of its former self. When you search for anything online today, the first N search results are “sponsored” links, essentially paid advertisements. Those ads are intended to distract your attention and often do so. When I recently ran a search for the rental-car company “National Car Rental” online, the first eight or so results were sponsored ads posted by competitors of or companies that leech off of National. I had to scroll down a page just to get the link to National itself, the firm whose name I had typed in. So much for “perfect information.” So much for “efficiency.”

Finally and most important, there’s the time and annoyance factors. The time that consumers have to seek “perfect information” on the Internet is hardly infinite. We are all busy people, and we all spend far more time staring at screens than we should. As biologists and doctors are slowly discovering, the sedentary lifestyle, high-mental-throughput and high-annoyance quotient of an Internet desk potato are not good for one’s health.

And in our increasingly promo-based economy, from which science, engineering and manufacturing seem to have fled abroad, it’s increasingly hard to get straight answers from the Internet, let alone in a reasonable amount of time. Our online economy, let alone today’s all-promo-all-the-time Internet, is simply not set up for “perfect information,” even in theory. It’s set up so that firms that pay the price can distract, seduce and even delude you in order that the search and other Internet services you use can somehow qualify as “free.” The promotional part of the Internet—which is most of it these days—is designed to get you to buy what advertisers want you to buy, not what Adam Smith would advise his hypothetical rational economic actor.

2. Oil and Motor Fuels. We hold, or should hold, three truths to be self-evident. First, the vast majority of cars and light trucks today run on gasoline or diesel, despite the much-vaunted early rise of electric vehicles. Second, there is only one significant source of both motor fuels: crude oil. Third, OPEC, dominated by Russia and Saudi Arabia, has classic a monopoly of crude oil, controlling nearly 80% of all known global reserves.

What is the consequence of these bare facts? The supply of crude oil, and therefore of gasoline and diesel to run our cars and trucks, is monopolized by our geopolitical enemies. One of them, Russia, is pushing the others mightily to keep the price of oil high, so as to finance its atrocity in Ukraine. Another, Venezuela, by itself has close to 20% of all known global oil reserves. Its mercurial dictator Maduro, with Russia's encouragement, takes every opportunity to stick his economic thumb in our still-democratic eye.

So why are our own Republicans blaming the current high prices of gasoline and diesel on President Joe Biden, who, like the rest of us, is just an innocent victim of a global oil cartel (“cartel” being a word for a collective monopoly)? Because they can. Voters, apparently, don’t understand the basic facts of the global oil economy. Republicans are not about to inform them, since keeping voters ignorant serves their selfish political purposes.

On a day-to-day basis, the good ol’ USA is the world’s biggest producer of oil. It’s also a net exporter. But that matters only only if you divide things up nation by nation, an irrelevant thing to do in the global oil market. The fact is that, taken all together, petro-states like Iran, Iraq, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the like out-produce us by a country mile. And their collective, known reserves vastly outnumber ours, because most of our current production comes from fracking. (Fracking reserves are notoriously hard to estimate, because they comprise infinitely complex three-dimensional networks of oil-filled cracks in underground rock.)

So what is going on here is a classic and totally transparent example of what Adam Smith himself recognized as a big exception to the pretty picture of his “invisible hand”: collusion. Our geopolitical enemies, who collectively monopolize both crude-oil reserves and crude-oil production, are using their collective monopoly to screw us and, incidentally, to support Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. That, dear readers, is what’s keeping the prices of motor fuels at the pump high here at home. It’s not some imagined default or defect in Joe Biden’s White House or Jay Powell’s Federal Reserve.

Blaming our president and the independent Federal Reserve for things entirely outside their control are like a child blaming his parents for the bad weather that spoils a party or an outdoor game. And at the risk of repeating myself, I should say that this type of thing—collusion on pricing—is something that Adam Smith specifically mentioned and warned against in his great treatise The Wealth of Nations.

It gets worse. Our own native and friendly Western oil companies both pump crude oil from the ground and refine it into fuel for cars and trucks. At the moment, their doing so at internationally-determined prices is making them billions of dollars of profit. They could, if they wished, push a little less dough out to their shareholders and take the pressure off millions of hard-pressed American consumers and small businesses. But they don’t.

Why is this so? Well, if you think “free markets” are America’s mindless, secular religion, you’re not quite right. Profit is. The GOP and the right-wing ideologues don’t really give a damn about economic theory. If the truth be told, they’re not even passably good at it. (Just read any of the many columns by Nobel-Prize-winning economist and columnist Paul Krugman on this subject.) What they care about is profit, i.e., the riches flowing to the oligarchs, corporate bosses and rich people who fund their campaigns. And they absolutely love the false “economic theory” razzle-dazzle that leads voters to accept and even applaud the outsized profits that provide those riches.

Could government brings fuel prices down by regulation? Most probably. Price controls have a long, albeit contested, history in our country. Even Richard Nixon tried them during the early-seventies inflation. But bald price controls don’t work very well because market prices do move, even in controlled markets, and government is seldom nimble enough to follow the movements intelligently. So a better approach might be to tax excess oil profits heavily, giving oil firms an incentive to lower prices, reduce shareholder bonanzas, and devote more precious resources to energy transformation to renewables and so save our planet. (Investments in research and development get subtracted before tax rates are applied.)

If you think any of these approaches would help our nation and your family seek a better life, with less economic anxiety and uncertainty, you have only one choice. You should work, donate and vote your heart out for Joe Biden and the Democrats. Getting the necessary legislation done will require a House and a Senate in Democratic hands, with enough of a majority in the Senate to kill the minority-rule filibuster stone cold dead, a fate it richly deserves.

3. The Internet Giants’ Soft Corruption. Besides imperfect information and collusion (e.g., in cartels), Adam Smith identified another big exception to his idealized story of the “invisible hand.” That’s corruption. A smoothly functioning market system, by succumbing to corruption, can suck consumers dry like some kind of economic vampire. It will do so when key market participants decide that sucking blood best serves their interests. And, big news flash: average consumers are never among those key participants, who are mostly CEOs, marketers, investment bankers and big shareholders.

That is exactly what appears to be happening with the great Internet giants. The legendary founders of our Internet infrastructure—Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin—have died or taken their chips and left the table. The “leaders” sitting there now are green-eyeshade folks. Imbued with the gospel of profit, but having no bold new ideas for improving goods or services, they have turned the Internet that we use daily into an all-promotion-all-the-time advertising extravaganza. The extent and speed of this transformation is already remarkable.

If you haven’t noticed this, you are either not paying attention or a newbie at the keyboard. A decade ago, I praised Amazon mightily on my blog for being the first retailer in human history to abandon the old Roman rule of “caveat emptor” (let the buyer beware!) and allow actual buyers and users of products for sale to evaluate them for potential buyers. Amazon’s introduction of user reviews of products, which many online retailers have now copied, was something truly new under the Sun.

But today, when you search on Amazon for a product by description or type, you get so many promotional paid ads that it’s hard to complete your search. Some, if not many, of the ads don’t even precisely match the search words that you used. And then there are the numerous “customer” reviews, produced by ‘bots and/or by competitors, that require you to read what once were mostly honest customer ratings with increasing care and skepticism.

Of course competitors and spoilers abusing Amazon’s review system is not entirely Amazon’s fault. But I have the distinct impression that Amazon devotes about as much time, effort and money to eliminating bogus reviews on its site as Facebook (now “Meta”) does to eliminating harmful and even deadly misinformation from its pages. (We won’t even mention Elon Musk’s reveling in the right to lie on his dying site “X”—once known as “Twitter”—as supposedly sacred “free speech.”)

No, insofar as goods and services for sale are concerned, the Internet is rapidly becoming a cesspool of deception and misinformation for retail, as much as it is already in the fields of politics, public health, and policy. And the driving force is something Adam Smith recognized from the very beginning: corruption. If green-eyeshade folk with few really beneficial ideas can make more money by confusing, duping and deceiving consumers, that’s what they will do. The gospel of profit so demands.

One other aspect of today’s Internet deserves mention, although it’s much too complex a topic to do more than outline here. The Internet giants are crushing small businesses nationwide by forcing them to pay exorbitant fees for such things as: (1) presenting and selling their products online and (2) arranging for services to deliver their products (including restaurant food) to online customers. Companies that charge these exorbitant fees, such as Apple, Amazon, Walmart and DoorDash, often have monopolies or near-monopolies in relevant markets, so there is little room for the small businesses that pay them to renegotiate the high fees.

These arrangements have some advantages for the small businesses, of course. Among them are providing selling access to a larger geographical market, statewide or even nationwide. But they also have important disadvantages: (1) reducing the profit margins of the small businesses, making it harder for them and their individual owners to survive; and (2) concentrating massive distribution of goods and services under central management, in the proceess creating powerful economic combines that can exert deadly economic power and even political power.

Having a mid-level manager at Apple or Amazon control the fate of millions of small businesses that depend on their respective Internet platforms for economic survival is hardly a clear path to an open, vibrant, and creative small-business economy. On the contrary, it’s closer to a monopoly or duopoloy of product distribution nationwide.

Today our Internet distribution and delivery gateways are in much the same positions of dominance and unfettered economic power as were the railroad trusts at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, and for much the same reasons. Our antitrust authorities are just beginning to look at their dominance and power and consider whether they are healthy for our economy and our democracy, and rightly so. In the past, one of the key moral drivers of antitrust law was the notion that too much power in too few hands is bad for our economy and our democracy in general, regardless of the presence of some sort of technical competition. When current regulators and members of Congress take a close look at what is happening to small businesses on line, I expect and hope that they will come to much the same conclusions.

* * *

In case you haven’t noticed, our nation is in the throes of a Second Guilded Age. All the symptoms are clear and rampant: impossible wealth alongside grinding poverty, even among many full-time workers, rampant injustice among non-oligarchs, massive corruption and self-dealing at the top, and a culture of impunity. Over it all hovers a media culture of celebrity, “glamour” and glitz, as if the hoi palloi’s vicarious thrill from watching the oligarchs flaunt their wealth were a valid substitute for justice and fairness, let alone efficiency. The only reason we don’t see the massive breadlines and gross dislocations of the Great Depression is that most of the economic reforms and safety nets put in place by FDR, LBJ and (lately) Obama are still working, at least for now.

But, relative to the baselines established in the immediate aftermath of World War II, we have appalling rates of child poverty, substandard education, discrimination and inequality, family poverty, union-free and justice-free jobs, localized pollution, and homelessness. Plus we have crazies in Congress who don’t seem to give a damn about any of this. And unfortunately, the Internet, with all its promise of a future of universal knowledge, is rapidly becoming a cesspool of lies and self-promotion that makes all of this worse.

We can fix this, using a tool of our species that’s been around for at least three thousand years. It’s called democracy. But in order to make our democracy work, we have to abandon the oligarchic, minority rule that our slave-holding Founders bequeathed us and create something new.

It’s not an impossible task. We don’t have to amend the Constitution, at least not right away. For the immediate future, all we have to do is take a “trifecta” for the people: re-elect President Biden, take back the House for the Dems, and give the Dems a big enough majority in the Senate to kill the slaveholders’ filibuster stone cold dead at last.

With an avalanche of legal liability and criminal convictions now falling on the Demagogue, and with the GOP having settled on no alternative, this outcome is within our grasp. But we each must do all we can to make it happen: work, think, speak, write, donate and vote.

Most of all, we have to abandon simplistic faith in the power and goodness of free and unfettered markets, which Adam Smith himself did not share. We must use our political power to reshape our rigged and broken markets closer to the dream of an equal, fair, efficient and unpolluted economy running in something resembling the Earth’s climate in which we evolved.


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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My Kafkaesque-Orwellian Encounter with AI

I just had an enounter with AI so bizarre that I feel I have to report it immediately. It suggests that AI has the potential to turn what we conceive as fact and reality into a contingent and ever-changing phantom. It hints that AI could be used as a tool to gaslight anyone from selected individuals like me to our entire species.

On the other hand, what I encountered could have been just a very sophisticated example of Chinese hacking. Or it could have been a bizarre blunder of a harried programmer, of the kind that observant Web users see every day. You’ll have to decide for yourself.

The encounter involved Microsoft’s new AI-enhanced search engine Bing. In its favor, I find it more powerful than Google. It often gets me quickly to what I want, but sometimes at the cost of having to wade through wildly irrelevant and even bizarre search results.

But this time, the bizarre and scary search result, which I at first thought was right on, came up first. And it involved my own Google Blooger posts, which I know well.

This first search-result link led to an essay that I never wrote. Instead, it was an essay that combined a title of one of my essays with the body (the text) of another.

The chimera looked exactly like a real product of Google’s Blogger, on which I had written both essays years before. But it wasn’t my work; it was a hybrid.

Worse yet, the hybrid appeared designed to make China look good. Even still worse yet, the link to the false hybrid essay has the logical effect of hiding my real first essay from everyone looking for it using the search engine Bing. For those searchers, my first essay would not really exist, and the second bogus hybrid essay that was linked would have an incongruous title that doesn’t fit its text.

Since my first essay was unfavorable not only to China, but to its entire ancient system of writing, and the second essay was a flight of future-historical speculation favorable to China (before Xi Jinping went all despotic and removed his term limit as supreme leader), it’s possible to make a credible inference of sophisticated Chinese hacking.

To preserve the evidence, and to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, I copied the key pages in PDF format, after making a copyright-infringement take-down request to Bing. I couldn’t find a way to upload those PDF files to this blog legibly, but here’s what the first Bing search result looked like:

When I clicked on the first bold link, labelled Diatribes of Jay; China Rising II; The Hantsu Hypothesis, what I got was this. If you scrutize this result carefully, you’ll see it’s a combination of the title from this essay, China Rising II: The Hantsu Hypothesis, and the body, but not the title, of this essay: China Rising III: American and China in Crisis.

So searchers using Bing to find the first essay would find only the second, albeit with the wrong title. They would never know that the first essay ever existed, let alone that it contained a lengthy scholarly exploration of the practical and human consequnces of China’s ancient system of writing. All they would know, if they were particularly attentive, was that the title didn’t match the substance of the essay they were reading, which would be one speculating on a favorable future history of China.

What’s even more bizarre is the dates in the URLs, which you can read in the search fields of your browser. The URL month-date of the real first (hantsu) essay is 2009/01. The URL month-date of the hybrid, bogus one is 2009/02, just like the real date of the second essay. But I reviewed the archived chronological records of my blog and found no record of a hantsu blog in February. How some programmer accomplished all this is beyond my comprehension. If deliberate, it was likely an inside job.

Orwellian? Kafkaesque? Scary? You bet! Choose your adjective. Now imagine that the subject matter were not just the musings of an aging, retired professorial blogger, but the words or summaries of statues, the opinions of a court (maybe the Supreme Court), or official records of an event like the Capitol Insurrection of January 6, 2021.

If nothing else, I hope that this brief, true tale evokes as much justified suspicion of and concern about AI in everyone reading it as it did in me.


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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The Paradox of Joe Biden: A Cold-Blooded Look

I can state the paradox of Joe Biden in four sentences. Everyone frets about his age. But the experience that comes with age has made him the most successful and productive president I ever got to vote for, and I’m 78. He’s far from a brilliant orator; he lacks “charisma.” But he also lacks the “buzz” and notoriety and of an ex-president who beat two impeachment raps and is facing 91 felony counts, and the “attractions” of such worthless grandstanders as Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, Jim Jordan and Kyrsten Sinema.

So what do we Americans want—a guy who knows his job and gets things done, big time, a leader who’s entertaining and endlessly fascinating because he’s as dangerous as a rattlesnake curled up and rattling, or someone like Putin, Kim, Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini? Do we Americans share the same character flaw that led several nations down the garden path to despotism and ruin? Only time will tell.

When it comes to assessing actual accomplishments, the race is not even close. No president since FDR or Harry Truman (with his Marshall Plan and desegretating the Army) has done as much as Joe Biden to maintain and improve democracy, equality and the lives of ordinary Americans. In JFK’s short presidency, he helped save the world from nuclear Armageddon and began the race to the Moon, which LBJ later won. If LBJ had focused on his Great Society and his miraculous civil rights laws, he might have surpassed Biden’s feats; but he didn’t. He escalated the War in Vietnam into a major global conflict—the single most catastrophic blunder in our nation’s foreign policy and a permanent blot on our national escutcheon. In so doing, LBJ destroyed much that he had worked so hard to create at home, as MLK brilliantly predicted a year before his own assassination.

Obama was an immensely talented and popular president. But his main accomplishments were so-called Obamacare and successfully withstanding a shameful avalanche of bald racism and political hazing that Mitch McConnell, the late Rush Limbaugh and eventually the entire Republican Party (except, belatedly, John McCain) dumped on him. Obama could have done much more if treated like any other president, but history is history.

In comparison, Biden’s list of major accomplishments is breathtaking. Together with the lamely named “Inflation Reduction Act,” Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act gave us the largest investment in fighting our species’ primary (and accelerating!) existential threat—global warming—of any nation in human history. It also began fixing a woefully dilapidated national infrastructure that had been dramatically brought to our national attention at least fourteen years before and that no one, including Biden’s immediate predecessor, had even managed even to begin to fix.

As a mere sidelight, the Inflation Reduction Act has begun the long process of letting ordinary people in America afford the miracle drugs that our pharmaceutical giants make, and that have often been priced out of many patients’ reach. The so-called “Chips Act” is beginning a long struggle to bring a little of our key manufacturing back from China, where our oligarchs sold it for profit, to our own shores. And it does so in an absolutely key industry that we Americans invented.

That’s not all. Biden pushed through hundreds of billions of dollars in relief, for corporations, small businesses, and ordinary people, allowing our economy to survive a pandemic that hit us much harder than it had to because Republicans and their demagogues, including Donald Trump, disputed and ridiculed science and got many people to refuse their vaccines, their masks and pills that work. With careful nudging and a dogged refusal to overreact, Biden has navigated the shoals of our pandemic slowdown and inflation and brought us the lowest employment and strongest job recovery in half a century, against all fears of a recession that hasn’t happened.

But that’s still not all. With a single exception—the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, which was pre-committed by his predecessor—Biden’s foreign-policy achievements have been as impressive as his domestic ones. He has brought together a national and international coalition to fight Russia’s abomination in Ukraine, in the process holding the line against a new nuclear-backed imperialism. He has steeled NATO and the Western alliances generally, overcoming the doormat-to-Putin policies of his predecessor. He’s now in the process of creating a global alliance of democracies and democratic-leaning nations, including two of the strongest, our old enemies Germany and Japan. He’s even trying to get fence-sitting India, now the world’s most populous nation, on board.

How did Biden do all this, in a mere 2.5 years in office, and in the face of the most over-the-top, blind political opposition since our Civil War? He did it by knowing his job. He did it by knowing people.

Politics is not entertainment. It’s not show business, as so many current American pols and voters seems to believe. It’s about people.

It’s about getting good things done by knowing how they think, what they want, what motivates them, and, yes, what they fear. With over half a century of experience in politics, Biden knows how to deal with, work with, and, yes, out-think, national and international leaders of all kinds. His latest State-of-the-Union speech, in which he snookered his opposition into (reluctantly) declaring their support for Social Security and Medicare, was just the tip of the iceberg. Biden knows how to get things done because he knows the people who have their hands on the levers, plus those standing in his way, better than any leader in any democracy on the planet.

So why would any sane American want to give up Joe Biden for a new, untested leader who could easily lose to our Demagogue and thus lose our democracy? If you want entertainment, try streaming services or Tik-Tok. If you want good government and an American renaissance, stick with the guy who’s delivered because he has a half-century of solid experience and knows his stuff.

Oh, and did I mention that, amongst all the inveterate liars and grifters like the Demagogue and George Santos, the ranters and ravers, the over-the-top furies like Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the “look at me!” performance artists like Ted Cruz and Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Biden still epitomizes the political virtues of practicality, mutual respect, human decency and basic morality? Maybe that explains why he can still get things done in today’s topsy-turvy political world. Why would anyone want to abandon his calm, steady, decent, soothing leadership for today’s perpetually raging wildfires of the soul?

In closing, let me say the unsayable. Biden could die. He could have a stroke. He could become incapacitated. Any of those misfortunes would be a catastrophe not just for the Biden family, but for the nation and the world. It would be all the worse if it happened before next year’s presidential election.

But if the worst occurred, what would happen? The Democratic Party and the nation would try to find a substitute for Biden among the Democrats who, even now, are, quite properly, refusing to challenge him for the nomination. There would be an unseemly scramble among people who aren’t yet ready for prime time in the White House and know it.

So why, pray tell, would we want to accelerate that unseemly scramble, bringing it forward into the present, when Biden, albeit perhaps slowing down a bit, is very much alive and in full possession of his faculties, his knowledge of people, his experience and his skill?

We have a winner and a great leader who happens to be old and not a great entertainer. To children of YouTube, he may be “boring,” but many children of YouTube are too young to know the agony that “exciting” chaos can bring. He’s done the most for us of any president in my long lifetime, and he’s still got his mojo. Why would we want to accelerate the chaos and uncertainty that would attend his death or disability before either actually happens?

And anyway, who’s better placed to choose our A-team and, if need be, Biden’s successor? The now-demented and traitorous GOP? Those voters who can’t see the difference between a skilled and productive leader and a wily but psychotic entertainer? Or Biden himself, and his A-team, while he and they still have it?

If you put your faith in history, achievement and skill, there is only one answer to these questions. And it’s not an invitation to a political free-for-all. It’s reliance on past history. “Stick with the winner” is the best advice that anyone can give Democrats today. Jim Clyburn, another wise and experienced pol who is no great orator, and who put Biden back on the path to victory in 2020, would understand.

At the end of the day, it’s not just our right-wing opponents who have trouble accepting reality. They can’t seem to accept the facts that their Dear Leader is a traitor, a bully, a psychopath/sociopath, a criminal many times over, a cruel tyrant-in-waiting, and—in his inability to conceive practical solutions to real problems (his Wall, bleach and ivermectin, for example)—a moron. But we progressives have trouble facing reality, too. We can’t seem to accept the fact that our current president’s long-honed talents, although not obvious to all, make him the best and most productive political leader our nation has had in at least half a century.

If we can just accept those facts, keep him in place, and bolster his bench and his backup, wouldn’t we be making the best with what we have, rather than wringing our hands and throwing it all away on a half-baked, risky strategy? And, if so, isn’t that how smart people make the best of their inevitably imperfect lives?


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Vladimir the Terrible

Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584), was nearly a contemporary of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), the author of the famous political tract The Prince. Had there been an Internet back then, Ivan’s reign would no doubt have made it into Machiavelli’s long litany of wars, deceptions, treacheries and bestialities perpetrated by leaders of medieval Italian city-states.

Ivan reportedly killed his eldest son and presumed heir in a fit of pique. Legend has it that he had the eyes of the architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square put out, so that he could never again create anything as beautiful. Those are the kinds of things that happen when there are no rules, no accountability, and no restraints on leaders’ personal power.

Deception, assassination and intimidation may be necessary skills for survival in a lawless and brutal medieval society. But are they good skills for governing a modern nation?

The English word “Terrible” is a poor translation of the Russian word “грозный” (“grozny”), which normally means “threatening” or “menacing.” But it remains a good description of those times. How could the architect of what may be Russia’s most admired edifice otherwise have been treated so?

Yet Ivan’s horrific examples of unbridled cruelty and arrogance pale in comparison with those of Vladimir Putin. The cruelty may not be quite the same: a “clean” assassination somehow seems less cruel than blinding an innocent and brilliant professional who needed his eyesight for his world-leading work. But this is the Twenty-First Century, some four centuries after the Western Enlightenment was supposed to have made big changes in human life. And Vladimir the Terrible makes up in volume whatever he may lack in bestiality.

Is there any doubt that he had Yevgeny Prigozhin—his one-time chef and personal butcher—assassinated, along with Prigozhin’s top retinue of mercenary loyalists? Does anyone believe that the airplane crash that did the trick was an accident? Does anyone believe that Putin’s speech praising Prigozhin as a good “businessman” was anything other than one of Putin’s ever-increasing and now-routine deceptions?

There are a thousand ways to down an aircraft if you have the means and access. You can plant a bomb, taint the fuel, or modify any one of a thousand parts to fail catastrophically at a particular time, on command. And all this is apart from means of attacking the plane from the ground or the air.

In this case the message is clear, unmistakable and consistent with past events: cross Putin, and you die. Cross him in even minor ways and you wind up poisoned or disfigured, like Litvinenko, the Skripals, Navalny or Yushchenko, shot down within sight of the Kremlin like Boris Nemtsov, the popular progressive Mayor of Moscow, dispatched routinely like some eighty recalcitrant journalists during Putin’s tenure, or jailed and exiled like the businessman and oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. If Machiavelli were alive and writing today, he would have a field day with modern Russia.

In the sixteenth century, Ivan the Terrible was a tragedy mostly for Russia and its neighbors struggling with Russia for territory and power. In the twenty-first century, Vladimir the Terrible is a problem for the entire world, and not just because Russia has nuclear weapons.

Despite invidious comparisons, Vladimir the Terrible is in a class by himself. No other modern leader of a major power—let alone one that commands nukes—has left as long a line of wounded and dead human carcasses of his own people in his wake. No other single leader has presided over as many assassinations and attempts, let alone the most horrible war, with the most horrible atrocities against civilians, since the last century. Even Kim Jong Un has, so far (to outsiders’ knowledge), only killed a handful of powerful North Koreans to stay in power, and he has only threatened war (yet), never started one. China’s Xi is a saint in comparision: he sends his political enemies into forced labor, jails or exiles them; he doesn’t kill or maim them.

In comparison, Vladimir the Terrible is a walking vortex of bestiality, lies and cruelty, worthy of the sixteenth century, somehow living and ruling in the twenty-first. Worse yet, he commands world’s most deadly (or perhaps second-most-deadly) nuclear arsenal.

Two conclusions follow from these awful facts. First, his “example” must not be allowed to stand. If it does, others will follow, as surely as there is evil in Man, and as surely as power corrupts.

The Western Enlightenment is already tottering in Britain, the place of its birth. If the civilized world allows this bestiality to stand, it will risk a series of conflicts and atrocities that could vastly increase the likelihood of a nuclear Holocaust.

That’s why the War in Ukraine is America’s business, just as it is every other nation’s. The world can no more ignore it than it could hide from the runup to World War I or II. To put our heads in the sand of isolationism and “America First” would be to court the end of human civilization, or at least a long, new Dark Age.

The second conclusion is that, while Russians bear primary responsibility for changing this dismal picture, correcting it is not their task alone. Leaders, intelligence services, engineers, scientists and politicians from every nation should make it their business to help where they can. The reasons are simple: (1) they have vastly more resources and experience than do Russians, let alone Russians’ poor, shell-shocked and isolated expatriate community, and (2) they are not on the direct firing line and so can act with less fear and more calculation.

During the mid-nineties, I was in Moscow on a democracy-building project. That decade saw a wonderful window of openness and rule-building in Russia, which now goes by the lost names “glasnost’” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring). I was lucky enough then to catch a radio program—entirely a Russian production—about the death of Stalin. He lay on his bed, dying, in an enormous room befitting an emperor. His doctors, his chief aids, and various political actors attended him silently.

According to the narrator, all present in that huge room felt nothing but terror. As Stalin raised his hand, each feared that he would point to him or her, condemning them with his last breath to exile, the gulags or immediate execution, for reasons known only to him. Only when Stalin’s dying hand fell, he had breathed his last breath, and his doctor had pronounced him dead, did a feeling of relief and redemption pervade the room.

This was the monster that many Russians, according to polls, still revere as their “savior” in humanity’s most terrible conflict. And this is the man whom Vladimir Putin appears hell bent not just to emulate, but to outdo in cruelty and arbitrariness, in the twenty-first century.

While the last century saw some of our species’ greatest tragedies and worst atrocities, it also saw some of our greatest progress. Among them are the United Nations, the various Geneva Conventions and other agreements establishing rules of international relations, institutions and rules of international finance, and basic rules for warfare, treatment of children, and treatment of refugees. Nations like China, India and Saudi Arabia may complain that these developments constitute Western or US “hegemony,” but they have signed up to many. And the agreements have made life easier, or at least more predictable and humane, for much of the world.

This progress has been unsteady and sometimes, perhaps, unfair. But it’s a vast improvement over Machiavelli’s world, let alone with nuclear weapons and Internet persuaders.

Every civilized nation, especially including China, has an obligation to its citizens and to humanity to make sure that leaders like Vladimir the Terrible don’t drag our species away from the promising beginning of global rules and organization into a new Dark Age. The result could be partial or total species self-extinction, as accelerating global warming makes parts of our planet uninhabitable, and unwanted migration becomes a new pandemic. No leader today, with the possible exception of Donald Trump, presents as grave a threat of species-wide devolution as Vladimir Putin.

I am not privy to the deep secrets of our United States. But I cannot help but imagine that we have resources, means of gathering intelligence, and, yes, secret and stealthy weapons, that might be useful in this regard, and not just in helping Ukrainians recover their stolen territory. We and our allies should use them all—judiciously, carefully, and thoughtfully—to make sure that Vladimir the Terrible’s reign of terror is as short as possible, and that the end of his reign provokes no further catastrophe.

Reaching those goals will require all the vast collective experience of our nation and its allies, working in concert, along with Russian expatriates and any still-domestic Russians who wish to join. If we fail, a new Dark Age, or even partial or total species self-extinction, is possible, if not likely.

Machiavellian assassination, deception, treachery, cruelty and a complete lack of circumspection and accountability don’t mix with nuclear weapons, nor with modern mass means of disinformation. What is at stake is nothing less than the short-term future of our species in time of unprecedented runaway global warming and therefore unprecedented uncertainty and risk. If Kim, MBS, Xi, others (Bolsonaro, Erdoğan, Orban?), or our very own Demagogue take the wrong lessons, our still-young new century could be dark indeed.



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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