Our Last Chance

This is our last chance. This election, in 55 days. It will determine not just our future, but whether we have one. At the moment, our nation is visibly suffering the most precipitous decline of any great power in human history. We are on track to shorten the time scale of ancient Rome’s fall by a factor of ten. And there appears to be no bottom.

The causes of our decline are easy to see. In order of importance, they are: (1) internal division, deliberately fostered and magnified as a political ploy; (2) incompetent, unserious and self-obsessed leadership; and (3) an obsession with personal wealth without regard to how it’s made or what it’s used for. Let’s take them one by one.

1. Division. Our national motto “E pluribus unum” appears on every dollar bill. It’s Latin for “From many, one.” Originally, it referred to the union of our original Thirteen Colonies into one United States. But today it has a much deeper meaning.

Except for our Native Americans, every single US citizen or resident came, or has ancestors who came, from elsewhere. And if you believe the “land bridge” theory of Native Americans’ origin, there is no exception: this point is universally true.

So what does this mean? We are a nation of movers and seekers. We all come from people with the initiative, daring, courage and persistence to build a new life in a new place, under new rules. Our forbears founded that nation on principles of equality and tolerance (though we needed our still most brutal and deadly war to extend those principles to Black slaves).

Our current leader now wants to slam the door shut. He seeks support for slamming it by insulting and demonizing all the prior immigrants, especially those just getting established. He lies about our neighbors, calling them mostly violent criminals when only a tiny percentage are (and often NOT the ones he deports). He even makes the ridiculous charge that some ate eating pets.

In so many ways, he pushes us to hate our neighbors. Is that what Jesus advised?

Every day, with insults and lies, he tears at the fabric of our society and undermines our national origin, in the process flouting the teachings of every organized religion. And he also contradicts the teachings of modern science: that all our human DNA is 99.9% identical.

If he were just one man, that would be bad enough. But he’s backed up by a dedicated media universe that, for various self-seeking reasons, amplifies his hate and defamation incessantly and nationwide. Every day, it spreads lies and hate over the Internet, on cable and streaming TV, and into the cockpits of moving cars and trucks through radio. A more effective system to propagate the anti-Christ would be hard to conceive.

2. Incompetence and self-obsession. Our presidents have been an odd bunch. In a nation (once) founded on equal opportunity and competence, they have come from impressively diverse backgrounds.

Our military-general presidents helped expand our territory and our principles while authoring our “Indian” genocide (Jackson), winning our Civil War (Grant), and winning the most horrible war in human history (Eisenhower). Our civilian reformers suppressed our first wave of oligarchs and passed the antitrust laws (Teddy), recovered from the Great Depression and established a baseline for social support, including Social Security (FDR), and strengthened that social support while unfortunately waging our most misguided and catastrophically losing war (LBJ).

But up to now, we have never had a president so obsessed with own image, his personal wealth and his family. The only one who comes even close was Harding, with his infamous “Teapot Dome” self-dealing scandal.

What’s worse, we’ve never had a president so self-evidently lacking in basic reasoning power, or (with the possible exception of Biden in his last year in office) so obviously suffering from senile dementia. And we have never, ever had another president who threatened lawsuits against his college and independent testing companies to keep them from disclosing his college grades or test scores.

Trump’s modus operandi is now clear from endless repetition. He creates an “Executive Order” to do or forbid something. He sits at his desk, signs it for the TV cameras with his spiky signature, and explains in a few shaky sentences (often profane or insulting) what it’s supposed to do. Then he uses his presumed executive power to implement it, without regard to whether it complies with the Constitution or our laws. He leaves all those “details” to his feckless subordinates, the opposition, his lawyers and the courts.

Does this dismal picture in any way resemble the functioning of a constitutional democracy?

This is as close to one-man rule as we have ever come. And it happens nearly every single day, if not every week. In the process, Trump relies on his son-in-law and cronies, who have never been elected or duly lawfully appointed to public office, as emissaries for missions as important as avoiding nuclear war with Russia, settling our improvident and so-far losing war with Iran, and stabilizing our relationship with a rogue and lawless Israel.

This kingly approach to governing our supposed democracy would be bad enough if it were competent and produced results. But it is not and does not. Why? Because the people who carry out his orders were chosen for all the wrong reasons: abject loyalty, sycophancy and good looks. Our Secdef Hegseth is the worst offender: a mere major in a job for four-star generals (e.g., Powell and Austin) in which a misguided civilian (MacNamara) brought us our most catastrophically losing war ever (Vietnam).

3. Personal wealth obsession. There is nothing wrong with wealth per se. Great-power status usually comes with wealth because a great economy both requires and produces wealth. It takes wealth to keep the people satisfied, maintain a strong military and project international influence.

But it matters how wealth is made. In the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, most of our wealth (apart from oil) came from scientific and engineering innovation. Among other things, we Americans either invented or co-invented all of the following: the electric light, sound recording (the “Victrola” or record player), the telephone, television, digital computers, airplanes, high-altitude (pressurized) flight, lunar landers, CAT scans, MRI machines, statin drugs and several modern antibiotics.

But can you think of any major innovation, of the same or similar order of importance, that we’ve invented in the last decade? The only ones I can think of are in the field of medicine: mRNA vaccines, GLP-1 receptor agonists (fat-inhibiting drugs) and the Moderna anti-melanoma-mestastasis vaccine that just had a successful clinical trial. I can’t think of anything else in a general field of science or engineering (again, apart from biology and medicine) with anywhere near the commercial and economic potential of any invention in the preceding paragraph.

Why is this? There are two reasons. First, the price of higher education has risen to the point of: (1) making it difficult to survive and raise a family on a career in science or engineering; and (2) forcing most college grads to limit their career choices to law, medicine, business and finance in order to have a comfortable life.

In contrast, my college education at the University of California, Berkeley (then and now the nation’s premiere public university) required no tuition at all (for California residents), only an “incidental fee” of $100 per semester. So it cost me $800, apart from room and board, for an excellent, four-year education. With the help of scholarships and fellowships, l later graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at San Diego with no debt and money in the bank. Try that today, and unless your family is wealthy you will end up mired in debt.

The second reason for our precipitous decline in STEM (outside of biology and medicine) is more subtle and more irreversible. The last two generations have seen an explosion of business schools as an alternative to traditional post-graduate education. We now have between 1,600 and 2,000 of them in our country.

What do business schools teach? First, they teach the gospel of profit, contradicting the dictates of virtually every organized religion. Second, they ignore and supplant virtually every traditional field of science and engineering except stuff like spreadsheeting and computer science. Finally, and more fundamentally, they distract students from the basics of human knowledge into ways of getting rich. The excesses of corporate acquisitions, our stampede-like overinvestment in AI, and the depredations of private equity upon nursing homes, rural hospitals, and now children’s sports are all direct consequences of this shift from discovering new learning and making new stuff to making money by any clever gimmick that seems promising.

4. What’s the cure? As this discussion shows, Trump’s presidency and our current precipitous decline are just symptoms of a much larger, longer-lasting, more serious disease. They’re products of a generations-long national decline.

It all began with Ronald Reagan. With his inimitable Irish charm and undeniable oratorical skill, he taught us that greed is good (“It’s your money!”) and that government (the means by which we coexist and form a workable, rational society) is not just invariably incompetent, but bad. And it was Ronald Reagan and his party who made that a self-fulfilling prophecy by marginalizing government, and then appointing and electing incompetent and hostile people to staff it whenever they could.

Trump is just a product of this trend, which has been going on now for at least two generations. We’re not going to turn it around overnight. It’s going to take at least a full generation, and the burden is going to fall hardest on the generation just coming of age now. That means everyone of college age now, whether or not still being educated.

Fortunately, the cure is simple, at least in principle. For two generations, one party has inveighed against, campaigned against, and worked against government in all its forms. It has never concealed its desire to replace government with private power and private capital, even yearning to “drown [government] in a bathtub.”

And with the aid of those myriad B-schools and a like-minded media universe, the party has succeeded in making private capital the overwhelmingly dominant force in our nation. This is the force responsible for the plastic spoons in our brains, for the near-insolvency of Medicare and Medicaid, for runaway global warming, for the epidemic of salty, fatty, artificial foods that are causing maladies unknown to the primitive world, for making our latest war with a third-world supply of drones, and for fomenting hatreds among different people wherever possible.

If you don’t like this trend (and you shouldn’t!), your solution is simple. Register to vote if you aren’t already registered. Vote in every election, especially in the upcoming midterm election, where the typical 40% turnout of eligible voters will enhance your relative power. And for every single partisan position on your ballot, vote for the Democrat and against the Republican.

Don’t worry about details. Don’t miss the big picture. The GOP has given us the worst, most vile and incompetent president in our history. It has supported him consistently and reflexively through countless counterproductive and costly moves, just because he’s for private capital and against effective government.

Republicans will continue to do this until our democracy has become an oligarchy of wealth. Then they will line up behind the wealthiest oligarch (a future Elon Musk) and genuflect.

Don’t listen to the quibbles about Crockett, El-Sayed, Mamdani or Jayapal, even if they make some mistakes and say some improvident things. For two reasons, they deserve your vote notwithstanding. First and foremost, they are Democrats and will support rational government against unrestrained private wealth.

Second, because they are members of minority groups, they will encourage members of the same groups not to despair, but to work with others to save our government and our democracy. From our Civil War, through the flight of European nuclear physicists from Nazism, to the more recent diasporas of Vietnamese, Hong-Kong-ers, Afghanis, Jamaicans and Haitians, we have built our nation on the strong backs of good people seeking better lives under better government. To ignore them when they try to improve our nation by doing the hard work of politics and government would be to forsake our national heritage.

This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. There is no room for quibbling or nuance. If we do not save our government from the likes of Elon Musk, the oligarchs, the tech bros and their capo Trump, our democracy and our Constitution will become historical relics. Two years from now will be far too late.

Corporate Rule

This essay addresses a new phase in our species’ sociopolitical evolution. It seems to have gone mostly unnoticed for over half a century. Yet it has changed and is changing our world, most notably and rapidly here in the United States, but also in various ways around the world.

I first wrote about it over 11 years ago, during Obama’s second term. My essay was too prolix and used a confusing term, “corporate governance.” To lawyers and business people, that phrase denotes how shareholders, boards of directors and executives govern business corporations. What I meant to and did discuss was the ways in which corporations today perform and control most of what used to be functions of government, with or without governmental authorization. Thus the proper term is not “corporate governance,” but “corporate rule,” i.e., political rule of people’s lives by and sometimes for corporations.

A notable example today involves Elon Musk, the CEO of Starlink (among several other leading firms). He alone is said to have determined in detail how Ukraine can use Starlink’s satellite system to fly Ukrainian drones fighting both inside Ukraine and inside Russia. If so, this one man alone—elected to no office and with no military rank—controls how an ally of our nation, fighting a brutal and desperate invasion, can do so. Is this not a corporation, through a lone man, making foreign and military policy?

That’s just one current example (perhaps an extreme one) of “corporate rule.” Another example has been more subtle but far more pervasive.

Over the last several decades, our American courts have ruled that the “click here” agreements that corporations have you sign in online transactions are valid and enforceable. This is so despite the fact that virtually no one actually reads them, and for good reason. There is no opportunity to negotiate or change the terms, so trying to do so would be a waste of time and energy.

These “click here” contracts (and their earlier paper counterparts) control a vast swath of modern commerce. They’re what law professors call “contracts of adhesion.” You have no control over their terms and no power or opportunity to negotiate them. You are the fly, and they are the flypaper. You either land on them and adhere to the dictates of the corporation’s lawyers, or you fly away and do without. If you land, flapping your little fly wings will do you no good.

What most non-lawyers don’t know is that these flypaper contracts take away (vis-à-vis corporations) many, if not most, of the “rights of Englishmen” and other fundamental safeguards that our Constitution enshrines in our Bill of Rights.

How can they do that? Simple. “Private” corporations can do so by contract because our Bill of Rights, like all our constitutional protections, only restrains action by government. The law calls this “state action,” and it’s a fundamental legal requirement for any constitutional provision to apply (with important but limited exceptions in a few state constitutions).

So unbeknownst to consumers who don’t read these contracts, corporate lawyers over the last few decades have taken away, with the Supreme Court’s complicity, a number of what US citizens think of as fundamental rights. These include consumers’ rights to trial by jury in civil suits, to injunctive relief, to class actions (which make suing for small corporate swindles financially possible) and (through confidentiality clauses) to publicize a win. In other words, over the past few decades (especially but not exclusively in online contracting), corporate practice has taken away many of the most important rights that common law and even statutes eventually developed to level the playing field between wronged individuals and corporate giants.

But that’s just the bad side of “corporate rule.” There’s a good side, too. Corporate rule reflects the necessary specialization that a society of billions of individuals must have to accomplish ever more complex, sophisticated and challenging things.

Take my personal case, for example. My father had congenital hypercholesterolemia, which I inherited. He died of his second heart attack at the early age of 57. With better knowledge of cholesterol, its control by diet and exercise, and later the advent of statins, I’m 81 and still going strong. I literally owe my life and longevity to the development of scientific specialization, and I’m happy that several pharmaceutical corporations produce the simvastatin that I take for this condition, including foreign ones.

We Americans tend to idolize notable individuals. An example is Albert Einstein, the brilliant theoretical physicist who developed two theories of relativity—a “special” one which astronomers, astronauts and particle physicists use every day, and a “general” one whose conclusions about cosmology are still relevant but not yet fully accepted. He is widely considered one of the most brilliant people in human history. But would you want him performing your heart transplant, or even filling a painful dental cavity, let alone programming your computer or flying a space shuttle?

My point is that our individual brain capacity is far more limited than our self-anointed monicker Homo sapiens might suggest. It takes a whole decade of higher education to produce a medical doctor (including internship and residency) and nearly as much to produce a Ph.D. in science or any other field. That’s why you go to different specialists for a heart transplant, a knee replacement, specialized computer programming, or designing your home. That’s why pilots control airplanes, astronauts space ships, and aquatic captains oil tankers and cruise ships. Specialization in tough jobs, abstruse fields of knowledge and the application of specific skills is our species’ primary adaptation to our limited individual brain capacity, slow learning and short life spans.

Enter the corporation. Today it is our primary means of organizing society into specialized groups doing specialized things. (The “conglomerate” phase of corporate development was a financially motivated misstep, as shown by the spectacular demise of Jack Welch’s General Electric.)

In fact, the rise of corporations in human affairs has been roughly contemporaneous with the development of science. Modern science can be said to have begun with the 1613 publication by Galileo Galilei of his confirmation of the heliocentric theory of our solar system by actual telescopic observations. That was just over four centuries ago—less than 7% of our species’ recorded history of roughly 6,000 years, and a minute fraction of the span of our biological evolution.

Observational and experimental science have literally exploded the volume, and vastly increased the accuracy and precision, of our species’ knowledge of our world and our Universe. That explosion of knowledge and expertise necessitated today’s minute specialization. Today, we have corporations that specialize in a wide variety of things, such as sophisticated computer chips, catheters and other medical devices, fertilizers, cars, laundry appliances, and a vast variety of comestibles and household wares for consumers.

Specialization in institutions mimics specialization in individuals. It allows individuals with similar interests to work better together and form social and intellectual bonds. (It’s no coincidence, IMHO, that startup companies in Silicon Valley—and worldwide—typically employ less than thirty individuals. This number is similar to that of members of the tribes/clans/extended families in which we evolved from our ape ancestors.)

So with this non-specialist’s overview of human history, I would categorize the millennia after Christ as follows. The First Millennium (at least in the “West”) involved slow recovery from the Fall of the Roman Empire, and the rise of religion as a dominant sociopolitical force: both Christianity and Islam. In Christian nations, religion once was such a dominant force as to presume to control all that people thought and believed. (Even England’s King Henry VIII had to ask the Pope for permission to annul his many marriages and remarry.)

That stagnant situation lasted well into the Second Millennium, at least until Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation in 1517. In my view, it’s no coincidence that what we now know as modern observational science began about a century later.

Despite its slow start, science, with its handmaiden engineering, has changed everything in a mere four centuries. It has given us what earlier generations of humans would have considered the powers of gods.

Not only can we annihilate whole cities in an instant with nuclear fire. We can each fly around the world in a single day. Some of us can set foot upon the Moon (and maybe soon, Mars). Doctors can cure diseases and hereditary defects for real, in short times, and in numbers that would make shamans and healers of old green with envy. Seniors well past the expected age of death in earlier generations can walk, run and play tennis again with the aid of artificial joints. And most or all of these miracles are the products of corporations, not government.

So our Third Millennium is unique in human history in that science, its handmaiden engineering—and their teachings and products—are ever-present. They are the things that every nation wants, and whose products and prestige every person wants, along with the corporations that practice them.

In a very real sense, those corporations, at least collectively, are more powerful than any government because: (1) they can make and do things that no government can make or do; and (2) as they proliferate in every field of human activity and every nation, they’ve become as numerous as stars in the sky. (Even Russia has its counterpart to Amazon, a company called Wildberries, whose warehouses Ukraine recently bombed because they supply some armaments to Russia’s invading forces.)

So just as conflict and accommodation between religion and government occupied large parts of the Second Millennium, I think a similar accommodation between government and corporations will occupy much of our new Third Millennium. (For an interesting, current take on that balance in the field of children’s education, click here.)

How will that accommodation emerge? How will governments—especially nominally democratic ones like ours—handle its conflict with the real power of unique expertise applied to citizens’ needs and the power of those few individuals who control the corporations that wield that expertise? How, in short, will civil government maintain its control over society when corporations do almost everything important for ordinary people’s lives, as well as most in their collective defense?

Our current presidency illustrates the problem well. It features corruption and inattention that give corporations pretty much free rein. At the same time, its policies are abandoning support for large swaths of basic research, leaving them to corporations to pick up if they choose. Who or what will pick up support for the basic research that government has abandoned, and how will doing that increase their practical, economic and political power?

However it is managed, the conflicts and accommodations among government and corporations will be far more consequential for our species than the last millennium’s conflicts between church and state. Miscalculations in setting the balance could maim or extinguish our entire species. They could do so, for example, with nuclear war (perhaps begun inadvertently by an autonomous AI), runaway planetary heating (and consequent catastrophic wars over cooler territory), or with a new airborne pandemic that spreads to every corner of the globe in days on airplanes, the greatest viral vector ever noted.

The balance of power between corporations and government will also affect the balance of power between both of them and “us, the people.” The effective cancellation of nearly all “the rights of Englishmen,” developed over most of a millennium, with “click-here” contracts is just one example of many possibilities. Will government step in to make sure that corporations respect the human rights vis-à-vis government that British and American law have developed over eight painful centuries since Magna Carta? Stay tuned.

One thing, however, is clear. The nation or region that first secures a proper balance between political and corporate power will own this nascent Third Millennium, assuming that our species survives.