Part One:
HOW WILL THE NEW YEAR TREAT MOST OF US AMERICANS?
It’s finally 2020, the year we’ve been talking about for such a long time. Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Arnie is neither; she’s just frightened. Even if Trump is defeated in the election, our country (and our planet) may not be capable of taking sufficient action — quickly enough — for us to recover from the disasters that we’ve been through in the last three years. Perhaps this fear is a different kind of pessimism – pessimism about our ability to recover from what Trump hath wrought.
WILL WE BE ABLE TO STOP AMAZON FROM DOMINATING US WTH ITS ECONOMIC & POLITICAL POWER?
We speak with Wolf Richter, host of WolfStreet.com, about the danger we’re facing from Amazon’s monopolistic power over the entire economy and the political power that arises out of that economic power. Amazon wants to — and now has the ability to — control everything in our lives. As one example, Amazon began providing its own delivery service, to the point where it is now the #1 dominant force in the delivery industry (surpassing icons like UPS, FedEx, DHS and the Postal Service). Similarly, Amazon controls its own suppliers: Because of its economic dominance, Amazon is the *only* customer for many of those suppliers. We expect that Amazon will do the same thing with its cloud technology (AWS services) : as soon as its cloud is running profitably for Amazon’s *own* e-commerce, it will offer its cloud service to *other* e-commerce enterprises.
Moreover, it’s well known that Amazon “helps” small start-ups to market their creative ideas. But then, once those new ideas begin to take hold in the market, Amazon uses its vast resources and business connections to drive its former “partners” out of business (or to buy them out and reap huge profits growing the business to scale).
We wonder whether this is a new manifestation of a perennial problem that our economy has been facing for more than a century. Or is there something different (and more difficult to solve) about Amazon’s situation? More crucially, is there anything that we can do, either to mitigate or to eliminate these serious problems? Can’t we just follow the precedent of the US Justice Department’s antitrust suit against IBM, in which the government challenged IBM’s huge technological advantages when they provided that mega-corporation with similarly frightening control over the American economy?
Part Two:
IS IT A “PURITY TEST” OR JUST OUR DEEPLY-HELD VALUES?
We talk with John Nichols of the Nation, about some people who criticize progressives for trying to impose a so-called “purity test” on the rest of America. As AOC recently commented, it’s not some insidious imposition of the power of political correctness. Progressives are simply talking about their ideals, values, and standards. They’re simply stating their aspirations about creating the kind of world they want to live in.
Obviously, (most) progressives know that there’s a real world out there, and none of us is going to achieve all of our goals in life in exactly the way we’d prefer (political, economic, or social). So every candidate for office knows that, if elected, in order to govern in a pluralistic society, they’ll have to make some compromises. They won’t have the luxury of insisting on all-or-nothing, demanding that 100% of their goals be met or else they’d prefer to have nothing at all.
We take a look at history to illuminate the present. Until relatively recently, the Democratic Party had no standards at all governing our national sin of racism and segregation. The Democrats had no standard even on overt, violent racism: In the post-WWII era, Congress wouldn’t ban lynching (!). In 1948, the Democrats put a marker down: their platform endorsed a civil rights plank. This was deemed so radical at the time, so “dangerous” to the safe status quo of newly middle-class Americans, that it caused racists and segregationists like Strom Thurmond to leave the Democratic Party altogether.
They even ran their own candidate for president. Despite this daunting divisiveness, Harry Truman won the election — even withe his (very mild) civil rights plank. So there are some circumstances where standing up for the right thing is an honorable standard. Taking a values test on segregation was an important public statement, even if it could have caused the Democratic Party to lose one or more elections. Sometimes it’s more important to clearly state what we believe in, to assert who we are as a nation and as a people.
Think about it another way: Would Mayor Pete say that his more progressive opponents are trying to impose a “purity test” based on their support of gay marriage? And the Republican Party certainly wouldn’t run a candidate for president who believes that women should have a choice about their reproductive health!
THE IMPORTANCE OF UNIVERSALITY
We also discuss the important of universality when it comes to our core programs. Fundamental rights and needs must be available to every member of our national community. The reason that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are successful is because they’re universally available. They’re universal commitments, universal guarantees . There’s a bottom line — in health care, wages, environmental protection, across the board.
With all our incredible wealth and resources, the U.S. ought to be a country, where we hold ourselves to a universal standard, with everyone in it together. We should all share a standard that says we’re going to stay as good as we are and maybe get a little better. It’s astounding that (a) we’re not doing that, and (b) that there are politicians in both parties who think that that’s not even what we should **strive for**, or that it’s okay to end up somewhat short of that.
If we start compromising away access to health care, access to education, nickel and diming it, we’ll end up with a situation where there’s a comfort level with inequality. And we have too much inequality already.
Our country was born in hierarchy, with a series of strata whose people enjoyed different levels of rights. Our Constitution allowed slaves to continue being kidnapped and “imported” from Africa. The only Americans who could vote in our “democratic” elections were white men who owned significant property. As a new decade dawns in 2020, we see a trend where inequality grows ever more exponentially. We recommend that every fair-minded person get actively involved, and do everything that s/he can to close the gaps in equality on all levels.
