Masters of Disaster

A couple of days ago I was driving on the lower Eastside of Santa Barbara where two corners of an intersection are occupied by gas stations. At one a gallon of regular gas cost $6.19 and at the other $6.10. I silently thanked the Sky Gods that I don’t have to commute to a job or school every day, but also felt bad for people who do.

Not long after, my wife and I stopped into a popular eatery on State Street for a drink and a bite. The establishment’s signature hamburger cost $17.25. Two of those, a glass of house wine and a cocktail, plus tip, ran $76. No wonder we don’t eat out much.

I wonder if you feel the great American squeeze, which is, of course, part and parcel of the great American late-stage capitalism rip-off, where multinational corporations and members of the Billionaire Class act as rentiers, extracting money from the little people by way of rents, fees, subscriptions, co-pays and so on. We are nickel & dimed at scale, constantly fleeced. Meanwhile, our deranged president and his coterie of smarmy economic advisors — Scott Bessent, Kevin Hassett, Howard Lutnick and Peter Navarro — constantly boast that the economy is roaring, booming, breaking records, off-the-charts, and for the already wealthy and well-connected this is likely true. As Trump’s disastrous War of Choice against Iran continues and traffic in the Strait of Hormuz slows to a trickle, as Asian countries ration fuel and major international airlines cancel flights, US stock markets climb. As I write this the Dow Jones is 49,839 and the S&P 500 is 7,338. Boo-yah territory! Yes, but how can this be and how long can US markets defy what’s happening globally?

Oh, and we must factor in the national debt, which stands at a staggering $39 trillion; for the first time since World War II, the debt exceeds our entire Gross Domestic Product.

It has been a very, very long time since this neoliberal (low taxes, minimal regulation, privatization of public services and spaces) capitalist economy has advantaged average Americans, folks who work for wages. Our economic masters, the Billionaire Class, has created an economy that rewards the few at the expense of the many and they have every intention of keeping it going in perpetuity. It’s not surprising that millions of Americans feel aggrieved, left out, left behind, screwed over, forgotten and doomed to a precarious life of rising costs and staggering debt, nor is it surprising that public anger is directed at the wrong targets. Immigrants, migrants, transgender people, women, left-coast liberals and educated experts are not the cause of impossibly high costs of housing, transportation, health care, education and food, but these groups are easy scapegoats and distractions from root causes and the vast network of perpetrators: Wall Street banks, hedge funds, captured regulators, courts and states. Virtually from birth Americans are indoctrinated to believe that no alternative to capitalism exists, that we’re on our own and if we fail to make it the fault rests with us, never the system. We are force-fed fanciful notions of self-made titans with entrepreneurial genius, bold risk-takers without whom nothing of value would be created; we are told that wealth is equivalent to goodness, morality, even godliness.

I just finished reading a book by David Harvey, a well-known Marxist scholar. In The Story Of Capital Harvey writes, “The more indebted the working population, the more bound they are to use their future labour to retire their debts. In advanced capitalism, working people and the population in general are now so thoroughly mired in mortgage debt, medical debt, student debt, auto loans, credit card and consumer debt that they find themselves in a virtual state of debt peonage.” Rings true, doesn’t it?

At the low end of the wealth and income pyramid where most of us live there is widespread malaise, fear and a feeling of alienation; too much wealth has been allowed to settle in too few hands, and some of those hands — belonging to Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Thiel among others, are malign; the existential threats of nuclear war and climate catastrophe are shrugged off as improbable. It’s difficult to say with certainty in a country drowning in misinformation, but perhaps people are finally recognizing that an economy based on endless accumulation and consumption is unsustainable. Politically speaking, we have coddled the wealthy for many decades now, and naturally they’ve got most of the nation’s private wealth. This has been a consistent bipartisan political project. Socially, we exalt the wealthy, treat them as extraordinary beings who deserve their wealth, no matter how it’s derived.

Karl Marx got a fair number of things wrong, but the philosopher was right about this: capitalism scatters the seeds of its own destruction. I’m afraid a bitter harvest is coming. Like an old farmer, I can feel it in my bones and smell it on the wind.