Putin Wins

No, Not the War in Ukraine

If the war against Ukraine is not settled, I have no idea how it will end. I am not a military analyst. Come to think of it, I am not a political philosopher either. Yet I can’t help thinking about the future of capitalism in the U.S. And that is where Putin comes in.

One of the animating principles of Putin’s rule is his resentment against Western capitalist societies, particularly the U.S., for bringing down the Soviet system he had served. Revenge is one of his aims. He is doing all he can to destabilize American society and destroy the capitalist system which, with all its faults, raised the standard of living to heights unequaled in human history. Putin has sought to undermine our alliances, sponsored cyberattacks on essential infrastructure, and helped elect leaders who are most divisive and disruptive.

He is assisted in his endeavor by the present state of American capitalism itself. Characterized by its failure to improve the economic condition of the majority of citizens, by fiscal recklessness, and by big-money arrogance, capitalism may well be hurtling toward its demise. The system has been sowing the seeds of its own destruction under both Republican and Democratic administrations, but the pace has noticeably quickened in the Trump era. Some of those seeds are listed below.

Income Inequality

The income inequality between the wealthy and the middle and working classes has rightly been called obscene. The situation has received a lot of attention and needs no elaboration, except perhaps to note the staggering numbers involved. According to reports, between 1975 and 2023, 79 trillion dollars flowed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Yet the tax system continues to redistribute wealth upward. This situation, reminiscent as it is of the ancién regime before the French Revolution and of imperial Russia before the Russian Revolution, bodes ill for our social order.

Deficit Spending

We face, first of all, the ever growing federal deficit to which Trump has mightily contributed with tax cuts that decrease federal revenue and with reckless spending. According to Fortune, in Trump’s first year back in the White House, the increase in the national debt, $34 trillion, soared by another $2.25 trillion. Moreover, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next ten years. This track is considered unsustainable, and not only by deficit hawks.

Trump seems bent on further impoverishing the nation for personal gain as well as through spending on what are clearly vanity projects. His lawsuit against the IRS for allegedly improperly disclosing his tax information is likely to give him the $10 billion he seeks, since the IRS is now under his control. He has pledged to devote $10 billion of taxpayer money to his newly formed Board of Peace, whose first meeting, not coincidentally, took place in the U.S. Institute for Peace, now renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute for Peace. After slapping his own name ahead of Kennedy’s on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Trump faced a boycott by performers and subscribers alike. As a face-saving solution he has suddenly discovered the need to close the center for renovations with the initial price tag of $200 million, on top of the $257 million already appropriated by Congress for repairs.

Petty stuff, of course, which pales into insignificance when compared with the national debt. But, as Senator Everett Dirksen would have put it, a few billion here, a few billion there, and pretty soon we’re talking real money!

Big Money in Politics

One way or another, Trump will soon be gone, but our movers and shakers in the 1%, continue to undermine the capitalist system which sustains them. The permission slip the Supreme Court gave them in Citizens United to inject vast sums of money into politics has not always been used wisely. Their meddling in political matters has been highly visible, as have the personal rewards they have reaped in terms of cabinet appointments, ambassadorships and similar political plums. In that respect, Putin has made a more intelligent deal with his plutocrats: said to be one of the richest men in the world, he lets his cronies too enjoy their ill-gotten gains in peace, but they must stay out of his own domain, politics.

More important is the fact that the super-rich have demanded of the politicians they helped elect deregulation, and the license to pollute the environment, to appropriate land, water and electricity for their giant AI farms, to eliminate competition through mergers, to weaken labor unions and … but why go on?

The 90% are watching and taking note.

“Meritocracy” and Short-Term Thinking

While there are true visionaries among the 1%, most members, particularly in the managerial class, are short-term people. Our “meritocracy” rewards success, and success is measured by the results of the prior year or the prior quarter. Why then should the CEO of a large corporation worry whether some decision is good for his company’s future when a multi-million dollar bonus beckons at the end of the fiscal year? By the time the future arrives that CEO will be enjoying retirement on his yacht.

That lack of vision has an impact on employment. While cutting costs can be a perfectly legitimate business strategy, shedding employees just to make the bottom line look better at the end of the year is cynical, shortsighted and socially harmful.

Control of Information and Communication

Recently, the tentacles of great wealth have been reaching into some of the remaining bastions of independent thought. The ultra-rich have taken to buying up news media and social platforms. Of course, Murdoch’s empire, including Fox, and The New York Post, has been with us for some time. But now Bezos owns The Washington Post, and Musk has acquired Twitter, now renamed X.

Judging by the algorithms applied to social platforms, which favor maximum user engagement and thus promote controversial subjects, profit, rather than influence, seems to be the main motive for these acquisitions. Nevertheless, people like Musk can de-platform opponents at will and banish them from what has become the public square. Profit may also have been Bezos’ motive in acquiring The Washington Post in 2013, but he has not hesitated to curb its traditionally liberal orientation.

Most troubling of all is the manipulation of public information sources by investors serving only their own interests. The venerable CBS is a case in point. Its owner, Paramount, shamefully accommodated Trump’s demands in order to gain the administration’s approval of its merger with Skydance. Under Paramount’s control CBS, in addition to paying Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit, appointed an ombudsman to review complaints about content, edited out parts of interviews Trump disliked, and appointed a new, more right-leaning executive director of 60 Minutes.

Law itself is not exempt from the prevailing acquisitiveness. Model Rule 5.4 of the American Bar Association forbids ownership of law firms by non-lawyers, since lawyers are subject to special ethical rules, including confidentiality, which do not apply to others. Nevertheless, investors have been permitted to buy law firms in the District of Columbia, Utah and Arizona.

The insatiable greed of investors to own everything in sight is depriving members of the public of information they can trust, of ways that information can be communicated, and of advocates they can turn to when they feel aggrieved.

Signs and Portents

Looking at the previous section, it’s reasonable to ask: isn’t control of information and communication more likely to lead to oligarchy and even totalitarianism, than to the implosion of capitalism?

Possibly, but I don’t think so.

There is such a thing as national character, a term I use, not by way of compliment, but only to describe how national traits are formed by history and by commonly held ideas. Americans, unlike, say Russians, are used to freedom. They are used to sounding off on any subject that interests them, and their egalitarian streak makes them far less deferential toward “their betters” than is the case in many other societies. There is, in fact, a certain amount of antipathy toward the rich, which is why politicians would have us know about the hardscrabble conditions of their youth.

Most important of all is Americans’ cowboy mentality, their admiration for the individualism and independence said to be the traits of cowboys.. Trying to cow people of that stamp into acquiescence is a tall order. Trying to silence them, particularly in the age of social platforms, is like herding cats, not cows.

Signs of discontent with things as they are can be seen everywhere. The clamor for affordability, the push to bring down “the elite” even at the cost of further financial sacrifice, has been aimed at both Democratic and Republican administrations. It is no coincidence that it was corporations, “elite” universities, large law firms and wealthy individuals that capitulated to Trump’s unreasonable and often illegal demands. The resistance has come from the 90%. While the rich dine at Mar-a-Lago and attend meetings at the White House, they march and protest.

Increasingly, anti-capitalist rhetoric is also gaining ground. Remember the days of Saint Ronald Reagan, when the president spoke about “the L word,” as if “liberal” were a term of shame? And remember more recent times when the term “socialist” was the death-knell of any politician or measure tarred with it? No more. We now have avowed Democratic Socialists, including the Mayor of New York, in positions of power

To me all of this indicates that something is coming that will be different from the existing economic order. The pushback may not be revolutionary, but it will be fierce. It’s hard to predict what it will look like, but at the very least we will see strict regulation of both industry and finance, significant tax increases for the wealthy and corporations, possibly even a wealth tax; and perhaps part ownership of major enterprises by both the state and their employees. Capitalism it may remain, but not the economic order we know. It is likely to be capitalism with many socialist modifications, and its birth is likely to be attended by strife and social disruption.

Putin may get his wish.