Dear America,
Please forgive me for the desultory nature of what I am about to write, but the experience of reading the Washington Post on my Amazon tablet this morning evoked several thoughts at once, the first being a dismayed reaction to an article in The Post about big-money Republican donors. The Post reports that several billionaires are withholding their early financial support because they see the field of Republican aspirants to their party's nomination for president in 2016 as being so crowded that support for too many of them might result in the kind of crowded field that would dilute the potency of their money as a force in American politics. So, the first subject that entered my mind is the newly old Citizens United case. It has been the subject of at-first-copious commentary, but now after being debated, so to speak, as its own subject relative to monetary pollution of our political process it has become just a short-hand reference to the deleterious effects on money on American democracy and egalitarianism, but every once in awhile something comes along to revitalize the case as a matter of profound concern for me. The Post article was just such an event as it discussed culling process indulged in by these uber-riche robber-barons'--among them a major force in the gambling "industry"--regarding the 2016 crop of Republican hopefuls. The article made references to one of them "interviewing" candidates over the past few months and continuing to do so in order to ascertain the viability of the various candidates' incipient campaigns for the office of most powerful national leader in at least the free world, implying that the choice of at least one party's candidate will be decided by the thrower of a cocktail party somewhere near Las Vegas. That is a frightening prospect to me, not just because some rich person of perhaps dubious integrity is playing such a prominent role in directing the history of the world from 2016 on, but because this deference to the moneyed few is so Republican and Republicans seem so much on the rise today. Thus, these king makers are making preliminary decisions that may well affect women's right to abortion, the role of government in our lives in the form of provident benefactor for those in need, foreign policy that may or may not result in war, the autonomy of business and the enabling of predatory and avaricious practices, the degradation of our environment in the name of facilitating business's predatory and avaricious practices, disparity in wealth and income between those who work to produce and those who happen to have capital, and all of the rest of the panoply of areas of American endeavor in which government plays a role. After reading that article, I was chagrinned.
The next article I read was about Chris Hughes, Face-book multimillionaire by virtue of being Mark Zuckerberg's roommate at Harvard, buying The New Republic...a renowned liberal journal that has a noble history, but is now suspended from publication by its barely post-adolescent super-rich owner because all of his news staff quit out of resentment of his glitzy ambitions and cognate management decisions. But then I read the rest of what Amazon was offering under the masthead of the Washington Post, and I felt affirmed in fact about what I had thought, and in fact wrote here, about Jeff Bezos' acquisition of the paper about a year ago. In addition, the contrast between what Hughes did to the New Republic was inescapable, though comparing multi-millionaires to one another seems nothing but a pointless diversion. I said then, when everyone was puzzling over his motivations for spending $250 million to buy it, that his ability to provide quality credible news coverage to his customers at a price that he set--and the price is minimal compared to other news outlets--would be just one more asset in the treasury of his primary occupation, running Amazon, the world's largest on-line retailer, but it seems it is not being abused as is The New Republic, but is being used well, as the venerable old institution should be. Of course all that depended on the reaction of those who might benefit from what ostensibly is Bezos' largess in providing the service for almost nothing to his loyal customers, but that remained a subject for skepticism in my mind until today. I was given that tablet as a birthday present last August just before I was to have back surgery, which was to result in a period of fairly inert recuperation, and frankly, I didn't want it. But with it came a short subscription to Amazon Prime, which I extended for a year for $89 dollars, as I recall, and as of today, I am getting The Washington Post as a perquisite of my decision to do so. What that means to me is that my subscription to The New York Times is now superfluous, because much to my surprise, The Post is every bit the paper that The Times is...and I don't have to pay for it. My perusal of The Post on the internet was easy to accomplish, and the range of subjects covered by Post articles was just as broad, if not broader, than is that of The Times. Of course, some features of The Post are not available on my internet version of the paper, or at least if they are, I haven't found them yet. But I can do without the crossword puzzles and the commentaries of David Brooks and Paul Krugman if I have to, and I can be just as well informed as I was when The Times was what I relied on. What's more, when my subscription to Amazon Prime expires in eight or nine months, I'll renew it because not only can I shop from home and get delivery of Amazon products free, I can read a world-class newspaper at no cost with the rest of its content--the frills I mentioned above--available for as little as $17 a year. But now I wonder: am I being co-opted by a man with money just like American politicians are?
Your friend,
Mike
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