What if America Doesn’t Meet This Moment?

Sue Gordon, who served as the principal deputy director of national intelligence — the nation’s top career intelligence post — shared her big concern: What if America just doesn’t meet the moment? What if, coming out of the pandemic, America just fails to step up as great powers, adversary nations, partisan polarization, and rising income inequality upends the global system that has kept watch for 80 years? “Our institutions are not keeping up with the turn of the Earth, and they’re being devalued in the moment,” she told me. “Society requires government, yet we’re running out of the structures that make it work.”

As I wrote then, “There are massive economic, societal and security benefits that come from being the world’s leading superpower. What happens if we’re not anymore? Imagine a U.S. that doesn’t attract top talent. What if the next great innovations happen in Europe or Asia instead of Silicon Valley? What if Chinese venture capitalists get first crack at the hottest deals in the world?”

  • ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org
    4·
    8 days ago
    Grousing about Mr. Graff's silly hyperbolic description of the DOT

    Want to take this seriously as much of it merits serious discussion, but I just don’t know what to do with weird nonsense like this:

    The Transportation Department, which has had such a literal renaissance of imagination, innovation, and investment under Mayor Pete and the flood of infrastructure money from the Inflation Reduction Act, would be cut back extensively.

    Here is the DOT’s own propaganda: [https://blog.bayareametro.gov/posts/us-dot-highlights-infrastructure-accomplishments](US DOT highlights infrastructure accomplishments) What the heck does “literal renaissance of imagination, innovation-” mean here? Gosh Biden’s years were such a letdown, and then they tout the barest accomplishment of their jobs as the second coming as if people don’t have eyes and ears.

    What if suddenly living in Denver versus Austin or Charlotte versus Tampa start to come with very different sets of rights as an individual in terms of your family’s access to basic health care, what books your child gets to read in school, whether you can walk the streets without carrying your “papers,” whether your kid’s school requires basic vaccines, or even whether the public water supply is considered safe?

    This is already the case in the Rust Belt. Default is you don’t have basic healthcare, your kid goes to some fake voucher school or an extremely underfunded school (books comment is weird, Texas decides most of the books already), you can’t get vaxed or operate in the economy without your “papers”, public water supplies are not safe by modern standards. This crumbling ramped up during Trump 1 and became the default in the pandemic and the region didn’t really recover.

    Anyway the Fed isn’t my friend and the decline of that faction isn’t the part of this mess that has me worried. Has the Fed been really helpful or a positive influence where you are located? Mostly to me they are ICE and FBI offices and I don’t think those folks do good work.