Get off the couch

Since last November’s electoral defeat, Democratic leaders have engaged in plenty of navel-gazing as they struggle to find a way to appear relevant to an increasing number of Americans, including many in their own party.
Here’s a humble suggestion from the hinterland: How about putting on some big boy pants and truly fighting for an economy that works for the people rather than the billionaires?
Think about this little nugget. We know that the nation’s housing shortage is critical, with estimates suggesting the U.S. is as many as seven million units short of the current need. That shortage has contributed to years of rising home prices that have left home ownership a distant dream for most of an entire generation of Americans.
A government that was truly responsive to the people would be ensuring that the nation’s resources were being directed to the development of new housing, which would help to make homes more affordable and more available to its people.
But that’s not what’s happening, because our government, on both sides of the aisle, is far too focused on helping the rich get richer. If Democrats want to make a difference, rather than just regain political power, they’ll start by offering up a fundamental challenge to the way our government and our economy functions. If the Democratic Party wants to matter again, that critique can’t just come from Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, or Zohran Mamdani, who crushed establishment Democrats in the recent mayoral primary in New York City. Americans are hungry for real change, not lip service, and certainly not an economy dictated by a king masquerading as a right-wing populist.
Since we’re not investing in new housing, where are all our vast resources going, instead? Right now, our nation’s resources, under the direction of a handful of billionaires, is going to build vast numbers of truly gigantic data centers that consume almost unimaginable amounts of electricity, cooling water, scarce minerals, and, most of all, cash.
A recent study by the consulting firm McKinsey, projects that the big tech companies will need to spend $5.2 trillion over just the next five years to keep pace with the growing computing demands being generated by artificial intelligence and another $1.5 trillion to store the growing catalog of cat videos and TikToks that populate so much of social media.
Those are investment dollars that won’t be allocated toward new housing. At the same time, the rise of data centers will make it more expensive for everyone who owns a home as these energy hogs create a shortage of everything from electrical generating capacity to transformers to water.
If this were an economy responsive to the public, these are resources that would be going toward housing and other infrastructure that serves the needs of average people.
Polls show that majorities of Americans are ambivalent at best about the rise of artificial intelligence, which threatens to eliminate millions of American jobs, distort the information we receive, and even threaten what little is left of our democracy. And there’s the very real possibility that artificial intelligence could eventually wipe us out. Talk about sowing the seeds of our own destruction.
We’re told it’s a race to develop artificial intelligence and that the U.S. has to come out on top. Why that is has never been clear, particularly when we’re allowing other countries, like China, to wipe the floor with us on the green technologies that will power our future. While AI certainly has potential military applications, wouldn’t all of humanity benefit from an agreement that no country will pursue AI for military purposes? Don’t we have enough ways to kill each other already without creating an army of mechanical golems to do the job?
If it isn’t a race between countries, it’s a race between egos, as America’s resources are consumed as the billionaires race each other for the golden ring that a dominant position in an AI future might yield.
We talk of “We the People” and pretend that we have some kind of control over our destiny in this “democracy,” but as we have increasingly seen since the 2010 Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates of big money in our politics, We the People have been shut out of the decision-making in Washington. We see massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while resources to address America’s housing shortage, climate change, and so many other critical issues, are slashed to the bone.
And as all this goes on, the Democratic Party seems unable to muster the energy to get off the couch, much less fight for a compelling alternative that makes America a better place for everyone. No wonder the party is on the outside looking in.