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**JUNE 23, 2023**

Kuttner on TAP

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**** A Tale of Two Disasters

The Titan submersible tragedy has overshadowed the sinking of a boat
carrying hundreds of impoverished migrants.

Note from Bob Kuttner: While away in Europe, I've invited François
Furstenberg to write today's On TAP post.

When the Titan submersible disappeared in the North Atlantic last
Sunday, with passengers who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for
the risky voyage, the world took notice-and mobilized.

A multinational force immediately launched into action to search the
site, some 900 miles off Cape Cod. The U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, and
the Canadian Coast Guard established a unified command the morning after
the distress was reported, and French and British ships with deep-sea
capabilities soon joined. By Wednesday, they were combing a search zone
about twice the size of Connecticut, as deep as 2.5 miles under the
surface. Medical personnel equipped with a hyperbaric recompression
chamber stood ready to help.

Private actors joined the effort as well. Within 20 hours of being
notified, a Cape Cod-based company specializing in sub-sea research
expeditions assembled a team; three U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft
transported them to Newfoundland on Tuesday. Within hours, they were
sailing on board a Canadian ship.

Later that day, some 60 hours after the Titan was first reported in
distress, rescuers discovered a debris field confirming the implosion of
the submersible and the death of all five occupants. The tragedy, as The
New York Times put it
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had "mesmerized people worldwide for days."

The same can't be said about a tragedy that unfolded just a few days
earlier in the Mediterranean. There, up to 750 Pakistani, Syrian,
Egyptian, and Palestinian migrants had jammed aboard a rusty fishing
trawler to undertake a perilous journey from Libya to Italy. Five days
into the voyage, the ship was in severe distress. Food and water had run
out. "People were dying. People were fainting," recalled one refugee.

As the boat floated helplessly off the coast of Greece, with at least
six dead refugees on board and hundreds more locked in the hold below,
passengers sent out calls of distress. Few, however, bothered to
respond. On June 13, two merchant vessels approached the ship to offer
supplies before sailing off. The Greek Coast Guard arrived that day, but
did not intervene. (Indeed, just a few weeks earlier, Greek authorities
had been filmed
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kidnapping recently arrived migrants on the island of Lesbos and towing
them back out to a life raft. European officials in Brussels had
expressed that they were "concerned" by the images.)

Early on the morning of June 14, as the Greek Coast Guard ship looked
on, the rickety fishing trawler lurched and began to sink. With only one
ship deployed, the Greek Coast Guard was ill-prepared to help. Only
thanks to the arrival of a $175 million superyacht were around 100
survivors saved from drowning. An estimated 650 desperate migrants, many
of them women and children, went down to the sea depths.

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The divergent responses should trouble anyone who ponders the contrast,
even for a moment. They tell us a great deal about the entrenched and
interrelated inequalities of the world over the last few decades.

With a U.S., French, or British passport, countries will spare no
resource to save you. Hold a Pakistani, Egyptian, or Syrian passport,
and those same countries will make every effort-building walls across
vast terrestrial borders, flying you to Rwanda
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middle of the sea-to keep you out.

The wealthy victims of the Titan tragedy have well-reported identities.
Readers and viewers were invited to empathize. The identity of the
migrants, by contrast, remains mostly unknown-even those who survived.
As for the ones who perished, we are unlikely to ever know who or even
how many disappeared.

Both voyages involved extreme risk. The passengers on the fishing boat
undertook their journey out of necessity; for the passengers on the
submersible, it was a choice. Space on the rickety trawler cost far less
in monetary terms than space on the advanced submersible. But as a share
of the passengers' total wealth, the refugees paid far more.

It's worth asking about the extent to which the wealth of billionaires
who adventure deep underwater-or into space, for that matter-results
from the poverty of global billions. Did those Pakistanis on the trawler
flee the climate catastrophe in their country, made so much worse by the
developed nations that burned up the fossil fuels to enrich a few
billionaires? How much has the soaring concentration of wealth in the
United States and in other developed countries resulted from the ability
to exploit workers in the developing world?

It's worth asking, too, to what extent the extreme inequalities of
wealth within developed nations fuel anti-migrant sentiment and
right-wing backlash, which generates perilous obstacles for refugees,
forcing them into ever-greater risks in their quest for a better life
for themselves and their children.

The spectacle of impoverished migrants sinking with the ship while every
resource is mobilized to save the wealthy few certainly recalls a past
maritime tragedy-the very one whose wreckage the submersible went to
explore. Why did the original Titanic hold such a grip on the popular
imagination? Why is it that, more than a century later, people will pay
hundreds of thousands of dollars to visit the wreckage? Wasn't it at
least in part because it stood as a parable of the hubris of modernity
in our last Gilded Age?

Martin Luther King famously said that the arc of the moral universe
bends toward justice. Perhaps he was right, but it can also bend the
other way. Maybe the moral of the Titanic tragedy was that, rich or
poor, we all sail on the same ship, and we will all sink or survive
together. Well, now we have our own parable, updated for the 21st
century. It's up to us to decide what meaning we want to make from it.

François Furstenberg teaches history at Johns Hopkins University.

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Attacks on Lina Khan's Ethics Reveal Copious Amounts of Projection
<[link removed]>
Before the Federal Trade Commission chair got there, the agency was
brimming with conflicts of interest, including from her loudest critics.
BY DAVID DAYEN

Fleecing in Indian Country
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An undercovered SCOTUS decision brushes against Native sovereign
immunity, but also potentially snuffs out loopholes exploited by payday
lenders. BY JAROD FACUNDO

Progressives Launch Campaign to Win School Board Seats
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In what has become a national battleground over public education, the
campaign seeks to fundraise for and train progressive school board
candidates. BY RAMENDA CYRUS

The Obscure NIH Official Blocking Lower Drug Prices
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Mark Rohrbaugh, a mid-level staffer at the National Institutes of
Health, has consistently blocked the use of march-in rights to seize
patents on high-cost drugs. BY ANANYA KALAHASTI

 

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