Bernie Said it First!

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He’s Baaack!

Having waited politely (and strategically) until after Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden, President Obama is back in the fray. His trademark empathy, slight understatement, and absolutely precise analysis make such a contrast with the random blathering of our incumbent Caligula as to give us all much-needed hope. Take a bit less than twelve minutes and transport yourself to a kinder, better, and infinitely more competent universe, by clicking here.

Preliminary Lore on Covid-19 Immunity and Antibody Testing

At last there is an authoritative preliminary news report on ongoing research on acquired-immunity responses and antibody testing for Covid-19. The picture is still uncertain and evolving. But research on related viruses, including those that cause SARS, MERS and the common cold, suggests that immunity in recovered patients may last about a year and have a spectrum of strength: a majority may be complete, a minority may be weak, and a small minority may be nonexistent. (We need further research to tell whether we can distinguish among these levels of acquired immunity with blood-testing for antibodies, which promises to be quicker, simpler and cheaper than swab-testing for active viruses.) The report speculates that acquired immunity might be fairly widespread if, as some epidemiologists suspect, actual recoveries from the virus are ten to a hundred times as numerous as confirmed recoveries, due to the paucity and late rollout of active-virus testing in the United States. While uncertain and still needing confirmation in actual tests with recovered Covid-19 patients, these preliminary results are encouraging. They suggest that we might soon start putting recovered patients to work in numbers, at low risk, after antibody-testing them for immunity and freedom from active virus. Thus would begin the next and first “offensive” stage in our war against the virus, which I call “Stage Three.” As more and more immune patients were “cleared” in this way, we might begin, perhaps in months to a year, to produce “herd” immunity in the general population. This approach—and not an uninformed “back to work” decree from on high—is the only right way to ramp up the economy with acceptable risk to people who don’t work at home and other “virgins” never exposed to the virus.

The principal post follows:

“Nothing’s ever been said until a Harvard man says it.”—Comment of a colleague at an American Law Institute meeting, after a pompous Harvard-trained lawyer repeated, with slightly more precise wording and better grammar, what two previous speakers had said.

It was with great pleasure and satisfaction that I read the New York Time’s grand editorial Thursday, explaining just how extreme, corrosive and unsustainable America’s economic inequality and malign neglect of workers have become. It’s best to view the project online, where appalling but true facts come tumbling across the screen like world-destroying meteors.

The top 1% of us Americans collectively own more wealth than the bottom 80%. The hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin paid $238 million for a New York apartment, while 10.9 million American families spend more than half their incomes on rent, and a half million Americans are homeless on any given night. More than 90% of Americans born in 1940 were earning more than their parents by age 30; only half born in 1980 were. In 1980, an American with income in the top fifth could expect to live 13 more years than one with income in the bottom fifth; today that advantage in longevity has more than doubled. (Not coincidentally, 1980 was the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.)

This extreme inequality has resulted in a “reverse-Robin-Hood” effect—a vast transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The editorial describes it as follows:

"If individual income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year, on average. In effect, the extreme increase in inequality means every worker in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution is sending an annual check for $12,000 to a worker in the top 10 percent.”

In other words, if the fruits of increased worker productivity since 1970 had been widely and fairly shared, every worker in the bottom 90% of income distribution today would be earning $12,000 more per year on average. Many, of course, would be earning even more. Over the last decade, that’s an average loss of nearly $120,000, which actually went toward enriching the oligarchs. So much for the US as a socially mobile and egalitarian society.

The NYT “exposé” also mentioned, in brief passing, the 2014 study by two American academics proving that the United States already had become an oligarchy, in which economic elites’ “needs” produce legislation far more often than workers’. (For a brief BBC summary of the study, click here.)

Bravo! The NYT’s editorial summary was cogent, well-written, impressively illustrated and compelling. It promises to be part of an ongoing journalistic project, a “Times Opinion series exploring how the nation can emerge from this crisis stronger, fairer and more free.” I and the rest of America await future installments with bated breath.

And yet, and yet . . . Haven’t we heard all this before, and from a serious candidate for president, twice?

Hadn’t Senator Bernie Sanders been making the very same points, long before they bubbled to the surface of “mainstream” American consciousness enough to make headlines in the New York Times? Sanders himself made headlines (and lots of enemies) talking about our “rigged economy” and extreme inequality on the campaign trail in 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2020.

But Sanders didn’t limit himself to sounding the alarm about an economy whose fairness, equity and social mobility have already faded into myth. He also offered solutions.

He proposed replacing our byzantine, hideously inefficient and grotesquely dysfunctional private health-insurance system with the kind of streamlined single payer that every other developed nation has. He pushed to relieve our higher-education graduates of the mountain of debt that began only after Ronald Reagan “downsized” the University of California and its theretofore nearly free undergraduate education to slake his political ambitions. Like Henry Ford, Sanders wanted to empower workers and boost our economy with a living wage, at least $15 per hour. And he sought to create millions of new, non-outsourceable jobs rebuilding our dilapidated national infrastructure and converting us to clean energy with a Green New Deal.

Just a few years ago, these proposals of Sanders seemed progressive fantasies. But now, after his near-win of the Democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020, everyone takes them seriously. Many states already have instituted $15-per-hour minimum wages, as have a few leading businesses like Amazon. Voters are no longer talking about how disruptive a rational, functional, single-payer health-insurance system would be. They are asking how much it will cost.

As a curmudgeonly but brilliant independent Senator from Vermont, Sanders has been making these points for decades. Yet he has been vilified as a “socialist” and allegedly unable to work with others—a point his actual colleagues belie. He’s been marginalized, ridiculed, mocked and minimized by the “mainstream,” including the New York Times.

Reporters have characterized him not just as “left wing,” but as “far left,” as if name-calling were analysis. The New York Times’ own reporters have been far from innocent in this regard. By dint of such cheap name-calling, respectable reporters from solid “mainstream” media have made it impossible for the workers who most need Sanders’ insight—let alone those never weaned from Fox—to hear and heed his message.

For years and years, the national reception to Bernie’s accurate and compelling analysis was what you would expect from a clique or gang on a high-school playground. They ignored the substance of his message and attacked him ad hominem. They averred that no “democratic socialist” could ever win high office, or rightly diagnose our national ills. They neglected to mention, let alone explain, the vast chasm between “democratic socialism” and a socialist economy without free enterprise; they never even admitted the divergence from galaxies far, far away, in which abide Communism and radical tyrannies like North Korea’s.

In doing all this, the NYT and (to a lesser extent) the post-Bezos WaPo followed the “lead” of such paragons of estimable journalism as Fox and Rush, albeit more subtly and with less overt mockery. Only now, after three years of catastrophic, hard-right drifting, inexpert near-anarchy, a sycophantic takeover of Congress the likes of which the US have never seen, and a pandemic that threatens a new Great Depression, has the NYT suddenly “gotten religion.”

Perhaps we should all rejoice and shout “hallelujah!” just as Jesus welcomes a repentant sinner, even one at death’s door. But don’t we also have a more urgent obligation to recognize the single, lonely man who spent a lifetime in the political wilderness in relentless pursuit of unpopular, inconvenient and unacknowledged truths? Shouldn’t we celebrate the man who eventually brought marginalized workers, indebted students, honest laborers who can’t see a doctor, and the undocumented to the attention of our “mainstream”?

I will go to my grave believing that, if Bernie had won the Democratic nomination in 2016, he, not Trump, would be in the White House today. Had Hillary Clinton just named him as her Veep, she would be in the White House today. In either case, we would not be suffering the surreal misrule of a man whom a former conservative called, quite accurately, “the worst president ever.”

After a full century of horrors, we humans stand on the precipice of a grand choice. We can try to emulate ants, bees and termites and model our societies on mechanistic hives. We can squeeze our workers for every ounce of energy and diligence, like the last century’s “efficiency experts,” with their endless rows of identical lathes or sewing machines. We can push Amazon’s warehouse workers to pack those boxes ever faster and faster, competing for space in narrow aisles with heavily laden robots, and sometimes getting crushed. We can focus obsessively on “efficiency” and “productivity” and make things we need in places like Foxconn in China, with globally low salaries and dismal working conditions punctuated by barely-contained mini-epidemics of suicide. We can watch helplessly while so-called “deaths of despair” reduce our national average longevity into banana-republic territory.

We can overdo abstractions, just like megalo-mechanistic Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, who, knowing nothing about Russia, its language or history, invented a crash program of privatization “shock therapy” and got our government to foist it on Russia during Russia’s brief window of trust, thereby creating Russia’s current oligarchy as yet another reason, besides the Cold War, for a durable international grudge. We can measure “success“ by such impersonal abstractions as GDP, low prices, and profit. We can forget (or ignore) that the flip side of low prices and high profit is low wages, one of whose many consequences is tens of millions of workers suffering poverty, perpetual insecurity, and (today) the inability to resist the pandemic now maiming our economy.

Or we can try another approach. We can recognize ourselves as human beings—intelligent, naked apes, not ants, bees or termites. We can see our empathy and ability to cooperate as our two greatest evolutionary adaptations, greater even than our large brains and opposable thumbs. We can see what Henry Ford saw a century ago—that high wages produce a vibrant consumer economy, while low ones produce a restive society of serfs. (It really is that simple.) We can understand, at last, that satisfactory societies with minimal conflict require keeping everyone happy, well fed, and secure, from the oligarch in his mansion, to the worker in the factory, mine, farm or warehouse, down to the undocumented serf in our fields and slaughterhouses, which Jesus described as “the least of these.”

Yes, Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee. Yes, he will challenge Trump in a coming political Armageddon. Yes, the result of that epic political battle will fix the fate our our nation and the world, for a long time to come. (Imagine world with leaders like Bolsonaro, Duterte, El-Sisi, Erdoğan, MBS, Orban, Putin, Trump, and Xi in power, in every significant nation, as far as the eye can see! Would we have to wait for another millennium of Dark Ages to see our next Renaissance?)

But make no mistake about it. If we are to face facts—if we are to change our profligate, oppressive, oligarchic, bossist and racist ways and recover our soul as a nation—Bernie Sanders is our guru.

There is nothing we can do, as a people, to repay him for his boundless energy, persistence and perseverance in showing us the terrible errors of our ways. Unlike Jesus, he hasn’t yet died for our sins; but he did have a heart attack striving mightily to enlighten us.

The least we can do, if Biden wins and the dark clouds of political Armageddon slowly part, is to replace every statue of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and the genocidal racist Andrew Jackson with one of Bernie Sanders. Then, as long as Bernie lives, we can honor and laud the man who devoted his life to reminding us of our common humanity and how far we have strayed from actualizing it.

Endnote: The State of our “Mainstream” Media

It’s a sad fact, but true. We Americans have only two independent national “print” media of real clout: the Washington Post and the New York Times. What used to be a third, the Wall Street Journal, is fatally corrupted by Murdoch’s 2007 takeover, after over a century of independent family ownership. It’s now best described as “Fox Lite,” a rag whose news and analysis—not to mention basic journalism—are perpetually harnessed to a not-so-subtle right-wing political agenda. (After thirty years of subscribing, I gave Murdoch a few years and then canceled, for reasons described here).

As the WaPo’s masthead now declares, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” To appreciate that truth, all you have to do is consider how Fox has become human history’s most effective propaganda organ, and how assiduously and relentlessly it’s now pushing Donald J. Trump as the first emperor of a new “Amerika.” The recent electoral fiasco in Wisconsin is just a foretaste of what’s in store if Fox, Trump and the modern excuse for the GOP have their way.

It’s vital to understand that nothing about capitalism or “free enterprise” saved our Fourth Estate, or the independence of our “print” media—the only portion of our vast media empire that provides sober analysis and reflection. On the contrary. It was robust, laissez faire, winner-take-all capitalism that allowed Murdoch and right-wing apostles like Rush and Sinclair Radio to dominate the airwaves with a toxic mix of entertainment, mockery of education and experts, and right-wing ideology. They won by making propaganda sell.

What saved our Fourth Estate was two fortunate and unexpected accidents. First, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Then the New York Times, after a near-death experience, belatedly managed to convert its journalistic high repute and already-national print distribution into a viable online business model. Nothing in our economic system substantially assisted, let alone foreordained, these two fortunate events. From a political/social/economic perspective, they were unplanned, world-historic bits of dumb luck.

Whatever you may think about how Jeff Bezos treats Amazon’s workers on his way to assimilating the known retail Universe, his purchase has left the WaPo with complete editorial and journalistic freedom, comparable to what it had enjoyed under the legendary Graham family. (Katharine Graham, as editor-in-chief, had risked the WaPo’s economic survival in order to publicize the Watergate Scandal, eventually driving Richard Nixon from the White House.) Bezos has recycled all operating profits back into building the WaPo as a world-class paragon of news and analysis. For that purpose he seems ready to dip again into his fortune as the world’s richest man, if necessary. As for the New York Times, you can gauge how close it came to untimely journalistic death by noting that, before publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger died, he almost killed his baby by making an advertising executive CEO, with full control over editorial policy.

So we Americans escaped the fate of the old Soviet Union by the skin of our teeth. As Americans my age (74) recall well, “news” in the Soviet Union depended on two self-conscious Communist propaganda organs: “The News” (“Izvestia”) and “The Truth” (“Pravda”). Soviet citizens explained these rags’ effectiveness in informing the Soviet public with the slogan “There’s no truth in The News and no news in The Truth.”

Today, with Fox dominating TV and Sinclair dominating local radio, we Americans may yet achieve a similar apex of Orwellian ideological spoon-feeding. Only the WaPo and the NYT stand in our way. (The British weekly The Economist provides some international perspective. But, by and large, it serves only the elite in the United States. Anyway, its consistent editorial outlook is not far from that of the oligarch-suborned Wall Street Journal, as I explain here.)

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