Emergency socialism
It’s one of the all-time great ironies that the very week that the establishment and rank and file of the “liberal” party of the United States rise up in unison and cooperation to tell the rest of us that they’re frightened of socialism, we’re faced with an historically-outlarged pandemic that could only be effectively combated with socialized medicine.
Last month, MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews, since fired-- but surprisingly not for what I'm about to describe-- suggested that Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist candidate for president, would support “executions in Central Park,” and he equated the campaign’s ascendancy in the Democratic primary field to the Nazis walking into Paris. And Matthews is a Democrat. The New York Times, on the eve of the Nevada caucuses, published a story suggesting that Bernie had been an unwitting Cold War stooge of the Soviet Union during the 1980's because he attempted, as mayor, to establish a sister-city relationship between a Russian city and Burlington, Vermont. And again, this is a “left wing” newspaper. Anderson Cooper, admired by Democrats, grilled Sanders on
60 Minutes over how the candidate had once praised Cuba’s literacy rate. Meanwhile, Sanders’ opponent, Joe Biden, escaped untouched by the Washington press corps after a whopper he told on the eve of the South Carolina vote, that he had once been arrested in South Africa while trying to visit the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. It was another Biden “gaffe,” we were told, when really it was another Biden lie.
Then, through the door, walks the Covid-19 virus, a global pandemic dressed in the clothing of the common cold. And all of a sudden, the failures of health-care-for-private-profit are laid bare for all to see, even if they’re not all willing to acknowledge. The anti-freedom attacks against socialism are replaced by the reality of a capitalism freedom choice between work and death.
The development of the tests has been disproportionately left to private researchers. There are only an estimated 300,000 unoccupied beds nationwide in hospitals, a situation helped not in the slightest by the fact that profit-conscious “health systems” have shuttered 120 rural hospitals in the last decade. Despite the
promise of Obamacare, a weak-sister substitute for Medicare-for-All, single-payer, 27 million Americans still have no health insurance and they are certainly unlikely to pursue unaffordable care, which will grow the crisis exponentially. A patient in Pennsylvania has already been hit with a $3,900 bill for a coronavirus test.
For what seems like eons, American politicians outside the Democratic Socialist tradition have been claiming that cost-sharing health care would incentivize people to use more than they need. Universal health care could not be afforded-- even when the most costly portion of the population-- the elderly-- already have it and have since 1965. California governer Gavin Newsom, a “San Francisco liberal,” like Nancy Pelosi, shares her disdain for it. He could have introduced single-payer for his state any time over several years. He didn’t. This week, he’s demanding that insurance companies make the coronavirus testing free to everyone.
In-between his years of supposedly not accomplishing anything in Washington, Bernie Sanders introduced an amendment in 2000 that would regulate the price of drugs that have been developed with public money, which was a plank also in the Green Party platform that year of presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Democratic lawmakers shot it down. Senator "Sleepy" Joe Biden, among them, voted against it. That was Bernie looking ahead
20 years ago. This week Biden and Pelosi are demanding that the developing coronavirus vaccine be available to everyone. Forget the Republicans. These ideas couldn’t even get past
the Democrats. What I wouldn’t give for even the opportunity for them to be attacked by the right-wing media machine.
Good for Biden for coming to the party only two decades on, but here’s the thing. This is only rhetoric. He doesn’t believe a word of it, or at least won’t follow through on it. How do I know? Because the checks have already cleared. He took the money from the pharmaceutical companies, the “health systems,” the banks. He would not be on the precipice of the nomination without them. He would not have stood in line for so long for this moment without their bribes. There is no compromise. The monied interests and the people are diametrically-opposed. The tent would not be big enough for the Democratic Party if it covered the entire nation. You can’t have one without completely rejecting the other. Medicare-for-All is the end of private insurers. It’s the end of an employment-based coverage system.
The Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, you know it. It’s not socialism. It’s the exact opposite of socialism. It’s a federal requirement to buy a private product. A shitty private product that is understandably unpopular. It was, in medical terms, a Band-Aid on a serious problem, but more importantly, a giveaway of billions of dollars to the health insurers. It's the most expensive health care system on Earth. For what you're experiencing now. When it came up before the Senate Finance Committee, Democrats in control of the proceedings did not allow Medicare-for-All advocates to testify. That kept even a public option from being included, but that promise was counterfeit too. A government option could never be allowed to exist without inevitably revealing what a better option the government one is. It's only rhetoric. It only exists to perpetuate the boogeyman of “government-run health care”-- that evil demon. You know him. He’s the one we give to our military veterans and to all of our congressional representatives, and none in either group give it back.
Viruses don’t read personal bank accounts. Security gates don’t insure protection from them. As sure as I’m writing this, we can also be sure that those with both vulnerable immune systems and fat pocketbooks are angling to get one of the too-rare tests, and then after that, certainly, the first doses of immunization. This week the Center for Disease Control administered 70 tests. ONLY 70 tests. But the well-heeled corporation, the National Basketball Association, somehow scored access to 58 tests. So we're not remotely past that.
Even Republicans now are having to give in to the political failure of health care for profit. They couch it perhaps with suggestions that this socialized medicine is only needed for the rare pandemics, but what works best is what works when the shit hits the fan, like now.
All Americans-- regardless of citizenship or immigration status-- need to receive free testing and treatment. All of us pay so that none of us become economically crippled, or ever have to make a health choice based on money. That is what will save thousands, if not millions, of lives. And that is also the system we have been rejecting.
This extraordinary virus will act as an illusion to some. It forces us to isolate ourselves physically, to quarantine ourselves, but that belies the interconnectedness of the defense. It makes clear our unavoidable link to one another-- at home, work, school, sporting events and concerts, churches, neighborhoods, houses for the sick and the vulnerable.
We’re going to engage in some patently absurd behavior, trying to isolate ourselves in our work, if we’re lucky enough to have that, or with our school work, if we’re fortunate enough to be a student at the upper levels to have the technology access, but 50 percent of the country is week to week in their essentials, if not day to day. They need food and gas, maybe public transportation, care for their children. They won't have it.
That’s the system of thought disconnect that still threatens to ultimately break us. If not with this strain of virus, then perhaps with the next. It was said by someone really smart 15 years ago, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, that the storm did not create a third world nation, but instead revealed one. The Covid-19 virus has opened the same window for us to see. We're only as healthy as our sickest citizen, as we're only as wealthy as our poorest. The water is rising again. We must be
physically isolated from each other to avoid sharing the contagion, but we must not be
morally isolated any longer.
Where it stands
There will come a moment this fall when Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee for president, will look into the camera at a nationally-televised debate and begin answering a question. We’ll be dialed into his response because Joe long ago learned the cadence and posturing of the traditional American politician. He executed better, in fact, then almost all of them. But in the middle of his response, he will go blank. The cognitive synapses that used to function so well as he was hustling us will fail him. The words will trail off. We’ll see the blood drain from behind his facelift, and then it will drain from our faces as well, as we realize what it is exactly that we’re witnessing. Something already foregone. Four more years of President Trump.
It didn’t have to have been that way. The Revolution that the party bosses deprived us of in 2016 had been graciously-- and shockingly (to some of us)-- offered a second time to the Democrats, and what did they do? They crushed it again-- because the Revolution means an end to oligarchy, and though they claim to despise the incumbent president, they know their stolen loot is safer with him working in the Oval Office than it is with Bernie Sanders.
Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?
Senator Elizabeth Warren was poised to be something she’s never wanted to be. She had a revolutionary’s love for the adoration that people would have for her, but she possesses not the revolutionary’s spirit. She was for Medicare-for-All, then she dropped it to chase after that tantalizing middle ground. She decried Super PACs and refused to take money from them-- until her treasure chest of small donations proved too meager to keep up with the one that's funding the Revolution. She began working in public policy in 1995 for the very purpose of opposing Senator Joe Biden’s corrupt bankruptcy bill, and then, years later, as a presidential candidate, she owed the very chance she even had at the nomination to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign of 2016. But instead of joining with the Revolution when it mattered, dropping her pathless campaign to the presidency after an almost-cruel third-place finish in her home state and failing to finish above third place in
any state, she continued her Dead Woman Walking bid, ostensibly over some ridiculous pipedream that the bosses would broker her to nomination at the summer convention in Milwaukee as, I guess, some sort of “unity” candidate, even though they have shown no compulsion to even entertain such an idea, and, if they did, it would go completely against the voters’ wishes.
Over a spat she claimed took place in private when Bernie Sanders supposedly told her a woman couldn’t beat Trump head-to-head, she refused to shake his hand in each of the two most recent debates even as she
did shake the hand of Michael Bloomberg, a man she had basically called out as a racist and a sexist in her famously-prosecutorial style at each of the same debates.
After her weak showing on Super Tuesday, she refused even then to make a distinction between the candidates Sanders and Biden, saying only that Biden compromised too much with Republicans, but that Sanders did a poor job of coalition-building.
The Elizabeth Warren politician, the one-time conservative Republican (like Hillary Clinton), that stubbornly went after the “too big to fail” banks, displayed that stubbornness now in an effort to crush a youth voter revolt that boasted nearly one in two Democrats under the age of 30, and to possibly alienate an entire generation of idealistic progressives. Rather, she’s thrown in with the bosses that run the party, their corporate donors, and the corporatist, militarist superdelegates. Warren arguably has done more than either of Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar to elevate Joe Biden to the cusp of the nomination this week. It’s pretty easy to imagine how different the reaction would be in much of the Democratic world if Sanders and Warren were in reverse positions and Bernie was refusing to concede.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?
Rushing to rally behind Biden, Pete Buttigieg is a special case of political grossness. He’s the son of a respected socialist author and he’s a one-time major fan of Sanders, at least according to a prize-winning essay he wrote in high school. Somewhere along the way, though, Pete became an apparatchik for the establishment, a company man. In his last debate, he did some red-baiting of Sanders, and then, according to a campaign memo, chose to leave the race precisely over his personal concerns that he was aiding Sanders. He’s a fascinating case study. After school-- and a Rhodes Scholarship-- Pete joined the McKinsey Group in Washington, then enlisted in the military to fight in the Afghanistan War after it was a decade old. (He never saw combat.) His goal, it seems, of one day becoming a “check all boxes” candidate that could challenge for the presidency, presumably included a fall back plan, which now kicks in, to become a highly-compensated Washington lobbyist.
He looked, for all the world, like a new Obama, young and charismatic, outwardly optimistic, and with one history-challenging characteristic of diversity. At times he even seemed to be doing an Obama impression on the stump, mimicking the former president’s pattern of speaking. He became the favorite of the billionaire class, even spouting at one of the debates, hilariously, “billionaires are people too.” He started a “national investors circle” for his biggest donors and one of his aides was caught telling potential donors by email that they needed to pony up and buy access to the candidate before the line got too long.
Like Warren, he was for Medicare-for-All before he was against it. But he failed, like she did, to show voters more authenticity than the Revolution’s leader. That lack of perceived honesty produced some sometimes-embarrassing results, like when he failed to get the support of even one black voter in a poll conducted in South Carolina. His South Bend, Indiana police force shot a black man to death during the early part of his campaign, and he had fired the black police chief of the majority-white police force in a majority-black city. His offensive pandering to black voters challenged the lows of even Joe Biden. Before Biden thought to invent a story, on the eve of the South Carolina primary, about how he was once arrested in South Africa trying to meet with Nelson Mandela, Mayor Pete put out a release where he fabricated the endorsement of a number of African-American leaders. Both Biden and Buttigieg had to cop to their lies, but neither were ever, or have ever been, confronted with those lies by panelists during the televised debates, even as Bernie Sanders had to answer 253 times for the reported bullying by his followers on the internet.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?
Trust me, this is not what the Democratic bosses wanted. We wouldn’t have ever had a Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Bloomberg if the inner circle wasn't scared to death of the advanced mental impairment and indefensible public record of Joe Biden. But they had to do it. They had to float these other candidates, and you can add Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, Beto O’Rourke, and Deval Patrick to the list as well. They all struck out with voters, to varying degrees, and finally, Sanders became too much of a threat to still be facing a
team of options. No candidate had ever won in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada previously and then been denied the nomination. The last two alternatives fell on their sword this weekend so that Biden could be elevated to the top, and now they’ll hope for the best-- knowing that at the very least, their money and power positions are safe, and that the anti-Trump “opposition” in Washington can continue to be quite lucrative even in the wake of bone-crushing defeat. It dawns on me that it’s a little like a title bout where you know your fighter is going to be destroyed, but oh, that pay day!
If his Super Bowl Sunday interview with Sean Hannity is any indication, Trump is going to hammer “Sleepy Joe” over the 1980s crime bills he supported. Trump has been trying to make in-roads with African-American voters, and he can point to a mild record of prison reform for himself while slapping hard down at Biden over the senator’s dismal “tough on crime” history. At the very least, African-American turnout will likely be smaller than it’s been for the last few electoral cycles. Trump will once again be the anti-war candidate because the Democrats have found their wagon hitched to yet another signature-backer of the War on Iraq, while Trump can call out that military fiasco for what it was, and point to a recent peace agreement (to his credit) with the Taliban, at last an end to the fighting in Afghanistan after Obama and Biden inexplicably extended the war by the full length of their eight years in office.
Biden will walk out onto stages across the Rust Belt, where Clinton met her Waterloo, and he’ll be going there having to defend his four decades of horrible trade deals that helped to financially devastate many of those communities, while Trump can claim-- with at least a tiny amount of honesty-- that he’s the president that finally tried to get tough on China. Though he’s largely a con man and a married-for-life crony-capitalist, he did pull us out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and attempt tariffs on the Chinese.
Biden will also be carrying the legitimate weight of having to front the ticket of a party largely perceived to have rigged its process. Yes he will-- and they did. It wasn’t a Putin conspiracy, but they’ll try to Red Scare the voters for sure. When they undoubtedly fail to win back the Sanders voters they’ve alienated, it won’t be the hand of Putin, it will be an All-American reality. They’ll have nothing to offer Sanders voters. You all must know, that even when you’re throwing around weighted dice in politics, and elevating your preferred candidate through back-room chicanery, you still have to offer them
something. What will Bernie demand? What will his supporters demand? What can they even offer? I can think of nothing that would be pacifying to what I know of the majority of his backers that would also be realistically offered.
Voters aren’t stupid. Many of them formed in around Joe Biden yesterday, and that’s frustrating to many of us, but it’s not on them. They take their cues from the party leadership. They don’t devote their days to politics, and they want a candidate this time around that has the best chance of beating Trump, and for weeks, the party leadership didn’t offer them a unified answer on whom that candidate was. But when Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out together, ending their campaigns in a surprise, never-before-seen pre-Super Tuesday sort-of-spectacle, and immediately throwing in with Biden-- with Warren refusing to do something similar in reverse, the voters took the cue.
This is what Sanders was up against all along-- and why it’s clear now that he’s back to being simply the generation-defining figure of an ongoing movement that will continue long after he’s gone. He’s still in it for 2020-- and needs to be fought for by tooth and by nail, but Biden already has enough delegates, in my view, for the bosses to force the brokered change to Biden, even if Sanders manages to garner the most delegates. It needed to be a Sanders blowout to make the brokering impossible for them to attempt.
Biden will get pummeled by Trump though in November. A friend at work asked me today for predictions-- a wager, actually-- as to which of just ten states each that the Democrats and Republicans can rely upon in November. I said that, with Biden at the front, I can’t guarantee ten states for the Democrats. Biden won't inspire voters, and that means the down-ticket races will suffer as well. We’re accustomed to being outcasts here on the Left-- those of us to the left of the liberals that have failed us time and again, and so that role will fit again. There needs to be principled, aggressive,
peaceful, civil disobedience in Milwaukee this summer, promised of the kind that might be worth the drive. This is a true Revolution, one I already didn’t presume to ever see, and it’s bigger than Bernie Sanders and as long as the arc of history. Which side are you on, which side are you on?
