California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

America Has an Employment Problem, Not an Unemployment Problem

by John Lawrence

Wherever you look from air traffic controllers to fruit pickers to caregivers to teachers to police, there are not enough workers. That is why unemployment is so low - at 3.4%. The Health Services, Professional and Business Services, Trade, and Accommodation and Food Services industries have the highest numbers of job openings. The question is why there is a shortage of workers and what to do about it.The pandemic caused a major disruption in America’s labor force—something many have referred to as The Great Resignation. In 2022, more than 50 million workers quit their jobs, many of whom were in search of an improved work-life balance and flexibility, increased compensation, and a strong company culture. But a closer look at what has happened to the labor force can be better described as ‘The Great Reshuffle’ because hiring rates have outpaced quit rates since November of 2020. So, many workers are quitting their jobs—but many are getting re-hired elsewhere. In a game of musical chairs workers are seeking and getting better jobs, leaving high stress professions like nursing and teaching and getting paid more to do other things.

So America basically has a shortage of "essential workers," workers who do necessary work for traditionally low pay. America has developed so many ways to make money doing inessential work at higher pay so why should anyone who doesn't have to work in an essential job? There are two ways. 1) Pay more for essential work and 2) increase legal immigration because increasingly immigrants are doing the work that Americans who have been Americans longer don't want to do. The worker shortage has empowered workers. They are so to speak in the catbird seat. They are demanding more pay, shorter hours, better working conditions. This is all well and good, but, as the pandemic showed, essential work is necessary for people to live while so many other forms of work, while more lucrative, could disappear tomorrow without affecting much most Americans' quality of life. For instance, Facebook had 86,482 full-time employees as of December 2022, up from just 150 people in 2006. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, nothing essential to life would be lost in my opinion. The same is true for other social media like Tik Tok. In fact considering the effects social media has had on the population, the world might be better off if all social media disappeared tomorrow. Then those workers would be available for more essential jobs.

If the advertising industry disappeared tomorrow, the world might be better off. For instance, I can find anything I might be interested in buying on Amazon. I don't need to be pounded on by TV commercials to be told what I should want or what I should need. In particualar, Facebook makes all its considerable revenues from advertising. It does not manufacture a product essential to life or any product at all. People are getting smart that there are cushier, safer jobs with better work-life balance than essential jobs. Caregivers like Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) are low paid but essential jobs. Anyone who has had a loved one in the hospital for any length of time realizes how essential they are. They do the dirty work like changing patients diapers and cleaning up when they haven't got to the patients' bedsides in time to prevent a tragedy. Nurses and teachers are overworked considering the nurse/patient ratio and the teacher/student ratio. Much essential work is done by non college graduates and, therefore, does not merit the esteem that college graduates' jobs garner. Nevertheless, they are more important jobs in an essential sense, than many jobs that require a college education. When you need a plumber, you will not usually be hiring a college graduate.

About half of Americans who lost their job during the pandemic and are still not working say they are not willing to take jobs that do not offer the opportunity for remote work. However, many essential jobs can't be done remotely. They are "hands on." It is about time that America values its essential workers and makes a distinction between what's essential and what is inessential. It's a question, to some extent, of values, of what kinds of work are valued. This is where unions come in. America cannot function without essential workers. Yet the only way they can get the pay and benefits they deserve is to unionize and withdraw their workforce if necessary to get what they deserve. For sure, they won't get a better paying job otherwise unless they quit and go to work for Facebook.

Off the Top of My Head

The Elevation of Personal Beliefs Above Objective Truth

by John Lawrence

I saw an amazing interview involving a health care worker who refused to get vaccinated even though it means she will lose her job. Talk about obstinacy. She admitted to being Catholic and even the authority of the Catholic church, whose Pope himself got vaccinated and recommended that others follow his example, was not enough to sway her towards getting the shot. So she's denying the authority of the whole medical science system and the Pope of the Catholic church, elevating her own personal beliefs above those authorities, while at the same time being willing to lose her livelihood. Is this a gigantic child's tantrum or what? Did this person stomp her feet and refuse to eat her pablum? Has she been totally captivated by Fox news and social media? She must be basing her refusal on something. The knowledge that statistically very few vaccinated people have died with COVID while the vast majority of the current deaths are among the unvaccinated evidently means nothing to her.

We've seen this phenomenon before. Strong leaders can even lead willing participants to their deaths. Rolling Stone reported:

"Until the September 11th attacks, the tragedy in Jonestown on November 18th, 1978 represented the largest number of American civilian casualties in a single non-natural event. It is unfathomable now, as it was then, that more than 900 Americans – members of a San Francisco-based religious group called the Peoples Temple – died after drinking poison at the urging of their leader, the Reverend Jim Jones, in a secluded South American jungle settlement. Photographs taken after the carnage forever document the sheer enormity of the event: the bodies of hundreds of people, including children, lying face down in the grass."

We have to ask "how could the Jonestown massacre been prevented?" So could Jim Jones' rights of free speech been curtailed? Could the Peoples Temple have been dissolved by authorities as detrimental to human welfare? Of course to do any of these things would have violated our Constitution and people's rights of free speech and religion. It comes to mind that China wouldn't have any problem doing both if the authorities there felt it was in the people's and/or the country's interest to do so. So is our Constitution flawed when it comes to letting massive deceptions of the American public go on or is it people's right to allow themselves to be deceived which results in their losing their livelihood or even their life?

Where I come down on this is to disallow snake oil salesmen from doing their jobs. Basically, I would censor social media especially as it pertains to the proliferation of lies and untruths. I would censor the purveying of misinformation. This lady that denied the authority of both the Pope and the consensus of medical science probably got her mentality altered by social media which is known to proliferate misinformation. Obviously, Facebook, Instagram and others are not doing enough to police themselves for obvious reasons. Their profit model depends on the proliferation of lies and mistruths. If they weeded out every lie being purveyed on Facebook, it would drastically cut their profits. Misinformation and lies especially if conveyed in a flambuoyant fashion get way more hits than does the bland truth and valid information. Sensationalism sells and makes big profits for social media as well as tabloid newspapers such as the National Enquirer.

Wikipedia explains sensationalism as follows:

"In journalism (and more specifically, the mass media), sensationalism is a type of editorial tactic. Events and topics in news stories are selected and worded to excite the greatest number of readers and viewers. This style of news reporting encourages biased or emotionally loaded impressions of events rather than neutrality, and may cause a manipulation to the truth of a story. Sensationalism may rely on reports about generally insignificant matters and portray them as a major influence on society, or biased presentations of newsworthy topics, in a trivial, or tabloid manner, contrary to general assumptions of professional journalistic standards."

"Some tactics include being deliberately obtuse, appealing to emotions, being controversial, intentionally omitting facts and information, being loud and self-centered, and acting to obtain attention. Trivial information and events are sometimes misrepresented and exaggerated as important or significant, and often include stories about the actions of individuals and small groups of people, the content of which is often insignificant and irrelevant to the macro-level day-to-day events occurring globally."

Some people are more easily manipulated than others. The example of the lady in the interview that denied the authority of both medical science and the Catholic church doesn't bode well for unlimited freedom of speech and religion. You can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, but freedom of speech should have a much greater threshold than that. Lies and misinformation in social media at least need to be fact checked by an authority whether governmental or quasi-governmental or otherwise so that every time the misinformation pops up, the fact check also pops up. This in and of itself is not censorship, but it is an intrusion into private business, a regulatory effort to prevent the general public from being hoodwinked. China would have no problem with this and no problem with outright censorship. If the US is to maintain itself as a cohesive society with everyone moving in more or less of a positive direction, some sort of restraint on lies and misinformation needs to be put in place.

Off the Top of My Head

Wanted: A Billionaire to Run Ads Directed at Anti-Vaxxers

by John Lawrence

Interview unvaccinated patients dying with COVID, then interview the Moms, Dads and Children left behind after their Mom, Dad or Child has died from COVID. Put together a powerful ad of people who believed the anti-VAXX lies and then got COVID and died and/or were left behind to grieve. Spend millions running these ads, and pretty soon no one will believe the lies and misinformation any more. These ads should be run on all the channels and social media that anti-Vaxxers and Trump supporters watch. So many of the ads running currently are superfluous, their only purpose being to get you to buy more stuff. Instead of spending billions on private space missions, spend some money where it really influences people to do the right thing - TV and social media advertising oriented toward getting people vaccinated.

Advertising could be transformed into a socially meaningful operation. I don't need to see ads telling me to buy more stuff. Force feeding Americans ads to buy more stuff is part of the problem. Americans are over consuming while the rest of the world is barely eating. Americans need to consume less, but advertising could also have a socially redeeming purpose. I don't know what the ethics are of the government itself running ads on TV and social media, but for sure a private party can run ads of any type and description. So why don't they? Powerful ads could be put together to get people to do the right thing and get the vaccine. Dying parents and crying children might convince people not to follow in the footsteps of the unvaccinated. We need that to get the pandemic under control.

Advertise on all the anti-vaxxers' favorite social media platforms. Facebook will target ads for you. So the buys for pro-Vax ads could be targeted at all the anti-vaxxers. This is not only completely ethical; it will save lives. In fact it would be unethical not to do it since Facebook's algorithms are set up to link anti-vaxxrs together. It should be a no brainer to target antivaxxers with pro vaccination material, and the most powerful and poignant material is the remorse of the dying for not getting the COVID shots and the grief of distraucght wives and children at the loss of their husband and parent. Michael Bloomberg and the Gates Foundation, where are you?

The $3.5 Trillion Bill Corporate America is Terrified Of

by Robert Reich

Monday, September 13, 2021

Right now, Democrats are working to pass a $3.5 trillion package that will provide long overdue help for working Americans.

The final bill hasn’t yet been determined, so we don’t know the exact dollar amounts for all its policies. We’ll probably find that out in late September or early October. For now, the Democrats’ budget resolution frames what’s in the bill.  

First, on families:

The bill would make permanent key benefits for working families, including the expanded child tax credit in the pandemic relief plan that sends families up to $300 per child each month but is now set to expire in December, and is estimated to cut child poverty by half. 

It would also establish universal child care, for which low- and middle-income households would pay no more than 7 percent of their incomes. 

And provide a national program of paid leave — worth up to $4,000 a month — for workers who take time off because they are ill or caring for a relative.

Next, on education:

The bill would reduce educational inequality by establishing universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, benefiting an estimated 5 million children, and providing tuition-free community college – essentially expanding free public education from 12 years to 16 years. 

It will also invest in historically Black colleges and universities and increase the maximum amount of Pell grants for students from lower-income families. 

On health care:

The bill expands Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing benefits and lowers the eligibility age. It also expands Medicaid to cover people living in the 12 states that have not yet expanded Medicaid, and makes critical investments to improve healthcare for people of color. 

The big question is how far it will go to reduce prescription drug prices by, for example, allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. That could reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and free up more money for other parts of the bill. But Big Pharma is dead-set against this.

Big corporations and the rich picking up the tab:

In another step toward fairness, all of these are to be financed by higher taxes on the rich and big corporations. 

The bill would also increase the Internal Revenue Service’s funding so the agency can properly audit wealthy tax cheats, who fail to report about a fifth of their income every year, thereby costing the government $105 billion annually. 

In addition, the bill tackles the climate crisis, which also especially burdens lower-income Americans: 

There are a range of solutions – subsidizing the use of solar, wind, nuclear and other forms of clean energy while financially penalizing the use of dirty energy like coal; helping families pay for electric cars and energy-efficient homes. 

The bill might include something known as a carbon border adjustment tax — a tax on imports whose production was carbon-intensive, like many from China.

The bill would also establish a Civilian Climate Corps, and invest in communities that bear the brunt of the climate crisis.

And the bill helps American workers:

It will hopefully contain much of the PRO Act, the toughest labor law reform in a generation. 

Finally, the bill includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
This is all about making America fairer. 

Remember: we won’t know the exact details of the bill for at least a month, but these are the main areas that it will focus on. The big challenge will be ensuring Senate Democrats remain united to get it passed. All of us will need to fight like hell.

Don’t listen to spending hawks who claim it’s too expensive or too radical. For far too long, our government has ignored the needs of everyday Americans, catering instead to the demands of corporations and the super-rich. No more. 

It’s time to get this landmark bill passed and build a fairer America.

Off the Top of My Head

Just When We Thought the War Was Won, the Enemy Surprised Us With a Blitzkrieg

by John Lawrence

Reminiscent of the blitzkrieg in the Second World War when Germany overwhelmed France in just a few days, Americans had been led to believe that the war with COVID was winding down. Just then COVID mutated and launched a surprise attack. Americans were taken by surprise. Like Yogi Berra said, "It ain't over till it's over." So now we have to pivot and take on the enemy again just as we were starting to relax and go back to our privileged lifestyles. The problem has been exacerbated by so many Americans not doing their patriotic duty and getting vaccinated. It's a sad commentary on American culture when President Biden has to offer the unvaccinated $100 to get vaccinated. It's not just about your freedom, it's about saving the nation from an unmitigated disaster.

The Delta variant is a game changer and not in a good direction. Americans who haven't gotten vaccinated have been far too casual about it. And uninformed and downright stupid. In a war some people are going to be sacrificed for the greater good of winning the war. When the General sends people into battle he knows that some of his troops are going to be killed. The Civil War was a war of attrition. The North won because they could afford to sacrifice so many more of their troops than the South could. By contrast the war against COVID doesn't require much if anything in terms of sacrifice. Getting vaccinated doesn't mean that you're taking a chance of being killed or harmed by the vaccine. It means that you are increasing your chances of staying alive. Sure some people will die despite the fact of being fully vaccinated, but the vast majority of vaccinated people will live while the vast majority of unvaccinated people will die. It's as simple as that.

The Delta variant is the virus equivalent of a blitzkrieg. It's military potential is far mightier than the US defenses which rely on convincing people rather than mandating people to get vaccinated.  It's like a war in which people are free to decide whether or not they want to join the battle. Some are saying, "I don't give a fuck whether I die or I infect those around me and they die. My freedom of choice is more important. Isn't that my right according to the Constitution?" With this attitude Germany would have won the Second World War. Oh I have to wear a mask. Boo Hoo! What babies! What selfish A holes. No wonder so many of them are following the former A hole in Chief who only thought of his own selfish interests. They are a perfect reflection of his values.

Even the best guidance from the doctors and scientists was too rosy glowed compared to the situation on the ground. They never emphasized the fact that, even if you are fully vaccinated, you can still get infected with the virus. They told us that, if you were fully vaccinated, you could go anywhere, do anything unmasked and unsocially distanced and never have to worry about getting COVID, This was too pollyannish. Yes, chances are you won't die fom COVID, but it was never emphasized enough that the vaccines were 90% effective - not 100%. That means that 10% of the fully vaccinated could still get COVID and potentially even die. Now with the Delta variant being COVID on steroids, even though statistically you are much better off, it's still a statistical possibility you could die, and the best way to prevent yourself from being a statistic is to stay away from large gatherings of people especially when some of them might not be vaccinated.

We know children can get the virus. Those summer camps where a lot of them got it are a case in point. So now we are sending them back to school unvaccinated which is a disaster in the making. Why are we doing this? Because we had planned to do it thinking the pandemic would be over by the time children went back to school? Well now the situation has changed. We can't pivot because we had promised that children would be back in school sans masks? This is ridiculous. Sure vaccinations are super important, but children under 12 cannot be vaccinated due to the fact that the authorities haven't cleared them for vaccinations. So now, since they were promised it, we have to go ahead and send the largest unvaccinated group into a situation where they are most likely to get infected? Does this make any sense at all? Even if the adult population were 100% vaccinated, the children would still be at risk. Ironically, we have the capability of remotely educating them at home. Parents can even home school them. But the American people are being told that their children should go back to school masked or unmasked. They still insist on children going back into the classroom. The Delta variant is watching and waiting. And then comes the blitzkrieg.

Off the Top of My Head

The Code Breaker

by John Lawrence, March26, 2021

The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson is an exciting new book which details the efforts and the knowledge to edit genes known as CRISPR. That means cutting into the DNA genome and removing "sick" genes and/or replacing them with the correct genes. The book details the quest to discover the mechanism by which this is possible. The book focuses on Jennifer Doudna but many researchers, many of them recent immigrants or workers at foreign universities, are involved. The fundamental insights can be explained in a few sentences. They noticed that bacteria have been fighting off viruses successfully for billions of years, and they were doing this by incorporating the virus DNA into the data base of their own genome. Upon encountering a new virus the bacteria knew how to encode that virus's DNA so that they could identify it in an attack in the future. Secondly, the bacteria knew how to dispatch a portion of RNA that would travel to the site of the virus and encode an enzyme that would then destroy the virus. The messenger RNA knew precisely where to point the enzyme which then cut the virus DNA thereby destroying it. So the e. coli bacterium has known how to edit genes for billions of years. The trick is to figure out exactly how the bacterium does this.

So Jennifer Doudna and cohorts did just that: They figured out how a bacterium cuts a virus's DNA precisely in a certain location. That's what the book is about. That's what gene editing is about. Gene editing is in its infancy, but it has already been used to correct the genetic mutation which causes sickle cell anemia which is caused by the mutation in one gene. Experimentally, it has been shown that if this gene can be cut out and replaced by one that contains the correct genetic information, the disease can be cured. If this can be done early in the development of an embryo, the correct gene can even be transmitted to succeeding generations. An estimated 8 million children are born each year with severe genetic disorders or birth defects. Gene editing can possibly correct some or all of these defects. In order to do this the enzyme which cuts the gene out of the DNA must be told precisely where to cut, and the correct gene must somehow be implanted precisely at this location and the DNA reconnected. In theory the whole idea is very simple. Figuring out how to do this either in the laboratory or in actual animals, much less in humans, is the hard part.

Whether or not this research will lead to an understanding of the origins of life is an open question. Perhaps there is a sub-atomic entity sort of like a neutrino which is massless and ubiquitous in the universe which is the progenitor of life wherever conditions are propitious. Perhaps it is able to generate an organism with the minimal genome, something which has never been discovered in nature. Even a virus which has the simplest known genomic structure has three thousand base pairs, compared to the three billion base pairs in human genomes. A base pair consists of the 4 nucleotides called A, C, G, T   which comprise one rung of the DNA ladder. So a successful gene edit would have to identify the precise rung of the DNA ladder where the mutation had occurred which means at least one of the 4 letters of the base pair was incorrect and correct it.

So I theorize that a life progenitor would have to be something that is ubiquitous in the universe and capable of starting life with a minimal genome which consists of only a few base pairs. This is a mystery but certainly not the only one. Gravity is an every day phenomenon but no one has detected a graviton which is thought to be the physical entity that distorts space time according to Einstein's theory of relativity. No one understands the "dark energy" which is thought to be responsible for the fact that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating. No one understands what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" which has been demonstrated to be a reality in quantum theory. Just as the line is blurred between what is material and what is massless energy, the line is blurred between what is spiritual and what is material. Is the creation of life in the universe a physical, material phenomenon or a spiritual one?

Off the Top of My Head

When Will the Pandemic Be Over? Maybe Never

by John Lawrence, February 10, 2021

We may just have to live with it, the same way we live with most other viruses. To eradicate COVID-19, it would have to be eliminated everywhere in the world. Not likely. To add insult to injury, COVID-19 is mutating - everywhere in the world and not only in humans. These viruses are also present in animals and are mutating there as well. What this means is that all the billions spent on vaccines so far may not have resulted in vaccines effective against the mutants. So billions more need to be spent for new vaccines that might not be effective against even newer mutants. It's a race against time, and humans may need to be vaccinated multiple times each one not effective against the newest mutant.

So we may have to learn to live with COVID. After all we have learned to live with a number of other viruses including flu, which also keeps mutating, HIV, poliomyelitis, yaws, dracunculiasis, malaria, measles, mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis and cysticercosis. In some cases symptoms are treatable in an individual even though the virus may still be present as is the case with HIV. The only viruses that has been eradicated from the planet are smallpox and rinderpest. The fact that humans are the only reservoir for smallpox infection and that carriers did not exist, played a significant role in the eradication of smallpox. Most viruses are present in animals as well as humans and can harbor there for years before breaking out again in humans.

The modus operandi for a virus is that the more transmissable ones win out over the less transmissable ones. So the longer the virus exists in the population, the more the virus mutates and the more transmissable the virus gets. It does not necessarily get more deadly because if it killed its host right away, it wouldn't have as much time to infect others. So an ideal virus is one that hangs around in its host for a long length of time and then kills it. Being asymptomatic but transmissable for a long length of time also contributes to the success of the virus at least from the virus' viewpoint. Time magazine reports:

"That underscores wealthy countries’ responsibility to help developing nations get access to vaccines, Mazet says–for the benefit of the people who live there, of course, but also for the rest of the world. Even if one country achieves herd immunity, that status could be threatened by new viral mutations emerging from areas without broad vaccine coverage.

"The good news is we already know how to live with viruses, like seasonal influenza and the coronaviruses that cause the common cold. These diseases aren’t harmless–the flu infects millions of people in the U.S. each year and kills tens of thousands–but we have learned to minimize their damage."

So it becomes apparent that, if we don't help poorer countries, our own lives will never be out of danger. This is true for pandemics but it is also true in many other respects which should be perfectly obvious. Global poverty contributes to global disease. Going it alone or America First or ignoring the plight of our neighbors puts our own lives in peril. This is especially true for global warming. It is also true for the refugee crisis, childhood poverty all around the world and many other things. Climate refugees are already being created thanks to the effects of global warming. All these problems can only be addressed if not solved by global cooperation. In order to do this we must overlook things about other countries that we quibble with especially on the order of human rights. From their perspective we are human rights violators. What is important is not to bully or sanction other countries but to get along with them. Diplomacy and cooperation should be the order of the day. We must deemphasize military threats and solutions to world problems, defund the military and fund programs designed to counteract the real threats to ourselves and others.

Time put it this way:

"A better solution, many experts believe, is investing in the public-health infrastructure that went neglected before the COVID-19 pandemic, thus improving our ability to contain, respond to and monitor coronaviruses and other pathogens. “We need to invest in creating a healthier country [and world!], so when there is another virus, we will not be as unprepared as we were for this one,” Galea says.

...

"Recovering from the pandemic must also involve better science communication, to improve understanding of what must be done to curtail disease spread–and to persuade Americans to actually do it.

"Part of coexisting with COVID-19 may mean recognizing the need for cooperation [emphasis mine], whether it’s getting vaccinated to contribute to herd immunity; wearing a mask to prevent spreading the virus; consenting to regular testing or contact tracing to help with monitoring; or adhering to the guidelines set out by local health authorities if an outbreak emerges. Steven Taylor, author of The Psychology of Pandemics, says it’s possible for humans to adjust to such a scenario. Wearing masks felt bizarre to many in the Western world less than a year ago; now it’s second nature for most. “The virus will adapt to its host,” he says, “and we will adapt to the virus.”"

Yes, cooperation to provide herd immunity, to provide a herd response to global warming which also affects the whole herd and elimination of war and military responses to every nonexistent but imagined threat. We are all interconnected so that the more we cooperate, the more likely it will be that we will solve these global problems. If we don't the human race could be wiped out by ongoing pandemics, global warming and warfare. Let's spend our money on the real threats to mankind and not on a bloated military-industrial complex which is proving on a daily basis that it is ineffective in confronting the real problems of mankind.

7 Ways 2020 Exposed America

by Robert Reich
Monday, January 4, 2021

If America learns nothing else from these dark times, here are 7 lessons it should take away from 2020:

1. Workers keep America going, not billionaires.

American workers have been forced to put their lives on the line to provide essential services even as their employers failed to provide them with adequate protective gear, hazard pay, or notice of when COVID had infected their workplaces. Meanwhile, America’s 651 billionaires – whose net worth has grown by over $1 trillion since the start of the pandemic – retreated to their mansions, yachts and estates.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sheltered in his 165,000-acre West Texas ranch while Amazon’s warehouse workers toiled in close proximity to each other, often without adequate masks, gloves, or sanitizers. The company offered but then soon scrapped a $2 an hour hazard pay increase for warehouse workers, even as Bezos’ wealth jumped by a staggering $70 billion since March, putting his estimated net worth at roughly $186 billion as the year came to an end.

2. Systemic racism is literally killing Black and Latino Americans.

Black and Latino Americans account for almost 40 percent of coronavirus deaths so far, despite comprising less than a quarter of the population. As they’ve borne the brunt of this pandemic, they’ve been forced to fight for their humanity in another regard — taking to the streets across the country to protest decades of unjust police killings of their community members, only to be met with more police violence.

Among Native American communities, the coronavirus figures are even more horrifying. The Navajo Nation has had a higher per-capita infection rate than any state but can’t adequately care for the sick, thanks to years of federal underfunding and neglect of its healthcare system.

Decades of segregated housing, pollution, lack of access to medical care, and poverty have left communities of color vulnerable to the worst of this virus, and the worst of America.

3. If we can afford to bail out corporations and Wall Street, we sure as hell can afford to help people.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to insist we can’t “afford” $2,000 COVID survival checks for Americans. But the latest coronavirus relief legislation doled out over $220 billion to powerful business interests that could instead have been used to help struggling working families.

Another way of looking at it: The total cost of providing those $2,000 checks ($465 billion) is less than half the amount America’s 651 billionaires added to their wealth during the pandemic ($1 trillion).

4. Health care must be made a right in America.

Even before the pandemic, an estimated 28 million Americans lacked health insurance. After it struck, an additional 15 million lost employer-provided coverage because they lost their jobs. Without insurance, a hospital stay to treat COVID-19 cost as much as $73,000. Remember this the next time you hear pundits saying Medicare for All is too radical.

5. Our social safety nets are woefully broken.

No other advanced nation was as unprepared for the pandemic as was the United States. Our unemployment insurance system is over 80 years old, designed for a different America. We’re one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t provide all workers some form of paid sick leave.

Other industrialized nations kept their unemployment rates low by guaranteeing paychecks during the pandemic. But Americans who filed for unemployment benefits often got nothing or received them weeks or months late. Under new legislation they get just $300 a week of extra benefits to tide them over.

6. The Electoral College must be abolished

Biden won 7 million more popular votes than Trump. But Biden’s margin in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin totaled just 45,000. Had Trump won these three states instead, he would have gained 37 more electoral votes, tying Biden in the electoral college. Under the Constitution, this would have pushed the election to the House of Representatives, with each state delegation getting just one vote. Even though Democrats have a majority in the House, more state delegations have Republican majorities. Trump would have been reelected.

The gap between the popular and electoral college vote continues to widen. The Electoral College is an increasingly dangerous anachronism.

7. Government matters.

For decades, conservatives have told us that government is the problem and that we should let the free market run its course. Rubbish. If nothing else, 2020 has shown that the unfettered free market won’t save us. After 40 years of Reaganism, it’s never been clearer: Government is in fact necessary to protect the public.  

It’s tragic that it took a pandemic, near-record unemployment, millions of people taking to the streets, and a near-calamitous election for many to grasp how broken, racist, and backwards our system really is. Biggest lesson of all: It must be fixed.   

Off the Top of My Head

Conservatives Argue That Phasing Out Fossil Fuels is Socialism. They Argue That Saving the Planet from Global Warming is Socialism. They Argue That Universal Health Coverage is Socialism. I Say Bring It On!

by John Lawrence, October 27, 2020

So anything that would benefit the people as a whole or the planet is socialism. Creating jobs by a government sponsored infrastructure program is socialism. Yet private enterprise has not built any infrastructure. It won't do so unless the money is provided by the government. Rebuilding roads and bridges is not something private enterprise is equipped to do. If it was, they'd build roads and bridges and then charge tolls to recoup their investment. Private enterprise is good at inventing things and starting entrepreneurial enterprises, but not large picture enterprises which are properly the domain of government or require government cooperation with the private sector. A government that makes sure that everyone has health care complements private enterprise. They want healthy workers after all. Private enterprise benefits from safe roads, tunnels and bridges more so than does the average citizen. They use infrastructure in the conduct of their business.

President Reagan declared that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Yeah, it's the problem when it doesn't do its proper job. It's the problem when President Trump doesn't take any responsibility for the pandemic or attempts to do anything about it. Reagan also said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Really? We could use a little help from the government in the midst of a pandemic. The private enterprise system is doing its part inventing a vaccine, but they're doing it with the help of government money. Pfizer got $1.95 Billion to produce a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year. Johnson & Johnson got a billion dollars. Without government being "here to help" there would be no vaccine on the horizon. Private enterprise would not take that money out of its own research budget especially if it didn't figure to make a profit selling the vaccine.

So socialism will be responsible for developing a coronavirus vaccine and eventually ending the pandemic. It will be done with the "government help" that Ronald Reagan thought was so terrifying. The problem is that we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The rich spend tons of money lobbying Congress to pass legislation in their favor. In a truly free market they wouldn't be spending money making sure government was doing their bidding in their interests. They would be spending money on research, development and promoting their products. Rich people don't want government so small that they can "drown it in the bathtub" as Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist said. No, they are manipulating government everyday to get government just the right size to suit their financial interests. Defense contractors lobby to get the government to spend more money on the military-industrial complex. Pharmaceutical corporations lobby to get government not to allow Medicare to negotiate with them for lower drug prices. This is something Joe Biden said he would do: allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma.

Most civilized nations have universal health care. The US is the only outlier. Most civilized countries want to do something about global warming. The US under Trump is the outlier. Most civilized countries have a social safety net so that people don't suffer needlessly. At the same time most countries facilitate a partnership between government and private enterprise that works for entrepreneurs and business people and the citizenry as a whole, in partnership and cooperation. There is a balance between capitalism and socialism that works for the benefit of all the people. That's what makes for a successful nation. Right now this is very out of whack in the US. A bloated military has wasted trillions of dollars on disastrous wars that have made the nation less safe. And yet the military was absolutely impotent to do anything about COVID-19. The money would have been better spent strengthening our knowledge and preparations for a pandemic and for better health among Americans so that they don't have so many underlying conditions that have led to more deaths from the coronavirus.

As jobs are being destroyed by automation, robotization and AI, it's imperative that jobs be created addressing the needs of infrastructure and the need for renewable energy. This endeavor can be in part a joint mission for both government and private enterprise, but without government's input the nation will keep on spewing fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere because that's what's in the interests of existing corporations. That dynamic needs to change and government has to be instrumental in bringing about that change. That's why it's important to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Many vested interests will continue making money by polluting and emitting greenhouse gasses unless government changes the dynamics of energy production. This means countering the demand of lobbyists and putting government in a direction that benefits the people as a whole and not just special interests.

VOTE!

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

There is No Such Thing as a National Solution to a Global Crisis

by John Lawrence, October 9, 2020

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation announced its 2020 Goalkeepers report with the above words. COVID-19 has killed more than 850,000 people worldwide. Every year until this one the world has made progress towards reducing poverty and disease. Notice the Gates foundation emphasis on the world as one coherent unified organism rather than just on US national boundaries. The pandemic knows no national boundaries. Until it's stamped out worldwide, the US is vulnerable. The foolishness of spending a trillion dollars a year on the US military which was powerless to do anything about the pandemic has been demonstrated. International cooperation is crucial to ending this pandemic, as well as others which are likely to follow, and reducing the conditions of poverty and disease in the world which breed war and terrorism. When will the US get its priorities straight?

The Goalkeepers report tracked 18 indicators included in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In recent years, the world has improved on every single one. This year, on the vast majority, we’ve regressed.There is also a worldwide recession that the military and military-industrial complex is powerless to do anything about. The US is not an island. Pandemics, global warming - these are problems affecting the whole world not just the US. Nations that have the resources need to assist other nations that don't have the resources. That means that the developed world has to help the developing world to combat these problems: disease, poverty, weaponization, global warming.

In 2015, 193 world leaders agreed to a series of 17 ambitious goals to end poverty, fight inequality, and stop climate change by 2030. The Global Goals are within our reach, but we must remain committed—embracing what works and addressing what doesn’t, while holding ourselves and others accountable. In 2016 President Trump dropped out of global cooperation with his America First policy. That has gotten the US nowhere. Whichever countries handle the pandemic intelligently are going to come out of the recession as world leaders. That won't be the US unless Joe Biden gets elected and is able to turn the shambles of Trump's response to the pandemic around.

The first and most important goal is ending poverty. Eradicating poverty is not a task of charity, it's an act of justice and the key to unlocking an enormous human potential. Still, nearly half of the world’s population lives in poverty, and lack of food and clean water is killing thousands every single day of the year. Together, we can feed the hungry, wipe out disease and give everyone in the world a chance to prosper and live a productive and rich life. The second goal is zero hunger. Hunger is the leading cause of death in the world. Our planet has provided us with tremendous resources, but unequal access and inefficient handling leaves millions of people malnourished. If we promote sustainable agriculture with modern technologies and fair distribution systems, we can sustain the whole world’s population and make sure that nobody will ever suffer from hunger again.

The third goal is good health and well-being. Over the last 15 years, the number of childhood deaths has been cut in half. This proves that it is possible to win the fight against almost every disease. Still, we are spending an astonishing amount of money and resources on treating illnesses that are surprisingly easy to prevent. The new goal for worldwide Good Health promotes healthy lifestyles, preventive measures and modern, efficient healthcare for everyone. The fourth goal is quality education. Education liberates the intellect, unlocks the imagination and is fundamental for self-respect. It is the key to prosperity and opens a world of opportunities, making it possible for each of us to contribute to a progressive, healthy society. Learning benefits every human being and should be available to all.

The fifth goal is gender equality. Gender bias is undermining our social fabric and devalues all of us. It is not just a human rights issue; it is a tremendous waste of the world’s human potential. By denying women equal rights, we deny half the population a chance to live life at its fullest. Political, economic and social equality for women will benefit all the world’s citizens. Together we can eradicate prejudice and work for equal rights and respect for all. The sixth goal is clean water and sanitation. This will require major infrastructure development. It's not rocket science. The techniques involved are well known in the developed world. One in three people live without sanitation. This is causing unnecessary disease and death. Although huge strides have been made with access to clean drinking water, lack of sanitation is undermining these advances. If we provide affordable equipment and education in hygiene practices, we can stop this senseless suffering and loss of life.

Actually I would put clean water and sanitation right up there with ending poverty. It would put an end to many of the diseases that occur in the underdeveloped world. The emphasis on healthy living and basic creature comforts needs to spearhead the use of resources worldwide. That means that developed nations have to give back to the underdeveloped ones instead of putting their further enjoyment and well being first which is the gist of America First. Global cooperation to combat global problems needs to take precedence over preparations for war and bullying other nations by the most powerful ones. The negligence and incompetence with which Trump has treated the COVID pandemic, the withdrawal of the US from universal institutions, almost assures that the US will assume a secondary status in the world unless the next administration can make up for the damage Trump has done and set us on a new and more constructive course.

Off the Top of My Head

Let's Talk About the Communist Bogieman

by John Lawrence, October 8, 2020

After the vice Presidential debate last night Trump called Kamala Harris a communist. Let's be clear: communism is a system in which the government owns all property and makes all economic decisions. Let's also be clear about this: nowhere in the world today does communism exist. Not in Russia. Not in China. Not in Cuba. In Russia private ownership of enterprises and property had essentially remained illegal throughout the Soviet era, with Soviet communism emphasizing national control over all means of production. In the 1990s, during the Presidency of Boris Yeltsin, there was  large-scale privatization of Russia's state-owned assets, particularly in the industrial, energy, and financial sectors. Privatization shifted Russia from the Soviet planned economy towards a market economy, and resulted in a dramatic rise in the level of economic inequality. It facilitated the transfer of significant wealth to a relatively small group of oligarchs.

In China private property and state owned enterprises co-exist. According to the NY Times: "Today, the private sector contributes nearly two-thirds of the country’s growth and nine-tenths of new jobs, according to the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, an official business group." In fact the reason why China has pulled 800,000 people out of poverty in the last 40 years is that the economy has been partially privatized. There are more billionaires in China than in the US. Many people in China went from being poor to middle class due to the privatization of the housing market. So although China is still ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, its government is communist in name only. They should probably eliminate the word "Communist" from the party's name.

Now consider Cuba. In 2010, Cuban leaders Fidel and Raul Castro made the decision to abandon the old Soviet model of centralized planning. In 2011, new laws were enacted to expand the right to private property. In 2019, a new Constitution was approved which officially recognizes the right to private property, while also reconfirming the central government's authority over the regulation of production and land.

So if the accusation that Kamala is a communist is ridiculous, what about socialism? There is not one definition of socialism. Many of the western democracies like France, Germany, the UK and Sweden, which are US allies, have been governed by democratic socialist parties. These societies have market economies including the encouragement of entrepreneurialism, but also have a government provided social safety net including universal health care, free or inexpensive education from pre-K through college, allowances for child care, elder care etc. Sweden's government even owned a hamburger chain until recently and owns Sweden's state-run alcohol monopoly Systembolaget. The democratic socialism advocated by Bernie Sanders and others is nothing more than a model based on Sweden where there are high taxes on the wealthy which provide a government sponsored safety net for the middle class and the poor. Today there is one more reason why there should be a strong social safety net: global warming. It is clear that private enterprise is not up to the job of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero within a reasonable amount of time, reasonable meaning before the earth becomes uninhabitable.

Today in the US we  have a nominal capitalist or free market economy, but even in this economy the government institutes the rules within which the economy operates. The rules are set up and tweaked by those in power, those who have the money to hire lobbyists to convince legislators to write the rules in their favor, namely large corporations and the very wealthy. Don't be fooled by the meme that the powerful don't want government regulations. They do want regulations, but regulations that favor their interests and not the interests, necessarily, of the average person who doesn't have the resources to influence legislation by hiring lobbyists.

Today Kamala Harris and other Democratic progressives are really taking the realistic middle ground when they advocate for government policies which will mitigate and reduce climate change and provide a social safety net for the American people. This goes against the interests of the oil and gas industry to be sure. To advocate for universal health care is to advocate for the health care system that Canada and all our allies already have in pace. To advocate for policies that reduce the out of bounds economic inequality by taxing the rich and spending the money on raising the economic level of the poor and lower middle class only makes sense. None of these policies make Kamala Harris a communist since communism doesn't even exist in the world today. Formerly communist countries have given way to hybrid economies in which private enterprise and state owned enterprises coexist with, in the case of China, private enterprise having been the significant factor in improving the lives of the Chinese middle class.

Today, the US has gone way overboard towards an economy controlled by the rich and powerful in their own interests. Economic inequality has gotten way out of hand. The balance needs to be redressed and only a government which uses its authority to diminish the economic power of the wealthy and augment the power of the poor and middle class can provide the necessary change. Good paying jobs can be created which address infrastructure and climate change needs. So more or less a Green New Deal or whatever else you want to call it is necessary. Too bad that Republicans have gone out of their way to demonize that name as they've gone out of their way to demonize Obamacare or any other initiative progressive Democrats put forth. That is their stock and trade - not discussing the merits but demonizing the name.

Off the Top of My Head

Take Heart Americans: We May Have the World's Worst Response to the Coronavirus, But We Still Have the World's Strongest Military

by John Lawrence, July 15, 2020

Even though we have reduced spending on public health to near zero, we spend about a trillion dollars per year on our military. Trump's response to the pandemic has been, "Pandemic? What pandemic? Let's not let the pandemic ruin a beautiful economy. Open up the economy. It's mainly people of color, the elderly and meatpackers who are doing the dying. So let it rip. If everybody gets it, and there's a 2% death rate, that's only .02x330 million = 6 million Americans who will die. That still leaves 224 million healthy Americans and a fully open beautiful economy." That is the thinking that is the opposite of the thinking of the health professionals, scientists and people who care about the elderly, people of color and meatpackers. Some might say that it is the thinking of a sociopath, a sociopath that cares more about getting himself reelected than he does about the people of America.

Trump knows that it isn't rich people in his base that are doing the dying. Sure, there are the libertarians, non-mask wearers and COVID partyers in his base who are stupid enough to follow his suggestions, those deserving of Darwin awards. True conservatives don't believe in public health. They only are concerned about private health care for those who can pay for it.That's why Trump has defunded every public health agency in the government he could get his hands on. If there's no profit in it for private enterprise, conservatives are against it. That means the CDC, WHO and Dr. Fauci. In an article, Public Health’s Falling Share of US Health Spending, we find this:

There is no absolute measure of the optimal level of public health spending. However, an Institute of Medicine panel recently concluded that public health agencies are markedly underfunded, and that US health spending is out of balance, with spending for clinical care disproportionately high compared with spending for “population-based activities that more efficiently and effectively improve the nation’s health.

While spending on public health is declining, spending on private health care is increasing. That's because health care insurance and pharmaceutical costs are going through the roof. But you get what you pay for in private health care as opposed to public health which treats everyone more or less equally. That's why Trump and Republicans in general seek to defund governmental public health initiatives and to deregulate private health care corporations. The rich then will always get the best health care because they can afford to pay outrageous prices while the poor will get what they can pay for which is not very much. If they lose their job and their health insurance, they will get nothing.

So in Trump's mind it's not worth ruining his beautiful economy for the sake of  a few million people of color, immigrants, people of color, meatpackers and old people who were going to die anyway. He could Make America Great Again without these people who were not in his base without them.

But we can all rejoice in the fact that America's military budget is greater than the combined military budgets of most of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined. The U.S. outpaces all other nations in military expenditures. World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total. All this spending hasn't been able to fight off the coronavirus though. While other countries spent their money on public health, the US spent on weapons of destruction. It seems the only thing we've destroyed is our own society. Trump's real slogan should be MAPA - Make America Pitiful Again. That's exactly what he has done.

Off the Top of My Head

Culture Wars: Neither Here Nor There

by John Lawrence, July 4, 2020

So they change a name of  a military base: is one black family any better off? Conservatives love it when the debate is confined to cultural stuff. It doesn't threaten their bank accounts one tiny little bit. But when you get down to anything substantive, anything concrete, like defunding the military-industrial complex and using the money for free public education from pre-school to college, well, wait a minute that's socialism. They already consider public education K-8th socialism. Well what about health care? When you start talking about free health care, or even reasonably priced health care, well that's socialism. Hey let's confine the discussion to whether or not we should allow confederate statues to exist. Taking one down does not make one black family any better off and doesn't threaten the white elite one bit. It doesn't cost them one dollar and it doesn't add one dollar to any black family's income.

So let's talk about concrete issues, ones that could really benefit the hoi polloi and take a few dollars out of wealthy peoples' pockets:

    1. Medicare for All

    2. A Financial Transactions Tax

    3. Forgiveness of student loan debt

    4. A Green New Deal that would create good paying jobs for millions of black, Native American and     Latinx people

    5. Raising the minimum wage to a living wage

    6. A wealth tax

    7. Defunding the military which is the police force of the world and increasing the budget of the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization

Instead of debating these concrete issues conservatives want to argue over symbols. That's where their mentality is at. Don't trample on my flag. Don't trample on my history. Don't burn my flag. None of these symbolic and cultural issues improve the life of any American. They just preserve the status quo and the economic inequality that is only getting worse and which will get worse at a faster rate due to the pandemic. In short the ones mired in these issues know that nothing really will change as long as they can keep the discussion at this level. And those who could profit by changing the system are too often persuaded by those who wouldn't just to argue about symbols. Eliminating all the statues of slaveholders will not change American history one bit and will not make one black person better off.

As long as they don't eliminate the military bases and reduce the inflow of money to the military, the big wigs would be happy to entertain changing the name of Fort Bragg to Fort Rosecrans. General Rosecrans whipped Bragg's ass in Tennesee. As Commander of the Army of the Cumberland, he fought against Confederate General Braxton Bragg at Stones River, and later outmaneuvered him in the brilliant Tullahoma Campaign, driving the Confederates from Middle Tennessee. So it's a logical change of name. But it won't do anything to improve the lives of blacks, native Americans or Latinx. All the government help given to whites like the GI bill after WW II effectively excluded blacks as did all the land given to whites by the Homestead Act. First slavery, then Jim Crow laws served to keep black wealth at a minimum even negative in many cases. Instead of gaining wealth as whites did, they were targeted to be debtors and kept there by PayDay loan operators charging exorbitant rates of interest. Native Americans were gypped out of their lands by Americans not honoring treaties and by outright theft. They were also killed by a pandemic the white man brought with him from Europe. Thus Montezuma's revenge and now maybe COBID will do the same thing to Trump's non-mask wearing base.

So Trump is getting his base excited about cultural issues. It's a total sideshow designed to keep the status quo intact and to let the rich keep on getting richer. The poor, especially blacks, need to be kept in their place. All the progressive legislation designed by Cory Booker to reform the police nationwide will never see the light of day as long as the Senate is controlled by Republicans. He might as well not waste his breath. It's meaningless and never has a chance in hell of passing the Senate and being enacted into law. So why don't the Democrats do something more productive instead of spinning their wheels with great ideas that will never see the light of day.

Off the Top of My Head

A House Built Upon Sand: the US Economy

by John Lawrence, June 26, 2020

The wise man built his house on rock, and it withstood the rains and the floods and the wind. The foolish man built his house on sand and it collapsed. An apt metaphor for the US economy in the midst of a pandemic that is only getting worse. Before the pandemic hit, it was a full employment economy in which half the people couldn't survive a $400. emergency. It was an economy built on consumerism. Consumerism was 70% of GDP. About half the economy was small business, but these jobs and this economic activity was vulnerable. Much of it was non-essential. It was bars (by the way you can drink at home); it was restaurants (by the way you can eat at home). It was travel and hospitality (by the way you can sleep at home if you're willing to make your own bed).

The essential parts of the economy continued to operate even when the pandemic hit. It isn't fair that minimum wage workers were more exposed to the coronavirus, but, be that as it may, with some exceptions these workers did not get sick in higher ratios than anyone else. If more of the jobs were essential, productive and less frivolous, there would have been fewer jobs lost and much less unemployment. The economic house was built on sand and when the pandemic hit, it collapsed. At the same time the fault line of black racism and inequality was fully exposed. It's as if the hurricane of the pandemic cut away the underbrush and exposed this situation for what it is thanks to #BlackLivesMatter.

The Homestead Act signed by President Abraham Lincoln which gave free land to white people allowed whites to build equity and wealth while blacks who were promised 40 acres and a mule after slavery were denied even that. They ended up in many cases working the same land as sharecroppers and living in worse poverty than when they were slaves. After World War II the G.I. Bill aimed to help American veterans adjust to civilian life by providing them with benefits including low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans and financial support. African Americans did not benefit nearly as much as White Americans. Historian Ira Katznelson argues that "the law was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow". In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites.

Additionally, banks and mortgage agencies refused loans to blacks, making the G.I. Bill even less effective for blacks. Once they returned from the war, blacks faced discrimination and poverty, which represented a barrier to harnessing the benefits of the G.I. Bill. So whites were able to build wealth through home ownership while blacks were denied that opportunity. Wealth from home ownership is the difference between the middle class and the poor. Home ownership became the means for the intergenerational transfer of wealth for white people. Each generation of black people started out from zero. There was an intergenerational transfer of poverty instead.

Blacks who were able to get manufacturing jobs after the Second World War did fairly well, but those jobs have by and large fled the country. In the financial crisis of 2008, the Great Recession, blacks were screwed as well. While the Federal Reserve bailed out the banks and mortgage companies hundred cents on the dollar, blacks who needed help paying their mortgages did not get it and were foreclosed on. The government could have bailed them out instead, but it didn't.

So now the country is faced with not only a public health crisis but also an economic, financial and racial crisis which would be much less severe if those manufacturing jobs still existed. The economy is not coming back as it was constructed pre-pandemic. There is no way that small business based on 100% occupancy is going to survive based on 50% occupancy. Many of the businesses like professional sports, cruises and even churches are predicated on high occupancy. People will not be comfortable with high occupancy unless a vaccine is found for COBID, but finding a vaccine is not a foregone conclusion. There are some viruses for which a vaccine has never been found including HIV, malaria and tuberculosis.

It takes a lot of money to develop a vaccine, and that money has been lacking from US budgets. There are two obstacles to faster progress, said Dr. Gregory A. Poland, director of the vaccine research group at the Mayo Clinic. “One is scientific, and one is embarrassing,” he said. The embarrassing part is the lack of investment. It takes 10 years and more than $1 billion to develop a vaccine — a small fortune for a medical advance but a pittance for a weapons system. While defense research is driven by one mega-customer, the Pentagon, vaccine researchers face a confusing hodgepodge of potential backers. In short the US has spent its money on weapons of war instead of protecting its people from pandemics which are far more deadly than terrorist attacks. 405,000 Americans died in WW II. Over half that amount have already died in this pandemic, and it's getting worse due to American foolishness at the top levels.

There is a chance now for America to start out on a new path, and that path would be more or less what Bernie Sanders and other progressives have identified as their agenda: a Green New Deal would create good jobs for millions of unemployed Americans and it could give priority to black people so that they could get started on wealth building. Low cost housing loans and subsidies could give black people the same advantages they didn't get with the Homestead Act and the G.I. bill. At the same time a Green New Deal would be converting the country to renewable energy and rebuilding infrastructure, both of which are necessary if earth is to remain habitable for the human race. Medicare for All would only bring the US up to the level of most other civilized countries.

We have to reset our priorities, reduce the military-industrial complex and make peace and have cooperation with our so-called enemies. We can quibble about Russia's and China's internal affairs or we can cooperate with them as peers to forestall global warming and create a planet worth inhabiting. We can spend our money on war or we can spend it forestalling future pandemics. The solution to many of our myriad problems is clear, and it doesn't require a revolution necessarily. Reform is all that's necessary to implement Medicare for All. Reform is all that's necessary to implement a Green New Deal. But countries that do not do what's necessary and obvious to meet the needs of the people create a situation in which violence may ensue. It's no longer a question of capitalism vs socialism. Most countries of the earth including Russia and China are a combination of both. I started with a Biblical reference so I will end with one: "Blind guides! You strain your water so you won’t accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel!" God bless the USA.

Off the Top of My Head

The Power Structure Wants the Discussion Circumscribed to Systemic Racism, Not Systemic Inequality

by John Lawrence, June 17, 2020

Let's just talk about systemic racism and not about an economic system in which a few people control all the wealth and the rest get crumbs from the table. The power structure does not want the discussion extended into that area. Let's just integrate black people into the system so that they are not disproportionately poor, only poor proportionally to their percentage of the population. Blacks compose 12% of the American population. 27% of black people are in poverty so the good old American way is to reduce the percentage in poverty to 12%. Then blacks would be proportionately and not disproportionately poor. That's the American way. Don't question systemic poverty and inequality; Confine the discussion to systemic racism.

The American way is to have a few rich people among every ethnic group and then to use this as an example that anyone can get rich in America. So what if the majority are poor. It's more important that you have examples of huge wealth among black people, and that is certainly the case today. American black billionaires on the 2019 Forbes list included American investor Robert Smith with $5 billion, businessman David Steward with $3 billion, media mogul Oprah Winfrey with a net worth of $2.5 billion and American sports executive Michael Jordan with $2.1. There are 615 billionaires in the US; only 6 are black so to be proportionate we'd need about 74 more black billionaires.

Blacks comprised 13.6 percent of the U.S. population according to the 2010 Census, but account for only 1.4 percent of the top 1 percent of households by income. Whites are the overwhelming majority of the top 1 percent of households by income, comprising 96.2 percent. There are 18.6 million total millionaires in the US, but only an estimated 35,000 are black. That may sound like a lot, but the U.S. population of millionaires is 76 percent White. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians make up about 8 percent each. So problem solved if we add another 4% to the black millionaires list. Then they would be proportionately rich at least at the million dollar level.

Many black athletes and entertainers are millionaires or multi-millionaires. Take the NBA, for example, in which 80% of the players are black. The total annual revenue of the NBA is $8.7 billion of which about 50% goes to the players. Since there are 30 franchises with 15 players per franchise, there are 450 active players. That means that the share of NBA revenues going to black NBA athletes is ($8.7 billion)x(1/2)x(.8) = $3.48 billion or an average of $7.7 million per black player. Bingo! The NBA has created way more black millionaires than it has created white ones. That's for sure.

This is the thinking of the power structure, mainly the Republican power structure which is not threatened by having a few more black millionaires and billionaires. However, they are threatened when you talk about everyone, black or white, having a living wage, everyone, black or white having decent housing, medical care and free public education from pre-school through college. They are threatened by talk of taxing the wealthy, taking from the rich and giving to the poor, as it were. That would be socialism much like the People's Republic of France or the People's Republic of Germany or even the People's Republic of Sweden. The power structure can't tolerate that kind of debate. Let's just make black people equal in the number of millionaires, but not change anything else. Then all the poor blacks and whites, for that matter, can aspire to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps as many of their counterparts have done.

Whatever happens we can't change the system to make it inherently more equal, inherently more naturally producing of equal outcomes. Instead, it must produce inherently unequal outcomes so that those who make it in the system will feel like they have really accomplished something and can serve as role models for others to strive harder. Republicans recoiled at all the hippies in the 60s who were having too much fun and not working hard enough. They were even getting free tuition in the California University system and elsewhere. On August 23, 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," an anti-Communist and anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America from the hippies and left wingers. It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of the power of private business and an ostensible step towards socialism.

So they changed the system to criminalize all sorts of behaviors mainly involving drugs so they could incarcerate mainly black people and so they could saddle mainly white people with a ton of student loan debt. Then they would have to work hard paying off their debt instead of partying, surfing, having free love and doing drugs. Well, it certainly has worked. In 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population. About 1 in 3 black boys will have served some time in the penal system during their lifetimes. Profits are up for the private penitentiary corporations and American millenials are buckling at the knees from the weight of $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. So if the percentage of black people in prison gets down to 12%, then this should make the American system non-racist? Wouldn't it be better to eliminate the root causes of incarceration which have to do with poverty and get the incarceration rate down to zero for everyone?

Off the Top of My Head

Racist Economics

by John Lawrence, June 8, 2020

Is it racism when the schools in predominantly black neighborhoods are worse than schools in predominantly white neighborhoods? Schools in many parts of the country are funded with local property taxes. It stands to reason that property values in poor neighborhoods are less than property values in rich neighborhoods, and, therefore, property tax revenues and hence school funding is less. So the worse schools are found in poor "predominantly black" neighborhoods. A word you hear often these days is "predominantly". Nothing is totally black and white, but, when black people are affected in a way that is greater than their percentage of the population, one could say it is a "predominantly black" situation. When police arrest black people at a greater rate than they do white people, we could say that the police are a racist institution.

It has been said that the only mistake that the looters at the current protests made was that they didn't form a hedge fund first before they started looting. Martin Luther King said, “The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.” Republicans have breathed a sigh of relief that so far the Black Lives Matter movement has had little to say about poverty, economic inequality, militarism and materialism. Some though are getting to the heart of the problems in our society that affect us all but affect black people "disproportionately."

Writing in the New Yorker Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor said:

The [1992] uprising in L.A. shared with the rebellions of the nineteen-sixties an igniting spark of police abuse, widespread violence, and the fury of the rebels. But, in the nineteen-sixties, the flush economy and the still-intact notion of the social contract meant that President Lyndon B. Johnson could attempt to drown the civil-rights movement and the Black Power radicalization with enormous social spending and government-program expansion, including the passage of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, which produced the first government-backed, low-income homeownership opportunities directed at African-Americans.

By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, the economy was in recession and the social contract had been ripped to shreds. The rebellions of the nineteen-sixties and the enormous social spending intended to bring them under control were wielded by the right to generate a backlash against the expanded welfare state. Political conservatives argued that the market, not government intervention, could create efficiencies and innovation in the delivery of public services. This rhetoric was coupled with virulent racist characterizations of African-Americans, who relied disproportionately on welfare programs. Ronald Reagan mastered the art of color-blind racism in the post-civil-rights era with his invocations of “welfare queens.” Not only did these distortions pave the way for undermining the welfare state, they reinforced racist delusions about the state of black America that legitimized deprivation and marginalization.

The 1990s saw Democrats agreeing with Republicans that problems in the black community were largely caused by overly generous social programs. President Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it." Senator Joe Biden jumped right on board the push to reduce welfare programs by saying, "“the culture of welfare must be replaced with the culture of work. The culture of dependence must be replaced with the culture of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. And the culture of permanence must no longer be a way of life.” Biden championed the 1994 “crime bill” that pledged to put a hundred thousand more police on the street, called for mandatory prison sentences for certain crimes, increased funding for policing and prisons, and expanded the use of the death penalty. By the 1980s Ronald Reagan decried "welfare queens."

Taylor continues:

So, though Biden desperately wants us to believe that he is a harbinger of change, his long record of public service says otherwise. He has claimed that Barack Obama’s selection of him as his running mate was a kind of absolution for Biden’s dealings in the Democrats’ race-baiting politics of the nineteen-nineties. But, from the excesses of the criminal-justice system and the absence of a welfare state to the inequality rooted in an unbridled, rapacious market economy, Biden has shaped much of the world that this generation has inherited and is revolting against.

More important, the ideas honed in the nineteen-eighties and nineties continue to beat at the center of Biden’s political agenda. His campaign advisers include Larry Summers, who, as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, was an enthusiastic supporter of deregulation, and, as Obama’s chief economic adviser during the recession, endorsed the Wall Street bailout while allowing millions of Americans to default on their mortgages.

Biden was chiefly responsible for the 2005 bill that took away bankruptcy protection from student load debtors (presumably disproportionately black). Credit card companies, many of whom are headquartered in Biden's state of Delaware, have been major Biden campaign contributors. Biden was known as the Senator from MBNA. Biden should just turn over the Democratic nomination to Bernie Sanders who has been on the right side of issues which are now coming to the forefront in American life.

Taylor continues:

In 1968, King, in the weeks before he was assassinated, said, “In a sense, I guess you could say, we are engaged in the class struggle.” He was speaking to the costs of the programs that would be necessary to lift black people out of poverty and inequality, which were, in and of themselves, emblems of racist subjugation. Ending segregation in the South, then, was cheap compared with the huge costs necessary to end the kinds of discrimination that kept blacks locked out of the advantages of U.S. society, from well-paying jobs to well-resourced schools, good housing, and a comfortable retirement. The price of the ticket is quite steep, but, if we are to have a real conversation about how we change America, it must begin with an honest assessment of the scope of the deprivation involved. Racist and corrupt policing is the tip of the iceberg.

We have to make space for new politics, new ideas, new formations, and new people. The election of Biden may stop the misery of another Trump term, but it won’t stop the underlying issues that have brought about more than a hundred thousand COVID-19 deaths or continuous protests against police abuse and violence. Will the federal government intervene to stop the looming crisis of evictions that will disproportionately impact black women? Will it use its power and authority to punish police, and to empty prisons and jails, which not only bring about social death but are now also sites of rampant COVID-19 infection? Will it end the war on food stamps and allow African-Americans and other residents of this country to eat in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? Will it finance the health-care needs of tens of millions of African-Americans who have become susceptible to the worst effects of the coronavirus, and are dying as a result? Will it provide the resources to depleted public schools, allowing black children the opportunity to learn in peace? Will it redistribute the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to rebuild devastated working-class communities? Will there be free day care and transportation?

In short we need good paying union jobs (Green New Deal) that will deal with the issue of climate change (Green New Deal), forgiveness of student loan debt (the least Biden can do since he was largely responsible for creating the situation), Medicare for All (since hospitals in black neighborhoods compare unfavorably with those in white neighborhoods), public housing (to end homelessness and guarantee everyone the right to have a roof over their head). If we want to solve the problem of institutional racism in this country, we need to address the fundamental problems of economic inequality. Where do we get the money? Not only by defunding the police which claim the lion's share of local budgets, but by demilitarizing the bloated military-industrial complex and taxing the rich at 1955 levels (91%). The Federal Reserve can always take a few more trillion on its balance sheet; it has taken trillions on its balance sheet already and given the money to the big banks. How about Quantitative Easing for the people? Economic inequality is a problem which affects black people disproportionately (there's that word again), but the solution of which will contribute to the benefit of white people as well.

Off the Top of My Head

Black Lives Matter: Police Reforms Benefit Whites as Well

by John Lawrence, June 7, 2020

No more "carotid restraints" or chokeholds is a police reform caused by the Black Lives Matter movement, but obviously it applies to whites as well. We don't know how many of the 237 times Minnesota police used chokeholds, blacks were targeted, but probably like all police violence it was disproportionate. Police reforms such as ending "no knock warrants" also obviously apply to whites as well as blacks. The point is that what black people are demanding in terms of police reform doesn't just affect black lives. It affect all lives.

So why stop with just police reform? How about prison reform.Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the US population, they comprised 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015. African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. The imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women. Although only a small percentage are in prison for minor drug offenses, marijuana possession in small quantities should be made legal on a national basis. Many are in jail awaiting trial. Every day, 465,000 people are held in local jails even though they have not been convicted; legally, they are presumed innocent. Many are there because they cannot afford bail.

Let's not stop at prison reform. How about political reform? Mail-in ballots should be legalized and encouraged in every state. How many poor people can afford to take time off from work to go and vote? These people are probably disproportionately black, but it would help poor people who are white as well. Let's make the election of President be based on popular vote and not the electoral college. Let's do away with the filibuster which prevents legislation from being passed democratically. Let's limit the power of the leader of the Senate to even stop legislation from being introduced. Make it mandatory that legislation created in the House be debated and voted upon in the Senate. Let's outlaw lobbying which lets the richest and most powerful individuals and corporations determine the political agenda.

How about economic justice? That was basically Bernie Sanders' agenda. Let's eliminate poverty and homelessness in the US. Blacks are disproportionately poor and homeless, but there are plenty of poor and homeless whites as well. Instead of spending a trillion dollars a year on the military and military-industrial complex, instead of wasting money on fruitless wars, let's have a Green New Deal and rebuild American infrastructure while at the same time creating hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs. Let's cancel student loan debt which disproportionately affects blacks, but whites will benefit too. Let's have Medicare for All instead of an outrageously expensive health care system which is twice as expensive as any other country's while producing only half as good results.

You get the picture? All the reforms which could come from the Black Lives Matter movement will also bring those same reforms for whites, browns and any other colors. Let's protest to change the course of this whole country for all citizens. Then we have to help the rest of the world with a Green New Deal if we want to create a habitable planet for our children and grandchildren. Black people are leading the way for social justice, for political and economic justice, justice which will turn this country around and help turn this planet around. Let's keep on going.

Off the Top of My Head

Is a Pandemic More of a Threat to National Security Than War

by John Lawrence, May 16, 2020

Bill Gates thinks so. He's been warning world leaders and everyone else since his now famous Ted talk in 2015. However, the US has been spending over a trillion dollars a year on preparations for war, and nothing on preparations for a pandemic until one was upon us. Now it is costing trillions of dollars dwarfing the defense budget. Not to be outdone, the military-industrial complex is turning its attention to preparations for war with China which happens to be the current bogieman. China sort of snuck up on us while Lockheed Martin and others were promoting east European countries for membership in NATO with the incentive that they would locate defense plants there contributing to their economic development. They had been successful in locating subcontractors in every Congressional district so that they would have plenty of support from Congress for their projects such as the F-22 and the F-35. Now they would have subcontractors in places like Romania and Poland so that enthusiastic leaders in those countries would be cheerleading NATO membership.

So as they turn their attention towards China, Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors will no doubt be promoting location of defense plants in southeast Asia and the Pacific region. It has to be this way because Big Pharma does not have any interest in making vaccines or preparing for a pandemic. There's no money in it. That's why it falls to the lot of the Gates foundation, which doesn't need to make a profit, to spend their endowment supporting vaccine development and public health. The military-industrial complex has found a sure thing in the promotion of preparedness for war even though today it's becoming increasingly evident that the billions spent on hardware for war is money wasted when the real threats come from pandemics, global warming and extreme poverty in the world. The problem is there is no profit in providing solutions to these problems. Only people like Bill Gates who as private citizens have large sums of money to spend are even interested in finding and implementing solutions.

In March 2015, Mr. Gates warned in a widely watched TED Talk that an infectious disease pandemic posed a greater threat to the world than a nuclear war because nations have built so few defenses. He called for an international warning-and-response system with mobile units of medical personnel, rapid diagnostics, drug stockpiles and technologies to produce vaccines in months. So what did the world do in response: NOTHING. What has the world done in response to the global warming crisis: NOTHING. What has the world done to mitigate extreme poverty: NOTHING. What has the world done to foment war and aggravate tensions among nations: EVERYTHING.

At least 70.8 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 25.9 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18. There are also millions of stateless people, who have been denied a nationality and lack access to basic rights such as education, health care, employment and freedom of movement. What is the US doing to ameliorate the situations of these people: NOTHING. These children growing up in these harsh conditions are the future haters of the US. They are the future ISIS and al Qaeda fighters. The US is spending trillions on preparations for war in order to fight these children when they grow up in a few short years. Climate change is only going to aggravate the conditions of the poorest people in the world.

Governor Cuomo has said that his approach to solving the pandemic crisis is based on science and data driven. This in and of itself puts him at odds with President Trump and all his anti-intellectual and conspiracy theory driven followers. Trump and the neocon Republicans have been profiting from whipping up anti-intellectual hysteria for years. Their vendetta against Hillary Clinton was because she was too competent, she was too smart. They preferred a dumb ass like Trump. It's this mentality along with a military establishment and military mindset that glorifies war that will probably mean that an armageddon of one sort or other - whether it is ongoing pandemics, climate change or nuclear war - will determine the fate of the earth and humanity.

Off the Top of My Head

The Three Principles of Conservative Government and Free Market Capitalism

by John Lawrence, May 11, 2020

1) Ronald Reagan said the 9 most feared words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

2) Grover Norquist said, "My goal is to cut government ... down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

3) We're not all in this together. There are no meaningful public solutions, only private solutions.

4) There is no such thing as "public health" or public anything else. Everything should be privatized including police, fire, ambulance services and health care. There is only private health, not public health. That's why Trump tried to slash funding for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The latest problem is that there is not enough Remdesivir to go around. Therefore, it has to be rationed. Well who decides how many units go to each hospital and which patients get Remdesivir? Using the above conservative, free market principles, the obvious answer is to let patients bid on Remdesivir with the units going to the highest bidder. That's the free market, capitalist solution to the problem. If the patient is intubated and can't do the bidding themselves, they could have a proxy like a family member bid for them. The problem is totally solved because, according to free market principles, the Remdesivir will go to the highest bidder.

Evidently, the only country that really understands free market capitalism is China. China manufactures all the PPE and test kits. So it set up a bidding war for US states and municipalities so that they all had to bid against each other for the necessary supplies to deal with the coronavirus. US conservatives should be proud that they have exported their ideas around the world so successfully especially to the world's largest Communist nation where free market principles seem to have prevailed.

It was China who partnered with the US to solve the inflation problem during Ronald Reagan's administration. The 1970s were an era of high inflation. Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, had struggled mightily to get inflation down to a reasonable level during the Carter administration. Finally, during the Reagan administration inflation was finally gotten under control. There was a two part strategy. Reagan broke the union movement by firing all the air traffic controllers in 1981. It was the beginning of the end for the union movement. Since unions essentially vanished, so did wage inflation. The next thing was that laws were changed making it possible for US corporations to export most manufacturing jobs to China. The imported products were much cheaper than products "Made in America." Therefore, price inflation was solved. Cheap products and ineffectual unions allowed to US to get inflation finally under control where it has been ever since thanks to Volcker, Reagan and China.

The only problem is that inflation with regard to asset prices did not go down. Real estate, and therefore, rents continued to go up, but they don't count in the inflation index so while Americans are treated to cheap products imported from China, you can't import real estate from China, so these prices continue to skyrocket. Hence you have a growing homeless problem which is only exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Another asset, the stock market, also continues to inflate wildly beyond where any price to earnings ratio would indicate it should be. In fact it is totally detached from any economic reality as it remains high despite the fact that the economy is in shambles.

Conservatives can rest comfortably, however, in the knowledge that China has finally adopted free market capitalist principles at least in regard to the prices it charges the US for PPE and test kits. That's why there are few of them available. As conservatives have taught them and us, the most important principle of all is profit. Profiting from a pandemic is just par for the course for capitalism. Remember, drown government in a bathtub, blah, blah, blah. We're not all in this together.

Off the Top of My Head

A Jobs Program for Inessential Workers
by John Lawrence, April 30, 2020

Turn inessential workers into essential workers by putting them to work building green infrastructure. This is essential work that is not getting done. Much of the previous inessential work they did is better left undone even in a recovery. It is still inessential. It'll always be inessential compared to what needs to be done in creating and building green infrastructure. Building out solar and wind renewable energy could employ thousands if not millions of people. Repairing roads, bridges, waterways, clean water systems, airports, railroads and all other infrastructure could employ millions. This is essential work that has remained undone despite the fact that the American Society of Civil Engineers has given the US a D rating for infrastructure. High speed rail needs to be built. The widespread adoption of electric cars has to be mandated, and construction of a national electric vehicle charging network to power them has to be built.

Unemployed people still need jobs. Mark Cuban said on CNN this morning that there should be a jobs program similar to that of the New Deal. He is exactly right although he didn't make the necessary connection about the essential work that's still being left undone and the inessential work that doesn't need to be done even in a recovery. Forget Cuban's sports and entertainment enterprises. I hate to tell you that they are basically inessential. What is essential is greatly expanding the public health undertakings of the Federal  government which has been totally behind the curve in this pandemic.

We must ask ourselves what is essential and not go back to a new normal in which all the inessential businesses of the past are brought back just in order to provide employment to the millions who have lost their jobs. The pre-pandemic economy was 70% consumerism. The economy post epidemic should be much less a consumerist economy and much more an investment economy. The four components of gross domestic product are personal consumption, business investment, government spending, and net exports. Of these government spending must be ramped up to provide the essential jobs in infrastructure building as well as in the areas that the pandemic has made clear are indeed essential: health care, education, transportation, agriculture.

Government spending must go up; personal consumption must go down. It's as simple as that. As for business investment, it's a lost cause as business will only do what's profitable for itself as has been made abundantly clear. Investment in fossil fuels and plastics which the big oil companies are making is only destructive to a green economy, not constructive. As far as exports are concerned, the dollar has already been weakened as much as it could possibly be by zero interest rates, so increased exports, although desirable, are not likely to happen any time soon.

Private enterprise knows only one thing in terms of the economy "reopening": get back to consumer spending. It ain't going to happen. People are still afraid of the virus. The pandemic is not over. They will use their money to pay off debts instead of going in debt to the hilt like they are used to. People will save their money instead of entertaining themselves to death. Why? Maybe they have learned their lesson that a high employment economy predicated on the fact that people will always have a job and always have a prepensity to consume is just a chimera. Rather than living paycheck to paycheck, I hope people will understand that there may come a rainy day, and they need to save for that. That lesson has really been brought home by the coronavirus pandemic.

The true heroes are essential workers not the military. The military itself was brought to its knees by COBID-19. There is a lesson there. It's more important to spend our collective money on preparing for the coming pandemic of global warming than on a bloated military. It is more important to house the homeless and guarantee the economic rights of shelter and health care to all Americans as in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. It is more important to help people all over the world escape from extreme poverty because poverty breeds health crises which then can spread all over the world. It's more important to make peace with our rivals rather than try to control them with military threats and sanctions.

May the next President (and I hope to heaven that it's not Donald Trump) see the light of a more rational, compassionate and humane world, one more concerned about the health and welfare of all the world's peoples. I hope Governor Cuomo's values of being tough, smart, disciplined and most importantly loving spread to every corner of US and world society, and we get on with essential business instead of the inessential business of amusing, entertaining and consuming ourselves to death.

Off the Top of My Head

When The Pandemic Is Over, The World Must Come Together

by John Lawrence, April 28, 2020

These are the fateful words of Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Prize Laureate and the first and only President of the Soviet Union. Recently, he recalled how the threat of nuclear war was reduced by the treaties in the 1980s made possible by his friendly relationship with Ronald Reagan. Writing in Time magazine, he said, "The leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union declared that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought." Despite the fact that the Cold War was declared to be over, the neocons running foreign policy today have been doing their best to create another one. The pandemic has made it clear that there are more important challenges than U.S.-Russian rivalry, and that the world has more to gain by cooperating even with supposed enemies or rivals than it does by perpetuating idiotic animosities. We have common enemies that affect us all with the coronavirus pandemic being just one of them.

Gorbachev mentioned "poverty and inequality, the degradation of the environment, the depletion of the earth and the oceans." Global warming is an existential threat that must be addressed now or there won't be a habitable earth left to fight over. "We have so far failed to develop and implement strategies and goals common to all mankind." Not only that the U.S. under Trump has retreated from any kind of cooperation with the other nations of the earth even our supposed allies. Instead U.S. foreign policy has been based on ordering other nations around as if we were the supreme bully. Trump's latest blunder is to defund the World Health Organization (WHO) in the middle of a pandemic.

"Progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, adopted by the U.N. in 2000, has been extremely uneven." The U.S. under Trump does not really support the U.N. in any way because it wants to be the ruler of nations not part of an organization that attempts to have a forum for the cooperation of nations. The United Nations Millennium Declaration, signed in September 2000 commits world leaders to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women. The Eight Millennium Development Goals are:

• to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;
• to achieve universal primary education;
• to promote gender equality and empower women;
• to reduce child mortality;
• to improve maternal health;
• to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases;
• to ensure environmental sustainability; and
• to develop a global partnership for development.

I had never even heard of the Eight Millennium Development Goals although I think I'm pretty well informed. All of the media time spent on Trump's self-serving bragging could have been better spent informing us about this WHO program. But instead the media spends its time either chastising Trump's stupidity or praising his glory depending on which channel you watch. He has changed from campaign rallies to hour long daily commercials for himself.

"What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security. Even after the end of the Cold War, it has been envisioned mostly in military terms." Yes, military hubris crowds out any prospect of peace let alone a prospect of eliminating extreme poverty. Bill Gates is singlehandedly doing his best to eliminate poverty and disease in the world. He basically is a one man United Nations surrogate. He presciently tried to warn us of the pandemic in a Ted talk. Now he is spending millions of his own money on developing a coronavirus vaccine. There are some good people in the world - even billionaires. That I am sure of. It's just that not a lot of them occupy positions of power in the U.S. government.

Gorbachev continued: "The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water and a clean environment and caring for people's health. To achieve it, we have to develop strategies, make preparations, plan and create reserves. But all efforts will fail if nations continue to waste money by fueling the arms race. I'll never tire of repeating: we need to demilitarize world affairs, international politics and political thinking."

Gorbachev is calling on national leaders to cut military budgets by 10% to 15%. It is not enough. The mindset, even among Democrats, is that we need a huge military to defend ourselves from perceived threats and perceived enemies. They don't have the mindset that they could make the world a better place by defusing tensions among nations that they perceive as threats. It might start by apologizing to Iran for overthrowing their democratically elected leader Mossaddegh and installing the brutal Shah. That would go a long way to establishing a peaceful relationship with Iran. It could start there. Instead the U.S. only fuels tensions by applying sanctions and carrying on like the rest of the world should bow down to the almighty dollar.

Off the Top of My Head

How the World Could Change When the Current Crisis is Over

by John Lawrence, April 26, 2020

Perhaps we will rethink what is essential and what is inessential. Here's my list of what is essential: 1) Health care; 2) Food; 3) Water; 4) Sanitation (Waste water and trash collection); 5) Education; 6) Transportation; 7) Electricity; 8) The Internet; 9) Grocery stores. 10) Elder care.11) Police, Fire and Paramedic services. Here are some things that are considered inessential now: 1) Spectator sports; 2) Spectator music events; 3) Parades; 4) Conventions; 5) Bars; 6) Restaurants; 7) Barber and beauty parlors; 8) Tattoo parlors; 9) Political campaign events; 10) Large parties like wedding receptions.

Everyone can come up with their own list of what they consider to be essential and what they consider to be inessential. In my opinion the least essential of inessential services are tattoo artists. There are a lot of products and services in our mass consumer culture which are also frivolous and have nothing to do with what is essential or beneficial to human well being.. It seems that the most essential workers are the least paid while the least essential are well paid indeed. Is advertising really essential? You can look up everything you might want or need online using google or amazon. Why do you have to have some irrelevant product or service pounded into you by TV advertising? It's a historical relic. I record most programs so that I can fast forward through the commercials. If I watch a live program, I put it on pause while I do something else for awhile, and then I fast forward through the commercials. In my opinion everything advertised on TV, especially pharmaceuticals, is inessential. They should be prescribed by a doctor. It's the doctor's business to know which pharmaceuticals you need, not yours.

Are hedge funds essential? Is jewelry essential? Are the products of the wedding-industrial complex essential? Many people are having weddings during the pandemic without paying the tens of thousands of dollars that current weddings fashioned by the wedding-industrial complex demand. There are many frivolous consumer items which advertising insists that people need that they don't really need, that are completely inessential. Some are nice to have, but inessential, and some are downright destructive to peoples' health and welfare.

The most essential activity at this time in history is saving the planet from global warming. Production of renewable energy alternatives is absolutely essential. The provision of green infrastructure is absolutely essential. Fossil fuels need to be left in the ground. Getting rid of plastics which pollute the oceans and other waste products that aren't biodegradable is absolutely essential. Rethinking payscales for essential workers like agricultural workers and grocery store workers is essential. If these are the most essential workers, they should be paid more. The same goes for doctors, nurses, certified nursing assistants, the CNAs who do most of the caregiving at nursing homes. CNAs make little more than minimum wage and yet they are exposed to the coronavirus. What this means is that so much that is really essential now is either being ignored or very little money is being allocated to it while huge amounts of money are being allocated to fruitless and frivolous activities.

The most fruitless activity is war and the provoking of war. The trillion dollar annual budget of the military-industrial complex has been shown to be fruitless and meaningless when the real war is against a virus. Unhealthy conditions in poverty stricken areas of the world including refugee camps can breed disease which affects the whole world including "privileged" people in the more advanced nations. Poverty and disease need to be eradicated in all parts of the world. The military cannot do that. Oh, they can be repurposed a little bit to help out with a pandemic, but they can not really do the job that needs to be done. In particular they are vulnerable to the pandemic themselves and all of the weapons of war cannot protect them. The real war needs to be against poverty and disease which are the breeders of war and pandemics. The real war needs to be against global warming. The real essential workers are construction workers who need to be constructing advanced green infrastructure.

What is clear is that real essential workers need to be paid more which argues for a lessening of economic inequality. So much of the wealth is held by people who are absolutely inessential to the health, welfare and betterment of people all around the world. A Green New Deal needs to be prioritized. Wealth needs to be taxed to pay for it. New York state needs to tax Wall Street to make up for its budget deficit. Priorities, priorities. The helping professionals and care workers need to be given more respect and money. Taxing inessential workers like hedge fund managers is what needs to pay for it.

Cuba to the Rescue, But Don’t Tell the American People

Published on Thursday, April 23, 2020

by Jacobin

As we move through this crisis, we see the tragedy of the rich superpower with its privatized, dysfunctional health care system failing its people, while its impoverished neighbor — under constant attack from the superpower — reaches out to help the world.

by Medea Benjamin

 

17 Comments

Doctors and nurses of Cuba's Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade pose with a portrait of Cuban late leader Fidel Castro as they are bid farewell before travelling to hard-hit Italy to help in the fight against the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, at the Central Unit of Medical Cooperation in Havana, on March 21, 2020. (Photo: Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images)

While Bernie Sanders paid a political price for uttering something positive about Cuba’s literacy program, the current pandemic has shown the whole world the heroic side of Cuba’s health care system.

I saw this heroism firsthand when I worked with Cuban doctors in poor, remote villages in Africa. It was the 1970s and I was a young woman employed as a nutritionist with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. My colleagues were good people who were helping to feed hungry children. They also made hefty salaries and lived a wealthy lifestyle they could never afford back home. The Cubans were different. They lived simply, worked under the harshest conditions, and earned almost nothing for their services. Their motivation was purely to help people in need.

They called it internationalism and said it was their revolutionary duty to repay their debt to society. They quoted Che Guevara: “The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.”

I was inspired, and ended up moving to Cuba. Four years, a marriage, and a baby later, I was accused by the Cuban government of writing articles critical of the revolution and deported. Certainly, I saw and experienced aspects of the Cuban system I disliked, but I never lost my admiration for the country’s public health system and its commitment to international solidarity.

It is truly inspiring that this small, poor island has basic health indicators equal, or better, to those of the world’s richest countries. This is even more remarkable after it has faced a brutal US blockade and sanctions for sixty years. Cuba’s infant mortality rate of 4 per 1,000 live births is lower than in the United States — and that’s according to the CIA! There’s little food on the store shelves and shortages in the pharmacies, but, as Cubans say, “We live like poor people, but we die like rich people.” That’s because their life expectancy of seventy-nine years is the same as in the United States, despite the fact that Cuba spends less than about $800 per person per year on health care compared with $11,000 in the United States.

Like most of the world, Cuba is now grappling with coronavirus. As of April 20, there were 1,137 confirmed cases, with 38 deaths. But Cuba’s free and universal health care system, including a robust cadre of health professionals, puts the island in a better position to deal with this crisis than most countries. With its intense focus on training health professionals, Cuba has the highest density of physicians in the world. Its ratio of medical professionals to patients is roughly three times higher than in the United States.

Cuba not only trains its own doctors; it trains doctors from all over the world. The island of only 11 million people is home to the world’s largest international medical school, the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM). Since its founding in 1999, the school has trained over 35,000 young people from 138 countries, including the United States. And here’s the kicker: it’s free.

Pastors for Peace, the group that selects US students coming from the “humblest and neediest” communities, says the scholarships include full tuition, dormitory housing, three meals per day, textbooks, school uniforms, and a small monthly stipend. While graduates from US medical schools leave saddled with six-figure debts, the only debt ELAM students have is a commitment to practice medicine in low-income and medically underserved communities. That’s why you’ll find ELAM graduates like Dr. Melissa Barbar on the front-lines in the Bronx fighting coronavirus today.

If that doesn’t make you teary-eyed, just look at the brigade of doctors taking off for international missions to the most COVID-19 affected area of Italy, Lombardy. “We are not superheroes,” intensive care specialist Leonardo Fernandez told Reuters as the first brigade left Havana. “We are revolutionary doctors.” As of April 1, Cuba had sent 800 medical personnel to fight COVID-19 in sixteen countries, from Angola to Andorra, and more are on their way.

For Cuba, medical assistance has been a hallmark of the revolution: helping Chilean earthquake victims in 1963; Nicaraguans and Hondurans devastated by Hurricane Mitch in 1998; Indonesia tsunami victims in 2004; Haitians after the disastrous 2010 earthquake and subsequent cholera outbreak. Teams were also dispatched to Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone to fight Ebola in 2014.

Gradually, this “army of white coats,” as Fidel Castro called them, not only responded to emergencies overseas but began serving as family doctors in poor communities around the world. Poorer countries pay only the medical teams’ expenses or seek international support to compensate Cuba; wealthier countries pay more.

But the Trump administration poses a significant challenge to Cuban social programs. When he came to power, his administration launched an all-out attack on the Cuban economy: placing new restrictions on US travel to the island, reducing the amount of remittances Cuban Americans could send back home, interfering with the transport of Venezuelan oil to the island, and trying to sabotage Cuba’s medical collaborations.

Anti-Cuba zealots in the Trump administration have been enticing Cuban doctors working overseas to defect, paying journalists to write negative stories, slapping sanctions on Cubans in charge of the program, and strong-arming countries to expel Cuban doctors.

The crux of the attack has been to paint the program as a form of modern slavery because the doctors only receive about a quarter of the money the countries pay for their services. But Cuban health professionals volunteer for these assignments — they want the experience, they earn much more than they would back home, and they know the rest of the money goes to support Cuba’s national health care system.

The Trump administration has been successful in convincing the right-wing governments that came to power in Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador since 2018 to send about 9,000 Cubans packing. In a tragic twist, these same countries are now overwhelmed with coronavirus and lamenting the loss of experienced professionals.

As we move through this crisis, we see the tragedy of the rich superpower with its privatized, dysfunctional health care system failing its people, while its impoverished neighbor — under constant attack from the superpower — reaches out to help the world. We see Trump desperate to deflect from his catastrophic bungling of this pandemic, including defunding the WHO in what a prestigious medical editor called “an appalling betrayal of global solidarity,” while Cuba’s army of white coats have become the embodiment of global solidarity.

But if you are an American with political ambitions, you might think twice before saying something good about Cuba’s health care system.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace, is the author of the new book, Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her previous books include: Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection; Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control; Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart, and (with Jodie Evans) Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide). Follow her on Twitter: @medeabenjamin

© 2019 Jacobin

Off the Top of My Head

Bernie, Where Are Ya Now, Buddy?

by John Lawrence, April 21, 2020

Can I take back my vote for Joe Biden? Now that I've lost my job and my employer based health insurance, I don't have a job, and I don't have health insurance. Medicare for All has never sounded so good. This is the situation for so many in this age of pandemic. Fortunately, it doesn't apply to me. I already have Medicare. Fortunately, for the rich, the poor who could profit the most from Medicare for All don't vote in anywhere the same numbers as do the rich. That's why voting by mail is something Republicans don't want. It means more poor people would be voting.

Does anybody care that Medicare for All is a "socialist" program advocated by a "socialist." They only have a similar system in every other developed country and most underdeveloped ones as well. Now that unemployed people have more time off, they will have ample time to think about Medicare for All vs the health care system they have (or don't have) now. Maybe they will come to the conclusion that Medicare for All is really in their best interests despite all the propaganda about it being "socialist." Bernie tried to tell us that health care was a human right not just a right for employed people. It would seem like a better deal now that "we are all in it together" except that we're not really despite all the sugary sentiment. If we were all in it together, people would be as concerned about their unemployed neighbor's health care as they are about their own especially if a sick neighbor is likely to spread the sickness to you which certainly is the case with a very contagious coronavirus.

Bernie's website says:

Today, more than 30 million Americans still don’t have health insurance and even more are underinsured. Even for those with insurance, costs are so high that medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Incredibly, we spend significantly more of our national GDP on this inadequate health care system—far more per person than any other major country. And despite doing so, Americans have worse health outcomes and a higher infant mortality rate than countries that spend much less on health care. Our people deserve better.

30 million? More like 130 million with a pandemic taking out its vengeance on the American people and in fact the world's people. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Bernie said the coronavirus outbreak has exposed the “absurdity and cruelty of our employer-based, private health insurance system” as “tens of millions of Americans” lose their jobs, incomes and healthcare as a result of the pandemic.Our neighbor to the north takes care of every Canadian citizen. All they have to do is present their health care card to any doctor's office or hospital and they are taken care of, no questions asked and never getting a bill. Some people have questioned the 'waiting times'. They haven't been to an emergency room in the US lately even with health insurance. First you have to wait a couple hours in the waiting room before you're even taken back to a stall in the emergency room. Then, if you need to be admitted to the hospital, you have to wait in the stall for several hours until a room is available. All this time, as much as a day if you're lucky, you're not given anything to eat or drink.

Rich people are afraid that if Medicare for All becomes the law of the land, they will just get the same level of service as the hoi polloi. They needn't worry. Even with Medicare for All they could pay a lot more and get a gold plated policy. This is the arrangement they have in the Netherlands. The rich can always pay more and get treated better, but with Medicare for All everyone is guaranteed adequate medical services at about half the price they are paying now with co-pays, premiums, deductibles and every other way the health care system in America has invented to fleece you. No wonder so many Americans go bankrupt. The health care system is the leading cause of bankruptcy in America.

The American diet consists of junk food, heavily advertised on TV, but guaranteed to give you diabetes and obesity if consumed over a lifetime. All those juicy hamburgers, fries and pizza and a lack of enticing pictures of fruits and vegetables means that you will need insulin and cholesterol medicine at some point. You will end up taking a bunch of pills every day for underlying heart disease and a ton of other diet caused maladies. Then you will pay through the nose to pharmaceutical corporations for the privilege of consuming them. Medicare for All would eliminate the travesty that pharmaceutical companies are perpetrating on the American people.

Wendell Potter was formerly in charge of public relations with Humana until his conscience got the better of him.. His job was to make sure that Americans would not be favorably persuaded by Medicare for All. He wrote: "The industry knows from years of focus group message testing that terms like “socialized medicine” and “government-run health care” scare many Americans and that many of us respond favorably to terms like “choice” and “competition.” Based on this knowledge, there were several big lies I helped craft — and that are still in circulation today."

Today those Democratic candidates that wanted a Medicare for All Who Want It option have been shown to be dead wrong. They said “If you like your employer-based plan, you can keep it." Well today many of those that liked their employer-based plan are not liking it so much especially those who are unemployed and without a plan.

Virus Wreaks Havoc on Workers’ Financial Health

from Capital and Main, April 15, 2020

By Sasha Abramsky

More than 2 million Californians have recently lost their jobs and many are now without health coverage.

International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers at the normally packed Wilmington, CA dispatch hall. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Since cities and states began issuing stay-at-home orders in early March to counter the spread of COVID-19, a mind-boggling 16 million-plus jobs have been lost, at least temporarily, representing the speediest and deepest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Many of those unemployed men and women also lost their employer-provided health insurance coverage at a moment when a pandemic is raging — and when containment strategies rely on early identification and isolation of carriers. The perverse structure of the American health insurance system means that huge numbers of people, if they don’t have a family member whose insurance will cover them, are having the continuity of their health care disrupted. To worsen matters, the largest private insurance companies are poised to introduce steep premium increases.

Historically the jobs that are most vulnerable to being lost at the start of a recession are those that are low paid, physically demanding and involve long hours. Many workers in such jobs already have precarious health situations.

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Larger companies participating in California’s insurance exchange could be forced to increase premiums by as much as 40 percent.

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“People whose incomes are below the median, or the 25th percentile, tend to be less healthy,” says Marianne Page, professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, and director of the campus’s Center for Poverty Research. They are, in consequence of their poorer general health, particularly at risk of succumbing to COVID-19. And yet it is the members of this very group that that are the most likely to now be losing their health coverage.

In California alone, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that by April 4 more than 2 million people had recently filed for unemployment insurance — and many of these had likely lost insurance coverage as a result. Since then, the job losses have only increased, along with the numbers of people losing their insurance.

Assuming the companies that fired them still exist, these individuals can sign on for COBRA, allowing them to pay out of pocket, for up to 36 months, for the health insurance that their employers previously paid for; but COBRA can run to thousands of dollars per year per family member, a sum that many — probably most — of the newly unemployed simply cannot access at the moment.

“It’s a staggering number of people,” acknowledges Anthony Wright, executive director of the Sacramento-based Health Access California advocacy organization. Worsening the situation is that some employers have cut back their employees’ hours and, once they are no longer deemed full-time, stopped paying their health care benefits.

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At the very least, the pandemic is a huge test of California’s financial and moral mettle.

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As a result, in the middle of a pandemic a tsunami of uninsured are now signing up for Medi-Cal, or using the reopened enrollment period for the state’s insurance exchange to shop around for new, subsidized, insurance coverage for themselves and their families. Many insurance companies worry that, unless Congress releases federal funds to help provide treatment for COVID-19 sufferers, their bills for covering those who get sick during the pandemic will be so high over the coming months that they could force smaller insurance companies on the exchange into bankruptcy and larger companies to increase premiums by as much as 40 percent, according to an estimate from Covered California, the agency that manages California’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance exchange.

California has created the country’s most user-friendly insurance exchange, under the ACA, and has made enormous strides in recent years in expanding Medicaid coverage to the near-poor – an expansion that is largely, although not entirely, paid for by the federal government — and, at the state’s expense, to young undocumented immigrants. Nevertheless, it is an enormous logistical and financial challenge to get California’s newly uninsured re-covered with decent insurance at speed.

“We’ve aggressively expanded coverage through the ACA,” notes Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget and Policy Center. Over the past decade, California’s pool of uninsured residents has dropped from nearly one in five people to only seven percent of a population of nearly 40 million. But, he asks, “Will California have the resources” to continue driving down that number by expanding coverage to those, especially the undocumented, who are left out of the federal eligibility criteria?

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At the very least, the pandemic is a huge test of California’s financial and moral mettle. The state’s Department of Finance, and the chairs of legislative budget committees, recently warned all California government agencies of extraordinarily tough budget conditions as a result of the state’s burgeoning pandemic-related bills and the loss of tax revenue as jobs disappear and capital gains on the stock market evaporate. And while Senate President pro tem Toni Atkins has told journalists that continuing to expand health care coverage remains a legislative priority, California is going to have to navigate uncharted financial waters in coming years as the economic fallout from the pandemic cuts deeply into state revenues.

Add into the mix the fact that many legal immigrants have been pushed out of the safety net system by President Trump’s regulatory changes and that undocumented immigrants never had safety net protections to begin with. California, with 27 percent of its population foreign-born, faces a particular challenge in keeping access to medical care open for its 10 million-plus immigrants. “The impact is on their health and on the economy,” argues Sarah Dar, director of health and public benefits policy at the California Immigrant Policy Center. “Because of people getting sick and not being able to work. This moment highlights the stark downside of this system of leaving people uninsured.”

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Garment Worker: “I’ve never been homeless, but if there’s no way to work I’ll have to sleep in my car.”

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 While many documented immigrants have recently lost jobs that came with health insurance, and like their citizen neighbors are now scrambling to find new insurance options, most undocumented adults in the state work low-income jobs lacking any kind of security of employment, and which never came with health insurance to begin with. They have never had easy access to doctors and medicines.

Given the sheer numbers of undocumented in the state – roughly two and a half million — the possibility of containing COVID-19 through comprehensive testing, treatment and quarantining of carriers becomes ever more daunting. The community health centers on which many undocumented residents rely for basic health care needs, did receive $1.3 billion, to be distributed to CHCs around the country, when Congress passed the CARES Act. But given the scale of need, that’s simply a drop in the bucket. On a daily basis the CHCs remain overwhelmed with patients, understaffed and chronically under-resourced.

* * *

“I don’t have access to unemployment or any benefits. It’ll be a really big struggle,” says Pablo, a 38-year-old undocumented worker in Los Angeles’ garment district, who, until his factory closed down in mid-March, was working for piece rates that came out to far below hourly minimum wage. “I’ve never been homeless, but if there’s no way to work I’ll have to sleep in my car. I’ve been limiting food, rationing the food I have.”

In addition to all the usual stresses that come with being undocumented and ineligible for public benefits, these days Pablo worries that he might get sick with COVID-19 and have no access to treatment, other than via the emergency room, and no way to pay for that treatment should he prove to be infected. “Any time I feel ill I start thinking whether I could get it. I recently found out someone I know died of the coronavirus here in Los Angeles. I’ve had a lot of anxiety and stress. I’m afraid to go to the doctor.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has made health care coverage a priority, and has been aware from the get-go that the more people are covered the better public health outcomes will be for all.

Even before the pandemic, Newsom was looking for ways to fund an expansion of Medi-Cal to cover low-income undocumented seniors. His budgets have generously funded the Covered California insurance exchange, and early on in the pandemic the exchange re-opened the enrollment period so that Californians who found themselves without insurance could quickly access affordable plans.

In addition, the legislature recently waived the requirement that Medi-Cal recipients produce documentary proof, every 60 days, of financial eligibility to remain covered by the program – meaning that coverage for those Californians enrolled in Medicaid will remain untouched at least through the duration of the pandemic. And early on in the response, Newsom’s administration requested a waiver from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to allow Medi-Cal providers to do telemedicine visits with patients, and to streamline the process for doctors to get reimbursed for treating patients covered by Medi-Cal.

While some states have made it cumbersome and time-consuming to enroll in ACA-mandated subsidized insurance, California’s process is quick, and coverage begins at the start of the month following enrollment. And for those who qualify for Medi-Cal, coverage is retroactive, so that if someone enrolls midmonth, their medical expenses going back to the first day of that month are paid for.

But all that still might not be enough to get the undocumented into treatment centers. Or to convince those who have insurance, but who, after losing their jobs, have had to buy lower-standard plans that come with higher deductibles and co-pays, to risk the inflated medical bills that will come with prolonged treatment. Without federal intervention to cover the cost of COVID-19 treatment, “We’ll have a bunch of people making decisions not to be treated,” Chris Hoene worries. “And that’s a public health risk to them and to the community at large.”

Anthony Wright agrees. “We’re not going to be able to control the virus unless we get everyone covered and able to get tested and access the treatment they need,” says the advocate, who has long been a leading voice in campaigns to universalize health care access in the state. “While the Affordable Care Act provided a lot of patches, it’s still patchwork, and the system leaves a lot of gaps that people will fall through. And we need quick action to contain the virus.”

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Copyright 2020 Capital & Main

Exposing 'Folly of Tying Health Coverage to Jobs,' New Study Estimates 7.3 Million More Uninsured in US by June

Published on

Tuesday, April 07, 2020

by

Common Dreams

Employer-based health insurance during the current coronavirus outbreak, said one researcher behind the study, "is like an umbrella that melts in the rain."

 

by

Jon Queally, staff writer

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Medical workers take in patients at a special coronavirus intake area at Maimonides Medical Center on April 07, 2020 in the Borough Park neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Hospitals in New York City, which has been especially hard hit by the coronavirus, are facing shortages of beds, ventilators and protective equipment for medical staff. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A new study out Tuesday estimates that worker layoffs unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic in the United States have already caused more than 1.5 million people to lose their employer-provided health insurance in recent weeks, with another 5.7 million likely to become uninsured by the end of June.With a total of 7.3million newly uninsured Americans by this summer, the new research—titled "Intersecting U.S. Epidemics: COVID-19 and Lack of Health Insurance"—reveals the devastating consequences of a health system so heavily reliant on employer-based insurance, especially in the face of an unprecedented public health emergency like the current outbreak.

"Millions of Americans are newly vulnerable to financial catastrophe, as we face an epidemic of life-threatening illness," said study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a primary care doctor, distinguished professor at Hunter College and lecturer at Harvard Medical School. "The COVID-19 epidemic highlights the folly of tying health coverage to jobs. Our health care system saddles people with medical bills when they're least able to afford them because they've been laid off or are too sick to work. Health insurance in the U.S. is like an umbrella that melts in the rain."

"The COVID-19 epidemic highlights the folly of tying health coverage to jobs. Our health care system saddles people with medical bills when they're least able to afford them because they've been laid off or are too sick to work."
—Dr. Steffie WoolhandleThe study was published in The Annals of Internal Medicine,the official journal of the American College of Physicians, the largest U.S. medical specialty society in the U.S. with 159,000 members. Woolhandler and her co-author Dr. David Himmelstein, an internist and distinguished professor at CUNY's Hunter College and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, looked at state-by-state unemployment data to determine estimates about the number of people now out of work who relied on their employer for insurance. According to their report:

We estimated the likely effects of current job losses on the number of uninsured persons by using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's March 2019 Current Population Survey on health insurance coverage rates among persons who lost or left a job. The uninsurance rate among unemployed persons who had lost or left a job was 26.3% versus 10.7% among those with jobs. Applying the 15.6–percentage point difference to the 9.955 million who filed new unemployment claims last week, we estimate that 1.553 million newly unemployed persons will lose health coverage. This figure excludes family members who will become uninsured because a breadwinner lost coverage and self-employed persons who may lose coverage because their businesses were shuttered, but are ineligible for unemployment benefits. If, as the Federal Reserve economist projects, an additional 47.05 million people become unemployed, 7.3 million workers (along with several million family members) are likely to join the ranks of the U.S. uninsured population.

Himmelstein and Woolhandler further argue that their new research "exposes the imprudence of tying health insurance to employment, and the need for more thoroughgoing reform. "

"In this emergency, Congress should make all of the uninsured automatically eligible for Medicare."
—Dr. David Himmelstein

"A trickle of families facing the dual disaster of job loss and health insurance loss can remain under Washington's radar," they continued. "However, the current tsunami of job and coverage losses along with a heightened risk for severe illness demands action."

Dr. Himmelstein said states are too overwhelmed by the catastrophe now unfolding to adequately address the current situation—especially as things get worse, not better in the coming weeks and months—and called for the federal goverment and Congress to step in.

"The states can't do it because tax revenues are plunging, and they're required to balance their budgets," Himmelstein warned. "Congress and the President have provided free testing for coronavirus, but no new coverage for those who need treatment. In this emergency, Congress should make all of the uninsured automatically eligible for Medicare."

New @AnnalsofIM study from PNHP co-founders Drs. @swoolhandler and David Himmelstein estimates 7.3M Americans will lose health coverage by June 30, because of the #COVID19 pandemic. https://t.co/FwGG4ef8NA pic.twitter.com/tTuJjiIwuK

— Physicians for a National Health Program (@PNHP) April 7, 2020

The call for lawmakers to immediately open Medicare enrollment has been issued by other progressive voices as well. As Common Dreams reported earlier Tuesday, Public Citizen and others have said opening the program to the recently unemployed is the easiest and quickest way to provide coverage to those who need it.

"With millions of people losing their jobs because of a pandemic, it's both crazy and immoral for them to be stripped of health insurance," said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. "If we had a Medicare for All system, this kind of problem wouldn't occur. But we can't wait to win Medicare for All. The solution to this immediate problem is to enroll all unemployed people in Medicare."

While expanding Medicare for the out-of-work and uninsured would be a short-term way to stem the pain for millions, advocates for Medicare for All—including Himmelstein and Woolhandler—say that the coronavirus may finally be the catastrophe that wakes the nation up to the need for a permanent solution to its healthcare woes and the unsustainable and inhumane design of the current for-profit system.

"A decade ago," the two researchers concluded in their report, "Victor Fuchs forecasted that 'National health insurance will probably come to the United States after a major change in the political climate—the kind of change that often accompanies a war, a depression, or large-scale civil unrest.' Such a major change may be upon us."

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The Promising Cuba/US Cooperation on Cancer

Published on Sunday, April 12, 2020

by Common Dreams

"The wonderful thing about working with our Cuban colleagues is that they really believe, in their heart of hearts, that medical care is a human right."

by César Chelala

 

7 Comments

Cuban doctor Liz Caballero and student Susana Diaz leave El Vedado polyclinic in Havana on March 31, 2020. (Photo: Adalberto Roque/AFP via Getty Images)

In 1991, I headed a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) mission of Latin American physicians to evaluate a national Cuban project involving the use of interferon to treat inoperable lung cancer. At the time, there was a rumor that Fidel Castro had lung cancer was particularly interested in the research about it. Castro showed his interest, in part, when he came to visit us and discussed the findings. At the time, interferon didn’t seem to have a significant effect, but Cuban doctors persisted in their search and, even with limited resources, they have now developed a new treatment for lung cancer that shows promising results.

In September of 2011, the Chinese press agency Xinhua reported that Cuban doctors had produced the first therapeutic vaccine for lung cancer called CIMAvax-EGF. It was the result of a 25-year research project at Havana’s Center for Molecular Immunology. Although the vaccine doesn’t prevent lung cancer from developing in new patients, it turns later-stage lung cancer, specifically non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) into a controllable chronic disease.

The vaccine contains a protein called epidermal growth factor (EGF). This substance stimulates the growth of normal cells. However, when present in excess in tumors, it causes them to multiply and grow without control. The Cuban doctors’ original approach was to pair EGF and a protein from the meningitis bacteria. When they enter the bloodstream of patients, this protein encourages their immune system to produce antibodies against the combined molecule, thus suppressing the effects of excessive EGF in the tumor cells. As a result, the vaccine doesn’t eliminate the tumors but prevents them from growing and spreading to other parts of the body.

The vaccine is given to people who already have lung cancer and where the traditional treatments have proven to be ineffective. For these types of patients, the vaccine could be a life saver. Unlike other immunotherapies, this technique uses the patients’ own antibodies, rather than using manufactured ones, thus having less side effects and being much cheaper to produce.

The vaccine, which is now available in Cuba, Colombia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Peru and Paraguay, is relatively cheap to produce and store, and produces only very mild side effects such as nausea, chills, fever, and lack of energy. There are now agreements to test it in the United States, Japan, and some European countries.

 

Initial trials have shown a trend towards longer survival among vaccinated test subjects. Also, a direct correlation has been found between the level of antibodies that a vaccinated patient has produced against EGF and survival. Other trials have shown that those under 60 benefit the most in terms of survival. However, researchers caution that some early positive results to date have been found in relatively few cancer patients who were carefully selected and given special oncology care. They may not represent all the patients who could benefit from this vaccine.

Trials are currently being planned in the United States, Japan, the European Union and Serbia. In late October 2016, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, to conduct a Phase I/II clinical trial of CIMAvax in patients with non-small cell lung cancer. “The chance to evaluate a vaccine like this is a very exciting prospect,” declared Candace Johnson, President and CEO of Roswell Park.

The same epidermal growth factor (EGF) acting on the lungs could play a role also on prostate, breast, colon and pancreatic cancer, thus opening a vast array of practical applications. Kelvin Lee, an immunologist at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center indicated that all these organs could be potential targets for this vaccine.

During several trips to Cuba on UN public health-related missions, I have had the opportunity to work with several Cuban physicians and became aware of their high commitment to public health. As Dr. Kelvin Lee has said, “The wonderful thing about working with our Cuban colleagues is that they really believe, in their heart of hearts, that medical care is a human right.”

The collaboration between the Cuban doctors and those at the Roswell Cancer Center is a promising one. But there are still several hurdles to overcome in large part because of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. Researchers at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center had to wait four years to obtain the government approval for clinical trials of the CIMAvax vaccine. Clearing the path to an effective collaboration may result in one of the most important advances to combat cancer in our time.

Dr. César Chelala is an international public health consultant, co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award and two national journalism awards from Argentina.

Off the Top of My Head

In the Age of Pandemic Has War Become a Luxury?

by John Lawrence, April 12, 2020

Saudi Arabia and Yemen have declared a cease fire. Sailors are becoming infected on aircraft carriers. War planning requires groupings of military people. So has war become a luxury we can no longer afford? Are we really "all in this together"? Does the pandemic require cooperation among all nations since the pandemic doesn't respect national borders? Will the pandemic, when it's over, have changed the way human beings conduct their affairs in the world or will we get back to business as usual. If the pandemic engenders cooperation instead of rivalry among the nations of the world, does this mean that we will all be socialists or communists? Does it even matter?

If the pandemic makes us realize that war is a useless exercise with few benefits, will the US military-industrial complex be defunded. Will the money then go to health care workers, to Peace Corps and AmeriCorps workers who will attempt to bring clean water and modern sanitary systems to developing countries? Will there be a push to create more sanitary conditions in the world so that pandemics don't get started? Plagues and pandemics before have motivated people to build modern sanitary systems in places like London and New York in the 19th century where urban populations in close proximity created the conditions of cholera and bubonic plague. Is homelessness a social situation we can no longer afford?

Will the meaning of 'essential services' become normalized in the economy post corinavirus? What then will be considered essential and what could we live without? As long as there is no vaccine for coronavirus, new cases will continue to crop up even after the economy has "reopened." The flu epidemic of 1918 lasted 10 months and had several spikes. We can expect more spikes in the current pandemic until there are widespread vaccinations available. So what is essential? Sports events? Cruises? Rock concerts? Movie theaters? Now with Netflix and Amazon prime we can watch movies at home. Any movie we want to see. I'm catching up on all the great movies I've missed over the years. Last night I watched "To Catch a Thief" with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. Free on Amazon Prime. The fidelity  both video and audio was excellent on my smart TV. I have no need to go to a movie theater where I can't control the volume. Hint: they are too loud.

Perhaps now we can grasp the concept that cooperation among peoples and nations is more important than manufactured rivalries over some nation's form of government. Perhaps now we can grasp the concept that diplomacy is more important, getting along is more important and winning isn't everything. Maybe now public health and human rights can be seen as more important than having everyone pull themselves up only by their own bootstraps. Maybe we can get on with the business of cooperating to combat the real enemy - climate change and even future pandemics. Maybe we will bring the US infrastructure into the modern world with a Green New Deal. Maybe we can finally grow up and have a consensus about what is really important, what really matters. Maybe doctors, nurses, caregivers, and social workers will come to be seen as more important that Wall Street brokers, the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps as more important than the War Corps. As Governor Cuomo says, "Love will conquer all." Happy Easter.

Sanders and Jayapal Put Forth Bill to Provide No-Cost 'Health Care for All During Pandemic'

Published on Friday, April 10, 2020

by Common Dreams

"We have got to work together to make sure that anyone in America who is sick—regardless of their income or immigration status—can seek the medical treatment they need during this national emergency."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

37 Comments

Medical workers take in patients at a special coronavirus intake area at Maimonides Medical Center on April 6, 2020 in New York City. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

As the number of Americans without health insurance continues to rise rapidly due to ongoing mass layoffs across the nation, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Friday introduced emergency legislation that would empower Medicare to cover all healthcare costs for the uninsured and all out-of-pocket expenses for those with insurance for the duration of the coronavirus crisis.

"Our broken healthcare system is failing to protect millions of Americans from the coronavirus pandemic," Jayapal, a Washington Democrat and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement. "Now more than ever, we need to take bold action to prevent more Americans from getting sick or dying."

"With an estimated 35 million Americans in danger of losing their employer-provided health insurance over the coming weeks and months, this legislation is needed now more than ever."
—Sen. Bernie Sanders

If passed, the Health Care Emergency Guarantee Act (pdf) would take effect immediately and remain in place until the Secretary of Health and Human Services certifies to Congress that a Food and Drug Administration-approved coronavirus vaccine is widely available to the U.S. public.

The legislation to "provide health for all during the pandemic," according to a summary (pdf) released by Sanders' office, would "fully cover the cost of medically necessary healthcare, including prescription drugs," for the tens of millions of Americans currently without health insurance.

An analysis by Health Management Associates earlier this month warned that the total number of uninsured Americans could rise to 40 million within the next several months if U.S. job losses continue at the current rate.

For Americans with either public or private insurance, "Medicare will cover the copays, deductibles, and other cost-sharing for all medically necessary healthcare, including for prescription drugs," the summary of the bill states.

"When individuals go to the hospital or doctor, they will provide their insurance information as usual," the summary explains. "The provider will use this information to bill Medicare—either for the out-of-pocket costs if the individual has another type of insurance, or for all of the care if the individual is uninsured. The patient will not be charged anything."

"An interesting play. Give people a taste of Medicare for All during this emergency while continuing to advocate for the real thing."
—Anand Giridharadas, TIME

Additionally, the legislation would ban surprise billing and prevent private insurance companies from limiting coverage or hiking co-pays and deductibles until a COVID-19 vaccine is available.

"During this unprecedented crisis, no one in America should delay seeking medical care because of the cost," Sanders said in a statement. "If this pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we are only as safe as the least-insured among us."

"We have got to work together to make sure that anyone in America who is sick—regardless of their income or immigration status—can seek the medical treatment they need during this national emergency," Sanders added. "With an estimated 35 million Americans in danger of losing their employer-provided health insurance over the coming weeks and months, this legislation is needed now more than ever."

Sanders and Jayapal are two of the leading advocates of Medicare for All in Congress, and the Health Care Emergency Guarantee Act represents a short-term solution as they work to build support for a national single-payer plan.

"An interesting play," TIME editor-at-large Anand Giridharadas tweeted in response to the new bill. "Give people a taste of Medicare for All during this emergency while continuing to advocate for the real thing."

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TRUMP’S DIRTY DEED: LATEST EPA DEREGULATION WILL KILL AMERICANS

from WhoWhatWhy blog

by Celia Wexler and DonkeyHotey, April 5, 2020

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0) See complete attribution below.

It is silent, deadly, and all around us. No, it’s not the coronavirus. It’s the dirty air millions of Americans are forced to breathe. And while the Trump administration has done too little to protect Americans from the current pandemic, its record on pollution is much, much worse — and its recent policies seem particularly cruel and wrongheaded right now.

Without even factoring in the ravages of COVID-19, we know that air pollution is very hazardous to health. Epidemiologists at Washington University in St. Louis examined the medical records of 45 million US veterans over ten years, and found an estimated 200,000 deaths were linked to particulates in the air that actually met current US air quality standards.

Even more concerning, African American vets were more vulnerable to the ravages of poor air quality than white vets exposed to the same level of pollutants in the air.

“I went into it thinking pollution is color blind … it’s not true,” Dr. Ziyah Al-Aly told the Guardian. “Actually, pollution itself does discriminate. For the same level of pollution, black people tend to be affected more. And on top of that, black people get exposed to more pollution than white people.

“It’s kind of like a double-whammy,” he added. “It’s really unfair.”

Just this week, capping three years of unraveling nearly 100 regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule that would drastically reduce automobile fuel efficiency standards. The new rule revises an Obama administration standard put in place to address climate change. Under the Obama rule, cars would have had to average 54 miles per gallon by 2025. The Trump rule changes that requirement to 40 miles per gallon.

The EPA not only is primed to allow automakers to unleash almost one billion tons of additional carbon into the air, increasing global warming. The rule also will make US air more dangerous to breathe.

That’s in part because anything that increases the amount of carbon in the air increases global warming. Climate change helps trigger events like forest fires that make the air we breathe dirtier.

This new policy would be cruel at any time, but seems particularly callous when the country is in the grip of a pernicious virus that preys in particular on Americans who already have respiratory problems, like asthma and lung disease.

In a statement, the American Lung Association (ALA) charged that the new rule “will result in dirtier cars that pollute the air and harm public health.”

The fumes from car tailpipes add to pollution, the ALA stated, particularly for minority and low-income people who often live near major highways.

Even worse, this federal policy will apply to all states. Over the past half century, under authority given the states by the federal Clean Air Act, California has imposed stricter mileage standards on automakers. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia follow the Golden State’s mandates.

Indeed, in 2019, California — fearful that the Obama standards would be gutted by the EPA — reached an agreement on a compromise standard with a few carmakers.

President Donald Trump reportedly was furious that some auto companies already had agreed to accept California’s requirement that they achieve 51 miles per gallon by 2026.

Perhaps his ire explains why the White House revoked the permission the federal government had routinely given California to impose stricter rules. The Trump Department of Justice also opened an inquiry into the four auto companies — Ford, Honda, BMW, and Volkswagen — that agreed to accept California’s standards for alleged antitrust violations. The DOJ dropped its investigation in February. 

But that’s far from the only thing the White House has done recently.

Just last week the EPA capitulated to every special interest. The agency announced that any company it regulates is excused from any penalty for the duration of the pandemic — if it can demonstrate that its violation of rules was related to the crisis.

So with this logic, if someone robs a grocery store and says it’s because of the pandemic, the cops should not arrest them, at least for the duration of the crisis. Ditto for murder, particularly if one spouse, cooped up in the house with his or her partner, can offer the COVID-19 excuse.

“Allowing a company to postpone the repair of equipment that leaks toxic gases into the atmosphere, as API [the American Petroleum Institute] has suggested, leaves the public exposed to those pollutants for longer periods of time, increases the risk of fire and explosion, and is not just a paperwork concern.”

This new policy is particularly good news for oil and gas companies, in trouble for not complying with air and water pollution regulations, consent decrees at their refineries, unsafe disposal of fracking waste, and emission reporting requirements.

It might seem reasonable to give companies a break on some reporting requirements, given the disruptions the pandemic has caused, but this blanket relaxation of enforcement of environmental regulations has much more serious consequences. Without oversight or the threat of penalties, companies could easily expose thousands of people near polluting operations to much higher levels of toxic chemicals. In a letter to the EPA, dozens of environmental groups charged that the “suspension of monitoring and reporting requirements would have a very specific impact on public health and safety.

“Allowing a company to postpone the repair of equipment that leaks toxic gases into the atmosphere, as API [the American Petroleum Institute] has suggested, leaves the public exposed to those pollutants for longer periods of time, increases the risk of fire and explosion, and is not just a paperwork concern,” the groups said.

The environmentalists pointed out that just one example — allowing oil refineries to ignore the rule to monitor the amount of benzene they emit — can expose nearby communities to this “deadly pollutant.”

But of course, the Trump White House is not content to roll back rules, the administration also is seeing to it that future rules will be dumber, because they’ll be informed by less scientific data.

Remember that study of millions of veterans and deaths related to pollution? It found not only an estimated 200,000 pollution-related deaths, it also tracked pollution’s impacts on kidney disease, hypertension, and dementia.

If the Trump White House has its way, this study will not be able to guide the EPA in the future. The EPA’s proposed “secret science” rule directs the agency to rely almost exclusively on studies whose underlying data is not fully disclosable to the public. Public health studies, like the one that estimates the health impacts of air pollution, cannot be disclosed because of federal rules protecting the privacy of individual patients.

I don’t know about you, but as a member of the public, I have not been clamoring to see the “raw data” that underlies massive epidemiological studies, sometimes involving millions of health records. The EPA’s claim that this is all about transparency is disingenuous, especially for an agency that so churlishly responds to requests for other more useful public records. Just last year, the agency tried to do an end run around its rulemaking process to make it easier for political appointees to control access to documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

Maybe the Trump White House and all its political operatives might want to practice more “social distancing” and keep their mitts off federal agencies, at least until we’ve escaped the coronavirus, a risk to health almost as damaging as their bad policies. 

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The cartoon above was created by DonkeyHotey for WhoWhatWhy from these images: Donald Trump caricature (DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), body (The White House / Flickr), White House lawn (Obama White House / Flickr), boxes (Pexels), EPA Logo (EPA / Wikimedia), and lighter fluid (Bonnie Pierce / Flickr).

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Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy The White House / Flickr.

Off the Top of My Head

One of the Reasons Ventilators Weren't Available: They're Not Manufactured in the U.S.

by John Lawrence. April 6, 2020

The two major manufacturers of ventilators Medtronic and Hamilton Medical have their manufacturing facilities in Galway, Ireland and the idyllic Swiss Alps town of Bonaduz, respectively. In addition to the US, 100 other countries have placed orders with them. If the US had in country manufacturing capabilities, these could have been ramped up instead of asking GM and Ford, which know nothing about ventilators, manufacture them. As it is the US has to compete with hundreds of other countries for critical products.

Finally, President Trump is getting around to talking about infrastructure. Is that going to be included in the next round of stimulus? Worud't be a bad idea. The US is far behind many other countries in terms of infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the US a D+ grade in infrastructure. Meanwhile, China is not only building infrastructure in its own country. It is building infrastructure all over the world. The US has cautioned other countries not to cooperate with China in this initiative, but its allure is too great. The latest country to sign up with China is Italy. China is making friends and influencing people.

The Atlantic reported:

All these geopolitical complexities are tied up in this week’s [April 2019] Belt and Road Forum. The initiative, also known as One Belt, One Road, is the brainchild of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and aims to build railways, port facilities, power systems, and other infrastructure across the globe. Xi has sold it all as a model of peaceful development. “We should foster a new type of international relations featuring win-win cooperation,” he once said when discussing the initiative. Washington has painted a very different picture, of a self-serving scheme designed to extend Chinese strategic and economic influence. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently charged that the Belt and Road plan was “a non-economic offer,” and said Washington was “working diligently to make sure everyone in the world understands that threat.”

Of course China is extending its influence to other countries. It is offering other countries goodies whereas all the US is offering is military protection. However, the rest of the world does not see things in terms of a bipolar world of "us vs them" any more. Trade is too interconnected. Even the US which tries to downgrade China has most US manufacturing done there. If the US was really worried about its security vis a vis China, why would it let its manufacturing companies manufacture critical items there? Most of the ingredients for pharmaceuticals that Americans ingest are manufactured in China where the FDA can't even guarantee their purity. Recently, Zantac was taken off the market due to the fact that it contained contaminants.

The lousy state of US infrastructure is one reason global manufacturing corporations don't want to locate in the US. If the US wants companies to manufacture here, it needs to upgrade its infrastructure instead of discouraging other countries not to cooperate with China in upgrading theirs. The Trump administration has done its best to demonize Huawei, the Chinese company that is rolling out 5G. It has even told its European allies not to buy Huawei products, but they are buying them anyway. However, this did not stop the UK in January from approving limited use of Huawei’s gear in its forthcoming 5G networks. This move may portend well for Huawei in Europe, its second-most lucrative market after China, if the rest of Europe follows the UK’s lead. If so, it's sour grapes for the US which has done everything it can to stand in the way of this technology giant.

Off the Top of My Head

What About the 150 Million Workers Who Love Their Employer Provided Health Care?

by John Lawrence, April 5, 2020

This is what you heard Pete Buttagieg and Amy Klubuchar say in response to Bernie's Medicare for All proposal. Well, what are they saying now that a lot of those 150 million have lost their jobs AND their health care? You get employer provided health care as long as you're employed. Once you're not, forget it. All of a sudden Medicare for All looks a lot better. The coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic collapse could cause a staggering 35 million people in the US to lose their employer-sponsored health insurance over the next several months, with lower-income Americans bearing the brunt of the damage. Now is the time to get behind Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All initiative. Is it really about more "choice" vs a Medicare for All system. How many of those with employer based health care really love their health insurance now that they can lose it any day when their employer decides to lay them off. And besides they are still paying a ridiculous amount for premiums, co-pays, deductibles and out of network expenses despite the fact that their employer is paying part of the premiums.

With one system that is not employer based everyone is covered pandemic or no pandemic. "Good-quality health care should not be tied to your job," tweeted Sen. Bernie Sanders. "At a minimum, the government must ensure health care for all, without cost, for the duration of this crisis." The pandemic has really brought out the flaws in the employer based system. Joe Biden still doesn't like Medicare for All. “What we should be doing is having the Affordable Care Act, add the public option for those who want it, meaning Medicare if that’s what they want rather than keep their own health insurance policies,” he said. Probably most would opt for the public option now especially those who have lost their employer based health care. However, a new poll shows that support for Medicare for All is surging. The survey, conducted by Morning Consult and Politico from March 27 to 29, showed that 55 percent of voters back the Vermont senator's proposal for a single-payer universal health care system. That's the highest level seen by Morning Consult since June 2019, and nearly equal to the record high of 56 percent support reported back in January 2019. "Our health care system should be about protecting lives, not making huge profits for corporations," Sanders tweeted.

Trump is still trying to get rid of Obamacare. Some experts have said that the best solution for those that have lost their health insurance is to open back up the enrollment period for Obamacare, but Trump will not have any of that. Instead he says that those who require hospital treatment because of COVID-19 will not have to pay. He has restarted a lawsuit against Obamacare arguing in court that it is unconstitutional. “The one lasting effect of the repeal and replace debate is that the ACA is actually more popular than ever. That will make it harder to talk about repealing and replacing it,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “The repeal and replace debate in 2017 did the one thing that seemed impossible: which was to make the ACA popular.”

Medicare for Each of Us in the Age of the Coronavirus

Published on

Friday, April 03, 2020

by

Common Dreams

The U.S. public—and increasingly the business community—are becoming acutely aware of the rising costs and inadequacies of our current for-profit system, particularly as the current epidemic unfolds. There is no other choice but Medicare for All.

 

by 

Peter S. Arno, Philip Caper

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"The corporatization of medical care," writes the authors, "may be the single most distinguishing characteristic of the modern US health care system and the one that has had the most profound impact on it since the early 1980s." (Photo: Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Over the past two weeks, the explosive growth of the coronavirus pandemic has forced nearly 10 million Americans to file for unemployment benefits. Along with their jobs, many have lost their health insurance, if they had any to begin with. Aside from possibly spelling disaster for these newly unemployed workers and their families, this situation puts both the public health and economic wellbeing of our country at great risk. A clearer rationale for universal, affordable, lifetime health coverage as exemplified under a Medicare For All framework would be hard to find.

In this article we outline the need for a universal health plan, its historical context, and the obstacles raised by the medical-industrial complex that must be overcome.

There is a large elephant in the room in the national discussion of Medicare for All: the transformation of the US health care system’s core mission from the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of illness—and the promotion of healing—to an approach dominated by large, publicly traded corporate entities dedicated to growing profitability and share price, that is, the business of medicine.

The problem is not that these corporate entities are doing something they shouldn’t. They are simply doing too much of what they were created to do—generate wealth for their owners. Unlike any other wealthy country, we let them do it. The dilemma of the US health care system is due not to a failure of capitalism or corporatism per se, but a failure to implement a public policy that adequately constrains their excesses. 

"How is it that we spend more on health care than any other nation, yet have arrived at such a sorry state of affairs?"

Since the late 1970s, US public policy regarding health care has trended toward an increasing dependence on for-pofit corporations and their accompanying reliance on the tools of the marketplace—such as competition, consolidation, marketing, and consumer choice—to expand access and assure quality in the provision of medical care.

This commercialized, commodified, and corporatized model is driving the US public’s demand for fundamental reform and has elevated the issue of health care to the top of the political agenda in the current presidential election campaign.

Costs have risen relentlessly, and the quality of and access to care for many Americans has deteriorated. The cultural changes accompanying these trends have affected every segment of the US health care system, including those that remain nominally not-for-profit. Excessive focus on health care as a business has had a destructive effect on both patients and caregivers, leading to increasing difficulties for many patients in accessing care and to anger, frustration, and burnout for many caregivers, especially those attempting to provide critical primary care.

As a result, the ranks of primary care providers have eroded, and that erosion continues. One of the major reasons for burnout in this group is the clash between its members’ professional ethics (put the patient first and “first do no harm”) and the profit-oriented demands of their corporate employers. Applying Band-Aids can’t cure the underlying causes of disease in medicine or public policy. Ignoring the underlying pathology in public policy, as in clinical medicine, is destined to fail.

Many of the symptoms of our dysfunctional health care system are not in dispute:

• We pay more than twice as much per person on total health care spending and on prescription drugs in comparison to other developed countries. This spending totals nearly 18 percent of our economy
• Between 2008 and 2018, premiums for employer-sponsored insurance plans increased 55 percent, twice as fast as workers’ earnings (26 percent). Over the same time period, the average health insurance deductible for covered workers increased by 212 percent
• An average employer-sponsored family health insurance policy now exceeds $28,000 per year, with employers paying about $16,000 and employees paying about $12,000
• Almost half (45 percent) of US adults ages 19 to 64, or more than 88 million people, were inadequately insured over the past year (either they were uninsured, had a gap in coverage, or were underinsured; that is, they had insurance all year but their out-of-pocket costs were so high that they frequently did not receive the care they needed).
• Compared to other developed countries, the US ranks near the bottom on a variety of health indicators including infant mortality, life expectancy, and preventable mortality.

We must therefore ask: How is it that we spend more on health care than any other nation, yet have arrived at such a sorry state of affairs?  

"The theology of the market and the strongly held—but mistaken—belief that the problems of US health care can be solved if only the market could be perfected have effectively obstructed the development of a rational, efficient, and humane national health care policy."The answer is that only in the United States has corporatism engulfed so much of medical care and come so close to dominating the doctor-patient relationship. Publicly traded, profit-driven entities—under constant pressure from Wall Street—control the financing and delivery of medical care in the US to an extent seen nowhere else in the world. For instance, seven investor-owned publicly traded health insurers now control almost a trillion dollars ($913 billion) of total national health care spending and cover half the US population. In 2019, their revenue increased by 31 percent, while their profits grew by 66 percent.

The corporatization of medical care may be the single most distinguishing characteristic of the modern US health care system and the one that has had the most profound impact on it since the early 1980s. The theology of the market and the strongly held—but mistaken—belief that the problems of US health care can be solved if only the market could be perfected have effectively obstructed the development of a rational, efficient, and humane national health care policy. 

There are three main reasons to pursue a public policy that embraces genuine health care reform:

1. Saving lives: To simplify our complex and confusing health care system while providing universal affordable health care coverage;
2. Affordability: To rein in the relentless rise in health care costs that are cannibalizing private and public budgets; and
3. Improving quality: To eliminate profitability and share price as the dominant and all-consuming mission of the entities that provide health care services and products when that mission influences clinical decision making. Profitability should be the servant of any health care system’s mission, not its master as seems to be increasingly the case in the US.

What Is The Best Approach To Reform? 

It is not an exaggeration to say that no reform other than publicly financed, single-payer universal health care will solve the problems of our health care system. This is true whether we are talking about a public option, a Medicare option, Medicare buy-in, Medicare extra, or any other half-measure. The main reason is because of the savings that are inherent only in a truly universal single-payer plan. Specifically, the administrative and bureaucratic savings gained by eliminating private insurers are the largest potential source of savings in a universal single-payer framework, yet all the “option” reforms listed above leave largely intact the tangle of wasteful, inefficient, and costly private commercial health insurers. The second largest source of savings comes through reducing the cost of prescription drugs by using the negotiating leverage of the federal government to bring down prices, as is done in most other developed countries. The ability, will, and policy tools (such as global budgeting) to restrain these and other costs in a single-payer framework are the key to reining in the relentless rise in health care expenditures and providing universal coverage. 

"The real struggle for a universal single-payer system in the US is not technical or economic but almost entirely political."The various “option” reform proposals will not simplify our confusing health care system nor will they lead to universal coverage. None have adequate means to restrain health care costs. So why go down this road? Is it too difficult for the US to guarantee everyone access to affordable care when every other developed country in the world has done so?

The stated reason put forth in favor of these mixed option approaches is that Americans want “choice.” But choice of what? We know with certainty from former insurance company executives such as Wendell Potter that the false “choice” meme polls well with the US public and was used to undermine the Clinton reform efforts more than 25 years ago. It is being widely used today to manipulate public opinion. 

But choice in our current system is largely an illusion. In 2019, 67.8 million workers across the country separated from their job at some point during the year—either through layoffs, terminations, or switching jobs. This labor turnover data leaves little doubt that people with employer-sponsored insurance are losing their insurance constantly, as are their spouses and children. And even for those who stay at the same job, insurance coverage often changes. In 2019, more than half of all firms offering health benefits reported shopping for a new health plan and, among those, nearly 20 percent actually changed insurance carriers. Trading off choice of doctors or hospitals for choice of insurance companies is a bad bargain.

The other major objection to a universal single-payer program is cost. Yet, public financing for health care is not a matter of raising new money for health care but of reducing total health care outlays and distributing payments more equitably and efficiently. Nearly every credible study concludes that a single-payer universal framework, with all its increased benefits, would be less costly than the status quo, more effective in restraining future cost increases, and more popular with the public—as 50 years of experience with Medicare has demonstrated. 

The status quo generates hundreds of billions of dollars in surplus and profits to private stakeholders, who need only spend a small portion (millions of dollars) to influence legislators, manipulate public opinion, distort the facts, and obfuscate the issues with multiple competing reform efforts. 

Conclusion

The real struggle for a universal single-payer system in the US is not technical or economic but almost entirely political. Retaining the status quo (for example, the Affordable Care Act) is the least disruptive course for the existing medical-industrial complex, and therefore the politically easiest route. Unfortunately, the status quo is disruptive to the lives of most Americans and the least effective route in attacking the underlying pathology of the US health care system—corporatism run amok. Following that route will do little more than kick the can down the road, which will require repeatedly revisiting the deficiencies in our health care system outlined above until we get it right. 

The US public and increasingly the business community are becoming acutely aware of the rising costs and inadequacies of our current system, particularly as the current epidemic unfolds. It is the growing social movement, which rejects the false and misleading narratives, that will lead us to a universal single-payer system—truly the most effective way to reform our health care system for the benefit of the American people.

Peter S. Arno, PhD. is an economist and senior fellow and director of health policy research at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and a senior fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Philip Caper  is a physician and founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and currently serves on the Board of Maine AllCare.

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'Abolish For-Profit Health Insurance': Analysis Warns Companies Could Hike Premiums by 40% Amid Pandemic

Published on Monday, March 30, 2020

by Common Dreams

"Corporate-run health insurance isn't about saving lives. It's about making as much money as possible. With Medicare for All we can finally put an end to this international disgrace," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

26 Comments

Staff and volunteers with Project C.U.R.E hold a drive outside the United Center to collect donations of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from the community which will be used to supply hospitals and clinics that are experiencing shortages due to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 29, 2020 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

A new analysis warning that U.S. health insurance companies could hike already exorbitant premiums by 40 percent or more next year amid the coronavirus pandemic was received by Medicare for All advocates as further confirmation that America's healthcare system—driven first and foremost by the profit motive—is ill-equipped to provide necessary care for all, particularly in a time of nationwide crisis.

The research conducted by Covered California, the state insurance marketplace created under the Affordable Care Act, found (pdf) that "if carriers must recoup 2020 costs, price for the same level of costs next year, and protect their solvency, 2021 premium increases to individuals and employers from COVID-19 alone could range from 4 percent to more than 40 percent."

"They're doing healthcare to make money, not to take care of people."
—Dr. Judd Hollander, Thomas Jefferson University

The health and economic impacts of the coronavirus outbreak are "potentially staggering," the analysis states, and could result in even more "consumers and employers no longer being able to afford coverage, leading to employer groups dropping coverage or individuals deciding to go uninsured."

More than 80 million people in the U.S. are currently uninsured or underinsured, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and millions more are losing their employer-provided insurance as the jobless rate spikes due to the coronavirus crisis.

"The impact of COVID-19 will be significant, and... absent federal action, consumers, employers, and our entire healthcare system may be facing unforeseen costs that could exceed $251 billion," Peter V. Lee, executive director of Covered California said in a statement. "Consumers will feel these costs through higher out-of-pocket expenses and premiums, as well as the potential of employers dropping coverage or shifting more costs to employees."

"These increased costs could mean that many of the 170 million Americans in the commercial market may lose their coverage and go without needed care as we battle a global health crisis," Lee added. "These are not 'insurer' costs—these are costs directly borne by individual Americans."

Abolish for-profit health insurance. https://t.co/c95gYxyc1T

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) March 29, 2020

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose Medicare for All proposal would virtually eliminate private insurance in the U.S., tweeted in response to the Covered California study that "America's for-profit insurance industry is not compatible with healthcare as a human right."

"Now is not the time for greed," said Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. "Now is the time for Medicare for All."

Corporate-run health insurance isn't about saving lives. It's about making as much money as possible. With Medicare for All we can finally put an end to this international disgrace. https://t.co/sZrb6FcUPz

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 29, 2020

The new research comes as the coronavirus crisis continues to expose systemic flaws in America's fragmented and dysfunctional healthcare system. The Guardian reported last Thursday that as the virus has spread rapidly across the U.S., "private health insurance companies have lagged behind: making incremental changes to plans even as health providers seek to change course."

"They're doing healthcare to make money, not to take care of people," Dr. Judd Hollander, emergency medicine physician and associate dean at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, told The Guardian.

Last week, a 17-year-old boy in Los Angeles County died from complications believed to have been caused by COVID-19 after he was denied treatment at an urgent care center. The reason: he was uninsured.

"He didn't have insurance, so they did not treat him," said R. Rex Parris, the mayor of Lancaster, California.

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Is Wall Street Killing Grandma?

Published on Saturday, March 28, 2020

by Common Dreams

As we scramble to locate hospital beds and life-saving equipment during this pandemic, remember that we are fighting two diseases.

by Les Leopold

 

21 Comments

 "Lean and mean may be good for profits but not for Grandma," the author writes. (Photo: Joseph Prezioso / AFP via Getty Images)

If you or your loved ones become seriously ill during this pandemic crisis, either with Covid-19 or for any other reason, there may not be a hospital bed or life-saving equipment available for you. How can that be given that we spend twice as much on health care than any other country on Earth?

Maybe that’s just the way things go when a massive unexpected healthcare problem strikes. Yes, surely the government could have been better prepared by stockpiling more personal protective equipment and ventilators, given the pandemic guidance they received 15 years ago. But is it really possible for hospitals to have enough beds and costly equipment in times of crisis?  

The fact is that between 1980 and today, 400,000 hospital beds have vanished from our system while Wall Street financed a bonanza of hospital mergers and acquisitions. Given population growth of 100 million over this period, this means that the number of hospital beds per 100,000 people in the US has fallen by more than half. In 1980 there was 595 hospital bed for every 100,000 people. Today there’s only 281 per 100,000.  

Certainly some of those beds were removed because of changes in medical care. New surgical techniques have emerged that require shorter hospital stays. There also are more outpatient options today, and Medicare has changed its hospital reimbursement policies that have impacted the number of hospital beds. But entire hospitals have disappeared. In 1980 there were 3 hospitals per 100,000 people in the U.S. -- in 2019, only 1.9.  (For sources see here and here.)

 

But aren’t mergers supposed to improve care through technological efficiencies and the sharing of medical know-how? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (January 2, 2020) found that “Hospital acquisition by another hospital or hospital system was associated with modestly worse patient experiences and no significant changes in readmission or mortality rates.“ Too bad for us.

Hospitals have not gotten better because that is not the point of all these Wall Street-driven mergers. The real and ever present goal is to extract as much wealth as possible from the hospital system to enrich big investors and CEOs. The extraction takes the form of ever rising executive compensation and ubiquitous stock buybacks. Hospitals are increasingly designed to make the rich richer, not to provide high quality health care to the rest of us.

The top seven hospital chains have amassed nearly a trillion dollars in sales over the past decade with more than $35 billion in net profits.  Where does all that profit come from? From merging hospitals and cutting “excess” bed capacity and staffing to the bone.

Largest Hospital For-Profit Corporations	Sales ($billions)	Profits  ($billions)	Stock Buybacks 2010-19 ($billions)	CEO Compensation
HCA HEALTHCARE INC	$387	$23.2	$13.5	$20,100,000
COMMUNITY HEALTH SYSTEMS INC	$152	-$4.5	$0.4	$7,024,719
TENET HEALTHCARE CORP	$149	$0.2	$0.9	$15,000,000
DAVITA INC	$108	$6.1	$6.9	$32,000,000
UNIVERSAL HEALTH SVCS INC	$87	$5.9	$2.3	$23,588,883
SELECT MEDICAL HOLDINGS CORP	$37	$1.3	$0.4	$8,201,031
ENCOMPASS HEALTH CORP	$30	$3.0	$0.5	$6,388,227
TOTALS, SEVEN HOSPITAL CHAINS	$951	$35.2	$24.9	$112,302,860

Stock Buybacks

In addition to high CEO salaries, private hospital corporations use stock buybacks to enrich themselves at the expense of hospital staffing, beds, and equipment.  By using the company’s funds to buy shares in the open market, the price of those shares rises thereby enriching Wall Street investors and the CEOs who receive most of their compensation in stock options and grants. Just these seven companies squeezed nearly $25 billion from the hospitals over the past decade to pay for those stock buybacks. 

A Wall Street Grab for Hospital Real Estate

In addition to stock buybacks, there is wealth to be extracted from the real estate under hospitals. Here’s one current example in Philadelphia:

• Wall Street investor Joel Freedman bought Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia, a safety-net hospital with 400 beds and an E.R. that saw 40,000 patients a year. Two-thirds of patients admitted were Black or Latinx.
• Freedman “had scant experience in day-to-day hospital management and displayed little patience with the executives he brought in to run the two hospitals.” He made no major capital investments to improve the hospital.
• Less than 18 months after buying it, Freedman declared bankruptcy and shut down the hospital. 

Valuable Real Estate Kept Out of Bankruptcy

• Usually with a bankruptcy, all assets—land, buildings, equipment, etc.—are sold to meet financial obligations. 
• Hahnemann Hospital sat on valuable real estate in a gentrifying area of the city and Freedman managed to keep the land out of the bankruptcy—leaving him free to sell the land to the highest bidder.

Many believe that Freedman never seriously tried to save the hospital.  According to the WHYY story, Eileen Applebaum, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said “she is worried that a separate sale of the Hahnemann property to a developer will lay a road map for private equity firms around the country:  Buy older hospitals in areas that are gentrifying, separate the hospital from its real estate, let the hospitals go downhill, and then sell the real estate to the developers.” 

So as we scramble to locate hospital beds and life-saving equipment during this pandemic, remember that we are fighting two diseases.  The first is the pandemic that feasts on our bodies. The second is Wall Street that feasts on our health care system. Lean and mean may be good for profits but not for Grandma.

Les Leopold, the director of the Labor Institute in New York is working with unions, worker centers and community organization to build a national economics educational campaign. His latest book, Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice (Oct 2015), is a text for that effort. All proceeds go to support this educational campaign. (Please like the Runaway Inequality page on Facebook.) His previous book is The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green/2009).

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Off the Top of My Head

China and India Now Manufacture About 80% of the Drugs Consumed in the U.S.

by John Lawrence, March 29, 2020

The US doesn't even manufacture vital drugs like antibiotics anymore, with the last penicillin factory closing in 2004. But who can blame the drug manufacturers? They're in it for the money. Drugs that you use once or twice and then you're cured are unprofitable. They only manufacture drugs that need to be taken once a day every day for life like high blood pressure and diabetes medicine, and then they outsource the manufacture of those drugs to China because that's the most profitable way to do it. FDA inspectors are unable or unwilling to provide appropriate oversight of Chinese manufacturing. In contrast to the robust testing required for approval for new prescription drugs, the FDA only requires that generic manufacturers prove that patients will absorb drugs at the same rate as the brand-name medications they copy.

But who needs robust drug testing anyway? Ronald Reagan said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." So who needs the government's help to test drugs? Who needs government's help in a pandemic? Let's get government off our back and let'er rip. And what we surely don't need is government getting into the business of manufacturing drugs themselves and competing with the private sector. That would be socialism!

Many of the generic drugs imported from China are contaminated. So? Caveat Emptor! China is our great friend when it comes to trusting life saving drugs manufactured there, but our enemy when it comes to government sanctioning and disapprobation. We hate their form of government, but we love that we get Chinese laborers to work for a fraction of what Americans make. China and India are now restricting the export of some drugs and medical equipment. That means that Americans will not have the medical equipment and drugs they need due to export restrictions from countries that have a domestic need for those products. They will come first. The US will be last, but that's capitalism!

Big pharma continues to walk away from investment in new antibiotics and there are alarmingly few useful new drugs in the pipeline to deal with the worsening crisis of antibiotic resistance, according to the World Health Organization. So the US has to depend on another country for most of its pharmaceutical needs while at the same time the President is saying negative things about that country. According to him they are not our ally. Not our ally but we're depending on them for life saving medicines ? Does this make any sense? Of course it makes sense because it maximizes profits for private enterprise.

The US wants to have it both ways. They want to say negative things about the Chinese government while at the same time being almost totally dependent on that country for critical medical products as well as tons of other products. It's all about the fact that American corporations want to take advantage of cheap Chinese labor while at the same time the US government feels free to chastise China. The big pharmaceutical companies are not investing in antibiotic research because it is not a lucrative market for them. And BIG Pharma has successfully gotten government off its back because they made sure that in the Obamacare bill, Medicare could not negotiate with the drug companies for cheaper prescription drugs for old people. Score one for the free market! The law states that the secretary of Health and Human Services “may not interfere” in negotiations between pharmaceutical companies and prescription drug insurance plan providers.

At the same time there is much military swagger on the part of the US. China better watch itself in the South China Sea or we will send our mighty aircraft carriers there. "The head of the U.S. Navy warned China that hostile behavior from its coast guard and fishing boats will not be treated any differently from the Chinese navy, the Financial Times reported on Sunday." But what good is the military going to do if the whole world is at the mercy of a virus or a bacteria, if the whole world is brought to its knees except the countries who have invested in the manufacturing of their own critically needed products? Are we going to invade China and demand that they give us the medicine? Yes, we will send our military to make sure that China does not control the South China Sea, but then get down on our hands and knees to beg China to send us critical medicines that are manufactured there. The whole foreign policy regarding China is absolutely nuts.

Agribusiness continues to use antibiotics in animal feed not for the treatment or prevention of disease, but to make them attain higher marketable weights in the quickest possible time. This make more profit for the meat growers and slaughterers. At the same time it decreases the medicinal benefits of antibiotics in humans because the bacteria mutate at a faster rate. Therefore, new antibiotics must be developed, but they aren't being developed. The lucrative drugs are the ones that must be taken every day for life not the ones that, once they have cured a disease, are no longer needed. But we don't want to regulate Agribusiness, do we? We want fewer government regulations because we want to get government off our backs or at least off the backs of private enterprise so they can maximize profits.

For the US to be secure against disease the Federal government must develop the drugs and antibiotics that the pharmaceutical corporations are not developing because they are unprofitable. We can't totally rely on the private sector because the private sector is only in it for the money not for the health of the nation. In a pandemic Reagan's words, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" are not the most terrifying words in the English language. They're the most reassuring words.

Off the Top of My Head

Maybe the Shut Down of Non-Essential Businesses Should Be Made Permanent

by John Lawrence, March 27, 2020

As long as we have electricity, the internet, clean water, waste water disposal, full grocery markets, pharmacies, excellent health care, gas stations, trash collection and other essential businesses, perhaps the shut down of non-essential businesses is a good thing. Already it has cleaned up the environment and significantly reduced the emission of greenhouse gasses. What about all those unemployed people, you say? Put them to work in the Green New Deal building and repairing infrastructure throughout the country. If this COVID-19 thing lasts till January 20, 2021, I'm hoping President Joe Biden will do just that. And we should help build essential businesses in other parts of the world instead of engaging in military adventurism. Billions of people don't even have clean water, adequate sanitation, the internet, full grocery markets and other essential businesses.

Once these essential needs are taken care of for the entire world's population in such a way that GHG emissions are reduced to zero, then maybe some non-essential businesses could be reestablished. The pandemic goes to show that much of the US economy is based on non-essential businesses and the provision of non-essential goods and services. In fact not only are many of them non-essential, they are downright deleterious. Consider the gambling industry: downright deleterious. The movie and TV industry: about 70% deleterious. The fast food industry: 90% deleterious creating obesity and diabetes. Why isn't the school system educating people about nutrition? Many people have essentially a fast food diet. The food is cheap and ubiquitous, and people don't have time to create nutritious meals any more the way Moms used to when they didn't have to work to pay the mortgage and car payments.

The American way of life including may non-essential businesses is sickness producing. The profit oriented health care industry makes money off of sick people, not keeping people healthy. If everyone were healthy or were encouraged to lead healthy lifestyles, there would be far less sickness. But the stress induced by both spouses having to work leads to unhealthy lifestyles. Some families need 2 or 3 jobs just to make ends meet. The children are also subjected to a competitively oriented style of learning in which they are forced to compete with other children to get good grades so they can get into the best colleges. Instead maybe they should be encouraged to think in terms of what they want to do in their lives which would be a service to society in addition to affording a comfortable living for themselves.

More businesses considered to be non-essential:

Theaters, Salons and Spas, Racetracks, Shopping malls, Bowling alleys, Sporting and Concert Venues, Liquor stores, Bars, Cruises, Golf Courses, Resorts, Hair and Nail Salons.

Highly polluting industries and activities which are non-essential:

Most airline travel, the cruise industry, the travel and tourism industry, most automobile travel (use mass transit instead), most of the trucking industry (use rail instead), the beef industry, the hog industry, agribusiness (encourage small organic farms instead), most military and military-industrial complex, the plastic industry, the fossil fuel industry.

In Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How. Mark Lawrence Schrad writes:

America has long equated patriotism with the armed forces. But you can’t shoot a virus. Those on the frontlines against coronavirus aren’t conscripts, mercenaries or enlisted men; they are our doctors, nurses, pharmacists, teachers, caregivers, store clerks, utility workers, small-business owners and employees. Like Li Wenliang and the doctors of Wuhan, many are suddenly saddled with unfathomable tasks, compounded by an increased risk of contamination and death they never signed up for.

When all is said and done, perhaps we will recognize their sacrifice as true patriotism, saluting our doctors and nurses, genuflecting and saying, “Thank you for your service,” as we now do for military veterans. We will give them guaranteed health benefits and corporate discounts, and build statues and have holidays for this new class of people who sacrifice their health and their lives for ours. Perhaps, too, we will finally start to understand patriotism more as cultivating the health and life of your community, rather than blowing up someone else’s community. Maybe the de-militarization of American patriotism and love of community will be one of the benefits to come out of this whole awful mess.

The same sentiments hold true for teachers and other caregivers. People that take care of people and encourage people to have better lives are the true heroes. The Peace Corps and AmeriCorps should be the preeminent national services not the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines. We need to spread good will in the world by spades instead of bullying the rest of the world with US sanctions. We should develop the equivalent of China's Belt and Road initiative and start building clean water plants, sanitation plants, industries which decrease pollution and plastic trash in the ocean. We need to clean the environment around the world not contribute to dirtying it. We need to help bring home all the refugees in refugee camps and guarantee the safety and security of Latin Americans so they don't become migrants and refugees.

Off the Top of My Head

Dumb Move: Trump Closed the Pandemic Office in 2018

by John Lawrence, April 26, 2020

The Idiot-in-Chief has done a lot of dumb things, but closing the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense takes the cake. In addition he has attempted to cut the budget of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) each year for the last 3 years only to be prevented from doing that by Democrats in Congress. Perhaps COVID-19 is divine retribution for a man who has been so focused on basing his reelection on the economy that he has abandoned every other principle of government. I'm sure Dante would have an appropriate place in Hell for him. The experts tell us that this pandemic will last well into the campaign season for the 2020 election, but Trump keeps talking about getting back to normal in a few weeks. Ironically, if he hadn't done away with the NSC Global Health Security Office, we might have had a better handle on the virus. But now, thanks to Trump, the US is the epicenter of the pandemic. It makes a travesty out of "America First."

AP News reported:

Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.

“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed Friday in The Washington Post.

She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”

Now Trump wants to "get back to normal" by Easter. Imagine the churches packed with worshippers! They better stay home and utter a prayer for him. Dr. Fauci says that the deadline of Easter for reopening the economy is "aspirational" which is a euphemism for "this is the dumbest thing we ever heard of." It's clear that during the campaign season the economy will be in the tank and Trump is going down. He totally deserves it for the way he hasn't risen to the occasion of the pandemic. He continues to put his own self-interest above the welfare of the rest of the country. It should be obvious to most people by now. He has behaved abominably his whole Presidency, but this pandemic is bringing out the worst in him.

Trump: "Governor Cuomo and others that say, you know, we want 30,000 of them [ventilators]. 30,000! Think of this. You know, you go to hospitals, they'll have one in a hospital." Yes, and think of this. you can't see anything coming out of a tailpipe of a car. Why we've been driving cars for 100 years, and nothing bad has happened. Greenhouse Gasses? We never had greenhouse gasses in New York City. We have the subway. The people ride in a hole in the ground. Think of that!

If the coronavirus pandemic accomplishes nothing else, it will be the end of Trump, thankfully. The Democrats could run Winnie the Pooh and Trump would lose. The American people may be dumb, but they're not that dumb. His response to the pandemic has shown on a daily basis what a deplorable, small minded nincompoop he is. All the people who voted for him must feel ridiculous. Well enough of that.

Let's move on to a more positive scenario, post-Trump and post COVID-19. The NSC office of Global Health will reopen; the CDC will be fully funded. The billionaire class will be heavily taxed including a wealth tax. So far the only wealth tax has affected the middle class - the property tax. It's time to tax billlionaire's wealth and put the money to good use rebuilding infrastructure and greening America and the world, ending endless wars, putting all the money going to the military-industrial complex to better use providing universal health care as a human right as Bernie says. Banning fracking. Building out renewable energy fueled power plants. Building a national power grid. High speed rail. Either we make this country a leader again or America will become a backwater and China will lead the world. Countries will emulate them instead of the antiquated US political and economic system.

Instead of making America great again, Trump has made America a basket case like it never was before. That's what happens when you elect an idiot as President.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

The coronavirus has starkly revealed what most of us already knew: The concentration of wealth in America has created a a health care system in which the wealthy can buy care others can’t. 

It’s also created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency,  and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail. 

Almost everyone else has been hurled into a dystopia of bureaucratic arbitrariness, corporate indifference, and the legal and financial sinkholes that have become hallmarks of modern American life.

The system is rigged. But we can fix it.

Today, the great divide in American politics isn’t between right and left. The underlying contest is between a small minority who have gained power over the system, and the vast majority who have little or none. 

Forget politics as you’ve come to see it – as contests between Democrats and Republicans. The real divide is between democracy and oligarchy.

The market has been organized to serve the wealthy. Since 1980, the percentage of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest four hundred Americans has quadrupled (from less than 1 percent to 3.5 percent) while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has dropped to 1.3 percent [Saez & Zucman]. 

The three wealthiest Americans own as much as the entire bottom half of the population. Big corporations, CEOs, and a handful of extremely rich people have vastly more influence on public policy than the average American. Wealth and power have become one and the same.

As the oligarchs tighten their hold over our system, they have lambasted efforts to rein in their greed as “socialism”, which, to them, means getting something for doing nothing.

But “getting something for doing nothing” seems to better describe the handouts being given to large corporations and their CEOs. General Motors, for example, has received $600 million in federal contracts and $500 million in tax breaks since Donald Trump took office. Much of this “corporate welfare” has gone to executives, including CEO Mary Barra, who raked in almost $22 million in compensation in 2018 alone. GM employees, on the other hand, have faced over 14,000 layoffs and the closing of three assembly plants and two component factories.

Our system, it turns out, does practice one form of socialism – socialism for the rich. Everyone else is subject to harsh capitalism.

Socialism for the rich means people at the top are not held accountable. Harsh capitalism for the many, means most Americans are at risk for events over which they have no control, and have no safety nets to catch them if they fall.

Among those who are particularly complicit in rigging the system are the CEOs of America’s corporate behemoths. 

Take Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, whose net worth is $1.4 billion. He comes as close as anyone to embodying the American system as it functions today.

Dimon describes himself as “a patriot before I’m the CEO of JPMorgan.”

He brags about the corporate philanthropy of his bank, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to his company’s net income, which in 2018 was $30.7 billion – roughly one hundred times the size of his company’s investment program for America’s poor cities. 

Much of JP Morgan’s income gain in 2018 came from savings from the giant Republican tax cut enacted at the end of 2017 – a tax cut that Dimon intensively lobbied Congress for.

Dimon doesn’t acknowledge the inconsistencies between his self-image as “patriot first” and his role as CEO of America’s largest bank.
He doesn’t understand how he has hijacked the system.

Perhaps he should read my new book.

To understand how the system has been hijacked, we must understand how it went from being accountable to all stakeholders – not just stockholders but also workers, consumers, and citizens in the communities where companies are headquartered and do business – to intensely shareholder-focused capitalism.

In the post-WWII era, American capitalism assumed that large corporations had responsibilities to all their stakeholders. CEOs of that era saw themselves as “corporate statesmen” responsible for the common good.

But by the 1980s, shareholder capitalism (which focuses on maximizing profits) replaced stakeholder capitalism. That was largely due to the corporate raiders – ultra-rich investors who hollowed-out once-thriving companies and left workers to fend for themselves.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, for example, targeted major companies like Texaco and Nabisco by acquiring enough shares of their stock to force major changes that increased their stock value – such as suppressing wages, fighting unions, laying off workers, abandoning communities for cheaper labor elsewhere, and taking on debt – and then selling his shares for a fat profit. In 1985, after winning control of Trans World Airlines, he loaded the airline with more than $500 million in debt, stripped it of its assets, and pocketed nearly $500 million in profits.

As a result of the hostile takeovers mounted by Icahn and other raiders, a wholly different understanding about the purpose of the corporation emerged.

Even the threat of hostile takeovers forced CEOs to fall in line by maximizing shareholder profits over all else. The corporate statesmen of previous decades became the corporate butchers of the 1980s and 1990s, whose nearly exclusive focus was to “cut out the fat” and make their companies “lean and mean.”

As power increased for the wealthy and large corporations at the top, it shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers. In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.4 percent of them are.

The wave of hostile takeovers pushed employers to raise profits and share prices by cutting payroll costs and crushing unions, which led to a redistribution of income and wealth from workers to the richest 1 percent. Corporations have fired workers who try to organize and have mounted campaigns against union votes. All the while, corporations have been relocating to states with few labor protections and so-called “right-to-work” laws that weaken workers’ ability to join unions.

Power is a zero-sum game. People gain it only when others lose it. The connection between the economy and power is critical. As power has concentrated in the hands of a few, those few have grabbed nearly all the economic gains for themselves.

The oligarchy has triumphed because no one has paid attention to the system as a whole – to the shifts from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, from strong unions to giant corporations with few labor protections, and from regulated to unchecked finance.

As power has shifted to large corporations, workers have been left to fend for themselves. Most Americans developed 3 key coping mechanisms to keep afloat.

The first mechanism was women entering the paid workforce. Starting in the late 1970s, women went into paid work in record numbers, in large part to prop up family incomes, as the wages of male workers stagnated or declined. Then, by the late 1990s, even two incomes wasn’t enough to keep many families above water, causing them to turn to the next coping mechanism: working longer hours. By the mid-2000s a growing number of people took on two or three jobs, often demanding 50 hours or more per week.

Once the second coping mechanism was exhausted, workers turned to their last option: drawing down savings and borrowing to the hilt. The only way Americans could keep consuming was to go deeper into debt. By 2007, household debt had exploded, with the typical American household oweing 138 percent of its after-tax income. Home mortgage debt soared as housing values continued to rise. Consumers refinanced their homes with even larger mortgages and used their homes as collateral for additional loans.

This last coping mechanism came to an abrupt end in 2008 when the debt bubbles burst, causing the financial crisis. Only then did Americans begin to realize what had happened to them, and to the system as a whole. That’s when our politics began to turn ugly.  

So what do we do about it?

The answer is found in politics and rooted in power.

The way to overcome oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and form a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor and middle-class Americans fighting for democracy.

This agenda is neither “right” nor “left.” It is the bedrock for everything America must do.

The oligarchy understands that a “divide-and-conquer” strategy gives them more room to get what they want without opposition. Lucky for them, Trump is a pro at pitting native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, white people against people of color. His goal is cynicism, disruption, and division. Trump and the oligarchy behind him have been able to rig the system and then whip around to complain loudly that the system is rigged.

But history shows that oligarchies cannot hold on to power forever. They are inherently unstable. When a vast majority of people come to view an oligarchy as illegitimate and an obstacle to their wellbeing, oligarchies become vulnerable.

As bad as it looks right now, the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We have before. We will again.

In order for real change to occur – in order to reverse the vicious cycle in which we now find ourselves – the locus of power in the system will have to change.

The challenge we face is large and complex, but we are well suited for the fight ahead.

Together, we will dismantle the oligarchy.

Together, we will fix the system.

Off the Top of My Head

Bernie Slammed for Saying Something Positive About Cuba. Now Cuban Doctors Are Going to Italy to Help With Coronavirus.

by John Lawrence

Something the main stream media won't report: Cuban doctors are being sent to Italy. Previously, they helped with the Ebola crisis in Africa. Regardless of their form of government, give credit where credit is due. Joe Biden and the media jumped all over Bernie for saying one good thing about Cuba.  Biden sought to contrast Sanders’ comments with former President Barack Obama, noting that Obama “did not in any way suggest that there was anything positive about the Cuban government.” No, nothing positive? Not increased literacy? Not better health care outcomes than the US? The conventional wisdom about Cuba is bullshit, and you can't acknowledge that they have done one good thing without being slammed? Give me a break. Italy has no such compunctions about Cuba. They requested that the Cuban doctors come to Lombardy. That tells you something about what the rest of the world thinks about Cuba's proficiency in medical care. The rest of the world isn't as ignorant as US politicians and media stalwarts like Anderson Cooper. The US needs to wake up and realize that the meme that Cuba is all bad is outdated and factually incorrect. It is the meme of an ignorant electorate - Democrats included!

Reuters reported:

The Caribbean island has sent its “armies of white robes” to disaster sites around the world largely in poor countries since its 1959 revolution. Its doctors were in the front lines in the fight against cholera in Haiti and against ebola in West Africa in the 2010s.

Yet with the 52-strong brigade, this is the first time Cuba has sent an emergency contingent to Italy, one of the world’s richest countries, demonstrating the reach of its medical diplomacy.

This is the sixth medical brigade Cuba has sent in recent days to combat the spread of the new disease abroad. It has sent contingents to socialist allies Venezuela and Nicaragua as well as Jamaica, Suriname and Grenada.

“We are all afraid but we have a revolutionary duty to fulfill, so we take our fear and put it to one side,” Leonardo Fernandez, 68, an intensive care specialist, told Reuters late on Saturday shortly before his brigade’s departure.

Even staunch US ally, Britain, thanked Cuba for allowing a British cruise ship that had been turned away by several Caribbean ports to dock on the island and for enabling the evacuation of the more than 600 passengers onboard. Yet the US continues to sanction Cuba forcing it to forego much needed pharmaceuticals and medical supplies. Despite more than half a century of a US economic embargo, Cuba’s average life expectancy is greater than that in the US. As of 2015 Cuban life expectancies of 79.5 years and infant mortality rates of 4.3 per 1000 live births were better than rich nations like the US (78.7 years and 5.7 per 1, 000 live births) yet its per capita income of $7602. makes it one of the poorest economies in the hemisphere (World Development Indicators DataBank, 2017).

As for literacy, the rate was 77% in 1959 before the revolution. Two years after the revolution it was 100%.

Cuba has better health care outcomes than the US despite every attempt by the US from embargoes to sanctions to destroy their economy. Perhaps the American people should wake up and listen to Bernie Sanders for a change. He knows a helluva lot more about Cuba than the ignorant Joe Biden and the other Democrats who have attacked him about his remarks about Cuba and Latin America in general. At least admit the undeniable truth no matter how much you dislike their form of government.

America Doesn’t Have a Public Health System

by Robert Reich

Monday, March 16, 2020

Dr. Anthony S Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and just about the only official in the Trump administration trusted to tell the truth about the coronavirus, said last Thursday: “The system does not, is not really geared to what we need right now … It is a failing, let’s admit it.”

While we’re at it, let’s admit something more basic. The system would be failing even under a halfway competent president. The dirty little secret, which will soon become apparent to all, is that there is no real public health system in the United States.

The ad hoc response fashioned late Friday by House Democrats and the White House may help a bit, although it’s skimpy, as I’ll explain.

As the coronavirus outbreak in the US follows the same grim exponential growth path first displayed in Wuhan, China, before herculean measures were put in place to slow its spread there, America is waking up to the fact that it has almost no public capacity to deal with it.

Instead of a public health system, we have a private for-profit system for individuals lucky enough to afford it and a rickety social insurance system for people fortunate enough to have a full-time job.

At their best, both systems respond to the needs of individuals rather than the needs of the public as a whole. In America, the word “public” – as in public health, public education or public welfare – means a sum total of individual needs, not the common good.

Contrast this with America’s financial system. The Federal Reserve concerns itself with the health of financial markets as a whole. Late last week the Fed made $1.5 trillion available to banks at the slightest hint of difficulties making trades. No one batted an eye.

When it comes to the health of the nation as a whole, money like this isn’t available. And there are no institutions analogous to the Fed with responsibility for overseeing and managing the public’s health – able to whip out a giant checkbook at a moment’s notice to prevent human, rather than financial, devastation.

Even if a test for the Covid-19 virus had been developed and approved in time, no institutions are in place to administer it to tens of millions of Americans free of charge. Local and state health departments are already barebones, having lost nearly a quarter of their workforce since 2008, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Healthcare in America is delivered mainly by private for-profit corporations which, unlike financial institutions, are not required to maintain reserve capacity. As a result, the nation’s supply of ventilators isn’t nearly large enough to care for projected numbers of critically ill coronavirus victims unable to breathe for themselves. Its 45,000 intensive care unit beds fall woefully short of the 2.9 million that are likely to be needed.

The Fed can close banks to quarantine financial crises but the US can’t close workplaces because the nation’s social insurance system depends on people going to work.

Almost 30% of American workers have no paid sick leave from their employers, including 70% of low-income workers earning less than $10.49 an hour. Vast numbers of self-employed workers cannot afford sick leave. Friday’s deal between House Democrats and the White House won’t have much effect because it exempts large employers and offers waivers to smaller ones.

Most jobless Americans don’t qualify for unemployment insurance because they haven’t worked long enough in a steady job, and the ad-hoc deal doesn’t alter this. Meanwhile, more than 30 million Americans have no health insurance. Eligibility for Medicaid, food stamps and other public assistance is now linked to having or actively looking for work.

It’s hard to close public schools because most working parents cannot afford childcare. Many poor children rely on school lunches for their only square meal a day. In Los Angeles, about 80% of students qualify for free or reduced lunches and just under 20,000 are homeless at some point during the school year.

There is no public health system in the US, in short, because the richest nation in the world has no capacity to protect the public as a whole, apart from national defense. Ad-hoc remedies such as House Democrats and the White House fashioned on Friday are better than nothing, but they don’t come close to filling this void.

'There Is Genuine Panic': Fears of Global Financial Meltdown as Human Toll of Coronavirus Grows

Published on Monday, March 09, 2020

by Common Dreams

President Donald Trump described as "the worst person to be in charge in this moment" as the number of known coronavirus cases in the U.S. topped 500 over the weekend.

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

46 Comments

Traders work the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on March 5, 2020 in New York City. (Photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

Fears of a financial meltdown at least on the scale of the 2008 crisis intensified Monday as global markets were gripped by panic resulting from the spread of the coronavirus across the globe and the ensuing oil price war launched by Saudi Arabia over the weekend.

"The fear today is about a global recession," said Thomas Hayes, chairman of management firm Great Hill Capital, as markets headed for their worst day since the 2008 crash.

"Trump won't let people infected off of a cruise ship and into quarantine because he likes 'the numbers being where they are.' He'd rather keep the numbers down than help these folks. This is literally the worst person to be in charge in this moment."
—Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone

As the Washington Post reported Monday morning: "U.S. futures pointed to heavy losses on Wall Street on Monday. Overseas, London's FTSE 100 fell more than 8 percent to its lowest in three years; Japan’s Nikkei index slumped more than 5 percent and Australia's benchmark shed more than 7 percent. Oil prices suffered the sharpest plunge since the 1991 Gulf War, while 10-year U.S. bond yields dropped to a record low as investors sought safety."

While some urged caution in interpreting the meaning of daily market fluctuations, analysts said there is reason to fear that destructive economic crisis is on the horizon. Chris Weston, head of research at the Melbourne-based web trading platform Pepperstone, told The Guardian that "there is genuine panic" in the market, noting that he hasn't "seen anything like this for years."

Escalating market turbulence and warnings of a worldwide economic fallout came as the human toll of the coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19, continued to grow. In the United States, the number of recorded cases surpassed 500 across 34 states and deaths rose to 22 as the Trump administration's lack of preparedness was on full display Sunday morning.

Asked about the White House's plan for the 3,500 passengers and crew members aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship—which is set to dock Monday at the Port of Oakland after 21 people on the vessel tested positive for COVID-19—U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson insisted that "the plan will be in place."

Pressed to elaborate, Carson admitted the plan "hasn't been fully formulated."

STEPHANOPOULOS: The Grand Princess is docking tomorrow. What's the plan for the 3,500 people on board?

BEN CARSON: They're coming up with one

S: It docks tomorrow

C: The plan will be in place

S: Shouldn't you be able to say what it is?

C: It hasn't been fully formulated pic.twitter.com/J717Q7q0DG

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 8, 2020

U.S. President Donald Trump, for his part, told reporters Friday that he would prefer that the passengers remain aboard the Grand Princess because he doesn't want "to have the numbers double because of one ship," referring to the number of known coronaviruses cases in the United States.

"This is 25th Amendment stuff," tweeted Jamil Smith, senior writer for Rolling Stone. "Trump won't let people infected off of a cruise ship and into quarantine because he likes 'the numbers being where they are.' He'd rather keep the numbers down than help these folks. This is literally the worst person to be in charge in this moment."

Trump's remarks came just hours after the president falsely claimed that his administration "stopped" the spread of coronavirus in the U.S.

"The [coronavirus] tests are all perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. This was not a perfect as that, but pretty good." -- is Trump referring to the transcript of his phone call with the Ukrainian president here? pic.twitter.com/FU5XxPTu7Z

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 6, 2020

Meanwhile, Italy on Sunday ordered what the New York Times described as "an unprecedented peacetime lockdown of its wealthiest region," restricting movement for as much as a quarter of the country's population as the country struggled to contain the coronavirus outbreak.

"The Italian outbreak—the worst outside Asia—has inflicted serious damage on one of Europe's most fragile economies and prompted the closing of Italy's schools," the Times reported. "The country's cases nearly tripled from about 2,500 infections on Wednesday to more than 7,375 on Sunday. Deaths rose to 366."

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Off the Top of My Head

Finally, We're All in This Together

by John Lawrence, March 1, 2020

What has brought all the world together finally realizing their common humanity - the Coronavirus. You might think global warming would bring us all together to fight a common enemy, but, no, it took the threat of a pandemic. Global warming would only kill us more slowly; coronavirus is a clear and present danger. It can't be licked by taking up arms. It knows no national boundaries. Global warming is akin to the story of the frog who, put in a pot of water on a stove whose heat is gradually increased, realizes something is wrong too slowly until it's too late and he can't move his limbs to jump out. So he perishes. With the coronavirus you have to change the story. The frog is put into the pot of water and the heat is turned up rapidly. The frog, not being stupid, realizes something is wrong in time to jump out.

So will the present state of world affairs in which the US uses its dominance in arms to tell the rest of the world what to do work this time? You bet your bootie it will not. Will sanctions work? You bet your bottom dollar they will not. Only COOPERATION with the other countries of the world will work to solve this crisis. We will reluctantly have to put aside out arms, our F-35s, our wonderfully advanced ships, plane and missiles not to mention our very advanced drones, even our Space Force. All these tools of mass control and domination will have to be put aside because they are of no use whatsoever in winning the war against the coronsvirus. Finally, we will have to have some compassion for our enemies.

Finally, we are forced to realize how intertwined our economies really are. If China goes down, all the supply chains for Apple products among others go down. The US economy goes down. Will this wake us up that finally we must cooperate with China to get anything done or will we go back to the animosity of sanctions and military threats in the China Sea once this crisis is resolved. Probably we will because there is too much money at stake to carry on with cooperation with other nations. The military-industrial complex needs to get back to business as usual before too much time goes by and too many profits are held in abeyance or go down the drain prematurely.

Is the US capable of manufacturing anything or have those capacities been delegated to other countries while at the same time we are demonizing other countries whom we are doing business with or they are doing business with? Will they withhold their consumer products and even more inportant - vital necessities - as a pandemic shuts down production. Will US sanctions on countries reduce their abilities to control the virus while inexorably it spreads to our "Homeland"? If only we hadn't sanctioned them, maybe they would have been better able to check the virus in their own countries. Instead it may spread more rapidly to the country that sanctioned them.

Let's face it. With the threat of a worldwide pandemic, there are no allies; there are no enemies; there are no rivals. There are only human beings who will die one by one. No one is exempt. The mighty, the low - all are at risk. Kings and princes, oligarchs and billionaires, those with health insurance, those without. Let the rich pay and the market relegate those who cannot to the dustbin while the dustbin claims people regardless of their wealth. God forbid that those in high places are reduced to the lot of commoners. Even then will they refuse to pay for healthcare for all out of their largesse, maybe even out of their self interest realizing that the virus does not discriminate

Off the Top of My Head

Bernie Sanders, the Iconoclast

by John Lawrence, February 27, 2020

Bernie Sanders speaks the truth even when it grates on America's conventional wisdom. The idea that America's most reviled dictator could have done some good things - how abhorrent! Fidel Castro never could have improved the literacy of the Cuban people or greatly improved the health care system there. Unthinkable! Yet the fact is that Fidel Castro did improve both literacy and health care in Cuba whether or not the Cubans in south Florida like to hear it. David Blumenthal, M.D. wrote:

But there are also some much more positive sides to the Cuban experience. One of these—its health care system—was on display when I visited the country in mid-November with a delegation of American health care experts led by Michael Leavitt, the former Republican governor of Utah and secretary of health and human services under President George W. Bush. When it comes to health care, Cuba is a success story with few parallels.

Since its 1959 revolution, Cuba’s infant mortality rate has fallen from 37.3 to 4.3 per 1000 live births—a rate equivalent to Australia’s and lower than the United States’ (5.8). From 1970 to 2016 life expectancy increased from 70.04 to 78.7 years, approaching expectancy in the United States (79.8). Cuba’s leading health care problems—non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and stroke—are typical of much more wealthy countries.

Cuba has also exported its expertise in health care sending 50,000 health professionals, including 25,000 physicians, abroad annually to provide care in developing countries. Recently, it has begun charging for these services, making health care an export equivalent and a source of scarce foreign exchange. Cuba’s research investments are unusual for a nation of its modest wealth, and have produced pharmaceutical exports that are another source of foreign currency. According to Cuba’s ministry of foreign trade, medical products and services, including physicians practicing abroad, pharmaceuticals, and medical tourism, account for 70 percent of Cuba’s export revenues.

The article concludes:

Now that Fidel Castro has passed on, history will long debate his complex legacy. From a health care standpoint, however, Cuba has demonstrated that a poor country can dramatically improve the health of its population through long-term, consistent investments in primary care and public health. Even if those investments depended on the authoritarian rule of a long-reigning communist dictator who made many other errors, Cuba’s example shows what very basic health care services can accomplish when the political will to apply them exists.

But Anderson Cooper and the mainstream media want to crucify Bernie Sanders when he speaks the truth if that truth contradicts American conventional wisdom. How could a dictator have done so much good for so many people?

The Guardian reported:

Perhaps even more vaunted are claims about the standard of Cuba’s healthcare. The island’s reputation for medical excellence – a boon long enjoyed by allied governments and countries struck by natural disaster and medical emergencies – was most recently boosted by the deployment of Cuban medical staff to parts of west Africa during the Ebola crisis.

In October 2014, 15,000 medical workers volunteered to participate in the relief effort. More than 450 specially trained Cuban doctors and nurses arrived in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone to combat the disease, making them the largest single national medical force.

One doctor told Reuters at the time that he and his colleagues felt they had a responsibility to help: “We know what can happen. We know we’re going to a hostile environment. But it is our duty. That’s how we’ve been educated.”

But the American media don't want to hear this. They have carefully educated the American people that Fidel Castro is a bad, bad dictator. The possibility that he might have done something good is simply inconceivable. I understand that the Cuban revolution ripped off the wealth of Batista, the US backed military dictator, and his upper class henchmen. They ended up in Florida and from their perspective Fidel Castro is a no good nobody. But others see it differently.

As for literacy, the Guardian article also reports that "Figures from the UN children’s agency, Unicef, show that Cuba’s youth literacy rate stands at 100%, as does its adult literacy rate."

Politifact reported that Bernie Sanders was right: "A 1984 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report found that in 1959 [before the revolution], 23.6% of the population above the age of 10 were illiterate. By 1961 [after the revolution], the number had fallen to 3.9%."

However, the miseducated American public has been primed for years that Cuba is a cesspool of communism, and nothing good could ever be happening there or nothing good could ever come out of Cuba. Maybe now, even if Bernie is not elected President of the US, his influence of talking not so much truth to power as truth to a miseducated and ignorant American public, thanks to the mainstream media and the American educational system, will clear the air and make it easier and more thinkable for other unbiased truthtellers to come.

Off the Top of My Head

Bernie Socks It To Them

by John Lawrence, February 25, 2020

The critics have piled on Bernie about how he's going to pay for his proposals for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, forgiving student loan debt and free college tuition. Now Bernie has come out with a detailed plan about how to do it. The obvious answer is how do other countries do it? Most other advanced countries have free universal health care and free college tuition. They take it for granted. I had some passengers from Calgary, Alberta whom I asked 'how do you like the Canadian health care system?'. He replied, "It's free." I said, "Yeah, but don't you have to pay for it in your taxes?" He said, "I guess so." So he wasn't really concerned that he was paying taxes through the nose to pay for "free" health care. He didn't even know what percentage of his taxes went to health care. I suspect that once the tax structure changes here so that rich people pay more and poor people pay less that everything will be like that too.

It will cost $2.2 trillion to make public colleges, universities and trade schools tuition-free and to cancel all student debt over the next decade. It is fully paid for by a modest tax on Wall Street speculation that will raise an estimated $2.4 trillion over ten years. A Financial Transaction Tax has been talked about for years. Bernie is the only one bold enough to actually make it part of his campaign platform. It needs to be done. The financialization of the economy is what led to the 2008 economic debacle in which the banks were bailed out by the American people to the tune of trillions of dollars. So now even though it's years later, let them pay to bail out the American people. It's a good thing.

Bernie’s bill to expand Social Security will increase benefits for low-income senior citizens and people with disabilities by more than $1,300 a year. It is fully paid for by making the wealthiest 1.8 percent of Americans – those with incomes over $250,000 a year – pay the same rate into Social Security as working families. I like that a lot. Right now even though I'm still working and paying into social security, I'm receiving less than $700. a month in social security. Another $1300. a month would bring my social security up to $2000. a month. Why it's even enough to rent an apartment!

Bernie’s proposal to guarantee housing as a human right and to eliminate homelessness will cost $2.5 trillion over the next decade. It is fully paid for by a wealth tax on the top one-tenth of one percent – those who have a net worth of at least $32 million. (Bernie’s wealth tax will raise a total of $4.35 trillion.) A wealth tax on the rich! I love it. Eliminating homelessness and finally implementing the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights - priceless! It's time the millionaires and billionaires paid to eliminate poverty in this country. The wealth tax will also pay for universal child care and pre-school. By the way maybe the Congress should get on board and finally ratify the 1948 Declaration.

The Green New Deal will transform this country and be the first step in saving the planet from ultimate destruction. It needs to be extended to the rest of the world eventually as well. We need to cooperate with other countries to implement it and share renewable energy technology. This means joining China's Belt and Road initiative in terms of making sure everything under development is based on renewable energy and is non-polluting. It goes without saying that the US should rejoin the Paris Accords on climate change, but extend it even further.

All in all Bernie's plans are a wonderful and refreshing change of pace for the US of A and the rest of the world. If they come to pass, i will be proud of my country again for implementing both humanitarian policies and policies which will save the earth from a global warming catastrophe.

Medicare for All 'Is What Patients Need': New Harvard Study Shows Even Those With Private Insurance Can't Afford Care

Published on Monday, January 27, 2020

by Common Dreams

"When so many people can't get the care they need even when they have insurance coverage, it says that insurance is not doing what it is supposed to do: ensure that healthcare is affordable when you need it."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

6 Comments

Vicki Ibarra opens a late medical bill for her son at her home on Saturday, February 2, 2019 in Fresno, California. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The for-profit U.S. healthcare system is so broken that a growing number of people who are fortunate enough to have private insurance coverage are still unable to afford doctor visits and other essential services due to soaring costs—leaving a larger number of Americans with unmet medical needs today than there were two decades ago.

That's a central finding of a new study by Harvard University researchers published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Internal Medicine, examining 20 years of government data between 1998 and 2017.

The study found that despite a major expansion of insurance coverage in the U.S. during that period—most significantly through the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA)—"most measures of unmet need for physician services have shown no improvement, and financial access to physician services has decreased." The study's authors noted that the rise of "narrow networks, high-deductible plans, and higher co-pays" has contributed to the growth of unmet medical needs in the U.S. since the 1990s.

"Our findings call into question the value of private health insurance today."
—Dr. Laura Hawks, Harvard

Dr. Laura Hawks, a Harvard research fellow and lead author of the study, said the research poses fundamental questions about the viability of the private health insurance system at a time when presidential candidates, members of Congress, physicians, nurses, and much of the U.S. public support a transition to a single-payer system like Medicare for All.

"Our findings call into question the value of private health insurance today," Hawks, a primary care physician, said in a statement. "When so many people can't get the care they need even when they have insurance coverage, it says that insurance is not doing what it is supposed to do: ensure that healthcare is affordable when you need it."

The study found that, overall, the share of adults aged 18-64 who were unable to afford to see a doctor rose by nearly a third—from 11% to nearly 16%—between 1998 and 2017. Among adults with health insurance, there was a 60 percent increase—7% to nearly 12%—in inability to afford a doctor visit.

"Inability to see a physician because of cost also became more frequent among most clinical risk groups, especially those with coverage," the study found. "In 2017, the proportion of persons with cardiovascular disease who were unable to afford a physician visit was 25.6%, 5.9 percentage points... higher than in 1998."

"A single-payer reform like Medicare for All that eliminates financial barriers to care is what patients need."
—Dr. David Himmelstein, City University of New York's Hunter College

Compared to other wealthy nations, the U.S. healthcare system has left significantly more of its population unable to meet medical needs due to prohibitive costs, according to the analysis.

"The current level of unmet health needs in the U.S. that we found far exceed those of similar countries," the study's authors wrote. "In Canada, only 1% of adults 45 years old or older with a chronic disease reported a cost-related unmet health need—compared with 18.7% of adults with a chronic medical condition in our U.S. sample."

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a study co-author and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), said in a statement that the findings demonstrate the dire need for a healthcare system that is both "universal—covering everyone—and comprehensive—paying in full for all medically necessary care."

Another study co-author and PNHP co-founder, Dr. David Himmelstein, said a single-payer system like Medicare for All would meet those standards by providing comprehensive coverage to everyone—including the 30 million people currently without insurance—and eliminating premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.

"Some aspects of healthcare are improving, but death rates are actually rising and we are mostly moving backwards on the health and healthcare of working-age adults," said Himmelstein. "A single-payer reform like Medicare for All that eliminates financial barriers to care is what patients need."

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Off the Top of My Head

Les Nouveaux Pauvres

by John Lawrence, January 9, 2020

The new poor are basically millennials who have gone to college and acquired a huge amount of student loan debt. They were promised that graduating college would catapult them into the middle class. Instead, whatever job they were fortunate enough to get (and many of them landed at Starbucks or equivalent) does not pay enough to make debt payments and also provide the normal amenities of life. Most of their budget consists of paying interest on their debts. Student loan debt has soared from $260 billion in 2004 to $1.4 trillion in 2017; average debt jumped from $18,650 to $38,000 over that same period; and the number of people over 60 with student loan debt has quadrupled in the last decade from 700,000 to 2.8 million.

It used to be that the majority of the working class were either farmers or unionized manufacturing workers who were protected by unions. Then the propaganda machine got busy and told all those farm children that they would be much better off, instead of going to work on their father's farm, going to college instead. Many proudly became "the first in their family to graduate college." What did it matter that, in order to do so, they had to take out massive student loans. Workers, who had lost their unionized jobs, were told the same thing. Go to college and become part of the new (nonunionized) economy because everyone knows that college graduates don't need unions. While farmland may stretch far and wide, farmers and ranchers themselves make up just 1.3% of the employed US population, totaling around 2.6 million people. Today, there are about 2 million farms in operation in the US, a steep decline from 1935, when the number of farms peaked at nearly 7 million. Why milk cows and shovel manure when you can have a professional desk job!

Manufacturing historically created good paying jobs for workers without a college education, particularly for men. The jobs paid well enough so that women did not have to work when they had young children. Unions were strong and owners did not want to risk strikes in their factories due to large capital investments and significant on the job training. Such jobs are much less available in the post-2001 era in the U.S. though they remain available in Germany, Switzerland and Japan. So the solution we are told is for those workers and especially their childrenn since there is no future in being a worker in the manufacturing sphere, to go to college. It's the American way. Each generation has to move a step up the ladder, and the step up for children of manufacturing workers without college educations is to be "the first in their families" to get one. Of course this necessitates their taking on a huge amount of student loan debt, but no worries, this step up will make them better off even if their spouse has to work to afford a house and pay off student loan debt.

However, much student loan debt goes into default because the debt burden is just too big a load to carry. More than 1 million student loan borrowers each year go into default. For many, the payments are proving unmanageable. By 2023, nearly 40 percent of borrowers are expected to default on their student loans. That’s when a person has not made a payment toward their education debt in roughly a year, triggering it being sent to a third-party collection agency. They are les nouveaux pauvres, the New Poor. That's in contrast to les nouveaux riches, the likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg who have made billions off the high tech industry. But for many whose parents were farmers or manufacturing workers, they were sold a bill of goods that getting a college degree would not only resolve the stigma of being "uneducated," it would also land them a good paying job. Today most plumbers and electricians are doing better precisely because they don't have student loan debt.

Instead, many young people, and millennials especially, have not only a gargantuan load of student loan debt but credit card debt, and car loan debt as well. It's no surprise that the New Poor are mainly young people who can't afford either to buy a house or pay skyrocketing rents. Their parents and grandparents, however, are sitting pretty with assets consisting of a house which is skyrocketing in value and either a defined benefit pension (nonexistent today) or a 401k consisting of stocks which have also skyrocketed in value.They will naturally vote for Trump because of a booming economy (for them).

Meanwhile, the Democratic party, whose base used to consist of farmers and unionized workers, has lost them due to a change in demographics. Their new base naturally should be the New Poor, young people, millennials, student loan debtors and those who are concerned about the planet they're inheriting after climate change ravages it. They are turning to the progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They are smart enough to figure out that every other advanced industrialized country has a government sponsored public health care plane. They know that the rich are not paying their fair share of taxes which would alleviate them from some of the horrendous economic burdens they are now experiencing, that is if those increased taxes on the rich were used by government to pay for college and health care for all. They want government expanded to provide more benefits not contracted to the point where you could drown it in the bathtub which arch conservative Grover Norquist so famously said.

Les nouveaux pauvres want a Green New Deal, relief from student loan debt, a New Economy. They aren't committed to the capitalism which has made three billionaires more wealthy than 150 million lower income Americans. They want the elimination of the fossil fuel economy replacing it with renewable energy. They want the end of a military-industrial complex which has spent a trillion dollars on disastrous wars in the Middle East. There is a better way these New Poor millennials are finally figuring out, a way out of the mess created by short term profits and rugged individualism, a way that might just win back America's high moral position and leadership in the world.

Off the Top of My Head

The Solution to High Drug Prices

by John Lawrence, January 1, 2020

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) protects the health of all Americans and provides essential human services so why not have them develop, control and sell needed pharmaceuticals to the American public doing away with the private pharmaceutical corporations which have been gouging the American public and raising drug prices by ungodly percentages? What good is Medicare for All if Medicare has to buy drugs from private corporations?

Trump’s original spending proposal for fiscal year 2019, released last month, included major cuts to not just to the National Institute of Health (NIH), but the National Science Foundation as well. It is those two publicly funded entities — not Big Pharma — that support the bulk of the country’s basic research into diseases and pathways to new treatments.

That’s why the cuts were especially unwelcome in the executive suites of drug and biotech companies. Their business models depend on Washington subsidizing expensive, high-risk basic research, mostly through the vast laboratory network funded by the NIH.

Since the National Institute of Health does the research to develop drugs and not the pharmaceutical corporations themselves, why does the American public have to buy drugs from Big Pharma? Why instead can't we buy the drugs directly from HHS or NIH? If we want to cut out the middle man and bring drug prices down, let's have a public option for buying drugs.

But the NIH doesn’t get to use the profits from these drugs to fund more research, the way it might under a model based on developing needed drugs and curing the sick, as opposed to serving Wall Street. Instead, publicly funded labs conduct years of basic research to get to a breakthrough, which is then snatched up, tweaked, and patented (privatized) by companies who turn around and reap billions with 1,000-times-cost mark-ups on drugs developed with taxpayer money.

Those companies then spend the profits on executive bonuses and share buybacks, and lavish mass marketing campaigns to increase sales of amphetamines, benzos, opioids, and dick pills.

So Medicare for All? How about public sale of drugs developed by publicly funded research? Why is the government being used as Big Pharma's research and development branch with all the ridiculous profits going to private corporations?

The LA Times reported:

Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has invested close to $900 billion in the basic and applied research that formed both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors, with private companies only getting seriously into the biotech game in the 1980s.

Big Pharma, while of course contributing to innovation, has increasingly decommitted itself from the high-risk side of research and development, often letting small biotech companies and the NIH do most of the hard work. Indeed, roughly 75% of so-called new molecular entities with priority rating (the most innovative drugs) trace their existence to NIH funding, while companies spend more on “me too” drugs (slight variations of existing ones.)

But if Big Pharma is not committed to research, what is it doing? First, it is well known that Big Pharma spends more on marketing than on R&D. Less well known is how much it also spends on making its shareholders rich. Pharmaceutical companies, which have become increasingly “financialized,” distribute profits to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks designed to boost stock prices and executive pay.

Take Pfizer. Economist William Lazonick has shown that from 2003 to 2012, it spent $59 billion on share buybacks and $63 billion on dividend payouts — for a total payout to shareholders of 146% of net income. All the while, Pfizer benefited immensely from U.S. government spending on life sciences research and drug development.

Why aren't the Democrats talking about this? The profits should accrue to the American people not to Big Pharma which won't even market a drug which isn't profitable. So drugs which cure an illness with one dose will not even be developed or marketed. They want a profitable drug which must be taken every day for life. The US is so devoted to capitalism that it wants the profits from government research to go to private corporations. The American people are being hoodwinked. If the government sold the drugs developed with taxpayer money to the American public at a reasonable price, that would be socialism. Sorry, if you'd rather be taken.

Democratic Candidates Should Focus On Critical Societal Problems

by Frank Thomas

I may also go for Michael Bloomberg if he gets a high poll rating by October 2020.

Otherwise, I’ll being choosing between Warren and Sanders. Like many people, I'm getting more taken in by the urgent priority to defeat Trump. Besides climate change, there are also other extremely significant societal problems noted below that for some time have been tearing our country apart socially and economically. If these aren’t addressed convincingly by Bloomberg, I don't think Democrats will go for him in the nomination process. Things don't have to be revolutionarily ‘torn down,’ but major constructive changes are a necessity. Such an approach calls for a timely phasing in of well-targeted structural improvements in following areas: healthcare, income/wealth gap, infrastructure, poor quality pre-college education and burdensome college tuition costs that are adding to impoverishment millions of families caused by decades of stagnant wages.        

Right now, it's obvious the general public doesn't have a clue what Bloomberg's constituency is beyond the well-to-do, socially liberal and fiscally conservative types.

On the positive side, he doesn't need their money. Past issues he has focused most on are climate change, gun control and fighting the fiscal policies of the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party. But I doubt Bloomberg can win the nomination if he fails to address clearly his approach and solutions to following severely ingrained societal problems areas. They will only get much worse and complex, perhaps even become unsolvable, as a result of years of government reliance on incremental band aid improvements to Big structural problems. Political polarization and money interests have caused an absolutely deplorable ineffectiveness in bottom-up and top-down governance that meets societal wants, needs fairly and pragmatically for all.   

• HEALTHCARE: Quality healthcare for the average family has reached the insane cost level of $16,000-$19,000 annually in premiums, deductibles, copays for mediocre medical coverage. Extremely high healthcare and college costs combined with almost stagnant wage growth the past 40 years for over 80% of U.S. households is an 'economic high risk recipe' for an eventual  societal implosion. If EU countries can deliver universal healthcare plans for 10 to 80 million populations at half the household cost with better medical coverage, why can't we do the same - say, by developing a Medicare Plan For ALL Option (that incorporates Obamacare) for +-120 million households that are currently self-insured? Prove its superior benefits first with a smaller step that will eventually attract others.
• INCOME/WEALTH GAP: Since 1979, an incredibly huge income/wealth Gap has been taking place between the top 10% and bottom 90%. (see reference). The average yearly wage of the Bottom 90% was $29,608 in 1979 vs. $36,182 in 2017, a rise of  22.2%. The average yearly wage incomes of the Top 9% and 1% were $152,476 and $718,766 in 2017, an increase since 1979 of 57.4% and 157.3%, respectively. And the wage of the Top 0.1% since 1979 has been out of sight increasing from $622,018 to $2,756,865 in 2017, an increase of 343.2%. These wage figures exclude income from stocks, bonds, other investments. They reflect fact we have the lowest progressive tax rates and highest income (wealth) disparities of all world countries except perhaps China and India. U.S. highest progressive tax rate is 37% on incomes above $500,000 per year versus 51.75% in the Netherlands on incomes above $75,000 (euro 68,500).

Here’s a stark summary of U.S. average wage thresholds of the Top 10% and Bottom 90% wage earner groups.

WAGE GROUP SHARES Of TOTAL WAGES – 1979-2017

EARNER GROUP	WAGE THRESHOLD	% Of TOTAL WAGES
Top 0.1%	$2,756,900	5.2%
Top 1%	$718,766	13.4%
Top 5%	$299,810	28.0%
Top 10%	$118,400	39.1%
Bottom 90%	$ 36,182	60.9%

     

The Economic Policy Institute reports: “The Bottom 90% earned 69.8% of all wages in 1979 but just 60.9% in 2017. In contrast, the Top 1% increased its share of wages from 7.3% to 13.4% in 2017, a near doubling. The growth of wages for the Top 0.1% drives the Top 1`% share of wages which tripled Top 0.1%’s share of total wages from 1.6% in 1979 to 5.2% in 2017.”

Around 140 million of 168 million U.S. workers have been living on a near survival wage growth trend for a long time. A wage of less than $25,000 is earned by 42% of U.S. workers or ±70 million workers. The Top 1% of Americans own 40% of our nation's wealth. Several billionaires including JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Bridgewater Associates, founder Ray Dalio, Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway have said that current levels of income and wealth inequality are unsustainable.

It is well proven that savings and investments of ultra-wealthy Americans do not necessarily  "trickle down" in ways that grow the economy or benefit most Americans. Investments of the wealthy including billionaires are planted all over the world in exotic tax shelters, real estate, stocks, bonds, yachts and works of art. 

INFRASTRUCTURE & SCHOOLS: According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), it will cost $4.6 trillion to bring America’s infrastructure to a good state of repair. But only 55% has been committed leaving a $2.1 funding gap. Improving roads and bridges alone would require $1.1 trillion more than the states, localities, and federal government have allocated. Schools need another $380 billion beyond what's invested. Waterways, ports, levees, dams need another $150 billion. (see reference). Other studies show that another $473 billion of investments is needed in drinking water treatment and distributions. These needs vary sharply by state due to differences in size, congestion, condition, and age of existing infrastructure.

• State dollars and borrowing pay for 72% of Infrastructure projects; the federal government pays just 28% for a very low 0.5% of GDP. State and local spending is now way down from 2.4% of GDP in the early 2000s to 1.87% in 2017 and now is at its lowest level since 1950. Investments in Public Infrastructure stirs economic growth, private productivity, jobs, and can improve a state's quality of life, opportunity, and the environment. Why aren't the private sector investments being made is the BIG question?  Is it lack of federal funding because of massive  federal deficits, debt and interest cost? Trump's tax cuts went largely to the Top 10% and corporations. These cuts are now contributing to our annual $1 trillion federal deficits.
• BUT, if our nation can raise ± $9 trillion in federal funds as we did to save our economy from collapsing during the Great Recession, why can't we come up with ± $3 trillion for critically needed infrastructure/education improvements? These and other societal investments needed can be funded in a major part by raising current maximum federal tax rate of 37% on incomes above $500,000 to 40% on incomes above $1 million – plus eliminating tax avoidance, tax deductions or special tax structures for real estate, loss carry forwards provisions, corporate earnings held abroad in tax havens. The aim should be to introduce fiscally economically constructive tax funding changes that are relatively easy to calculate and oversee, and deter steep rises in federal/state debt levels and interest cost

Frank Thomas The Netherlands November 30, 2019

References :

(1) Economic Policy Institute - Top 1.0% Reaches Highest Wages Ever - Up 157% Since 1979, Oct. 18, 2018

(2)  https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/its-time-for-states-to-invest-in-infrastructure

Democrats Not Headed Too Far Left, Says Ocasio-Cortez, 'We Are Bringing the Party Home'

Published on Sunday, November 17, 2019

by Common Dreams

"I want to be the party of the New Deal again," says the progressive congresswoman from New York. "The party of the Civil Rights Act, the one that electrified this nation and fights for all people."

by Jon Queally, staff writer

 

52 Comments

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks during the Climate Crisis Summit before introducing Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at Drake University on November 9, 2019 in Des Moines, Iowa. Ocasio-Cortez has been campaigning in support of Sanders after endorsing him last month in New York City. (Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

As part of a wave of reaction to comments made by former President Barack Obama who reportedly suggested to "liberal wealthy" party donors late last week that some Democrats were going "too far left," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded by saying progressives are not pushing in some new, radical direction but rather trying to bring it back to where it came from.

"I want to be the party of the New Deal again," tweeted the freshman Democrat from New York on Saturday, referencing the era of progressive change under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt last century.

"The party of the Civil Rights Act, the one that electrified this nation and fights for all people. For that, many would call us radical," she said.

"We aren't 'pushing the party left,'" Ocasio-Cortez concluded, "we are bringing the party home."

The tweet also included a new campaign ad for Sen. Bernie Sanders, who Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed in the Democratic presidential primary. The two recently campaigned together in Iowa where they championed the need for a Green New Deal and spent time with local residents in the early voting states.

I want to be the party of the New Deal again.

The party of the Civil Rights Act,
the one that electrified this nation and fights for all people.

For that, many would call us radical.
But we aren’t “pushing the party left,”
we are bringing the party home.pic.twitter.com/wLeDaxCHkZ

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 17, 2019

"This is about a people's movement in the United States," Ocasio-Cortez tells Iowans during a living-room meeting featured in the ad, "and this campaign is a part of that and electing Bernie Sanders is the beginning of a transformational movement in the direction of working people in America."

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