https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/24/its-ok-to-be-angry-about-capitalism-by-bernie-sanders-review-straight-talking-from-the-socialist-senator

“When we talk about uber-capitalism in its rawest form – about greed that knows no limit, about corporations that viciously oppose the right of workers to organize, about the abuses of wealth and power that tear apart our society – we’re talking about Amazon,” writes Bernie Sanders in his new book. “And when we’re talking about Amazon, we’re talking about Jeff Bezos.”

These are typical lines in what comprises an attack on the status quo from every conceivable direction. Sanders addresses his own two ultimately thwarted campaigns to lead the Democratic party; the crisis in American healthcare and the chasms of health inequality shown up by Covid; the declining union movement and stagnation of wages; the burgeoning billionaire class and its impact on democracy; and the looming environmental crisis. Nothing he says will come as any surprise to his supporters, who are legion.

Everything he says is quite unfashionable, from the macro – greed is bad, actually – to the micro, still using “uber” to mean “ultra”, as if Uber itself didn’t exist. He has no compunction about his reference points, which go from the obvious (F Scott Fitzgerald observing that thing about the rich) to the niche (a union organiser and folk singer named Florence Reece, who wrote a song in the 1930s called Which Side Are You On?). If his ideas were a band, they’d be the Ink Spots, with songs written a long, long time ago, and all the intros the same.

These aren’t complex propositions. Of course it’s wrong to profit from other people’s illness; of course when access to healthcare is tied to work, that puts citizens in a state of semi-bonded servitude. Of course corporations are actively anti-social, of course they have driven down wages over 50 years and immiserated the workforce. Of course when three firms – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – control assets equivalent to the GDP of the entire United States, we’re into the rotting phase of late-stage capitalism.

Sanders’ popularity and his immense value to the political ecosystem stems from his willingness to say all this out loud, defying the credo which has defined mainstream discourse since at least the Clinton era: that the class war is over, that capitalism is as inevitable as the weather, and that markets don’t need morals, because they have their own separate schematics, drawn by an invisible hand.

In other words, his book is easily as frustrating and depressing as it is galvanising and uplifting; reading one story or statistic after another, about growing inequality, child poverty, financial insecurity – 77% of Americans are now anxious about their financial situation – one’s very lack of surprise reinforces a sense of hopelessness.

Yet, particularly in the early chapters, which cover the intricacies of both Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and his (also often thwarted) work as the chairman of Congress’s Budget Committee since the election of Joe Biden, you cannot ignore the fact that the wind has changed. Precisely because Sanders is such a straightforward thinker and writer, he insists on some facts that the political establishment – on both sides – wilfully ignores. It is objectively better, more democratic, more plural, when a campaign is funded by grassroots donations than when a candidate has to go cap in hand to Peter Thiel.

The Democrats do better in the polls when they allow in their left flank, rather than try to erase it in the name of electability. And at the level of the principle, to let the man himself take over, “wars and excessive military budgets are not good”; “carbon emissions are not good”; “racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia are not good”; “exploiting workers is not good”. This isn’t the book to come to for new ideas, in other words. But it’s a capitalist fallacy that everything has to be new, in any case.

https://jacobin.com/2023/02/bernie-sanders-book-capitalism-workers-medicare-for-all

It’s an exciting and frustrating time to be a socialist in the United States of America. On the one hand, the two presidential bids launched by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 helped precipitate a resurgence of anti-capitalist political organization and labor militancy, with organizations like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Starbucks Workers United racking up electoral and unionization wins across the nation. On the other hand, economic inequality still plagues us, and there’s no sign of meaningful change coming from Congress anytime soon.

Sanders, who now serves as the new chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, has a new book out this week that wants to assure you that you’re right to be angry.

It’s OK To Be Angry About Capitalism covers everything from the limitations of the Senate when it comes to passing legislation like Build Back Better, to the intense struggle for a Medicare for All system that enshrines health as a right to all, to the challenges of the future like automation and mobilizing a working-class coalition for change. Here are eight highlights from the book that drive home the challenges of the day and what Bernie Sanders thinks we ought to do about them.

1. The Capitalist Economic System Is the Problem

Here is the simple, straightforward reality: The uber-capitalist economic system that has taken hold in the United States in recent years, propelled by uncontrollable greed and contempt for human decency, is not merely unjust. It is grossly immoral.

Right from the get-go, Bernie rejects the phrase “the older you get, the more conservative you become” as an outright falsehood. In fact, for Sanders, it’s very much the opposite. As time goes on, the capitalist system only makes Bernie angrier. A consistent theme throughout the 2016 and 2020 campaigns was that the very system we live under is an abjectly immoral one.

It may seem like something we’ve heard before, but it ought to be repeated, since it grounds our argument for a better future in a normative objection to the inequality and hierarchies of capitalism.

2. Demand More, Demand the World

I don’t tell people to be satisfied with what they get — or to accept that some things will never be gotten. I tell people to demand more.

While campaigning for the Democratic nomination in the state of Wisconsin in 2016, Clinton derided Sanders’s political agenda as “pie in the sky stuff” in an attempt to portray herself as the sensible candidate. Evidently, the Democratic voters of Wisconsin did not find pie in the sky to be all that bad. Sanders writes in his new book that he doesn’t think it his responsibility to tell the working class what it can and cannot achieve, but instead that it’s his, and a much broader movement’s, responsibility to push for more and more, for “upending uber-capitalism” as he puts it.

3. The Problem of Inequality Is Systematic

The fight against American oligarchy — and the plutocratic arrangements that foster it — has nothing to do with personalities. Inequality isn’t about individuals; this is a systemic crisis.

There is an ongoing class war in the United States, and the billionaire class is unquestionably on the offensive. In Sanders’s view, it’s important not to get bogged down in the individual quirks and idiosyncrasies of men like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, but rather to stay focused on the very system that allows them to accumulate their wealth in the first place. It is a system that exploits the worker, it’s a system that erodes democracy, and it’s a system that, as Bernie argues, goes against values of human decency.

4. Medicare for All Is a Central Demand of Our Time

Too often, Americans lack the sense of safety and belonging that people enjoy in countries with a robust health care system that, in every case, is based around a universal health care program. No wonder so many of us succumb to diseases of despair.

The cornerstone plank of both the 2016 and 2020 presidential bids launched by Bernie was Medicare for All, so it’s no surprise that he dedicates an entire chapter to assailing the disaster that is American health care. Not only do we as a country spend more for less per capita on health care, we are also witnessing a marked decrease in life expectancy. Sanders even goes on to say that, because of these conditions, Medicare for All might be the most integral part of a political revolution in the United States. In a very literal sense, the fight for Medicare for All is a fight not just for decency in one of the richest countries in the world, but a fight for our very lives.

5. You’re Either on the Side of Workers or You’re on the Side of Their Bosses

Which side are you on? These days, corporations like Starbucks and Amazon don’t hire gun-toting thugs. Instead they hire anti-union consultants and pollsters and politically connected lobbyists — many of them Democrats — to thwart union organizing. But the fundamental premise remains: you’re either on the side of workers and organized labor, or you’re not.

Invoking the famous labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” written by Florence Reece of Tennessee, Bernie draws a clear line in the sand on the issue of labor. Either one is with the working class, or they’re against the working class. Sanders hits this note repeatedly throughout the book, that there is a class war ongoing in this country, and in the sixth chapter he does not flinch from how this applies to our struggle today. To be clear-sighted is to acknowledge what Amazon, Starbucks, and a plethora of politicians from across the two-party system are trying to do, which is keep the workers down.

6. New Technology Won’t Solve the Old Problems of Ownership and Control

The machinery may have changed, but the imbalance between economic elites and the working class has not. Nor has the injustice that extends from that imbalance.

In a chapter largely focused on the future of the economy as it pertains to technology, Bernie centers an important question that doesn’t get asked very often. When it comes to how automation might occur, or how artificial intelligence affects certain jobs, who actually gets to decide how this develops? Do workers have a say? Will workers still have dignity? Who should actually be in charge of industries and the broader economy?

These are questions that Eugene V. Debs asked one hundred years ago, and while we’ve certainly evolved technologically since then, the questions are yet to be answered.

7. A Democratic Society Demands Equal Education for All

Historically, progressives were at the forefront of education debates, battling to establish free public education, to open schools to all students, to build great schools in urban and rural areas, and to fully fund them. There was a forward motion to our activism.

In a chapter on education, Sanders takes a look at the advances we’ve made since the modern era began. We’ve achieved public education for children up to roughly eighteen years of age, but is that education working? Are our teachers treated fairly? What about those who want to go to college? For those who want to advance the struggle for a prosperous and democratic society, we must return to our roots and seek not only to reform but also to expand education and access to it.

8. There Is No Middle Ground in the Struggles to Come

There is not a middle ground between the insatiable greed of uber-capitalism and a fair deal for the working class. There is not a middle ground as to whether or not we save the planet. There is not a middle ground about whether or not we preserve our democracy and remain a society based on equal protection for all.

Toward the end of the book, Bernie threads the needle on all the aforementioned issues and much more by making the case in as certain terms as possible: there is no middle ground between the dignity of the working class and the wants of the capitalist class, and there is in fact no middle ground between democracy and extreme inequality.

Sanders not only wants people already engaged in politics to move toward his program, but he wants millions of people to organize wherever they are: in their neighborhoods, in their workplaces, and on the electoral and educational planes as well.

A Legacy That Will Continue

Regardless of whatever Bernie Sanders might choose to do in 2024, whether that be retire, run for reelection, or launch a third bid for the presidency, he wants you to not only be angry, but energized to do more. Ever since he won his mayoral bid in Burlington in 1979 as an open socialist against the entrenched political establishment of both parties, Bernie has stressed the centrality of mass movements to political change.

This centrality of the working class to his theory of change is what inspired the phrase “Not Me, Us” and it’s still what fuels him close to half a century later. So yes, it is okay to be angry about capitalism, and it’s even better to do something about it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2023/02/23/biden-white-house-social-security/

During an hour-long meeting in the Oval Office, before they went to film a video together about student debt, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pitched President Biden on his vision for hammering the Republican Party over one of the most potent issues in American politics.

Biden has for weeks leaned into the simple message that he is determined to block GOP efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare for millions of seniors. Left unanswered in these attacks is what Biden, himself, wants to do to address the massive funding shortfalls facing the programs, which face catastrophic benefit reductions within a decade if lawmakers take no action.

In that Jan. 25 meeting, Sanders pushed the president to fully fund Social Security for more than seven decades by expanding payroll taxes on affluent Americans, rather than just on workers’ first $160,000 in earnings, as is the case under current law. Sanders also asked the president to back his proposal — highly unlikely to pass Congress — to not only defend existing benefits but also increase them. He wants to provide another $2,400 per year for every Social Security beneficiary.

This previously unreported discussion between Biden and his onetime presidential primary rival reflects a broader behind-the-scenes effort inside the White House to decide how, or if, the party’s message on entitlements should go beyond criticizing the GOP. Biden aides have in recent weeks discussed proposing raising payroll taxes on the rich to fund Social Security, but it is unclear if the president will ultimately endorse that measure when he releases his budget in March, according to three people familiar with international deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks. One of those people cautioned the talks were preliminary and it is still likely the White House opts not to advance the plan.

Sanders said Biden was noncommittal in response to his pitch.

“It is not enough to point out the reactionary, anti-worker vision of the Republican Party. We have to present a positive, pro-worker alternative,” Sanders said. “The truth is that Social Security does have a solvency problem, and we have got to address that.”

White House spokesman Robyn Patterson declined to comment on internal deliberations but pointed to the reductions in health-care costs in both Obamacare and the Inflation Reduction Act that were designed to constrain growth in Medicare spending.

“The biggest threats to Social Security and Medicare are House and Senate Republican efforts to gut a program millions of Americans have been paying into since their first jobs as teenagers,” Patterson said in a statement. She added that Biden “has promised more to keep Medicare solvent in his budget, but he won’t budge on paying every penny of the benefits to Americans that have earned them.”
Story continues below advertisement

Not all Democrats believe the White House should soon offer a counterproposal on Social Security. Sanders’s plan, backed by nine Senate Democrats, calls for applying the payroll tax on Americans’ earnings above $250,000 per year and changing the tax so it also applies to investment income as well, which the Social Security actuary has found would extend the program’s life span by 75 years. Biden has been adamant that he will not violate his campaign pledge to block tax hikes on Americans earning under $400,000 per year, limiting how much revenue could be raised from an expansion in the tax. A majority of House Democrats have backed legislation that is similar to Sanders’s plan but would apply to earnings above this $400,000 threshold.

Additionally, some senior Democrats privately say the president has no reason to change course when his existing lines of attack have already proved so effective against the GOP. Biden has relentlessly pummeled Republican officials for pushing cuts to benefits, visiting Florida earlier this month to blast Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.) for a plan to sunset all federal legislation within five years. High-profile Republicans, including former president Donald Trump and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), have been adamant that they are not proposing cuts to the programs, but pollsters say the blows are landing.

“There’s a faction inside the White House that feels some need to offer a plan, though I personally feel that’s misplaced,” one senior Democratic pollster said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with senior administration officials. “Stick to our basic message: Hands off our seniors. That’s working.”
House GOP eyes Social Security, Medicare amid spending battle

Regardless of the politics, the aging of the baby boomer generation poses a real challenge for federal lawmakers.
Story continues below advertisement

Congress has until 2032 to avert major cuts to Social Security and until 2033 to avert major cuts to Medicare, according to the latest projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Both programs are primarily funded by payroll taxes, which are collected from both employees and employers. Roughly 40 percent of the entire federal budget already goes to funding Social Security and Medicare. But because health-care costs keep going up and the number of American seniors keeps increasing, the budgets for these programs is beginning to run dry.

Medicare’s trust fund is projected to be exhausted by 2033, which would trigger reductions or delays to payments to doctors and hospitals under the federal insurance program relied on by more than 60 million people. Similarly, should lawmakers fail to act, Social Security benefits for a roughly equal numbers of American seniors will also be cut by 20 percent starting in 2032. If lawmakers fail to act, the government will reduce the benefit for a traditional retiring couple by between $12,000 and $17,000, according to projections by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank.

As these dates draw nearer, policymakers have become increasingly less interested in advancing solutions that would cut seniors’ benefits. During his State of the Union address, Biden said his forthcoming budget would extend the Medicare trust fund by about two decades while fully protecting existing benefits. Prior Democratic efforts to fund Medicare have relied in part on taxing the income of affluent business owners, and the White House is widely seen as likely to take a similar approach.

Social Security may represent a harder puzzle. As a presidential candidate, Biden proposed tax increases to shore up Social Security, but only for earnings over $400,000 per year. But that plan, which also included new benefits, would only extend the solvency of Social Security by five years, according to a prior analysis by the Urban Institute, a D.C.-based think tank, raising questions about how Biden would fix the entitlement beyond that relatively short time frame.

Biden’s campaign also faced skepticism from some tax experts. Currently, Americans only pay payroll taxes on approximately their first $160,000 of income. This cap prevents the richest 2 percent of Americans from paying more in taxes, and its repeal has long been eyed as a mechanism for increasing funding for Social Security.
Story continues below advertisement

However, Biden has also pledged not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000. His campaign plan would only increase payroll taxes on those earning above that threshold. Such a proposal would create a “doughnut hole” — so-called because of the gap in taxation in the middle of the income distribution. Such a move is largely frowned upon by tax experts, because it disproportionately taxes lower-income Americans.

“You’re saying to someone making $150,000: You have to pay payroll tax on all your wages, but telling someone making $350,000: You have to pay payroll taxes on only the first $150,000 and the rest is exempt,” said Howard Gleckman, a policy expert at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “It does not make any policy sense.”
The former Trump aide crafting the House GOP’s debt ceiling playbook

The administration’s first two budgets, in 2021 and 2022, ducked the question altogether as the administration was focused on passage of its domestic spending priorities. Conservatives say that the White House is irresponsibly refusing to address the funding crisis to score cheap political points against its opponents, and that there is no way to preserve existing benefits while also rejecting tax hikes for all but the richest Americans.

“The president’s do-nothing position is an endorsement of the 20 percent benefit cut that is scheduled in a decade under current law,” said Brian Riedl, a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “It is an increasingly untenable position.”

By contrast, Social Security Works, an advocacy group for protecting the program, sent a letter to the White House urging a slew of changes to boost benefits, from across-the-board increases in checks to eliminating waiting periods for recipients of Social Security disability benefits. “Polling reveals that painting the contrast — Democrats want to expand Social Security, Republicans want to cut it — is a much more powerful message than simply attacking Republicans,” stated the memo, circulated in January and previously unreported.

So far, however, voices like these have been insufficiently powerful to force Biden to release a Social Security plan of his own. When asked by reporters on Jan. 20 if Biden would propose a fix to the funding shortfalls for the programs, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre responded: “The president’s plan is that he’s going to protect Social Security. He is going to protect Medicare.”

Asked the same question a second time, Jean-Pierre said: “What we’re saying is, and I just said this: These are programs that the American people pay into. These are programs that our veterans, that our seniors — right? — Americans across the country really value and need.”

it will surprise no one to learn that brooks signed the letter lecturing his nyt colleagues about being journalists and “not activists.” it appears he was so busy “pursuing facts” he forgot that doing the bidding of elizabeth koch’s pr firm is most certainly activism of a kind. https://t.co/DTyCcT8QZe

— mike casca (@cascamike) February 24, 2023

just the facts, jack. ideology free. Objective Journalism https://t.co/2kQ9ExNtat

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) February 24, 2023

As outlined in the release, the bill would ban diversity statements, make tenure and faculty hiring committees meaningless, and centralize control of core curricula and mission statements in the hands of political appointees. Unexpectedly, it would also ban gender studies majors.

— Jeremy C. Young (@jeremycyoung) February 23, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/22/opinion/bird-flu-pandemic-h5n1.html?smid=tw-share

Whatever happened to our Roaring Twenties? In the first year of the pandemic, it was common to hear predictions that however brutal and harrowing the near future seemed, the world would find itself, at some point, celebrating the end of Covid-19 — perhaps in a grand bacchanal to recall the dizzying decade that followed the Spanish flu of 1918 and 1919, which killed 675,000 Americans.

But that end never really came, not definitively. That the pandemic is no longer seen as an emergency is obvious; just look outside. But the country didn’t turn the page so much as limp forward, through a fog of exhaustion and loneliness and long Covid, into the dawn of a new period in which the coronavirus has retreated for most as an everyday threat but may well continue as gothic background noise, killing tens of thousands of Americans each year.

A true postpandemic period may still arrive, perhaps even a real Roaring Twenties. But in recent weeks, as researchers have registered one after another mammalian outbreak of the avian influenza H5N1, or bird flu, another possibility has loomed into view: back-to-back pandemics — a new one potentially driven by a disease that over the past several decades has killed about half the humans with known infections.

There have been few cases of human-to-human transmission of bird flu, which is the main reason its incursion into human populations has been so limited. The World Health Organization has said that the risk to humans is low, but also that “we must prepare for any change in the status quo.” There are reasons to think that if the virus did make such an evolutionary jump, it could bring with it a significant reduction in severity. We also don’t know exactly how rapidly such a disease would be transmitted among humans, though we have seen some eye-popping mammalian outbreaks over the past year: in minks, most notably, at a Spanish farm; but also in bears, seals, raccoons and foxes, to name just a few of the populations recently infected in the United States. In Peru, roughly 600 sea lions died.

The possibility of a second pandemic raises the obvious question of whether we have learned anything from the last one. Is there any reason to expect that even with new political leadership, the country’s response to a new global outbreak — of H5N1 or something else — would be more coherent or more coordinated? To the contrary. Contemplating the possibility of a new pandemic in the near future suggests all the ways that America, in its rush to return to normal, failed to do all the things that might have secured a lasting normalcy.

Consider the state of the country’s institutional public-health apparatus: Since 2020, there has been no meaningful nationwide disease-surveillance network erected or even planned. (Our patchwork surveillance of avian flu has given us only a crude sense of where it is spreading now among animals.) The F.D.A. is still moving too slowly on some things and too quickly on others. There is no Operation Warp Speed-style funding plan for rapid vaccine development; indeed, the president who can claim credit for it has stopped touting it as one of his achievements.

Billions of dollars in funding for things like air-filtration systems in schools have gone unspent, leaving public buildings no better prepared to endure airborne disease than they were before Covid. There has been little progress to date on lab safety — which even lab-leak skeptics will acknowledge is an ongoing risk — and early candidates for more expansive coronavirus vaccines, which could protect against many different pathogens in the same family as the coronavirus, are only in early trials. (Pan-influenza vaccines are moving slowly, too.)

As we now know all too well, pandemic containment isn’t just a matter of policy and public investment. It’s a complex web of leadership, social trust and public buy-in — along with a fair amount of chance. But it is hard to believe that the country is now capable of more solidarity and vigilance than it was in early 2020. Vaccine skepticism may not necessarily outlast this pandemic, but the signs are worrying, and there has been precious little policy focus on what can overcome that skepticism. Faith in public-health officials’ management of the pandemic has declined, too. And the Biden administration, which was champing at the bit on Inauguration Day, is now offering public-health guidance close to “you do you” — pulling back pandemic response, dumping millions of people off expanded Medicaid coverage and turning the provision of new tests and booster shots to the private market.

There are some encouraging signs when it comes to bird flu: federal discussion of a mass poultry-vaccination program and the “rapid” rollout of existing avian-influenza vaccines for humans. But each of these projects could take at least six months, and almost certainly we would find ourselves wasting the early stage of a new pandemic — and possibly more than that — repeating debates over the last one. You can see the fault lines already, with those who believe the country’s Covid response went too far taking to social media to mock the suggestion that any of the same measures — social distancing, masking, school closures — might be imposed to hold off a new contagion, as though it were irrelevant that this new one might be many times deadlier.

Over time, fatality rates considerably higher than those encountered with Covid would (one hopes) shake a lot of the country’s current mitigation fatalism — because a disease that kills 5 percent of those infected looks very different from one that kills only 1 percent. But a deadlier pandemic would probably also, perversely, reignite arguments over our response to the coronavirus, because such a fatality rate would make that disease look relatively mild — and the global response to it much more significant — by comparison. Beginning in 2020, Covid minimizers compared it to the flu, which kills a fraction as many (and tends to infect many fewer). If in the next pandemic, fatality rates were five times higher, would minimizers dismiss it similarly — “It’s just Covid”? Already, we’ve normalized quite a lot more dying than almost any American thought possible in early 2020, when the country hunkered down in response to warnings that the disease could kill 100,000 to 200,000 people. Normalization isn’t just a matter of the vaccine skeptics in your Facebook timeline. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden declared that any president responsible for 220,000 American deaths should not remain president; he has now presided over 700,000.

In 2020, we were panicked; now we’re exhausted. In 2021, many doctors left the profession, and those still working are often reporting burnout. As many as half of nurses have reported in surveys that they are considering leaving the profession, as are a fifth of doctors. Even in the postemergency phase of the pandemic, national hospital capacity is under strain, and rural hospitals are closing at a distressing rate.

This is not to say that in facing any potential new pandemic, failure is inevitable. But even a limited outbreak, successfully contained through mitigation or outraced through rapid vaccine production, would still represent a grim premonition — an unmistakable signal to many that the world has now entered what epidemiologists have been memorably calling the Pandemicene. That is, a new epoch, defined as much by the increasing frequency of viral spillover events as the Anthropocene has been defined by the human influence on the planet.

When we give our era names like these, it makes the disjunctures seem inevitable, almost preordained. But human fallout from new disease is no more inevitable than from carbon emissions. Here, the cost of accumulated indifference could be similarly high, and not just in the obvious human toll. In welcoming eight billion of us unmistakably to a new pandemic age, a new outbreak would cast a sort of permanent viral shadow on the decades to come — a legacy less like the Roaring Twenties and more like the Great Depression.