"Scientists have been warning of a pandemic for years, insistently so since the SARS epidemic of 2003, also caused by a coronavirus, for which vaccines were developed but did not proceed beyond the pre-clinical level. That was the time to begin to put in place
rapid-response systems in preparation for an outbreak and to set aside spare capacity that would be needed. Initiatives could also have been undertaken to develop defenses and modes of treatment for a likely recurrence with a related virus.
"But scientific understanding is not enough. There has to be someone to pick up the ball and run with it. That option was barred by the pathology of the contemporary socioeconomic order. Market signals were clear: There’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe. The government could have stepped in, but that’s barred by reigning doctrine: “Government is the problem,” Reagan told us with his sunny smile, meaning that decision-making has to be handed over even more fully to the business world, which is devoted to private profit and is free from influence by those who might be concerned with the common good. The years that followed injected a dose of neoliberal brutality to the unconstrained capitalist order and the twisted form of markets it constructs."
So often does the kleptocratic political class betray working and middle class voters, that the victims, under continuous economic stress, unsettled by scaremongering media, and persuaded they must cooperate to survive, develop an emotional identification with the con men and grifters holding their futures hostage.
If you look at today's Democratic Party and wonder, how did we get here?, consider words Bill Clinton uttered on April 7, 1993: "'I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans,' he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. 'We're all Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn't that great?'" (from The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House by Bob Woodward).
Though he spoke those words in frustration, what he said was true. The party of FDR and LBJ had become -- and in many ways remains -- the party of Ike: on some issues, on support for Labor and protection of Social Security, for example, on economic policy and national security, the Democratic Party today stands to the right of 1950s Republicans.
It is because the party leadership has been doing Wall Street's bidding for so long, now going on four decades, that Democrats have lost much of their following among the middle and working classes; nor will the voters return unless in the next two election cycles the party changes direction as radically as it did in the 1990s.
At the grassroots level, Democratic voters, and people who would vote Democrat if the party were true to its roots, are organizing: fighting pipelines and fracking; pushing for a living wage or a guaranteed income; demanding gun control; defending the Dreamers; shoving back against free trade; marching in defense of the environment; calling for Medicare for All. Even the general public sides with the left on a number of key issues that reflect on the size and purpose of government: hefty majorities support higher taxes on the wealthy and the corporations and think the government should be actively reducing the growing gap between the rich and the rest; want legislation to significantly increase in the minimum wage; and look to Washington to create jobs by making urgently needed repairs to our neglected infrastructure.
What nearly all Americans crave most, though, is leadership.
Part of Donald Trump's appeal as a candidate -- his only appeal, really -- was in his promise to do something, even if that something was just to break up the furniture. Doing something was more appealing than poking along the road to ruin, as the Democrats seemed to intend on doing.
The elections of 2018 and 2020 together will mark a turning point in our history. Another round of defeats for the Democrats, and the party will fade into irrelevancy. There is still a chance that the Democrat Party will again take the lead in the struggle for social and economic justice. If it does, the party will be invincible. If it doesn't, a new Liberal party will arise from its ashes as surely as tomorrow will dawn.
Eljeer Hawkins is a community, labor and antiwar organizer, and for 23 years has been a member of Socialist Alternative, the US affiliate of the Committee for a Workers' International, a global Trotskyist
organization fighting economic exploitation and oppression based on race, gender, sexual orientation and national identity. Hawkins writes regularly on race, the criminal legal system, Black Lives Matter and the historic Black freedom movement, and lectures widely, including at Harvard, Hunter College, Oberlin and University of Toronto. In this interview, Hawkins discusses how he came to believe in the socialist cause and how a socialist society can be realized in the US: Inspiring a Socialist Alternative: An Interview With Eljeer Hawkins with Bryant William Sculos (Truthout).
A palate cleanser from the New York Times: Reporter Carla Correa travels to the lair of "The Bachelor" so you won't have to. "There are two ways to watch 'The Bachelor.' The first is, in 'Bachelor' parlance, to be swept away on the 'journey' and suspend any disbelief that suitors are 'here for the right reasons.' For most viewers, though, the only way to sit through a two-hour episode is to accept the polyamorous spectacle as one big social experiment. 24 Hours in Bachelor Nation by Carla Correa (New York Times)
Aestheticist Adolph Hitler doesn't care for gentrification:
"The right to be heard is crucially important. But I want to think more generally about how we have learned to look at women who exercise power, or try to; I want to explore the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in politics or the workplace, and its forms (what kind of misogyny, aimed at what or whom, using what words or images, and with what effects); and I want to think harder about how and why the conventional definitions of ‘power’ (or for that matter of ‘knowledge’, ‘expertise’ and ‘authority’) that we carry round in our heads have tended to exclude women." -- Mary Beard, Women in Power.
The resemblance of zoos to prisons aside: At the Stock Island Detention Center, a jail in Florida, prisoners care for a zoo of their own. Curator Jeanne Selander runs the prison zoo with the inmates, who benefit not only from the responsibility, but also from experiencing reciprocal love and care --often for the first time. Operations like this one shouldn't be news, they should be standard.
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Finally, in a spirit of resistance not nostalgia, here is the last installment of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, never broadcast at the time. The brothers, Tommy and Dick Smothers, waged a war against network censorship for a couple of years in the late 1960s, a fight they lost when they were fired for inviting comedian David Steinberg back on the show, despite complaints from some viewers over a previous booking. Nancy Wilson and Dan Rowan were also guests.
“Privately, some leading Democratic strategists worry that" Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, "despite some forceful criticism, will lean too much toward making deals with Trump.”
Hillary Clinton is pressing Bernie Sanders to round up the kid vote for her.
"Although Sanders lost to Clinton, he consistently drew younger voters to his side with promises to take on Wall Street, make college less expensive and close the income gap. He called on young people in New Hampshire, a swing state in the presidential election, to get behind Clinton."
Both parties having become irrelevant and unresponsive to the majority's political needs, and with neither seemingly capable of learning from experience, the time seems ripe for a new politics. Or, more likely, a new politics is inevitable. The Greens are still active and the Working Families Party is demonstrating growing strength and relevance. The question for the Big Two is whether they will adopt the demands of a growing popular resistance -- the GOP by becoming more rightwing, the Democrats more progressive -- or, like the Whigs, to resist change and wither away.
How much better we would be served as voters, if there were -- at least -- three parties: a reactionary Republican Party (to absorb the anger and frustration of the tea party and provide a vehicle for the fantasies of libertarian fundamentalists and the brotherhood of Ayn Rand); the centrist Democrats as currently configured (to represent the interests of militarists and security staters, neoliberals and the free markets cohort, and conservatives-formerly-known-as-Republicans); and on the left a Progressive People's Party (for the middle class and working poor, New Dealers, traditional liberals, progressives, social democrats and the rest of the 90% or so of the people presently unrepresented by the two establishment parties).
It has been more than 40 years since the U.S. began its long, slow decline into militarism, corporatism and the cult of laissez-faire, and it's unlikely that the Republicans and Democrats can fix problems they made. Decades of austerity for the poor and socialism for the rich have left them compromised and bloated by self-interest. It is now up to an angry citizenry to compel change.
The rest of the story:
-> "Today, the labor movement has been largely subdued, and social activists have made their peace with neoliberalism and adjusted their horizons accordingly. Within the women’s movement, goals have shifted from practical objectives such as comparable worth and universal child care in the 1980s to celebrating appointments of individual women to public office and challenging the corporate glass ceiling. Dominant figures in the antiwar movement have long since accepted the framework of American military interventionism. The movement for racial justice has shifted its focus from inequality to 'disparity,' while neatly evading any critique of the structures that produce inequality. The sources of this narrowing of social vision are complex. But its most conspicuous expression is subordination to the agenda of a Democratic Party whose center has moved steadily rightward since Ronald Reagan’s presidency." -- Nothing Left: The long, slow surrender of American liberals by Adolph Reed Jr. (Harper's).
-> "[I]f f there’s one thing the left needs, it’s a serious talk about its future. The alternative is the continued fragmentation of an inchoate movement, accompanied by a never-ending rightward shift in American politics and the continued ascendancy of corporate economic power." -- Has the Left Surrendered? The Overdue Conversation We Need by Richard Eskow (OurFuture).
"We need to talk about transformation – social, economic, and political." Enough Recrimination. Let’s Build a Populist Movement. by Richard Eskow (OurFuture).
The reliably feckless David Brooks has this to say about the domination of the GOP by radicals:
"It's probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It's smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast. It's smarter to build a new division that is different the way the Westin is different than the Sheraton..."
"Would a coastal and Midwestern G.O.P. sit easily with the Southern and Western one? No, but majority parties are usually coalitions of the incompatible. This is really the only chance Republicans have. The question is: Who's going to build a second G.O.P.?"
Representative democracy would benefit from such a development, but here's an easier way to do it than by trying to recapture the GOP. Stragglers from the moderate wing of the Republicans, if joined by the neoliberals, now a declining and reviled minority among Democrats, would form a new centrist, corporatist, neoliberal party (the New Whigs?). The Republican Party under this scenario would continue to represent fundamentalists, reactionaries and rightist libertarians. The Democratic Party would take on its proper role as the champion of the middle and working classes. And a green party, maybe the Green Party, would carry on with an agenda focused climate change. A House with four or five parties could only function by building coalitions, making it far more likely that rational, practical and more representative political outcomes would prevail.
All parties in the legislature have an interest in reining in the executive branch. The Founders envisioned ours as a legislative democracy, and it would serve us all to return to that model. The assignment of power through winner-take-all contests has proven itself to be dangerous to democracy as well as to wise stewardship.
Now that consumer confidence, Hurricane Sandy and Mayor Bloomberg have settled the election, can we have a discussion about what to do about military spending;
drones; the assassination of American citizens; illegal military incursions into Pakistan; military adventures in Yemen, Bahrain, Somalia and now, it appears, Mali; Africom; the pumped up Drug War; militarization of US drug war interventions in Honduras, Guatemala, Columbia, et al; the brutal program of sanctions against Iran; the military "pivot" toward China; habeas corpus; Bradley Manning; expanded government secrecy and unprecedented actions against whistle-blowers; domestic government spying; continued the transfer of vast amounts of wealth into the hands of the financial giants without significant oversight or accountability; truly universal, truly affordable health care (Medicare for All); neoliberal judicial appointments and the general failure to make appointments at all; austerity as a budgetary priority; the need for a massive New Deal-style jobs program; the ambition to strike a "grand bargain" with McConnell, Cantor and Boehner that will put Social Security and Medicare "on the table;" and the ongoing control of the country by the corporations, the militarists and the industrial-security state?
