When Should the War Against Biden's Neoliberalism Begin?

The plague doctor cometh, and he don't cometh cheap.

by Thomas Neuburger

A re-elected Trump will almost certainly be welcomed with a General Strike.
—Yours truly

Cynic that I am, I'm convinced that Biden will betray us the minute he's in office. OK, not the exact minute, but pretty soon thereafter.

His current campaign promises include...

• No ban on fracking.
• No Medicare for All.
• No withdrawal from Afghanistan (or anywhere else we're "at war")
• A "baby steps" Green New Deal that won't hurt his Big Oil donors.
• A return to austerity spending as soon as Covid allows.

...and a host of other travesties, indignities and tortures he plans to force on the plebs from his "practical, centrist" seat at the peak of power.

But the worst of his policies, one that's likely to come the soonest, involves Covid and its soon-to-be-produced vaccine.

In a moral world, the vaccine would be made free to the citizens of any nation with access to it. In a practical world, it would be given to everyone with an arm or hip capable of receiving the needle. How else can the virus be removed from the population, except by universal vaccination? This, for example, was how polio was wiped out — for years, every school child in America of a certain age was vaccinated for free.

The neoliberal world, however — the world of government-protected and government-supplied profit — is not a moral world. It's not even a practical world. Which means that biotech companies will vie with each other to soak the population of as many dollars as they can and withhold the vaccine from any who can't pay.

Gilead Floats a "Deal"

Consider this from Matt Taibbi, in a piece titled, "Big Pharma’s Covid-19 Profiteers: How the race to develop treatments and a vaccine will create a historic windfall for the industry — and everyone else will pay the price."

Daniel O'Day, the CEO of Gilead, makers of remdesivir, an already existing drug with promising Covid treatment possibilities, recently played a one-two game with what it thinks the drug's new pricing ought to be, assuming the approvals come in as expected.

Note the twisted logic he uses to get to his implied price — $48,000 per dose:

In a breezy open letter, Daniel O’Day explained how much his company planned on charging for a course of remdesivir, one of many possible treatments for Covid-19. “In the weeks since we learned of remdesivir’s potential against Covid-19, one topic has attracted more speculation than any other: what price we might set for the medicine,” O’Day wrote, before plunging into a masterpiece of corporate doublespeak.

The CEO noted a study by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health, showing that Covid-19 patients taking remdesivir recovered after 11 days, compared with 15 days for placebo takers. In the U.S., he wrote, “earlier hospital discharge would result in hospital savings of approximately $12,000 per patient.”

The hilarious implication seemed to be that by shortening hospital stays by four days on average, remdesivir was worth $48,000 a dose.

One, Gilead could charge $48,000 for the drug. But two, Gilead was inclined to be generous: "Although 'we can see the value that remdesivir provides' — i.e., we could have charged $48,000 per dose — Day wrote, 'we have decided to price remdesivir well below this value' ... a measly $3,120 per patient."

A great many drugs, new and repurposed, are swirling in the Covid world, some as treatments and some as vaccines. One of the latter, in fact, is Russian (perish the thought!) and according to The Lancet, the premier British medical journal, it may be promising.

If the vaccine proves effective, the Russians, just to piss us off, might even decide to make it available for free. But I don't think any Western-produced vaccine, or treatment, will be offered so generously.

Covid Treatments and Vaccines Should Be Free to the User

Yet it's impossible, on moral or practical grounds, to make the case, that during a global pandemic (a) the price should be a multiple of the cost of manufacture; and (b) any user should spend a single dollar to receive it.

This is a perfect place for government intervention into the "free" market (it's really a captive market) on behalf of the citizens it claims to represent and protect. First, any Covid vaccine or treatment should cost a fraction, not a multiple, above the cost of manufacture — i.e., profits should be kept low. And second, government should be the purchaser of these drugs, not the patient, and should provide them to patients for free.

At least one vaccine of decent effectiveness is likely to come, at latest, sometime next year, perhaps less than six months into Biden's first year in office. Treatments may come sooner than that. (By the way, there's a very promising avenue of treatment — with existing drugs and technology — outlined here.)

What Will a President Biden Do?

With hope in sight, what will a President Biden do? Will he serve his donors and his policy prejudices, as he always has, or serve the people who, however reluctantly, elected him?

Here's one answer. If the former — if he gouges the patient public to enrich drug companies like Gilead — or if he gouges the government and pays "full price" for drugs the government charges patients nothing for — he should be made to feel an amount of pain equivalent to that which he inflicts.

And he should be made to feel this pain even during his so-called "honeymoon," even while he's still celebrating his victory over the monster he replaced, if that's what he deserves.

To be more blunt: If on Day One a President Joe Biden enacts policies that in any way hamper full and complete relief from the suffering this nation has already endured under Trump, he should be welcomed as a second-term Trump will almost certainly be welcomed.

A re-elected Trump will almost certainly be welcomed with a General Strike. A Biden who refuses to heal the public for free should see the same welcome.

When should the war against Biden's neoliberal policies begin? On the first betrayal.
  

The Culture Of Compromise... And Looking Ahead To 2022

On Monday morning, the Washington Post published an increasingly rare solo-piece-- rather than team effort-- this one by Annie Linskey: Biden's Flexibility Could Mean Bloody Fights. So! Someone has noticed! "He remains vague on policy." You think? Linskey started her piece by going right to the heart of why there is so much mistrust of the Biden campaign on the left and why even some of the most fervent Trump detractors are reluctant to commit to the hold-you-nose electoral strategy. "When Joe Biden released economic recommendations two months ago," she wrote, "they included a few ideas that worried some powerful bankers: allowing banking at the post office, for example, and having the Federal Reserve guarantee all Americans a bank account. But in private calls with Wall Street leaders, the Biden campaign made it clear those proposals would not be central to Biden’s agenda. 'They basically said, Listen, this is just an exercise to keep the Warren people happy, and don’t read too much into it,' said one investment banker, referring to liberal supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). The banker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks, said that message was conveyed on multiple calls... The Biden campaign said the economic recommendations were produced jointly by supporters of Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and were never intended as official policy."

This reluctance to be pinned down on policy details is central to Biden’s campaign, which has focused on a pledge to “restore the soul of the nation” rather than any particular legislative holy grail. While Biden has issued a raft of proposals, he’s often taken an all-things-to-all-people approach, sometimes making strong public declarations while relying on aides to soothe critics behind the scenes.

That strategy, reflecting a decades-long career in which Biden has seen himself more as mediator than ideologue, has helped him unify the party’s liberal and moderate wings behind the shared goal of defeating President Trump. But it also is laying the groundwork for bitter internal battles, should Biden win the presidency, on topics from race to climate to trade, while Wall Street leaders plan to have their way with a president many expect to be unusually susceptible to outside pressure.

...“We knew we weren’t going to get Medicare-for-all,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). “The question then for me was: How do we get some foundational pieces of Medicare-for-all, even if the words ‘Medicare-for-all’ aren’t there?”

Biden’s team agreed, for example, that low-income Americans would be automatically enrolled in Biden’s public option and that Medicare, not a private company, would run it-- significant concessions that nonetheless fell under Biden’s original framing.

“A good tell about how Biden would operate is there’s room for him to run as long as he doesn’t feel like he’s overturning his brand of moderation,” said one liberal who negotiated with Biden’s team.

Sounds like a bloody 4 years are coming up-- with a 2022 catastrophe in the making, when voters-- furious that the Biden administration, along with a Democratic-controlled Senate and House, are unable to deliver on anything of importance to working families. The 2010 midterm disaster will look like paradise compared to the Republican resurgence in 2022. The Biden campaign is about two things: a wrecked old man who wants it to say he was president on his tombstone and a coalition of conservatives and wary normal people who want to get rid of Trump. Policy-wise, there is no there there and 2021 is not going to be pretty as disparate groups fight for a piece of the pie.

Last week, reviewing John Nichols' book, The Fight For The Soul Of The Democratic Party, for Jacobin, Paul Heideman, asserted that this predicament is nothing new since The Soul of the Democratic Party Has Always Belonged to Capital. When did the Democratic Party go bad. Many say it was "with Bill Clinton and the Third Way in the 1990s" while other say it was "with Carter’s embrace of austerity" while other "more conspiratorially inclined parts of the left have argued, when JFK was assassinated? Or has the party never been anything more than 'history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party?' Where you draw the line says a good deal about your politics." Nichols, he wrote, "draws the line very early indeed, with the removal of Vice President Henry Wallace from the ticket in 1944. The book is written explicitly as an intervention into current debates over the future of the party, and its argument that for most of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party was degenerating, is reflective of the radicalism of one pole of that debate. For Nichols, Wallace represents the real soul of the New Deal Democratic Party. A proud progressive, dedicated anti-racist, and passionate anti-fascist, Wallace attempted to continue Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy, only to be stymied by more conservative forces inside the party. This narrative occupies the book’s first half, while the second half covers the history of the party in the seven decades following Wallace’s defeat in 1944. The result is a readable introduction to both Henry Wallace, one of the most interesting American politicians, and the Democratic Party’s long history of betraying progressive ideals."

Did someone mention "the Democratic Party’s long history of betraying progressive ideals?" There is no better emblematic case of that than Joe Biden, you know... the guy all your progressive friends are telling you have to vote for in November (as part of the existential fight against fascism). In the same issue of Jacobin, Luke Savage is as pessimistic about a Biden presidency as I am. Does no one else see the disaster on the horizon. I explained it to one of my favorite Members of Congress the other day. She didn't say she disagreed with my prediction of a 2010 midterm-redux in 2022, only "Let's get there first," meaning electing Biden and a huge load of conservative Democrats to Congress first. Thanks, but no thanks. She wanted me to help her raise money for Blue Dogs and New Dems running for the House. I love her but... give me a break. Blue America works to defeat conservatives, whether Republicans or fake Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Savage takes issue with the idea that Biden, like Ed Markey, is a flawed liberal who could-- again, like Markey-- embrace the Sunrise Movement and everything would be hunky-dory. Markey-- who hold the #1 lifetime position at Progressive Punch-- may be a flawed liberal, but Biden isn't and never was a liberal. He's a conservative-- a really, really bad conservative-- as bad as his hair plugs and fake teeth. As imperfect as the results show ProgressivePunch's system is, it's the best measurement Ive found and, as you see, Markey's record is significantly better than either Elizabeth Warren's or Bernie's.

The 10 best Dems in the Senate

No, I don't believe for one second that Markey's more progressive than either, just that he's at #1-- which says something-- where as the senators more ideologically aligned with Biden-- both now and when he was amnestying atrocious senator himself-- are in a whole different category of Democrats:

The 10 worst Dems in the Senate

Chuck Schumer plucked Kyrsten Sinema-- then head of the Blue Dogs and sporting the single worst voting record of any House Dem-- out of the House and gave her the Democratic Senate nomination in a year when a Democrat was going to win in Arizona. He just did the same thing with another Arizonan likely to prove as far right as Sinema, Mark Kelly. And it doesn't stop there. Schumer has guaranteed the most conservative Democratic-controlled Senate in anyone's lifetime: Hickenlooper (CO), Cunningham (NC), Harrison (SC), Bollier (KS), Ossoff (GA), Heger (TX), McGrath (KY), Gideon (ME), Gross (AK), Greenfield (IA)... And Cheri Bustos is doing a similarly horrible job in the House. The Red-to-Blue program is nearly identical with the list of New Dem and Blue Dog endorsements. It will be a Biden Congress.

Markey did, after all, vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq and support NAFTA. He even backed the USA PATRIOT Act back in 2001 (though voted against its reauthorization in 2005, 2010, and 2011). That he nonetheless won the respect of so many young left-wing voters therefore does yield an important lesson for other Democratic candidates and elected officials.

As former Sanders organizer Claire Sandberg put it earlier this week: “Corporate Democrats want to make the Left out to be purity-obsessed and unwilling to compromise, but the Left rallied around a longtime politician with a mixed record because he actively courted their support and became a champion of one of their major legislative priorities.”

Where I differ from [Michelle] Goldberg is in thinking that this is the kind of lesson a politician like Joe Biden either wants to or could conceivably learn. Near the end of her piece, Goldberg writes: “I hope Joe Biden listens. Young voters favor him over Trump by large margins, but their lack of enthusiasm could dampen turnout.” She quotes Sunrise’s Executive Director Varshini Prakash: “The best thing that Joe Biden could do would be to speak in clear, exciting visionary terms about exactly what he plans to do to tackle the climate crisis, racial inequality, and economic inequality.”

It’s a capital suggestion-- and one Biden is certain to ignore. That’s because, whatever officially appears in the Democratic platform (Goldberg, for example, cites the recommendations of the Sanders/Biden joint task force) is entirely secondary to the political coalition Biden is trying to build, and the one he built to win the Democratic nomination.

Much like Hillary Clinton did in 2016, Biden is aiming to win the presidency by motivating conservative-leaning suburban voters and some Republicans-- with more traditional (and liberal- and progressive-minded) Democratic constituencies turning out in sufficient numbers where it counts. The former group was largely the target audience for this year’s DNC, which  pandered endlessly to the sensibilities of anti-Trump Republicans and rich suburbanites. The latter, meanwhile, gets lectures about how they need to be more enthusiastic while young voters get virtual Biden/Harris lawn signs in Animal Crossing instead of Medicare For All.

Centrist Democrats do want the support of young and left wing voters, of course. But they uniformly want it on their own centrist terms.

All this may be a strategic choice on Biden’s part, but it’s also a feature endemic to the faction that controls the Democratic Party as a whole. Biden’s nomination, which party power brokers ultimately did everything they could to ensure, represented a very conscious repudiation of the alternative course offered by Bernie Sanders-- one which was decidedly less interested in the votes of suburban conservatives and, perhaps more importantly, which pledged to reject the dictates of the donor class that Democratic elites have long embraced.

As such, there is simply no incentive structure in place to shift Biden from his current course.

In Massachusetts, a hitherto quite conventional liberal politician recognized that it would be in his interest to harness the energy and power of young activists. He embraced their agenda and saved his career in the process. Whether Markey’s shift represented a sincere change of heart or pure political self-interest is a secondary matter: he faced an existential challenge and pivoted towards the only constituency he believed could save him from defeat. The young left, which Biden’s candidacy has always been about marginalizing and repudiating, enjoys no such leverage with Biden.

Goldberg is absolutely right to argue that the Markey campaign yielded real lessons for centrist Democrats. The problem is assuming those are lessons that centrist Democrats are under any real pressure to learn.

Going Big-- In Biden World

Summarizing a Jonathan Martin piece about Democrats wanting Biden to go big in Saturday's NY Times, This Week's Tim O'Donnell noted that conservative Texas Democrats Marc Veasey and Filemon Vela think "now is the best time" for a Democratic presidential candidate to win Texas "since Jimmy Carter" and that the state is "very winnable." Georgia Democrats want Biden, to ramp up his effort in the state, too. "But while polls indicate Biden may have a chance to flip those states blue, his campaign is taking it easy for now... Biden's aides reportedly consider it too early to switch up their strategy and go for an electoral college route by investing millions in states like Georgia, Texas, and even Ohio while surefire swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania remain up for grabs. 'When you look under the hood, we are ahead in the majority of the battleground states, but we expect them to tighten because these are battleground states in a pretty polarized electorate,' Biden's campaign manager, Jennifer O'Malley Dillon, tole The Times. O'Malley Dillon is also trying to make sure Biden doesn't lose vulnerable traditionally Democratic states like Nevada."

The thought is that "of course, this doesn't mean Biden's camp won't grow more confident and eventually pour more of their resources into other states because while presidential candidates only need 270 Electoral College votes to win... some Democrats, like Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), believe a more convincing victory would allow Biden flip the Senate and move his agenda more easily in office."

What agenda? Dying in office and having "president" on his headstone? Sure, Democrats say they want Biden-- a team, not a senile old man who is the front man for that team-- "to seize what they believe could be a singular opportunity not only to defeat Mr. Trump but to rout him and discredit what they believe is his dangerous style of racial demagogy. This election, the officials argue, offers the provocative possibility of a new path to the presidency through fast-changing states like Georgia and Texas, and a chance to install a generation of lawmakers who can cement Democratic control of Congress and help redraw legislative maps following this year’s census."

But it should not surprise anyone who has followed Biden's limp-dick career to see that they are "so far hewing to a more conservative path," in Jonathan Martin's words. As for "go big"... if they don't have the balls to at least try to pick states like Georgia and Ohio off the relatively low-hanging branches, how are they going to "go big" where it really counts-- policy. I'll laugh my ass off if Roger Stone and Javanka persuade Trump to get to Biden's left on marijuana legalization and Trump beats Biden on that, in effect, destroying the United States of America because the Democrats were too stupid to nominate someone who had moved out of the 1970s and '80s.

"Going Big" isn't about buying Facebook ads targeting voters with pablum in Dallas and Cincinnati; it would be, for example, explaining to voters what the Green New Deal means, something Biden has not a clue about. At beast, in fact, Biden could maybe understand and work towards undoing the damage Trump has done. Not what I would see in the kind of transformative presidency that should follow a Trump regime but... the Democrats are so horribly spineless and suck so badly that Biden is all they could come up with. As Time's Jeffrey Kluger wrote last week, "Trump has smashed a lot of environmental china in four years [and] no one can deny the unprecedented sweep of Trump’s policies. Data from Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program and Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law show that the President has signed more than 100 administrative rules, Executive Orders and acts of deregulation, 66 of which have gone into effect."

CBS News poll shows Biden voters hate Trump, don't give a shit about Biden. Maybe he should give them a reason to want him that's more persuasive than just that he's the lesser evil

Biden has indicated he will get the U.S. back into the Paris accord-- Trump's withdrawal doesn't become official until July, 2021-- but that is hardly what a President Bernie would have had in mind as his be-all and end-all agenda on Climate. "Nobody," wrote Kluger, "expects a Green New Deal out of a hypothetical Biden Administration. Freeman believes Biden will look to environmental laws now on the books like the Clean Air Act of 1970 and apply them more strictly to advance a green agenda. On June 30, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis did unveil an ambitious plan for the U.S. to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050–something Biden could embrace, though its chances would likely depend on the Democrats’ holding the House and flipping the Senate as well. Biden could also, [Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program Jody] Freeman says, attach climate policies to coronavirus-related economic-recovery bills that are likely to pass. The environment has never been Biden’s animating passion. He markets himself instead as more of a Mr. Fix-It, a President who will set right what he sees as the serial messes of the past four years and then try to move beyond them. The environment will be one of his biggest cleanup jobs of all."

So how can Biden possibly win? He can't... but he can be there when Trump loses. Nancy Ohanian's latest drawing demonstrates exactly what a Biden "victory" will look like:

Murder/Suicide by Nancy Ohanian