‘Assange extradition should be warning to liberals who believe in American democracy’

by Slavoj Zizek

https://www.rt.com/uk/461862-zizek-assange-extradition-brutality/

The UK’s decision to extradite WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange to the US should be taken as a warning to all liberals who still have any faith in ‘American liberal democracy,’ says cultural philosopher Slavoj Zizek.

The Slovenian sociologist told RT that signing of the extradition order is just one of two recent events that really worry him. The other “ominous” event was the Ecuadorian government’s invitation to US authorities to take possession of Assange’s property from its London embassy when he was taken to prison, including book manuscripts, computers and other personal possessions.

“The nightmare is that the accuser was directly invited to take possession of all these documents. This breaks even the elementary the norms of legality,” Zizek explained.

“The message is, ‘Yes, we will be brutal beyond measure.’”

Zizek drew particular attention to the sheer brutality of the coordinated effort against the whistleblower after he exposed the US government and military’s gross misdeeds.

“It’s always an ominous signal when measures against a threatened individual are done in such a directly brutal way that this very brutality means something,” he said.

The philosopher added that he is “radically opposed” to US President Donald Trump, but noted the peculiar situation where the anti-Trump “liberal center” in US politics is harsher on Assange than the Trump administration because, in his estimation at least, “they think Assange helped Trump get elected.”

Zizek also railed against so-called liberals back across the pond in the UK arguing that “those in the UK who are most fervent advocates of Assange’s extradition, are not conservatives but more centrist Blairite wing of the Labour Party.”

“We should ask ourselves: What went wrong in the liberal center itself that something like Trump could appear?”

There is just as much blood on liberals’ hands as those whom they oppose when it comes to the abuses of the military industrial complex, he argues.

However, he does believe that Assange’s high-profile persecution may eventually serve as a call to mobilize for advocates of freedom of the press, but also fears a cultural ennui in the face of such widespread and egregious abuse of power.

“The public will become more and more aware of the non-transparency. Among other things, this is one of the great achievements of WikiLeaks. We became aware of how things are,” Zizek said.  

“What really worries me is the inertia of the wider public; they are aware and yet they don’t really care about it.”

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Rising US “deaths of despair” driven by health care costs, lack of access to care

By Kate Randall

14 June 2019

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/06/14/comm-j14.html

A new report reveals that most US states are losing ground on key measures related to life expectancy, which has declined in each of the last three years. The Commonwealth Fund’s “2019 Scorecard on State Health System Performance” shows that “deaths of despair”—premature deaths from suicide, alcohol abuse and drug overdoses—continue to rise in nearly every state. The report further shows that these deaths are tied to rising healthcare costs that are placing an increasing financial burden on families across the country.

The Commonwealth Fund’s Scorecard assessed “deaths of despair” in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as ranked states on 47 measures of access to health care, quality of care, health care usage, health outcomes and income-based health care disparities. The report found that Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act has been a central factor leading to meaningful gains in access to health care.

The reasons behind the decision of a person to take his or her own life, to take drugs resulting in a fatal overdose, or to drink alcohol in excess leading to health problems and death, are complex. But this new study shows that one of the major underlying causes of such tragedies is social inequality, in particular lack of access to health care and the associated financial struggles.

The opioid crisis, suicide and alcohol-related deaths

While the study finds that deaths from suicide and alcohol and drug abuse are a national crisis, it notes that states and regions are affected in different ways. Opioid use disorder has fueled a rise in drug overdose deaths with tragic outcomes for families across the country. The emergence of highly lethal synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, in the illicit drug supply has contributed to this national crisis.

The opioid epidemic has hit states in New England, the Mid-Atlantic and several Southeastern states particularly hard. West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Delaware and New Hampshire have the highest death rates from drug overdoses.

In Pennsylvania, Maryland and Ohio, death rates from drug overdose were at least five times higher than from alcohol abuse and about three times higher than suicide rates. In Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Oregon and Wyoming, death rates from suicide and alcohol were greater than those from drugs.

Source: Commonwealth Fund. Data from National Vital Statistics System

West Virginia has been the state hardest hit by the opioid crisis, with 58.7 deaths per 100,000 residents—a staggering two-and-a-half times the national average. This was 25 percent more than the state with the next highest rate of opioid deaths, Ohio, which had 46.3 deaths per 100,000 residents. Opioid-related deaths in West Virginia increased fivefold in 12 years—rising from 10.5 deaths per 100,000 in 2005 to 57.8 in 2017.

The rate of death from drug overdose more than doubled across the US between 2005 and 2017. These deaths surged by 10 percent just between 2016 and 2017.

Suicide rates nationally have risen by nearly 30 percent since 2005. Parallel to the sharp rise in the death rate from drug overdose, the national suicide death rate rose more sharply between 2016 and 2017 than during any other one-year period in recent history. Similarly, the alcohol-related death rate rose by about 2 percent per year between 2005 and 2012 but increased by about 4 percent per year between 2013 and 2017.

Health insurance, access to care, cost

The Commonwealth Fund notes that the reductions in the uninsured population following the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) expansion of health coverage in 2014 have now stalled or even begun to erode in some states.

The ACA, commonly known as Obamacare, while expanding some access to health care coverage, has never challenged the domination of the for-profit health care industry. It required that individuals without insurance from their employer or a government program purchase insurance from a private insurance company.

Nearly all states saw substantial reductions in uninsured rates between 2013 and 2017 with the opening of the ACA’s insurance marketplaces, with fewer people citing cost as a barrier to receiving health care.

As the ACA was written, Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor jointly administered by the federal government and the states, was to be expanded to cover all US citizens and legal residents with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty line. However, the US Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that it was up to the states whether or not to expand their Medicaid programs.

Almost all those states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA saw a reduction in rates of uninsured through 2015. However, after 2015 any progress in reducing the rates of uninsured had stalled in most states. From 2016 to 2017, more than half of states were simply treading water. Sixteen states saw a rise of 1 percent in the uninsured rate, including both those that did and did not expand Medicaid.

States that adopted Medicaid expansion have seen lower rates of the uninsured. As of January 1, 2017, Massachusetts had the lowest rate of uninsured, at 4 percent. The states with the highest rates of uninsured—Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma and Texas—were among the 19 states that had not expanded Medicaid as of January 1, 2017. In Texas, 24 percent—nearly a quarter of all residents—were uninsured.

Uninsured rates were particularly high in states with large African-American and Hispanic populations. In Florida, George and Texas, about 20 percent of black adults were uninsured in 2017, compared to the US average of about 14 percent. In Texas, more than a third of Hispanic adults were uninsured in 2017. Undoubtedly contributing to the uninsured among Hispanics is the denial of Medicaid and access to the ACA marketplace for undocumented immigrants.

Health care costs

In addition to the lack of health insurance, the high cost of coverage for those who are insured is contributing to the crisis in accessing health care. The report notes that as of the end of 2018, 30 million adults remained uninsured and an estimated 44 million people had insurance but were considered “underinsured” due to the high out-of-pocket costs for health care in relation to their income.

People with individual-market plans under the ACA were insured at the highest rates. However, the cost of private, employer-sponsored health care plans is rising, exposing workers and their families to increasingly higher deductibles and out-of-pocket costs. In most states, the amount that employees contribute to their employer coverage is rising faster than median income.

A key contributing factor to the uninsured and underinsured rates is the overall rate of growth in US health care costs compared to the slow growth in US median income. Workers face rising costs as insurers increase deductibles and other cost-sharing for enrollees. As workers in both ACA and employee plans are covered by the insurance industry, these private companies raise costs for the insured to boost their bottom lines.

The Commonwealth Fund’s report explodes the myth that people’s use of health care services is the primary driver of cost and premium growth. The report notes that there is growing evidence that the prices paid by private insurers to health care providers, particularly hospitals, are responsible for this growth.

The report notes, according to the Health Care Cost Institute, that “between 2013 and 2017 prices for inpatient services paid by private insurers climbed by 16 percent while utilization fell by 5 percent. The analysis found similar patterns for outpatient and professional services as well as prescription drugs.”

In other words, while workers and their families are struggling to obtain decent health care and to pay for it, the entire system of health care delivery in America is geared toward enriching the hospitals, pharmaceuticals and insurance companies. Those succumbing to “deaths of despair” are the victims of a health care system and a society that values capitalist profit over the health and very lives of its citizens.

The Left’s Failure to Envision a World Without Capitalism

Bernie Sanders' speech on democratic socialism underscored the limits of a growing movement's imagination.

By CONOR LYNCH

June 12, 2019

https://newrepublic.com/article/154186/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialist-failure-envision-world-without-capitalism

There is a common saying on the left, usually attributed to the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” The late writer Mark Fisher once described this as “capitalist realism,” or the “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”

This sense has prevailed since the collapse of communism three decades ago, which led to a triumphalism throughout the capitalist world right up until the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing global recession, which triggered different anti-capitalist movements. But in the ten years since then, a true political and economic alternative has yet to materialize.

Though many now believe that capitalism should end, this doesn’t make it any more likely—not even if Senator Bernie Sanders becomes president.

The Vermont senator made that clear with a speech on Wednesday whose very title proves the limits of his revolution: “How Democratic Socialism Is the Only Way to Defeat Oligarchy.” He did not denounce capitalism itself, but “unfettered capitalism” specifically, and even used “socialism” as a sort of epithet.

“Let us never forget the unbelievable hypocrisy of Wall Street, the high priests of unfettered capitalism,” he said. “In 2008, after their greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior created the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression—with millions of Americans losing their jobs, losing their homes, losing their life savings—Wall Street’s religious adherence to unfettered capitalism suddenly came to an end.

Overnight, Wall Street became big government socialists and begged for the largest federal bailout in American history.”

Sanders’ hesitance to go any further may come as a disappointment to many on the far left today, but it’s not surprising given recent history. One of the first major signs of a socialist resurgence was the outbreak of Occupy Wall Street back in 2011. Though decentralized and leaderless, it was perhaps the biggest anti-capitalist movement since “the end of history” was declared 20 years earlier. While the movement spread globally and the “occupations” lasted for months, it didn’t produce any coherent vision of what was to replace capitalism. At the time, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek commented that the Occupy movement recalled Herman Melville’s famous short story about the law clerk Bartleby: “The message of Occupy Wall Street is ‘I would prefer not to play the existing [capitalist] game.’... Beyond this they don’t have an answer.”

A few years after Occupy, Thomas Piketty published his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which became one of the best-selling academic works of all time and prompted an international debate about inequality. Though centrist and right-wing critics labeled Piketty a “modern Marx,” the French economist was hardly calling for an end to capitalism or promoting some grand theory of capital. With an impressive slew of data, Piketty confirmed what those on the left had long known: that extreme inequality and the concentration of wealth is a natural outcome of capitalism. Unlike Marx, however, Piketty didn’t even attempt to imagine a radical alternative to the system of capitalism.

(His prescription was ultimately a global wealth tax, which manages to be both underwhelming and unrealistic.)

A year after Capital was published in English, Sanders launched his 2016 presidential run, which became another important display of the growing anti-capitalist mood that had spread since the financial crisis. Sanders openly identified as a “democratic socialist”—a radical gesture in itself—and provided an alternative to the “progressive neoliberalism” that had come to dominate the Democratic Party since the nineties. (I borrow this term from Nancy Fraser to describe an alliance between emancipatory movements such as feminism and anti-racism with “neoliberal forces aiming to financialize the capitalist economy,” who, according to Fraser, use the “charisma of their progressive allies to spread a veneer of emancipation over their own regressive project of massive upward redistribution.”)

Though Sanders reintroduced class politics to the debate and inspired a generation of young people to embrace the socialist label, he was ultimately offering an upgraded version of New Deal liberalism rather than a true socialist alternative to capitalism. The fact that his most “radical” policy—public universal healthcare—has been the status quo in European countries like the United Kingdom since the mid-twentieth century was telling enough. As many commentators noted at the time, Sanders was less a democratic socialist in the tradition of Eugene Debs than he was a social democrat in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt.

Sanders is now embracing that comparison. His speech on Wednesday was an effective love letter to FDR (with no mention of Debs). He called for the Democratic Party to take up the “unfinished business of the New Deal,” and proposed a twenty-first-century version of the FDR’s “economic bill of rights.” Though the senator continues to call himself a democratic socialist, his vague definition of socialism is still closer to the social democracy that FDR ushered in. According to Sanders, democratic socialism is the belief that “economic rights are human rights,” which means the right to a living wage, quality healthcare, education, affordable housing, and a secure retirement; it means “requiring and achieving political and economic freedom in every community in this country,” he said. These are all worthy and important goals, but only right-wing critics would honestly call this socialism.

In the three years since Sanders lost his primary bid, more and more Americans share his view, loosely speaking. According to a survey released by Axios just this week, four in ten respondents would prefer to live in a socialist country over a capitalist one, and 55 percent of women between 18 and 54 reject capitalism. That would seem to work in Sanders’s favor, but the size of the primary field has not. He does not have a sole establishment candidate to contrast himself with, and moreover, many of his competitors have embraced much of his agenda—albeit without the confrontational class-politics that defined his first campaign.

Sanders is still the only candidate who is remotely anti-capitalist, and the only candidate who calls himself a socialist. But his policies aren’t quite as unique as they were in 2016. Though no doubt “radical” in the American setting, Sanders’ economic agenda would be considered center-left in the rest of the developed world, and in practical terms there’s not much separating him from Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has insisted that she is “capitalist to [her] bones.”

There’s a degree of nostalgia for mid-twentieth century social democracy among today’s leading leftists, who long for the days when income taxes were high, unions were strong, and reformist policies found a middle ground between the extremes of “socialism” and “capitalism.”

Commonly referred to as the “golden age” of capitalism, the postwar era saw a reduction in inequality, growth in wages and living standards, and increased social mobility. This was all made possible—in part—by the policies implemented by New Dealers in America and Social Democrats in Western Europe. 

There is a real problem with trying to emulate the social democratic policies of the twentieth century today, however, and it’s not clear whether the middle-of-the-road approach is still viable in the twenty-first century. We live in a far more globalized world than we did 75 years ago.

Capital is more flexible and mobile than ever before and the rapid economic growth experienced during the postwar era is unlikely to be repeated, which makes national welfare states harder to sustain. In Capital, Piketty provided ample evidence that the trends during the mid-twentieth century were historically anomalous, and that today’s extreme inequality is a return to the norm.

“A concentration of circumstances (wartime destruction, progressive tax policies made possible by the shocks of 1914-1945, and exceptional growth during the three decades following the end of World War II),” he wrote, “created a historically unprecedented situation which lasted for nearly a century. All signs are, however, that it is about to end.” He added, “Broadly speaking, it was the wars of the twentieth century that wiped away the past to create the illusion that capitalism had been structurally transformed.”

Social democratic policies were originally designed to “save capitalism from itself.” Like Marx, John Maynard Keynes recognized the inherent instability of capitalism, but unlike the German revolutionary, he believed the system’s contradictions could be limited and its tensions mediated through state intervention—in other words, that the system was reformable. When Keynes was alive, it was still possible to imagine the end of capitalism (indeed, it was impossible not to), and the British economist devoted his life’s work to preserving the system. Today, even if you aren’t “capitalist to your bones” and believe that capitalism is “irredeemable,” as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the end of capitalism (or at least a viable alternative replacing it). It’s even difficult to imagine a return to the capitalism of the mid-twentieth century.

Sanders is an anti-capitalist at heart—otherwise he wouldn’t call himself a socialist—but we continue to live in an age where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (and with climate change and other ecological disasters threatening humanity, it doesn’t take H. G. Wells to imagine the end of the world these days). The question for today’s left seems to be whether the ultimate goal is to reform or to replace capitalism—and if the latter is indeed the goal, then what will a post-capitalist world actually look like? If Sanders wants to set himself apart from a candidate like Warren, he can start by giving these questions serious thought, and go beyond a simple critique of what he calls “unfettered capitalism.”

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