Ezra Klein’s Fact-Free Fabrications About the Left

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote the perfect soporific for snotty neo-liberals who want to strangle the movement bequeathed by Bernie Sanders and AOC.

By

David Gottfried

Mr. Ezra Klein has a new argument which is, supposedly, taking the nation by storm. He contends that progressives, like all red-blooded, greedy, gas-guzzling Americans, want more stuff. So he wrote a book, along with Derek Thompson, advising us to ditch the allegedly drippy liberalism of the past in favor of a politics that concentrates on getting us more junk. The title of his book is “Abundance.” Footnote 1

Of course, Klein overlooked a special facet of liberalism, the strain that shunned the religion of the shopping malls in favor of the princely, prophetic musings of a man who dreamt “of things that never were”:

Please, please listen to the words in the immediately succeeding clip and savor political rhetoric so fine and luminous that it makes today’s trite talk sound like the vulgar and incoherent exclamations of apes:

But most of you think Robert Kennedy is as dead as the dodo (Hell, when I hear RFK Jr, I think I’m gonna have a stroke), and so let’s go back to Ezra Klein’s imbecilic ideas:

Economic Inequality is Worse than Most People Realize

Ezra Klein seems to think that the Bernie Sanders’ camp has been fibbing about economic want and privation. According to Ezra Klein, the concentration of so much wealth and power in the hands of a few oligarchs does not explain poverty. Although Ezra Klein might be Jewish, his reasoning comes right out of the dogma of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages.

The Church, intent on defending royal privileges, said that the extreme wealth of the Kingly class had nothing to do with the poverty of Europe’s miserable peasants. (Obviously, the peasants are poor because the Jews are evil.) Ezra Klein, intent on defending billionaire oligarchs, has the gall to tell us, with a straight face, that the privations of the poor have nothing to do with the rapaciousness of the rich.

The problem with America is not that its productive capacity is puny or crippled. Rather, its productive capacity has been bought to serve only one class, the rich SOBS.

Although there has been a lot of press about income equality since Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, most Americans don’t realize just how bad things have gotten since President Ronald Mc Donald Reagan took the throne. America today is so different from the country it was in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s (decades when Republicans did not dare challenge the Rooseveltian consensus that there were times when the government had to fight for the poor in a big way) that we seem to be living in another country. Consider a few factors which highlight the veritable pauperization of the working class:

What does it take to support a family?

In 1970, the most common living arrangement consisted of a household of 4 in which one person worked full time and no one else worked at all, save for minor things such as paper routes. This household often owned its own home, went on summer vacations, occasionally dined in expensive restaurants, and sometimes had a country home. This was considered middle class living.

Today, the most common living arrangement consists of 3 or 4 people in one household, a couple and one or two children. Both individuals in the couple’s relationship go to work. Their two incomes provide just enough income for 3 or 4 people.

Of course, many people don’t even have children anymore because they fear they can’t afford to reproduce. I know writers whose fine books have been published who can’t earn enough bread to consider having children.

Very often, they see their health insurance policies steadily whittled down and mutated into monstrous managed care abortions which nickel and dime people and rob them of their health. Indeed, in recent years, life expectancy has been declining in the United States because of economic degradation, exacerbated by drug use.

Also, tuition is an egregious gut punch. Students can take out student loans, but this has many perverse consequences not only for our economy but also our national mental health. Years ago, one didn’t graduate deep in hock. Years ago, one could pursue a wide range of interesting, socially regenerative careers after graduating from college. Some students, flush with a Kennedyesque spirit, went into the Peace Corp.

(Mr. Trump, stuff like the Peace Corp is what made American great. But the things that made America Great are alien and antithetical to your vulgar, coarse, commercial Weltanschauung, or “world view.”)

Today, most bright students, upon graduation, are so chastened and chilled by student debt that they become slavish fodder for the commissars of the corporate state and, as such, will work toward making America more conformist, more commercial, more computerized, more dominated by AI, and more and more like the eunuchs in Woody Alien’s 1973 dystopian laugh-riot of a film, “Sleeper.”

Very simply, the next time some priggish, well coifed, nicely tailored, Brooks Brothers shit-head and horrible excuse for a human being tells you that we complain too much about corporate power, say this to him:

Why does it take two incomes to survive when it used to take one income to survive. Who is the thievish ogre and monster taking our daily bread? The culprits are the persecutory policies effected by the capitalist class, market machinations, a tyrannical tax code, and a rampant, greedy globalism which delights in making American workers compete against third world workers who make less than a dollar a day.

Corporate Executives v. Wage Slaves; the ratio that went from 50 to 1 to 500 to 1

Also, to really appreciate the ravages wrought by Reagan and his successors, one must compare gauges of the economy from the glory days, when the New Deal was still respected, with current economic numbers. Some people think numbers are boring, but these numbers pack the punch of Bryan’s cross of gold speech:

In 1965, in the United States, the ratio of the median income of CEOs to the median income of assembly line workers in manufacturing was roughly 40 to 50 to 1. Today that ratio is 400 to 500 to 1. That’s as breathtaking a change as going from Socialistic Sweeden to the London of Charles Dickens, where some mansions had 500 rooms. (Read Barbara Tuchman’s “The Proud Tower.” The first chapter, which chronicles the wealth and arrogance of the upper echelons of British society circa 1900, is enough to make anyone with any sympathy for his fellow man want to vandalize a mansion.)

But Ezra Klein, like so many bullshitting, rich liberals of the Bill Clinton school of dastardly dissemblers manages not to see this.

Ezra Klein’s Antediluvian Explanation for our allegedly disappearing abundance.

Ezra Klein imagines that a welter of regulations and governmental restrictions muzzled and muted and manacled the muscles of American industry and growth. He might be rhetorically alliterate and expansive in excoriating the regulatory state, but there’s a problem with his analysis: It’s all wrong.

In 1957, John Kenneth Galbraith, in “The Affluent Society,” shot down the farcical notion that a few statutes passed by Congress castrated the titanic power of General Motors and the Chase Manhattan Bank. Galbraith said that big business managed to “colonize” regulatory agencies, defang their claws and make them as impotent as sick kittens who could only meow in the form of impotent letters to the Editor of the New York Times that no one reads. Galbraith’s appraisal is just as true today as it ever was. For example, the FDA gave Burroughs Welcome the patent for AZT, the first AIDS drug, even though Burroughs Welcome never invented AZT; that drug was invented in 1964, long before we knew about AIDS, by a scientist on the government’s payroll who was looking for a cure for cancer. Essentially, the FDA made Burroughs Welcome richer and the American people poorer.

The Detritus and Death which are the Legacy of our under-regulated economy.

Our history proves that we could use more regulation, not less. Consider some of the horrible incidents which establish that Congress and regulators should not be squeamish about regulating commercial life. When the regulatory state is passive or nonexistent we suffer manifold maladies:

1) Because the drug thalidomide (prescribed to pregnant women to alleviate “morning sickness’) was not banned, thousands of children were born with extremely disfiguring birth defects (For example, a man who was 5 foot 10 might had wrists which were four inches from his shoulders. If he did not have that bizarre deviation, other parts of his body were mangled)

2) Because the over-the-counter preparation “Mothers little Helper” was on the market (touted as a remedy for colicky babies), thousands of babies become junkies. (The drug contained opium)

3) Because Sabin’s polio vaccine (which eventually worked wonderfully) did not, at first, adequately deactivate live polio viruses in the vaccine, many patients suffered illness with polio after getting the polio vaccine.

4) American dialysis patients are more likely to die than dialysis patients in Western Europe because Europe imposes more comprehensive and exacting requirements for cleaning equipment after it is used by a patient.

5) Because insufficient attention is given to adoptions, and the law does not interfere with adoption agencies, the Louise Wise adoption agency was given free rein to rip families asunder. It routinely put twins or triplets up for adoption by separating the twins or triplets, and giving them to different families, and never notifying the adoptive parents that the children they had adopted had siblings. (This was done for research purposes, but the results of the research have never been released.)

6) Telecommunication giants routinely exact all manner of redundant and ridiculous charges from consumers, and consumers are compelled to accede to this because telecommunications giants have the bargaining power of the trusts and monopolies of the gilded age.

7) Large swaths of Northern cities were turned into slums because banks were given free rein to red line neighborhoods

8) The need for regulation is infinitely greater today than in America’s imagined, Edenic infancy.

In colonial times, one might buy lumbar, chicken, sugar, coffee or tea. These products had been around for centuries. One didn’t need 30 years of graduate study to determine what to buy.

By contrast, today, in the course of a single day, one might a) get a script for a CT scan, b) buy airplane tickets, c) review a doctor’s recommendation that one submit to open heart surgery and d) buy an air conditioning system. To make the right decision, one might i) review different brands of CT machines as the Mayo clinic reported that America can expect 25,000 extra cancer deaths per year because of the radiation emitted by CT scans, ii) study the features, safety components and track records of different airlines to determine which one is most prone to collisions, iii) have a mini course of medical school to determine if one should really have open heart surgery instead of following the advice of a doctor who councils exercise and glasses of wine etc. Of course, if one had a personal Rain Man as in Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man” one might not need to couple shopping with 15 hours of research.

The Government Does Not Shackle or Impede Business Development; the Government is the Obedient Handmaiden of Business, Incessantly Showering it with Undeserved Riches.

In fact, government regulation, far from shackling business, is a terrific boon to business. For example, this country never would have become an industrial powerhouse if it weren’t for the aid government rendered to business.

The United States Government built the Eire canal and that investment gave America the capital to conquer the commercial world.

Very simply, the Erie Canal facilitated the transmission of produce from the mid-west to the East Coast. In the horse and buggy era, it was much easier to haul goods by water than to haul them by land. With the canal, produce grown in Ohio and Pennsylvania went on ships which took the Erie Canal to get to the Hudson River. From the Hudson River, one would go South to the Atlantic and then East to Europe where America made a mint selling its agricultural bounty. Furthermore, our sale of cheaper agricultural produce put many Europeans out of work. And so more impoverished European immigrants came to America where they became cheap labor to forge America’s stunning industrial power.

In addition, the Federal government in later decades of the 19^th century built the railroads. Railroads need a lot of land for stations, yards and thousands of miles of tracks, but the Federal government let the railroads have the land for nothing. Also, the federal government gave the railroads all the Engineers it needed, for free, from the army corps of engineers to provide railroads with additional profits.

Government’s pro-business bias is evident in all facets of American life. For example, in my legal work protecting tenants from greedy landlords, I had hoped to show that the landlord had violated the New York City Building Code. However, the preamble to the New York City building code appears to have been written by Barry Goldwater. It instructs that in applying health and safety standards, only minimal health and safety standards should be enforced and every command to clean or banish a pollutant or detrimental thing must be moderated by the cardinal necessity of not penalizing commercial or industrial activity.

Ezra Klein’s Argument that Labor uses regulations, not to advance the goals of the regulations but to play politics, completely overlooks how the Right has been playing politics to eviscerate our rights since this nation was founded.

Ezra Klein makes another argument that makes me ballistic with rage: He claims that unions and other organizations rely on various regulations to stop or impede action on construction projects, or other public objectives, until they are given concessions regarding some other issue that isn’t directly related to that regulation.

Essentially, he is complaining that unions have the gall and gumption to play politics. Is Mr. Klein out of his mind ?

The Right has been playing politics since the dawn of this nation. Hell, gaseous, verbose political windbags have been bullshitting us since the days of the Roman Senate.

Let me start small and work my way up:

Not too long ago, the Supreme Court threw out a medical malpractice suit premised on the charge that a medical device was unsafe. The Court held that because the FDA had approved the device no one could bring suit challenging the merits of the device. (Never mind that many unsafe devices are approved because industry scientists and resources overwhelm the much more modest resources of the FDA. Never mind that industry scientists often get much fatter salaries and that an FDA scientist might go easy on a company so that company will one day recruit him for a much fatter salary.)

Hence, the FDA, which was established to defend consumers, was used to shaft them. Essentially a tool was used to defeat the purpose for which the tool was established. But politics is a field where hijacking a tool to achieve ends that have nothing to do with the original purposes of a tool is as frequent as lying, and in politics lying is as frequent as breathing.

For example, the due process clause of the 14^th amendment had been enacted to defend the freed slaves. However, it was hijacked for another purpose: To invalidate all statutes meant to help the beleaguered poor of the industrial revolution. Very simply, whenever a statute did anything for a poor person (usually by extracting a duty from a rich person), the Supreme Court would render it unconstitutional by holding that it violated the due process rights of a rich corporation.

For example, in Lochner v New York — the model for all of these pre depression cases — the Supreme Court invalidated a New York Statute which said that a baker did not have to work more than 10 hours per day. The Court held that this new law burdened the employer, who would have to hire additional workers, and as such it violated his due process rights. Obviously, this view, which commanded the unswerving obedience of all American Courts, was dead wrong because due process – which means “fundamental fairness” – cannot have been violated since the statute, which limited hours to ten per day, was thoroughly debated and then voted on by the elected representatives of the New York State legislature.

And this is what makes me angrier than everything Ezra Klein pushes in his parsimonious prose. He says that Unions use environmental regulations and restrictions as a pretext to stop construction projects or other public works just so they can extract extra goodies from the political process. But doesn’t he understand that interest groups do this all the time. They claim that they are fighting for objective X, which they don’t care about, but they do it to obtain goal Z.

The 14^th amendment was designed to stop things like lynching, but from the time of its enactment, shortly after the Civil War, until the 1930’s, lynchings proceeded apace, and the 14^th amendment was used to make corporations get richer and richer.

So how dare, HOW DARE, Ezra Klein complain that unions or liberal pressure groups put on their big boy pants and get ready to rumble.

Of course, Ezra doesn’t see these things. Instead, he simply imagines that Big Pharma consists of philanthropic geniuses who genuinely want to do good and that we should unleash corporate power.

Does he not realize that the right has been playing politics in the most rabid fashion ever since Richard Nixon entered the White House. Do you remember that Republican legislators said that they wanted Obamacare to fail not because it was a bad bill but because it would hurt Obama. Do you remember how the Supreme Court became so subverted and perverted by the Trumpian menace that in its decision of July 1, 2024 it said that Trump was entitled to break the law and get off scott free. Don’t you fucking get it:

We crossed the Rubicon a long time ago. We’re past the industrial powerhouse that was the Ruhr. We have made it all the way to East Prussia and this country is the philosophical heir of the first and third Reichs of Imperial, Despotic Germany.

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Footnote 1) I have not read Klein’s book yet. Instead, I read Klein’s article, published in the New York Times a few days ago, which purports to tell us what he said in the book and why the book is literary manna from heaven.