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Revised Edition of “Bernie” Graphic Biography Due Out May 5, 2020

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Ted Rall

Heads up: a revised and expanded edition of my bestselling 2015 graphic biography of Bernie Sanders will be published on May 5th. It brings us up to the present primary campaign and includes 24 brand-new additional pages of artwork.

“Bernie” remains the only comprehensive biography of the Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate. Normally I would send you to your neighborhood independent bookstore but given the fact that the coronavirus crisis has closed all of those nationally, probably the only place you can reliably get it is via Amazon. Currently Amazon is not shipping box very quickly but they will be sending them out using some of the 100,000 new workers that they’re hiring.

My Dead French Grandfather Helped Me with COVID-19

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Ted Rall

Image result for deserted roads covid-19

After my mother died on February 7th I gathered her valuables and photo albums and drove home to New York. But there wasn’t enough room in the car for everything I wanted to keep.

There were tchotchkes like a silly white ceramic salt and pepper shaker in the shape of Arab kings. It wasn’t my taste but it had been there my entire life so I wanted it. There was a box of birth certificates and other official documents from her parents and grandparents back in France. Her bike. She bought a wooden chair for five dollars at a garage sale, stripped off the hideous paint and discovered it was early 19th century Shaker; I didn’t want to let that go.

One more trip to Dayton was all I needed.

Her house sold faster than I expected. Closing is in a month. The buyers want to move in then. So I’d have to get my stuff out. My realtor was generous. She offered to pack everything up and store it for me until the end of the coronavirus crisis. But as a rule I prefer to do it myself. Things you care about get lost and screwed up when you leave them to others.

COVID-19 be damned, I packed up to drive from New York to Ohio.

It was going to be a cannonball run. Twelve hours from New York to Dayton, one day to pack, twelve hours back. I’d only need to get gas once each way. If I needed to urinate, I’d do it on the side of the Pennsylvania’s Interstate 80. As Gary Numan noted, the automobile is the epitome of social distancing.

Aside from the possibility of contracting the coronavirus, my plan entailed the risk of being trapped at some checkpoint or forcibly quarantined as lockdowns continue to spread. Ohio has a “shelter in place” order. There are rumors that nonessential travel verifiable by documentation has been prohibited. The White House wants anyone who leaves New York to self-quarantine for 14 days. As of this writing, however, the highways are supposedly open. But will they be on Friday?

I couldn’t sleep last night.

What if I got sick somewhere in western Pennsylvania or eastern Ohio? I wouldn’t have any clue where to go. Would I be able to drive the remainder of the way to Dayton? Would I get stuck there? If I were on my way back, would I be in good enough shape to make it back to New York? There were too many variables to feel good about making the trip.

It’s not like I am particularly risk-averse. I’ve filed conflict reporting, including from Afghanistan. But something kept telling me I was being stupid.

Then my grandfather spoke to me. Not literally. He died over 30 years ago. But I could hear him in my mind, telling me a story for the umpteenth time, so clearly that I re-remembered the timbre of his voice.

The story concerned his best friend.

When France fell to the Germans in 1940, the country was partitioned. The western Atlantic coast and northern France including Paris were subjected to direct Nazi occupation. The center and the south became known as the absurdly misnamed “Free Zone,” governed for the first couple of years of World War II by the treasonous collaborationist regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain. My grandfather and his family lived in the free zone. His boyhood best friend lived in Paris.

A member of the French Resistance, he learned that Jews and others deported to Eastern Europe would never return, that they were being mass murdered by the Germans. He determined to save his friend, a Jew living in Paris.

Using forged papers that could have gotten him shot on the spot had they been discovered, he illegally crossed the line of demarcation into the occupied zone and made his way to his friend’s apartment in Paris.

You and your family, he told his friend as they smoked together, must leave at once. I have arranged forged documents for you. I will take you over the mountains to Spain where you will be safe.

His friend trusted him implicitly. I understand, he said. Then he went to talk to his wife.

After a time, his friend returned to the living room to inform him that they would not be leaving with my grandfather. They had a beautiful rent-controlled apartment, nice furniture. He specifically mentioned a fine china cabinet. Holocaust rumors seemed so over-the-top. Perhaps, he told my grandfather, everything will be alright.

After liberation, my grandfather returned to Paris where he learned that months after their meeting, his friend, his friend’s wife and their two daughters had been deported to Auschwitz. They almost certainly were gassed upon arrival.

The apartment was bare, the door wide open. Someone, neighbors probably, had taken everything, even the china cabinet.

“My friend died over an apartment and some stuff,” my grandfather remembered. He was still angry. “Never die over stuff. Society can collapse in an instant. Accept the truth, pivot and never look back. It’s the difference between life and death. Never risk death over a stupid china cabinet.”

COVID-19 isn’t World War II and driving to Ohio is hardly on par with waiting out the Nazi occupation of Paris. Yet my grandfather’s lesson was pertinent. I nearly risked myself and everyone that I came into contact over stuff.

Stuff doesn’t matter. People matter.

I’m sure my realtor will pack everything up diligently.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Bernie.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

3 Things the Government Must Do to Avoid Economic and Social Collapse

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Ted Rall

Image result for coronavirus closed sign

Americans don’t expect much from their government. But even by the standards of a nation with one of the flimsiest social safety nets in the Western world, the inability and unwillingness of both major political parties to manage and solve the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic is shocking.

President Trump’s lack of leadership is well documented elsewhere so I won’t go into detail here. Democrats aren’t blameless; the DNC-engineered pre-Super Tuesday soft coup against Bernie Sanders replaced a frontrunner whose prescient ideas were tailormade for this crisis with a babbling dolt without an original thought in his foggy brain.

Congress is squabbling over an economic stimulus package as if they had all the time in the world. My favorite part was Mitch McConnell letting the Senate take the weekend off. Hey, Japan, not cool about Pearl Harbor but we’ll get back to you about declaring war in a week or whatever. Meanwhile, experts predict that unemployment could go as high as 30%, significantly worse than the depth of the Great Depression.

But now is not the time to cast blame. The ship is sinking. We can make the captain walk the plank later. Right now we have to fix the problem.

First, we have to save lives.

Trump says he doesn’t want to “nationalize” American companies. Actually, no one’s suggesting that. But they should. This is still a spectacularly wealthy nation with incredible resources and brilliant entrepreneurs. Shortages of face masks, testing kits, ventilators, rubbing alcohol and so on are inexcusable. The federal government must immediately requisition factories, hire workers directly and place manufacturing of needed supplies on an emergency war footing. If a company is already set up to make something we need yet refuses to do so, it should be nationalized and put to work for the American people.

In the fight against COVID-19, the biggest danger to the privileged is the poor health of the underprivileged. You can hunker down in the Hamptons but your newly-purchased freezer full of hoarded steaks won’t protect you from infection as long as others are too vulnerable to protect themselves. Some of the 17 million vacant homes in the United States should be immediately seized to house America’s half a million homeless and other vulnerable populations. The vast majority of prisoners, many of whom are awaiting trial, convicted of minor offenses or convicted of serious crimes but safe to release, should be immediately released from facilities whose conditions create cesspools of contagion.

Healthcare must be free. Hospitals and doctors should send their bills to the government. That debate, along with the canard that we have the best healthcare system in the world, is obviously over.

Second, we have to save the economy.

I’m not normally one to agree with Thomas Friedman, but he’s right when he points out that economic collapse will kill people on a scale on par with COVID-19: “Either we let many of us get the coronavirus, recover and get back to work—while doing our utmost to protect those most vulnerable to being killed by it. Or, we shut down for months to try to save everyone everywhere from this virus—no matter their risk profile — and kill many people by other means, kill our economy and maybe kill our future.”

I don’t think we really need to “let” many of us get the coronavirus. That has already happened.

News coverage that emphasizes test results is an idiotic distraction. Roughly 1/10 of 1% of American citizens have been tested. We know nothing about the COVID-19 status of 99.9% of the population. We don’t call elections based on 0.1% of the poll results and we can’t draw real conclusions from the testing so far.

However, there is reason to believe that many, many people have already had it.

Roughly one out of five people who get the coronavirus will never know it because they are asymptomatic. COVID-19 was first identified in early December in Wuhan, China. Although the median incubation period is 5 days, it can be as long as 11 days. That means we are talking about a pandemic that dates back to late November 2019.

When did it arrive in the United States? Probably in a day or two, the amount of time it took for one asymptomatic and/or incubating carrier—people like this account for about 10% of new infections—to board a plane and fly across the Pacific Ocean. Roughly 10,000 people a day flew from China to the United States at that time.

This is not a new thing—and you should feel good about that.

Let me explain.

The number of new cases in the U.S. has been doubling about every three days. Get a calculator and start multiplying by two: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. That’s 10 three-day periods, aka the month of December. Keep going. By the end of January you’re at over a million. By February, a billion. The U.S. population is about 330 million. So when New York governor Andrew Cuomo says that 40 to 60% of the population is going to get the coronavirus, he’s being conservative.

The rate of transmission will stop increasing exponentially at some point. Some patients will die. The virus will run out of new Americans to infect. But mostly, we are going to recover and emerge with full or partial immunity to COVID-19. Many, many Americans have already had coronavirus, recovered, and are now fine.

Must they stay at home too? Maybe not. The U.S. government must pull out all the stops to test everyone, not just for current infection, but for past infection. A team at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York has developed a promising test for acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that lets you know if you’ve ever had it. We don’t know if it’s possible to be reinfected by coronavirus or, if so, whether a second bout would be equally or less severe. But there are promising signs that the human immune response can tackle COVID-19.

If COVID-19 patients can emerge with total or near total immunity to the strain, they can help people who are sick. There’s no risk of them transmitting the infection or of contracting it. They are the key to restarting our economy. We can’t waste a moment finding those people and getting them back to work.

Third, we have to save people’s individual economies.

As we saw after the 2008-09 Great Recession, there’s not much point saving banks or corporations or the stock market without targeting individual American citizens for direct relief. Bernie Sanders has proposed that the United States Treasury pay out $2000 per person per month until the end of the coronavirus crisis. Sounds right.

Republicans want an absurd regressive form of means testing—the poorer are you are, the less you would receive. Saying they don’t want to subsidize millionaires, Democrats like Nancy Pelosi also want means testing but from the other direction.

Both are ridiculous. There’s no time for detailed analysis or a new government bureaucracy to determine who gets what. Checks and wire transfers need to go out yesterday. So what if Bill Gates gets one?

It’s time to act, not to blame. But if there’s no action or if the action is late and/or insufficient, there will be plenty of blame to go around. And there will be no limit to the rage of the survivors who are suffering against politicians who did not do what was needed to be done.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Bernie.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Mass Testing for Coronavirus Antibodies Might Save the Economy

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Ted Rall

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems nuts that Americans didn’t assume that the novel coronavirus would make its way from China to the United States within a day or two after first appearing in China. We live in a highly interconnected world. What happens in Wuhan China will come to Los Angeles in the time that it takes a passenger jet to cross the Pacific Ocean. And that’s exactly what appears to have happened.

I’m a cartoonist, not a scientist, but it’s hard to escape the anecdotal evidence (prompted in part responses to my blog a week ago in which I suspected that I had this nasty virus in January) that many Americans have been unknowingly infected by the COVID-19 virus as early as January, perhaps even November or December. The United States intelligence community warned the Trump administration that that would happen early, and appears that they were right.

Assuming that COVID-19 acts like many other viruses and that having had it leaves a recovered patient with substantial antibody immunity, this means that the type of testing could point the way forward toward economic recovery. This is even truer if recovery from COVID-19 means complete immunity and thus no risk infection from this strain, or transmission to others. (All bets are off if there’s a quick mutation.)

A team at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York has developed a SARS-CoV-2 antibody test. This test serves two purposes: it will both tell you whether you actively have a disease or if you have ever had it in the past.

The government should pull out all the stops to make this test available to every American.

If we can start greenlighting infection-free and infection-proof Americans proven to have recovered from COVID-19, they can resume their jobs, go back to work and assist with people who are sick and getting sick.

Think, Don’t Hoard: How to Survive the End Times

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Ted Rall

Image result for afghanistan 1999

It feels like the end times. A mysterious invisible killer stocks the land. Wild rumors abound. The government is useless. There’s no sense that anyone knows anything, much less is in charge. Could America become a failed state?

Yes, but not yet. Yes, but not because of coronavirus. Late-stage capitalism will ultimately destroy the current sociopolitical governmental system, not COVID-19. A vaccine will come online either later this year or early next year; that will be the beginning of the end of this scourge. Before then, many if not most Americans will have contracted the disease and recovered from it. Businesses will reopen. People will go back to work. The stock market will resume its climb.

In the meantime, many of us are wondering: how would/will we survive in an apocalyptic scenario without a somewhat benevolent government to run things?

I have good news for you: it is possible. Not easy. Not fun. But it can be done.

I know because I have seen it.

For decades Afghanistan was the epitome of a “failed state,” a nation whose government is no longer able or willing to supply essential services to its citizens. The 1978 CIA-backed overthrow of a Russian-supported regime prompted the Soviet invasion of the 1980s, which was followed after withdrawal by a brutal, grinding civil war partly resolved by the victory of the Taliban in 1996. They ruled until 2001 but didn’t built much infrastructure before being themselves driven out of power by the United States after 9/11. I was there under the Taliban, long before the U.S. and NATO began reconstruction in the mid-2000s.

Afghans were utterly dependent on themselves. Not only did the Taliban government fail to provide services like mail delivery and garbage collection, the Taliban made people’s lives miserable through arbitrary edicts and a psychotic religious police force that beat Afghans in the streets willy-nilly.

Try to imagine, if you can, what it would be like to live in a country that didn’t have a single inch of paved road, just muddy ruts. No one has a phone. There are no newspapers. Radios and televisions are banned, which is fine because you have no electricity and no stations are broadcasting.

Inside your house, there’s no running water. You have to walk to a communal well if you are lucky enough to have one nearby that isn’t polluted. There’s a good chance that a local thug controls the well and forces you to pay for water. It gets blazing hot in the summer, but there’s no air conditioning. It’s freezing cold in the winter but there’s no heat. You could burn some wood but you can’t find any because everyone has already chopped down all the trees.

Under the Taliban you can’t send your daughter to school. But you can’t send your son either because there probably isn’t a local school at all. No one has work as we know it. You exchange odd jobs in a 100% unemployment economy where cash has stopped circulating; everything relies on barter.

There is a certain freedom. Without a public records office you don’t need a deed to move into an empty house. But of course you can’t sell it if you leave. There’s no DMV so if somehow do you acquire a car you can drive it regardless of your age. On the other hand, if someone steals it, there’s no police to report it to.

If you did get that car, you probably would only want to drive it around your neighborhood. If you tried to drive to a different town, you would almost certainly be robbed and killed.

Sounds like it would be impossible to survive, right? But millions of Afghans did. Some of them even had children. Life went on. How? It’s almost unfathomable for us Americans, so accustomed to our creature comforts, to imagine.

Not that they could have afforded to anyway, but Afghans did not hoard. Situations in which survival is precarious require you to be nimble. That includes being able to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice. If you manage to accumulate some possessions, you want something highly portable: cash (in Afghanistan, that meant US dollars), jewelry, gemstones. A year’s worth of toilet paper weighs you down.

I have met more than my fair share of survivalists in the United States. Typically their instinct is to hunker down on a remote plot of land, stockpile weapons and supplies, fortify a perimeter and arm up to fend off potential marauders. They are foolish. When the crap hits the fan, the best armed man will not be able to fight off a dozen invaders. It’s smarter to pack up and go if your area turns into a battle zone.

What you really need to stock up on are two items: personal relationships and IQ points. Both make the difference between life and death.

Good friends welcome one other into their homes. If one home is lost, they can squeeze together into a second one. A good friend might have a skill or a possession that you might need—they can stitch up a wound or drive you somewhere in their car.

You make yourself useful in a failed state by exactly the opposite means you would use in ours. In the United States in 2020, it pays to have excellent skills in one or two areas, to be the best at what you do in your specialty. Not in Afghanistan in 2000. Dangerous places work best for people who are renaissance men and women, those with a wide variety of skills. Learn to do a lot of things fairly well. Shoot a gun, drive a car, cook, sew. Translate a foreign language, ride a motorcycle, fish, hunt. You can sell those skills to people who don’t have them.

Most of all, stay sharp and think nimbly. Hone your instincts. Watch for changes that might affect you and the people you care about. Prepare to drop everything you are doing at a second’s notice and take off if need be. We are all descended from people who lived this way. Those who didn’t died. Survival is in your DNA.

I don’t think you’ll need raw survivalism for the coronavirus apocalypse. But it’s worth keeping in the back of your mind.

 (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Bernie.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

We Should Attach Strings to Corporate Bailouts

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Ted Rall

Image result for empty airport

It’s the end of the world as we know it and the banks and airlines feel fine because even in the midst of economic collapse CEOs can sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that the American taxpayer will bail them out. Again.

All they have to do is wait a respectable 6 to 12 months after the wire transfer clears to start giving themselves raises, renovating executive suites and buying back their stock.

That’s exactly what happened during and after the 2008-09 global economic crisis that followed the subprime mortgage meltdown. In 2008 alone banks that received government bailouts spent $1.6 billion on executive salaries, bonuses and benefits including “cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management,” the AP reported.

It has been a week since securities markets began a terrifying fall. Again, shamelessly, acting under the assumption that we have completely forgotten what they did last time, corporate lobbying groups like Airlines for America are already asking for a $60 billion bailout. Some people in the media are asking the right questions. Steve Inskeep of NPR’s Morning Edition asked an AFA spokesman about the $10 to $15 billion in profits the airlines have been raking in annually. Didn’t they save any of that? According to Bloomberg, the idiots spent 96% of their cash to buy back their stock even as they accumulated a mountain of debt.

As a society, however, Americans ought to be asking a bigger question: are we going to allow ourselves to be conned by these corporate douches the way we have been in the past?

Clearly the United States economy cannot recover from the coronavirus shock without a viable transportation system. That includes airlines. Similarly, we can’t allow banks to fail. But we should not repeat the mistakes of the Bush and Obama administrations, who bailed out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.

The federal government handed over $7 trillion interest-free, no strings attached, to the big banks in exchange for increasing liquidity in the credit markets—which they never did. It’s still too hard to get a mortgage or other type of loan. After 9/11 the feds gave $15 billion to the airline industry which has since treated American airline passengers like crap.

As with the bank bailout, much of the money was wasted and stolen.

As George W. Bush said, fool me once, shame on, shame on you, fool me, you can’t get fooled again. Or something like that.

I have little expectation that they will do this, but the Trump Administration should target federal assistance toward ordinary citizens who are losing their jobs rather than corporations. Not only is this the right thing to do, you get twice the bang for your buck. If Obama had helped distressed and unemployed people pay their mortgages and rent, it would have kept them in their homes, propped up the underlying mortgages that tanked derivatives and therefore saved the banks indirectly. Reducing the number of evictions would have mitigated the real estate crash caused by the deterioration of vacant houses.

To their credit, White House officials seem to be considering direct payments to prop up the economy during the coronavirus crisis. There’s even talk of a $1000 per person per month guaranteed minimum income reminiscent of Andrew Yang’s proposal. Seems like a lot of money but not when you compare it to the defense budget. Maybe we can take a break from killing Muslims?

But I would be surprised if they did that. The political class is just not that into us.

Trump should offer distressed corporations two options in exchange for being rescued from the financial downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Option one: nationalization.

If we save your automobile company or your oil company or your airline, we own it. All your stock gets transferred to the property of the U.S. Treasury. If the bailout is partial, we take a proportionate share based on a discounted rate of your devalued stock prices. If you are a competent CEO, you get to stay, but obviously at a greatly reduced salary. Once you start to do better, we deserve your profits.

You’re welcome.

Option two: we get to tell you how to run your company.

I’m picking on banks and airlines because they are particularly mean to their customers but you can extrapolate these principles to other lines of business.

If the U.S. taxpayer saves your bank, the U.S. taxpayer has the right to be treated like a human being when he or she does business with you. That means closing the gap between interest rates. It’s insane that banks pay out 0.5% interest on savings accounts while taking in 25% from credit cards. It’s immoral to charge lower fees to rich people with high bank balances than to poor people with hardly any money. Before we dole out money to these institutions, they must promise in writing to do better.

The list of sins of our widely-despised airlines is endless: seats packed so closely together that they would be difficult to evacuate in case of emergency, high flight change fees and baggage fees that have by themselves poured billions of dollars into airline coffers. As Columbia law professor Tim Wu says, “The change fees don’t just irritate; they are also a drag on the broader economy, making the transport system less flexible and discouraging what would otherwise be efficient changes to travel plans.”

 The anti-American caste system—first class, business, coach, basic economy—should be abolished. If your flight gets canceled for a reason other than bad weather, you should be compensated. I’m tired of seeing my flights canceled because there would have been some empty seats. Even in case of bad weather, they should put you up in a decent hotel until it clears.

Big bailouts come with big strings. Not one dime of taxpayer money should ever find its way into executive salaries. And no stock buybacks.

Think I’m being draconian? If so, think of all the times you have asked an institution like a bank or an airline to cut you a break. How many times did they say yes? They had all the power and they used it to crush you. Thanks to the coronavirus the tables are turned. We, the people, have the power over the money that these jerks need to survive.

Let’s leverage the hell out of it.

 (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Bernie.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Did I Have Coronavirus in January?

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Ted Rall

I seriously have this question: is it possible that I have already had COVID-19? I would love a speculative reply from a medical professional.

I spent four weeks in Los Angeles this past January. When I arrived via a flight from JFK to LAX, I began feeling ill soon after arrival. You may recall that there were wildfires northwest of Los Angeles at the time, and I could smell the acrid burning. I suffer from mild asthma; most Angelenos barely seemed to notice it but it bothered me a lot.

What followed were the symptoms that I associated at the time with something that happens to me fairly typically: allergic reaction causes runny nose which triggers bronchitis which, if it gets bad, can become pneumonia. I have had pneumonia at least four times. Now, however, I wonder if I actually had coronavirus in January. Because what happened then was nothing like my normal pattern.

My symptoms were what we all know now as boilerplate for COVID-19. I had an incessant dry cough. (To the people I met with, sorry, I just didn’t know.) I had a constant fever. My temperature ranged from about 101° during the day to closer to 103° at night. My chest was tight: it felt like a car was parked on it. I had absolutely no energy whatsoever. I was exhausted. Even walking half a block, I had to take a break. I would get back to my hotel after a meeting and be asleep by 6 PM. I would sleep 14 hours and wake up still wiped out. “What the hell,” I would ask myself, “is going on?”

This went on for nearly 4 weeks.

I visited two walk-in clinics in West Hollywood. The first one was useless. The attending nurse told me it was probably a viral as opposed to a bacterial infection and I just needed to treat it with over-the-counter stuff. I became alarmed when, a few days later, I felt like I was getting worse, not better. So I went to see another one.

These guys were better. They listened to me when I explained that my pulmonary problems usually have a bacterial component even when they are viral so that I needed antibiotics. They took an x-ray which revealed that I was in the early stages of pneumonia. I tested negative for flu.

However, they didn’t really give me a very strong antibiotic. I felt slightly better after two or three days but then I started to slip again. So I called my physician back in New York. So she called in a prescription for a stronger antibiotic. By then we were in week three. Normally when you have a fever, it gets worse at night but it starts to alleviate after the second night, maybe even after the first one. Whatever I had in January just kept going on like the energizer bunny. Night after night, that fever would hit me like a brick. And I could barely walk.

Looking back, it’s obvious that whatever happened to me in January, whether or not it was coronavirus, was definitely very different than anything else I have ever experienced. And I have had swine flu as well as regular influenza. This was nothing like that.

The timing certainly would work for coronavirus.

The Wuhan outbreak began in early December 2019. Los Angeles California is of course one of the major gateways to China so it’s likely that someone who carried the virus traveled from China to the United States within days. They were probably asymptomatic at the time.

New York to LA flights go back-and-forth between LA and New York and New York and LA so the plane was probably infected by time I boarded in New York. (I don’t care what the airlines say about how flying is safe. I often get sick due to the recirculated air on airplanes. I think planes are cesspools of contagion.)

At least three people with whom I came into contact suffered similar symptoms for at least a month. Again, sorry!

After I recovered from the initial symptoms, it took at least another month before I started to feel normal, as opposed to constantly exhausted and fatigued.

For the record, most experts believe that you will no longer transmit it after 14 days. The longest estimate I have found is 37 days. It has been longer than 37 days for me.

I am assuming that I am still vulnerable to coronavirus and I am taking all the necessary precautions to isolate myself and keep myself clean. And of course I don’t want to give it to anyone else. Still, it’s an interesting question: is it possible that I am one of many people in the United States who have already had coronavirus without knowing it?

If so, that gives us some reason for optimism in terms of recovery and fatality rates. If there are a lot of people like me who were never tested for this disease and got over it on their own, it means that the odds of recovering from coronavirus are significantly higher than those being calculated by public health officials.

A Premature Postmortem of the Bernie Sanders Campaign

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Ted Rall

Establishment media is ridiculing Bernie Sanders for stating some simple truths: establishment media was out to get him, the DNC was out to get him and young voters who support him haven’t been good about showing up at the polls.

But that doesn’t mean that Bernie Sanders didn’t make mistakes. So let’s take a look at those.

No matter what happens between him and Joe Biden, and it isn’t over yet, Sanders deserves credit for some remarkable achievements. In the face of formidable establishmentarian opposition, Jewish, with a speaking manner that is anything but conventional in U.S. politics, relying only on small individual donations and promoting a political agenda many Americans would consider radical, Bernie Sanders currently controls 42% of the Democratic primary vote against a recent sitting vice president. Much of his agenda, including making college affordable, increasing the minimum wage, and improving the healthcare system, has become mainstream Democratic Party policy after many decades during which the party didn’t even pretend to give a damn about normal people. Bernie Sanders is running an issue-based campaign, not one based purely on personality. Even if he loses, historians will mark this election as evidence of the strength of progressive and left-leaning electoral politics.

But he’s not perfect. There are things that he could have/could still do better.

Politics is first and foremost about framing, and Sanders isn’t great at it. “Medicare for All” is meaningless to millions of Americans who have had no contact with Medicare and don’t know anything about it. “Free healthcare” would have been easier to understand and would not have turned off or confused union members who already have decent healthcare plans. “Free college tuition,” on the other hand, tells too little of the story. Sanders’ plan only helps low-income college students but many voters seem to still think that he wanted to use their taxes to help out children of wealthy people. The “Green New Deal” hasn’t been defined or well-publicized beyond the fact that it would be expensive.

Sanders’ plan for student loan forgiveness was also presented in a problematic fashion. Many Americans don’t have college degrees; they wondered, why should we pay for those who do? Many other Americans went to college, took out student loans and then paid them back. Why shouldn’t millennials do the same? There are good answers to those questions: millennial student debt is many factors higher than Generation X and Baby Boomer debt because tuition has skyrocketed at a rate much faster than inflation. Student loan forgiveness would stimulate the economy by freeing up young people to buy cars and homes. People who already paid their loans should have been added as beneficiaries of his plan so that they didn’t feel like suckers due to a simple accident of birthdate. Most importantly, Sanders should not have proposed student loan forgiveness without coupling it to a free college tuition program and/or job retraining program for people who are older and don’t have college degrees or need retraining in order to retool for the 21st century.

Speaking of costs, I found it endlessly frustrating that Bernie Sanders never seemed able to clearly answer the question of how he would pay for his proposals. Generally, he should simply have said: “I’ll take it out of the Pentagon budget.” Maybe this wasn’t true. If it wasn’t true, he should have made it true. Not only is the defense budget bloated, most Americans, including people who favor strong military, know about the $800 toilet seats. I’m not sure why he didn’t bash the military.

He also hasn’t been good about explaining Medicare for All. What he should have said was, everyone is going to pay less for healthcare, so much less, that even though your taxes will go up a bit, you’ll still come out way ahead.  And if you got hit by something catastrophic like cancer, it would all be covered. Instead, he talked about how European countries somehow managed to pay for national healthcare plans. He’s right about that, but Americans have been told that Europeans pay high taxes. He needed to explain in plain language that that would not happen here.

He ignored my advice to own and explain his self-described “democratic socialist” label. He probably assumed that it would be more of a problem in the general election against Donald Trump, but what he underestimated was the Democratic Party’s long history of red bashing as well as the well-established fact that other people will define you if you don’t do it yourself. He should have followed the example of JFK when he gave a speech assuring Americans that he would not take orders from the pope as a Roman Catholic. Sanders should have given a speech entirely about democratic socialism.

Some things, it’s hard to do anything about. A campaign has the candidate that it has with a personality that he or she comes with. Bernie Sanders has an underlying vulnerability and warmth that his tendency to bellow often covered up. The media had a field day portraying him as a guy who likes to yell a lot. This is where something like “The Man from Hope” video that the Bill Clinton for President campaign created would have come in handy. A biographical look at Bernie’s roots in Brooklyn, his childhood struggling in a working-class family and the premature death of his mother due to poor healthcare would have helped to humanize a very human person.

Images of him being manhandled by cops during his participation in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s couldn’t have hurt him with African-American voters who ended up turning out for Joe Biden.

Of course the biggest mistake Sanders made may not have been a mistake at all. He ran inside the Democratic Party. They were never going to let him have the nomination.

He had to know that.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Bernie.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Thanks, Student Cartoonists of Columbia High School!

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Ted Rall

I recently had the pleasure to speak at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. It’s one of my favorite places to visit and I have had the honor to be invited to speak to students there several times over the years. On this past visit, several students drew some editorial cartoons.

I promised to pick my favorites and here they are in no particular order:

“Government Snake,” by Alex Schnorr, 9th grade:

“Melting Faster,” by Dakota Dallison, 9th grade:

“Trump as an Orange,” by Norah Vaughn:

It’s so great to see young people taking an interest in this profession!

Joe Biden Obviously Has Dementia and Should Withdraw

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Ted Rall

Image result for biden senile

            You Democrats ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

            You spent the last four years criticizing Donald Trump in no small part for his mental state, and rightly so. The founding fathers included an impeachment provision in the Constitution in large part as a contingency to remove a president exactly like him, whose temperament and personality and mental state are incompatible with the requirements of the highest elected office in the land.

Trump is not merely a jerk. Psychologists have been so alarmed that they have violated a core ethical principle of their profession by attempting to diagnose him at a remove. Narcissistic personality disorder is their universal conclusion and it fits like a glove. Among the characteristics of NPD is a lack of empathy—not something one wants or needs in a leader.

            Now Democrats are conspiring to gaslight the American people by engineering the presidential election of a man clearly suffering from dementia, Joe Biden.
            This is no time to be “polite.” We are talking about the presidency. As always, we need a frank, intelligent discussion and debate about the issues and the candidates. It is perfectly fair to talk about Bernie Sanders’ heart attack as well as Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s mental acuity.

            Contrary to current ridiculous Democratic talking points, it is not ageist to point this out. One out of seven Americans over the age of 70 suffers from dementia. (Biden is 77.) If it’s ageist to talk about dementia among the elderly, it’s ageist to talk about immaturity among the young.

            It is neither necessary nor possible to scientifically determine whether the former vice president has dementia. On the other hand, you don’t need an astronomer to know that the sun rises in the east. If you have encountered dementia, you know Joe Biden has it.

            There is so much blame to go around for this BS that I can’t figure out what order to put it in. I’ll go chronologically.

            There are the Democratic Party bosses who, terrified at the prospect that Bernie Sanders might win the nomination, recruited former Vice President Joe Biden out of a comfortable retirement to run yet again.

            There is Biden himself. His family should have known better than to allow a campaign by the guy who inspired the headline “Biden allies float scaling back events to limit gaffes.” Not that gaffes are the issue. Or stuttering. Or being old. Many Americans are as old or older than Joe Biden, they stutter, and they’re mentally competent. Biden is not.

            Of course you also have to cast the stinkeye at Biden’s former rivals Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Mike Bloomberg. Just because the DNC probably urged them to endorse Biden doesn’t mean that they had to. No cabinet position or even a position as vice president should be enough inducement to set aside common sense. Elizabeth Warren earns an honorary mention for her failure to speak out against Biden and to endorse Bernie Sanders.

            None of the media seem interested in the truth about Biden. Democratic media allies like CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post are running interference for the Democratic establishment and Biden by failing to ask any questions about the candidate’s mental fitness. Right-wing outlets like Fox News are gleefully trumpeting Biden’s mental decline but they would say that even if it wasn’t true. The fourth estate has abdicated its duty to follow the truth wherever it leads.

            And finally there are the voters. As a citizen, you have no business casting a vote thoughtlessly or less than fully informed. Deliberately casting a vote for someone clearly suffering from dementia, or turning a blind eye to it, or being simply unaware of Biden’s mental state are inexcusable.

            I spent the last few years watching my mother’s decline due to dementia caused by Alzheimer’s. She had been brilliant. Years before her death, however, she was having a tough time keeping it together. I would have voted for her as president in 2012 but not 2016. It would have been wrong.

No one who has been close to someone deteriorating from that disease could fail to see the same signs in Joe Biden.

            In online discussions Biden apologists sometimes say that a senile Biden is better than an evil Trump. Is this really where we are?

            Consider the 20 or so contenders for the Democratic nomination as of late last year. All of them except for one—Biden­—were mentally competent. Marianne Williamson came off as loopy and Tom Steyer was painfully awkward but both were in full command of their faculties. Congratulations, Democrats, you literally picked the worst of the bunch.

            This is not about politics. No doubt, Joe Biden’s voting record is monstrous. He opposed school busing, sold out Anita Hill, voted to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, supported NAFTA and bragged about the extrajudicial assassination of Osama bin Laden. And yes, Hunter Biden’s job in Ukraine is classic corruption. But that’s not the point here.

But even if his politics were closer to mine—quadrupling the minimum wage, nationalizing major industries, banning all wars of aggression, free healthcare and college—I would be writing this same column. It doesn’t matter how crappy Donald Trump is. It’s anti-American and unpatriotic to vote for someone suffering from dementia for a position with exclusive control over nuclear launch codes.

            What about Donald Trump? If Joe Biden is the nominee, and people don’t vote for him—which I think will be the case anyway—Trump will win a second term. Isn’t it imperative to stop that by any means necessary?

            As I wrote recently, odds are that Trump, like most previous presidents, won’t get much done during his second term anyway. Anyway, there is always a moral alternative to picking between two terrible options. Vote for another party, write someone in, don’t vote.

            But it’s not too late for the Democrats. Joe Biden doesn’t have to be the nominee.

            He can and should withdraw.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Bernie.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

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