Imagine for a moment that a notable American actually came up with a plan to save America. A good one. Maybe even one that was a little revolutionary. To turn this state of ruinous collapse around. What would you expect the pundits, politicians, columnists, and talking heads to do? Especially if she was a woman — and they were all men? I’d expect them to furiously ignore it — when they weren’t mocking it or insulting it. How else did we get to this point in history, after all? Unsurprisingly. that’s exactly what is happening.

Over there, the usual coterie of people is arguing furiously over Bernie versus Beto — when they’re not fixating on Trump and his latest clownish (or Hitleresque) antics. Meanwhile, in this corner, is Elizabeth Warren, and her suprising plan to save America. And it’s getting more or less no attention. But it should be. She’s getting Hillaryed, in fact — “but is she likable?!”, gasp the pundits, a condescending, reductive demand they never make of men, because that’s patriarchy in action — instead of considering her ideas on their merits. So let’s do what they won’t and can’t.

Warren’s plan to fix America is the most intelligent, courageous, and wise set of ideas I’ve heard an American leader propose in my lifetime. It’s the only agenda or vision I’ve seen for anything close to a New Deal for the 21st century. It’s so good, so well thought out, so admirable, that every one of us should be talking about it, thinking about it, reflecting on it. It’s genuinely radical, more than a little bit revolutionary, and promises to be pretty transformative. I’m impressed — which is something I rarely say about American ideas. Let’s go through a few of its components.

First comes a plan for the government to manufacture generic drugs. Brilliant. In case you haven’t noticed, American life expectancy is plummeting, unique in the world. It’s shocking and scandalous that people are dying younger every year in a “rich” country. Why does no one talk about it? The reason is that healthcare is unaffordable, and that means medicine is, too. Insulin costs ten to a thousand times in America what it does anywhere else in the world (even Pakistan). Why is that? Well, it’s because capitalism exists only to profit. And that means that the less profitable a drug gets, the less it’s manufactured. But that defeats the purpose of, well, healthcare. The government is indeed the only player who can fix this mess: capitalism creating artificial shortages to prop up its profits, in an ironically Soviet twist.

The less insulin you can get, the more drug companies profit. How twisted is that? So what’s important to note is that this goes way beyond “Medicare For All” — which is a cop-out. Medicare has all kinds of holes and gaps in coverage — it’s not really a universal healthcare system. This plan attacks the problem at the root — which is a “market failure”, or, more concisely put, artificial scarcity for profit. The government simply steps in and…makes drugs. The ones that are barely profitable to begin with. Why? So that everyone can…afford them. This is just basic common sense. It’s true that American economists will never understand it — and Americans who’ve been brainwashed by American economics will never get it, either — but that’s their problem. If you want to live a longer, happier, healthier life, you should want cheaper medicine, and if you want cheaper medicine, you shouldn’t want to rely on capitalism to make it for you (because mostly, it doesn’t.)

(By the way — when was the last time you heard anyone in American public life say: “society should make this”? Never, right? Why is that? I’ll come back to that — for now, just note how genuinely radical it is to say the government should make..well..anything, whether drugs, healthcare systems, retirement plans, or cars.)

Second comes a plan to let employees elect 40% of a company board. Shocking! Impossible! Why, that’s communism! No, my friends, it’s Germany. this idea comes straight from the German model of corporate governance. Do you see how Germany has a vastly better economy than the States? It makes higher quality stuff? People receive higher wages and salaries for making it? CEOs don’t get away with the same level of complete incompetence and malfeasance, earning hundreds of millions for running companies aground? Hedge funds don’t get to raid pensions and call it “shareholder value”? That’s all because employees elect board members. When they can do that, a board isn’t the coterie of sleazy, cheesy insiders that it’s become in America — so asleep at the wheel that, like Facebook’s, it drools and goes “duhhh” when, say, Russia hacks an election (LOL).

One of the biggest problems in America is capitalism run amok, and one of the greatest reasons capitalism ran amok is that “boards” only represent “shareholders.” But shareholders are only interested in profit — while companies exist to serve a public purpose. See the inherent problem, the unaddressed conflict of interest? So quite naturally, what’s happened is that since boards only represent the interests of shareholders, the public purpose of companies has vanished and disappeared. What else was going to happen? Hence, American capitalism is only interested in profit — and then distributing that profit to shareholders. But shareholders are only 10% of Americans — and mostly hedge funds. They aren’t the average person, like the one working for that very company. So the average person’s gone from middle class to new poor, while the rich have become the ultra rich, and society’s been eviscerated — thanks to this foolish, absurd model of capitalism.

Germany has plenty of capitalism too. But it’s less predatory, less short-sighted, less narrow-minded. That’s because when employees elect board members, those board members will veto and vote down proposals like “let’s dole out $250 million to this CEO for doing nothing” or “let’s let this private equity fund raid everyone’s pension, so our shareholders are happy” or “let’s give all the profit back to shareholders, instead of ever giving a raise to a worker.”

There’s plenty more in Warren’s plan. But let’s go on focusing on these two ideas — and the ideas behind them. What do they really say? They say three things.

First, that governance isn’t 100% bad — it’s necessary, beneficial, and useful. My friends, while you might think this — it’s only a measure of your own ignorance. Why do Europeans and Canadians have decent healthcare, retirement, childcare, high speed trains, media — which are the precise things that make them live vastly longer, healthier, happier lives than Americans? Because they are all public goods — guaranteed constitutionally, provided by governments. It’s a social contract that works so much better than America’s that at this point, America’s in it’s own category of country — a rich one of poor people, a powerful one of powerless people, a wealthy nation of broke people. In that sense, America failed at being a society — and the central reason why is that for our adult lifetimes, a bizarre, clueless coterie of economists, intellectuals, pundits, and politicians have all had one, single goal — to eliminate government entirely. Hence, the state of anarchy-by-way-of-capitalism that exists now: a society in freefall. America feels like the Wild West — can’t afford a a doctor? So sorry, now you die — because it’s never outgrown that mentality.

That mentality was embedded in capitalism — at least the neoliberal, conservative, 1980s, 1990s style of it, that was preached for so long by generations of American economists and pundits. But it failed — because advanced societies need cooperation. Not in some kind of absolute sense — communism, comrades!! But in the sense that predatory capitalism itself was an extreme ideology — it said we don’t need any governance, of any kind, ever, whatsoever. Just get out of the way, and let the market do it’s job! it will self-regulate! LOL — it didn’t. Instead, “the market” built monopolies — like it always does. First, quietly, then, openly — in the “rollup” strategies of private equity and hedge funds. Warren’s plan recognizes that this kind of totalitarian capitalism — which also demands no government, anywhere, ever — is also a ruinous failure, of Soviet proportions.

The second thing that Warren’s plan recognizes is that socialism and capitalism are better when they work together — the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. They’re not opposites — as we once thought, and the problem is that America is still stuck in those Cold War white nights. There will always be a need for capitalism in a society. But it must always be reined in and regulated — not to limit competition, but to promote it. Hence, socialism must come before capitalism — a government that sets rules like “40% of a board is made up of employees” or “you can’t buy and sell little kids, guys.” By the same token, nobody’s saying that government should make your iPhone — just that it should set ground rules which make competition possible — and meaningful, too. So far, all that corporations really compete for in America is money — but not to improve anyone’s life. And then their lobbyists do it, so then politicians do it — bang! That’s how American democracy crumbled. Organizations must compete for more than money — and they must also do more than compete, they must nurture, cultivate, care, and invest — if a society is to endure and grow.

So the third thing that Warren’s plan recognizes is that the first job of a society is to give everyone a decent life — because only such a society can endure, grow, and flourish. Everyone. Let me put that in concrete terms. Before there are billionaires — a society should have no children living in abject poverty. No starving mothers. Nobody — not a single person — choosing between chemotherapy and the mortgage. Isn’t that just common sense? Otherwise what is a society? What’s it’s point, purpose, and mission? Why bother being part of one? But the result is destabilization — people think just that. That is how these foolish waves of Trumpism and Brexit and so on have been born. When people get the feeling their society doesn’t care about them, is only there to prey on them, quite naturally, they will want to break up with it. They will turn their back on norms of decency and equality and fairness and even truth — feeling that they have been betrayed in all those ways, first, too.

A society’s role, point, mission, purpose, is to lift up the lowest — precisely by the highest. It is not to enable the highest to climb higher by trampling the lowest even lower. A “rich” society full of impoverished kids and a handful of billionaires isn’t really a rich one — it’s a poor one. The ideas and statistics that suggest that is what it means to be a “rich” society are childishly, laughably mistaken. Such a society will turn on itself, destabilize, fail to cohere — so in the end, what did its riches matter? Such a society will collapse — just like America is today.

It’s rare for me to say that I’m impressed by an American…anything. Not because I’m mean (OK, sometimes I’m mean), but because America doesn’t lead the world in anything anymore, really. But Warren’s plan really is different. It’s transformative, revolutionary, and radical. I’m impressed. You should be too. You should read up on it and think about it, talk about it with your friends, reflect on it by yourself.

See those bros yammering on? Bernie, dude! No! Beto!! Which old white dude will save us this time? Ignore them. They should be discussing Elizabeth (and Alexandria). Capitalism and its failure. What the future needs and demands. See those columnists and talking heads and cable news pundits — totally ignoring all this stuff? This plan, its ideas, its meaning, its underlying thoughts? You should learn from all those people. What willful ignorance and deliberate folly are. That is what really broke America apart. What I like about Warren’s plan most of all, then, is that it says: we don’t have to be a nation of dummies, dunces, and has-beens anymore. We can be better than that.

Umair

January 2019