Fauci, Abdul, Luigi

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J. Eskow, produced by the WeAC Radio Network and broadcasting from the banks of the Anacostia directly into the halls of power. And now your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the program. There was a phrase that was coined and directed against Bernie Sanders supporters in 2016. That phrase was vote blue no matter who. In reality, what centrist Democrats and the centrist establishment are saying is vote blue will tell you who. And when they don't get to tell us who or their voters who, more specifically, they get very... upset about it. Now, the Bernie Bro myth, first of all, was profoundly racist and sexist because it rendered invisible millions of black, brown, and women supporters of Bernie Sanders. Actually, I believe younger voters were more female than male when it came to Bernie Sanders. support it also relied on the myth that these voters did not fully support Hillary Clinton enough and that was the reason Hillary Clinton lost I say myth because the data doesn't show that Well, now we're hearing, seeing headlines like this one in the New York Times, moderate Democrats prepare for war, quote unquote, against an ascendant left. The quizzling Wall Street lackey outfit called Third Way is making a big publicity splash saying it's going to spend $15 million to defeat what it calls Democratic socialism, a tag they use. for people who aren't even democratic socialists like abdul el siad they do doing this on the day after an election of course is or primary rather is of course undermining their own party i wonder that if they'll get one-tenth of the vitriol that was directed against burney supporters not to mention jill stein and the green party we'll be right back after this

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J.S. Gal. Check out our free video archives at YouTube.com slash the Zero Hour. And we're back on The Zero Hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. And joining me once again is our good friend and purveyor of all sorts of insights, Professor Richard Wolfe. Richard Wolfe is an economist, economic historian, a host of economic update on free speech TV. And author of several books, the most recent of which I believe, I might be needing some updating, is the sickness is the system, is... commentary on COVID, which gets me to our topic today. But before we do that, first of all, Richard Wolf is always welcome back. Thank you very much, RJ. I'm very glad to be here. So I've been fascinated. and, of course, horrified in many ways, but it certainly led me to ponder a lot of things, the interrogation of Anthony Fauci by Republicans in the United States Senate. Anthony Fauci is, of course, former NAH director, former health czar, and go-to person for both. Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the COVID epidemic. And He has also become the source of all sorts of demonization on the right, that much of which others have pointed out as self-contradictory, that he downplayed the pandemic, but didn't do enough to protect American lives, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think the underlying issues behind, first of all, the pandemic itself. Secondly, Dr. Anthony Fauci and people's feelings towards him have gone largely unnoticed or unremarked upon. And I think... with the timeliness of the Anthony Fauci inquisition upon us. And as we speak on Thursday, what is it, August 6th, the Senate is considering contempt of Congress action against him for pleading the Fifth Amendment, which itself is an extraordinary site. And I'm a top American and scientists and government official pleading the fifth after receiving a blanket pardon by a past president.

But all that aside, I gave you a hint of the context in which I view these Anthony Fauci hearings. But to start off with, what's yours? Well, mine is kind of simple and maybe too simple, but I have all my life marveled at and felt completely horrified. by the spectacle of healthcare being organized as a capitalist enterprise. In other words, undertaken by people who are both self-consciously and publicly engaged in a profit-maximizing activity. which, indeed, once you make it a capitalist enterprise, it is governed by the rules of that kind of enterprise. And that kind of enterprise, you know, depends on generating a market for whatever it is you make and saving money in the production of whatever it is you found the market for. If you marry, as we do in America, a capitalized health care system with the advertising business, well, what do you get? You get exactly what we know. You get, and by the way, does not exist in many other countries. You get straight to the consumer. advertising by the device maker, by the drug maker, by the practitioner, whatever it made the hospital. They are all busily advertising, making money. And so the only way to believe in this is to believe in the following, if you pardon my editorializing, the following nonsense, namely. that whatever maximizes profit maximizes the quality and the quantity of health care. If you believe that, the rest follows. But if you don't believe that, then the rest is an abomination. I don't believe it, and therefore for me, it is absolutely an abomination. You know, I live in New York City. My doctor is located on Park Avenue, a very ritsy area of New York City. Why? Well, it turns out that more doctors are concentrated along Park Avenue than anywhere else in the world. That's not a rational distribution of health care. That is whatever the opposite. Irrational. Why? Well, it's very prestigious. They all want to be there because to be saying, oh, I'm a doctor, here's my address on Park Avenue. This is worth a great deal in building up a doctor's practice. So the doctor will spend the big bucks to have an office on a building on the first floor, but very typical. If you walk down Park Avenue, it's one doctor after another.

And similarly, a drug that is advertised in the evening news or in the pages of the magazines that come to your home are going to be the drugs you hear about, that you talk about, that you ask your doctor about. You know, they're building their demand. And that's why they have an advertising budget. And if you know anything about the economics of health care, and I'm going to give you now just one example. It's a standard joke that we explain to students in economics classes that we ask the student name a well-known over-the-counter medication. And they do, you know, Tylenol or, it doesn't matter whichever one it might be. And then I show them a statistic. What does it cost? What does it cost to make the little pill that's in that jar? And the answer is, you know, three cents or six cents. So it's ridiculously low. All right. What does it cost to distribute it around five cents, ten cents? What does it cost to advertise it, a dollar? And the final price covers what? So it turns out, if you understand advertising, The health care industry charges enough money to pay the advertisers to make sure that the people pay the money. This is craziness. It means that the promotion by the producer generates the profit maximization. It does so in relationship to how much money you're prepared to spend on advertising. It is... has nothing to do with the science of healthcare or any kind of healing mentality. And it is crazy. If you go into a drugstore, one of the big chains, CVS or Walgreens or any of the others, you will see the way that the shelves are lined up. That which is advertised is what's at eye level so that you will go and pay for it, you know. It is so gross that all of the drug chains, like CVS and Walgreens, will put there the Tylenol and right next to it, the generic equivalent, the exact same. medication at a markedly lower price with the name Walgreen or the name CVS on it because it is so crazy even within capitalism you can make a profit without all the rest of it and then when you finally add that Americans are financially pinched

Well, then they're either going to do without medication or have to buy cheaper medication. And the minute you allow cheaper medication, you're inviting one heck of a criminality in how you compose these medications, how you can use the same materials, but alter the way it's done to save money. And so I read the other day, my last point. that there's now a serious problem in the number of Americans who answer polling questions. Have you ever foregone a meeting with a medical practitioner in order to save money? And it's gone off the chart, the number of people who answer that in the positive. And there's your proof that what suffers is medical care. And I was going to... point out, and I will point out now, that this is very important for the context that I view all this in, because I think in many ways the hostility toward Anthony Fauci as an individual, I mean, it stands for many things to me. It's a proxy for many things, but one of the things it's a proxy for is the fact that Americans are in a deep state of anxiety, understandably, so about their own health care for exactly the reasons you mentioned. The fact is, U.S. statistics on health care have always been far worse than those of any other developed country, both in terms of life expectancy and other measures, the number of people who have... turned down or avoided needed medical care as you just mentioned has always been much higher and now is rising even further and while people don't particularly right the main vote i'm thinking of rank and file people now may not necessarily want to or be inclined to ascribe this to corporate greed, although I think they're more so than a lot of liberals and sectors are willing to admit. But I think that there's this profound anxiety. And I think Anthony Fauci is representative of and otherwise faceless elite to them, that is controlling their lives. So if they could take vengeance through their elected officials on Anthony Fauci, it brings them, you know, some sort of sense of catharsis. And to me, this ties into the fact that drugs were unaffordable. Everybody somewhere, viscerally, who's an adult now, remembers, even if we, we oddly enough, seem to have forgotten it collectively, that more than a million Americans died from COVID, and that many of those deaths were unnecessary. They didn't have to happen.

People will remember the famous story during that time of a young woman, a teacher who, quote, unquote, had health insurance. And I put quotes around it because I was at a conference once, you know, health economics is one of my own areas. I was at a conference where someone said, what do you estimate is the number of people in the United States that are underinsured? I said 100%. There is nobody in this country that has adequate, if you define insurance with protection against financial catastrophe, you know, some people may have the resources elsewhere, but their insurance in this country doesn't do it. So the, so you have that uncertainty, you have that fear. And then the fact that, look, let's be candid, the response to COVID initially under, I forget they had a, a project name for it under Trump was better than one. Trump won was better than one. One might have expected, I guess, but it was done through Greg Abbott Laboratories and other private corporations. It had to take their needs into consideration, although a lot of Americans may not know this. We let an awful lot of people in India and elsewhere die to protect our patent rights. And although people may or may not know this, the NIH, which Anthony Fauci directed, is deeply embedded. with drug corporations. So that there are all sorts of studies pointing out that many of these privatized patented drugs were developed. at public expense, using public resources, then the NIH allows drug companies to patent them and charge, overcharge everybody, especially Americans for them. Even insulin for diabetes, the three scientists who developed it in the 1920s gave the patent a wave. They had to take a dollar each to make it legal. I think you and I talked about this once. I did the math in my head and said at that time, that would be about $53 a day. It's only about 20 cents off. A little more now, but... They had to do it as a legal artifice. It's still being, a patent gamesmanship is still being used overcharged people for insulin. And they're dying of diabetes. So we have this whole context where the for-profit system that you describe, which extends to doctors, pharmaceuticals.

hospitals and diagnostics and so on has people hostage to an economic system that could literally take their lives at any time. And on some level, they must know that. So if a Dr. Anthony Fauci gets his roasting, however unfair it may be, leaving that aside, there are going to be people who take satisfaction in that. And along with the grand pauls of this world who hate any government intervention in human lives. And add to that the fact that public health is a collective activity and we're not a collective country and the fact that yes, serious mistakes were made in the management of COVID, probably should have open schools sooner, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What we're seeing, I think, is a deep well of frustration erupting now that runs much deeper than one personality or even one pandemic. Yeah, and I think we shouldn't be surprised. I agree with everything you said. I think we shouldn't be surprised. This is a government, particularly under Mr. Trump, but the Democrats did it too, that likes to find scapegoats. The minute its polling tells them that there's an issue, like the one you just finished describing, a suspicion about the health care system, an anger, a resentment, then that's a good message. Now let's find the appropriate scapegoat. So if American income and jobs have been under duress for the last 30 years, let's blame piss poor immigrants from Central America, as if they had anything to do with that other than wanting to do what every ancestor of an American native came here to do. Unbelievable scapegoatism. And I think that's exactly what happened with Anthony Fauci. We'll be right back after this with more of my conversation with Professor Richard Wolfe. I'm Richard R.J. Eskow, and you are listening to The Zero Hour.

You are listening to the We Act Radio Network produced in Washington, D.C. Visit us online at weactradio.com or at YouTube.com slash WeactRadio, D.C. And we are back on the Zero Hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Escal. We now continue my conversation with Professor Richard Richard Wolfe. to show you how insidious it is. I'll tell you a story. When I was teaching at Yale years ago, I bumped into people that I got to know who were scientists of one kind or another, either working in the medical school, the local hospital, which is owned and operated by Yale, or in one of the departments at Yale. And they were being made to sign agreements upon which their appointments as a professor was contingent. that in the event that they discovered anything that had commercial value while they were employed at Yale as a professor, Yale as an institution was a part owner of that. In other words, the university finances have become built into this whole apparatus. That's how capitalism works. It makes everything subject to its logic, if not directly, well, then indirectly. And as to this point about people choosing to avoid paying money because they don't have it. I'm sure that was understood when they decided some years ago to convert insurance policies that said you can visit a doctor without cost three or four times a year. No, they changed it. There's a copay. Each time you go, we're going to take $10 or $20 or $30. And then the same thing was applied to the drugs. They knew, they must have known because one moment's reflection will tell you, if it's free, people will come and take advantage of it in a way that they can't or won't if it costs money. And even if the money is small, what do you do? If it's small, then the amount of additional profit generated by it isn't going to be significant. And if a significant number of people don't go, Aha, that was the point. They don't want them to come. They don't want them to discover they have a serious illness because then they're going to demand the payment that the insurance company makes for a serious illness.

The longer it's postponed, the longer the premiums collect interest without having to be dispensed. This is grotesque, but the logic is right there in the capital. They're doing what a good businessman does. If you have to shell money out, you try to minimize it. If you take money in, you try to, I mean, it's just... It's disgusting. And then to watch Mr. Anthony Fauci be the, it's like watching a poor Honduran family get crapped by ice, have the children yanked away from the parents stuck in a detention center where they aren't properly fed or housed or cloth. It's disgusting. This treatment of the immigrant had nothing to do with solving the problems of the American working class. And yet it is the acceptable way under our existing system to cope. And if they now find him guilty and do what? Put him in jail. What in the world you think it's going to make the CDC behave otherwise? It's going to change the drug industry? Nothing. Nothing. Well, it will theoretically make people frightened to intervene on behalf of public health for fear of being held accountable for it later on. What you mentioned about financing, I think it's important to even put maybe a little bit more context on it because... Health profit-seeking is multiple economies preying off each other, right? So you have the drug economy jacking up prices horrifically for, I mean, the kind of multiples you talked about with over-the-counter medications when you get into various forms of prescription drugs, something that might cost pennies on the dollar to manufacture might cost... $1,500 a month retail, right? That's what they might charge for it. So the multiples get insane. So you have that sector, you have insurance companies who want to predate off that. So they just mark up the prices as much as they can to the buyer, who's usually an employer, or if it's on the affordable health care market, you know, an individual. So they mark it up as much as they possibly can to chalk it up to loss. inadvertently, I wrote about this at the time, the Affordable Care Act encourages that in a way because it allowed companies to charge a percentage over and above cost as profit. So why would you control cost if lowering costs meant reducing profit? So you have that, but also you have a pain threshold after which buyers won't buy. So you have these pieces competing.

for-profit hospitals, you have the buy-up of physician practices by large corporations. Everybody's contending for each other. Nobody's pursuing the improvement of public health. At the top it all off, with your point about, you know, we talk about prevention, we talk about public health. There's no money in it for the insurance companies who are the supposed to be the financiers or the financial intermediaries because they have one-year contract. So chances are that employer or individual will sign with somebody else next year or they'll move to a different plan to an HMO or whatever, that individual. Why should I put money if I'm an insurance executive into making sure Rick Wolf gets all the tests he needs to preserve his health? It ain't going to help me. It's going to help some other. you know, a greedy MF down the line. You know, it ain't my problem. So you have this insane system, all of which... If you will permit me a radical, seemingly radical pivot here now, all of which gets me to, I mean, there are two things you can do about this sick system and we won't even get into, you know, the kids and the, you know, distancing and all the rage over that, you can find a scapegoat. like Anthony Fauci and cheer in the town square as they call him a witch and burn him at the stake or whatever. Or you can try to fight for a better system, which gets me to this week's primary elections. Right. Because a physician, no less, a public health physician who. Unlike some other victorious candidates in Michigan does not describe himself as a democratic socialist, but seems closely akin to that movement. He calls himself, I was corrected on this, he calls himself a capitalist who understands how capitalism works. Okay, whatever. But he's got very left ideas, very in some ways for U.S. politics. And he's pro-Medicare for all. He won despite a massive outpouring of funds in favor his primary opponents. Some of that was Israel, but some of that was no doubt health lobbies and others. Also, by the way, in Michigan, I believe it's two Democratic Socialists, one against mainstream Democrats in House primaries, and a Democratic Socialist defeated an incumbent mayor in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is granted, you know, a progressive city. So you have this, despite the media doing yeoman's work trying to proclaim otherwise, you have this juggernaut seemingly continuing to move forward of the left, one of whose key issues is Medicare for all. I don't know about you, but I see the Anthony Fauci.

roast and the victories of the left as being two sides of, in a sense, one coin when it comes to ideology. You think I'm making too much of the connections there? No, no, I think you have to do that because... No matter what the media says, I don't believe the change in opinion, which is real, away from supporting Israel to being more supportive of the Palestinians, that's important in the country. That played a role. That would not have often. offset $60 million on the other side and the endorsement of Mr. Chuck Schumer and from the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries from the House of Representatives. So he wouldn't have won. I think there are other issues. One of them is that. I think nobody could have missed that. The roasting of Anthony Fauci and yet a doctor, if you're in Michigan, running who's making sense. about what they admit and admitting that it's a broken system which by the way all my doctors here in new york that i have they all admit it's a broken system they take different positions on what ought to be done but nobody defends the system that nobody um but here's a third one i think you're beginning to see the breakup of the maga community as the different parts of it no longer cohere. And when they don't, it's around issues that are fairly blatant, like the ones in Michigan. For example, Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, they can't go with Israel anymore. It's done. And they will fracture it that way. That was going on in the... in Michigan too, number one. Number two, and more important, I think Michigan very much a working class state, you know, built around Detroit, the center of our automobile industry, weakened now, but still significant. that they are reacting to something else, which is the decline of working class conditions of life. And they are angry about it. And they're not going to vote for conventional politicians because they rightly sense that they are the ones who've been presiding over the last 50 years of decline for them. And they don't want them. They don't want them on the Republican side. That's why they went for Mr. Trump. He was at least... something different. And to have a senator with the name like that, you know, that's something different. It's like people here in New York voting for someone named Zohran Mamdani, which would never have done before. But it worked as a sign, I'm not your regular politician. And for the mass of people...

That's what all the naughty, ugly racism of Mr. Trump, it signaled to a whole swath of the working class, oh, finally, somebody who isn't another one of the usual Clinton or Bush or all of that, which was boringly self-repetitive. And I think they're winning on these. The more different they are, Even those names, which you would have thought would have been childishly easy to argue against, turned out to be badges of positivity for that. And what do you have in response to these victories, to the victory and immense popularity of Zohran Mamdani, to the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and to the victory of these various candidates who have an even more, what would have been an even more problematic name associated with them, i.e. socialist. What is the Democratic Party's response to this? Well, for a lot of them, well, for some of them, it's, you know, they line up behind them, the mainstream Democrats, but for more and more of them, what we're hearing is these people have no place in our party. So this is setting up an internal conflict in the Democratic Party, but I would, you know, if I were, and obviously Democratic Party institution is, deeply behold into large donors. But if I were a health insurance executive bribing the Democratic Party with my money or a pharmaceutical executive bribing the Democratic Party with my money or or what have you, I would bear in mind another story in the news this week, which I have to approach carefully, which is a pretrial hearings of Luigi Mangione. Because here you have a figure who is startlingly popular, according to the last polls I've seen, for committing what is allegedly the murder of a health insurance executive. It brings to mind the quote from John F. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., probably written by Ted Sorensen or Schlesinger or somebody, but those who make a peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution. inevitable. And it seems to me that if the institutional leaders of this country are determined to close off all avenues for peaceful change, which you and I support, they're playing with fire. Yeah. And let me tell you, even if you have to take a look away from these electoral races, the economic inequality in this country is literally off the chart. I mean, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a couple days ago, a wonderful, through the Axios news people, a wonderful graph. It shows the percentage of total income earned by labor relative to that that goes to capital, right? When you take the revenue of anything, the hamburger produce or a software program.

Part of that revenue pays the wages and the salaries, and the other part goes to the owners, the employer. And the line for the, that what goes to the non-supervisory worker is a line that looks like this. It bounces around. But it is an unmistak, and the graph starts in 1947, close to the present. And it's just an endless story. of decline. You are literally in a country that celebrates the achievement of capitalism in making the already richest person on earth, Mr. Elon Musk, even richer. And in the same two-week period shows a decline of the working class, roughly estimated at 170 million Americans, going into the toilet unmistakably at the same. It's the same system that's producing this in unequal result. And I think it's underneath tearing the country apart. I think that's a great point. And maybe it's one we can revisit. I haven't seen that. That graft in a while. I know that in 1968, there was that dramatic split that began and widened throughout the following decades. And last I saw working class was flatlined, but now it sounds like it's nose diving. And it's literally life and death. So. RJ, I will make a note. And when we're done today, I'll send you an email with the thing I did, which has that graph in it so you can see it. Great. Okay, and maybe we'll discuss that next time. So as always, Richard Wolfe, thanks for such a fascinating and engaging discussion. And as always, thanks for coming on the program. My pleasure. These are important conversations. And I think we do a service. I would like to believe we do a service by exploring them and making explicit the kinds of feelings and thoughts that a lot of your audience already have generated themselves. Yeah, well, I certainly hope so. I aspire to that. So thanks. And to the rest of you, we'll be right back after this. I'm Richard R.J. Escal, and this is The Zero Out.

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J. Escal. Check out our free video archives at YouTube.com slash the Zero Hour. And we are back on this. Zero Hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. When I was growing up, there was a very despised group of public commentators known as genocide deniers. And of course, they're still around. But these were people particularly disliked within the Jewish American community because they denied that the Holocaust and the death of six million Jews ever even had. happened, which was and is a sign of grotesque bigotry. So being a genocide, denier was a pretty bad thing to be. Now, in those days, particularly decades ago, not enough attention was paid to the other victims of the Holocaust to communist, socialist, LGBTQ people. and Romani people and so on, but the idea of the genocide denier as a contemptible person remained the same. We have a new breed of genocide deniers now, and their spokes, most visible spokesperson, appears to be, oddly enough, Boy George of 1980s Culture Club fame. Now, musically, I was never a knocker of Boy George. In fact, I thought he was underrated. I thought he was a... good singer and interpreter of like light blue-eyed soul-type stuff. He did a duet with Stevie Wonder at a Motown special on one of my favorite Stevie Wonder songs is a part-time lover. He did okay for himself. So I'm not down on boy George, but when he denies in his new song that what's going on in Gaza is genocide, he's placing himself above all the many experts in courts and others who have decided otherwise. He has made himself a genocide denier and he is one of many out there in the world, including, I suspect, many people you know. Now, I should be honest and say that I have not listened to Boy George's song denying genocide because I have read that it was written with AI and I think AI music is like microplastics for your consciousness and I don't need any more of those polluting my soul, but I will say the new genocide deniers need to be called out for exactly what they are.