“I have called you by name; you are mine.”-Isaiah 43:1

One of the hallmarks of neo-liberalism is its “namelessness,” that is to say that it largely operates anonymously, in the shadows, or by not calling something by its real name: “human rights,” “liberal democracy,” et cetera. It is power for cowards. To quote George Monbiot:

The rentiers and inheritors style themselves entrepreneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income. These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.[1]

When it comes to electoral politics, as I’ve written extensively for this site regarding Jewish mega-donors, corporations, and NGOs, money talks, which enables BS to walk. We are going to get into the byzantine gears of the neo-liberal machine here a little bit to see a prime example of how liberalism functions without calling something by its real name.

Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office and that only “an insubstantial amount of a 501(c)(3)’s activities [may] constitute lobbying,” however this does not stop them and there are numerous ways around this prohibition. One is that, as Erin Bradrick writes:

We unfortunately do not have a clear definition of “insubstantial” in this context…[and] many 501(c)(3) organizations have the option of making the election under IRC Section 501(h) to have their lobbying activities measured based solely on expenditures. Section 501(h) also offers fairly generous thresholds for permissible lobbying expenditures by an electing organization.[2]

The particular Catholic Charities donations referenced in “Do Not Pass NGO, Do Not Collect $200” for example represent individuals within or affiliated with the organization donating to a specific candidate or specific candidates at a technical remove from Catholic Charities, but in such a way that would still represent CCUSA’s interests and indicate the focus and priorities of Catholic Charities. Many 501(c)(3)s also establish their own 501(c)(4)s (“social welfare” organizations), which can engage in issue advocacy, though that all too often ends up as political advocacy. Their weighing-in during elections has been permitted as long as their primary activity is the “promotion of social welfare and related to the organization’s purpose.” According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 501(c)(4)s:

May engage in political activities, as long as these activities do not become their primary purpose. The IRS has never defined what “primary” means, or how a percentage should be calculated, so the current de facto rule is 49.9 percent of overall expenditures, a limit that some groups have found easy to circumvent. Donations to these groups are not tax-deductible [as opposed to those to 501(c)(3)s].

Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club are examples of 501(c)(4)s. 501(c)(4)s often function as “dark money” fronts because they are not required to disclose their donors. The “dark money” groups such as social welfare groups are allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money however they see fit.

Both dark money groups and SuperPACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, but SuperPACs are required to disclose their donors. That said, SuperPACs may in some cases also function as “dark money” groups because they can accept unlimited contributions from political non-profits and “shell” corporations who may not themselves have disclosed their donors. Per the Center for Responsive Politics:

In 2007, Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC freed nonprofit 501(c) organizations to spend directly from their treasuries to make “issue ads” mentioning a candidate in the weeks immediately before an election or a political convention—as long as they didn’t exhort voters to cast their ballots one way or another. That was new, and in the 2008 presidential election, nondisclosed spending hit a record $78.8 million. The other case was 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC, which made it possible for corporations, unions, nonprofit “social welfare” organizations and trade associations to take things a step farther by directly spending their treasury funds on advocacy expressly calling for the election or defeat of a candidate; these ads (or phone banks, or billboards, or opposition research, etc…) are known as “independent expenditures.” The result has been an upsurge in political spending by nonprofit 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations—which aren’t overseen by the FEC, but by the IRS…Occasionally, information comes to light that illustrates the kind of thing that could be happening on a larger scale—though there’s no way to know. The health insurer Aetna, for example, made public pronouncements that showed support for President Obama’s health care overhaul agenda in 2010, but it was later discovered that Aetna had contributed millions of dollars to two dark money organizations—the Chamber of Commerce and American Action Network—that engaged in a costly and sustained attack on the changes to the system that would become the Affordable Care Act. Many of the politically active nonprofits appear to coordinate their efforts, passing large amounts of money to one another. In doing this, they claim to be fulfilling their “social welfare” mandate…The lack of specific information that groups disclose on their IRS tax returns is one of the principal stumbling blocks faced by citizens and watchdogs who want to check the activities of politically active nonprofits. No detailed breakdown is required when groups report spending chunks of money on things like “issue advocacy,” “grassroots issue advocacy,” “media production/buys” or whatever general category they want to invent—all of which could contain political spending.[3]

Many of the loopholes and donation strategies from “The Way Life Should Be?” series[4] follow these lines and others, with campaign donations also taking different forms and from different sources. There is also unregulated “soft” money (which the Center for Responsive Politics defines as “political expenditures made by organizations and individuals other than the candidate campaigns themselves”) and political action committee loopholes abound. “Soft money” is contrasted with “hard money,” or traditional donations where donors must be disclosed and contribution limits apply. Corporations are often less circuitous at the state level because unlike the prohibitions from directly contributing money to candidates at the federal level, many US states permit direct contributions to candidates at the state level, albeit usually capped. There are, obviously, ways around this, too.

One way or another, the money is either going to the candidate’s campaign or it is being spent in support of or in opposition to a certain candidate or candidates.

Consider the Republican Jewish Coalition, featuring Sheldon Adelson, Bernie Marcus, and Mel Sembler; Sembler personally took Mitt Romney to Israel in 2007 and told the Jewish Standard that Romney “gets it”:

Romney said that as president he would “enhance our deterrent against the Iranian regime by ordering the regular presence of aircraft carrier task forces, one in the eastern Mediterranean and one in the Persian Gulf region. I will begin discussions with Israel to increase the level of our military assistance and coordination. And I will again reiterate that Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is unacceptable.” He also said he would centralize U.S. Middle East policy to ensure “that the Arab Spring does not fade into a long winter.” The speech came a day after Romney published a list of his foreign policy advisers, including many who have been active in or are close to the pro-Israel community, such as Norm Coleman, the former U.S. senator from Minnesota who is now active with the Republican Jewish Coalition; Dan Senor, the co-author of a book on Israeli technological innovation who often works with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; and Dov Zakheim, a former top Pentagon official in various Republican administrations who also is active with the American Jewish Committee.[5]

Although the Republican Jewish Coalition does not contribute directly to candidates’ campaigns, it does donate money to different SuperPACs supporting politicians who “get it,” such as Team Graham (for Lindsey Graham), [David] Perdue for Senate, and the McConnell Senate Committee, which also received over $161,000 over the last half of 2019 from NorPAC, “a nonpartisan PAC with the goal of supporting members and candidates who demonstrate a genuine commitment to the strength, security, and survival of Israel.” Other recipients of Republican Jewish Coalition donations include Friends of John McCain, Ted Cruz for Senate, Rick Scott for Florida, Ben Sasse for US Senate, and Tim Scott for Senate. Sasse has received campaign contributions from Paul Singer, Rick Scott signed into law bill SB 86 — which prohibits the State Board of Administration from investing in companies that boycott Israel,[6] and Tim Scott is responsible for introducing the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act at the national level in 2019 and getting South Carolina to pass a state-wide Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in 2018, citing ADL statistics in the press release.

The use of bundlers is another “gray area” in campaign finance. Bundlers gather contributions from many individuals in an organization or community and present the sum to the campaign; as the Center for Responsive Politics notes:

The Obama campaign created its own definition of a “volunteer fundraiser,” which may not coincide with a common-sense understanding of what a bundler is. For example, celebrities George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker each raised millions by promising to have dinner with a certain number of people who donated to Obama. However, their names are nowhere to be found on the list…The amount raised by bundlers for winning presidential candidates has also grown: In 2000, it was at least $55.8 million; in 2004, at least $79 million; in 2008, a minimum of $76.25 million; and in 2012, the floor was $186.5 million… Hand-in-hand with the increasing sophistication of and reliance on bundlers is the heightened rate of return for those who bundle. According to Public Citizen, during his eight years in office, George W. Bush appointed about 200 bundlers to posts in his administration. An iWatch News investigation uncovered that President Obama had already appointed 184 bundlers to his administration in his first term alone. Further, it is clear that bigger bundlers get more recognition, as nearly 80 percent of those collecting more than $500,000 for the Obama campaign took “key administration posts” as defined by the White House. Similarly, the Center has identified 35 of Obama’s ambassador-level appointments as former bundlers for his campaign. The ambassadorships to France, the United Kingdom, and the European Union all went to campaign bundlers…There’s no law requiring disclosure of campaign bundlers, as long as the fundraisers are not currently active, federally registered lobbyists.[7]

Nevertheless, lobbyists also often work “off the record” for congressional campaigns by arranging fundraisers, assembling PACs, and seeking donations from other clients, and many lobbyists in practice do not register and instead function as “advisors” and “government relations specialists.”

Brendan Fischer has correctly identified the state of play as “effectively a legalized form of money laundering.” Soft money has been generally enabled by the Supreme Court’s decision in 2014 to eliminate some important campaign contribution limits in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission; this followed another major blow to election integrity from 2010, with Citizens United, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on “political communications,” though apparently the tech giants can censor your free speech rights on their platforms with impunity. Funny how that works. Generally the whole process can be extremely convoluted; as Elaine Godfrey wrote in 2018:

Across the country, dozens of Democratic candidates, from the democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the more moderate Conor Lamb, have proclaimed that they won’t accept campaign donations from corporate political-action committees… But that pledge, for many candidates, is mostly symbolic… Candidates can still accept donations from individual employees or owners of corporations, and those contributions can add up… Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign offers another example of how messy this PAC business can get…The JStreetPAC, which supports Democrats favoring a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has collected more than $170,000 from its members to be donated to O’Rourke’s campaign individually. In other words, the contributions were facilitated by a PAC, but didn’t come from it.[8]

For our purposes and as a logical human being, I will treat this donation and donations of a similar kind as coming from J Street. There are, though, plenty of single-candidate SuperPACs, which are often themselves recipients of donations from corporate PACs, and can spend in support of or against a candidate (running advertisements for example) but cannot donate directly to a campaign. As one example of the kind of shadiness of these SuperPACs:

The biggest single-candidate group at work in the House this year [2016] was Maryland USA, which spent $3.2 million in an unsuccessful effort to elect Republican Amie Hoeber in the 6^th Congressional District in Maryland. Democrat Rep. John Delaney, who secured his third term on Tuesday, filed a complaint against Hoeber’s campaign earlier this year, claiming the super PAC illegally coordinated with her campaign; almost all of the $2.1 million given to the group came from Hoeber’s husband, Mark Epstein. The Baltimore Sun reported that Hoeber’s campaign had listed Epstein as an assistant treasurer but removed his name shortly before the super PAC started spending.[9]

With corporations, it is senior management and ownership donating “as individuals” to advance their corporation’s interests, in addition to employees who are donating or pooling resources to donate, and the corporation itself can sponsor its own PAC. As Gregory Hamel writes, “Corporations can organize PACs to raise voluntary contributions for a select class of individuals, such as corporate managers and shareholders. A corporate sponsored PAC can then use those funds to contribute to political candidates.” Additionally, as Hamel expands, “Corporate employees can make contributions to political campaigns through corporate drawing accounts which draw personal funds against salary, profits or other compensation.”

In my “The Way Life Should Be?” series and subsequent exposés I have and will continue to generally be dealing with larger aggregate donation amounts as a kind of filter, albeit an imperfect one. Individual donations in the context we are discussing are seldom so straight-forward and innocent as a programmer for Google who wants to support Tulsi Gabbard and sends her campaign twenty bucks. The scale that concerns us here is far larger and with much more significant implications. When the organization chooses to obscure its donations through various means or using these individual donations as opposed to a PAC as a kind of built-in plausible deniability, in effect they are most certainly still donating to candidates on behalf of the organization, and this is before considering lobbying and all of the other various methods to influence elections and policies.

Let’s take a look at Thornburg Investment Management from “The Way Life Should Be?: Maine as a Microcosm of Jewish Activism.” For the 2020 election cycle thus far, the largest donation amount of over $17,000 in “individual donations” originating from Thornburg has gone to homosexual Democratic candidate for New Mexico’s Third District John Blair, who as the Department of the Interior’s Director of Intergovernmental and External Affairs during the Obama Administration “helped with the creation of the Paris Climate Accords and was on the team that helped make the Stonewall Inn the nation’s first LGBTQ National Monument,” favors mass immigration, and makes numerous overtures to the “rich Hispanic tradition” of New Mexico and blathers on about “Native Americans.” We also see significant donations to Xochitl Torres Small, Krishna Bansal, Beto O’Rourke, and Ben Ray Lujàn. In 2016, Thornburg-originating donations in the thousands of dollars went to both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. This would be defined as significant and reflective of Thornburg’s interests and ideological position; a $1 individual donation in the 2020 election cycle to Tulsi Gabbard is not significant, although the near-uniformity of Democrat recipients (91.2%) does reflect their corporate culture.

If twenty candidates have received individual donations, even smaller ones, from an organization or corporation, and eighteen are to Democrats, we can see the ideological position of the organization in question. Despite the campaign contributions possibly originating from multiple individual sources within or affiliated with Catholic Charities, its ideological bent is obvious and anything but heterodox, so these donations evidence a pattern and as such and in light of everything else we’ve discussed so far, we can consider these donations to come from Catholic Charities even if it is not necessarily an “official” donation that tracks from Catholic Charities “proper” at Point A to Candidate X at Point B. Rarely in neo-liberalism is anything quite so simple and straightforward. That is a major component of its success. On the corporate side, what this looks like is:

Based on Federal Election Commission data through the third quarter of 2019, includ[ing] money from the companies, their owners and employees and immediate families, as well as their PACs…Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple…have given over $5.3 million collectively in campaign contributions… Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and its employees have donated more than $2.1 million so far…and 81 percent of that—more than $1.7 million—has gone to Democrats…Amazon and its employees have given more than $1.7 million in the 2020 cycle, and 74 percent of that to Democrats…Apple and its employees have contributed…96 percent for Democrats… Facebook and its employees have donated $824,600 so far in the 2020 cycle, and 70 percent of that has gone to Democrats…High-profile Silicon Valley fundraisers [included] events co-hosted by top Facebook and Google executives for South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) and trips to the tech hub by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), The New York Times reported in June [2019].[10]

When we take a finer-toothed comb to that, Facebook campaign contributions in the 2020 election cycle take a variety of forms; fast-forwarding to a mid-April 2020 snapshot, we see $350,000 in “soft” money, $300,000 to PACs, and over $1.2 million in “individual” donations coming from Facebook as an institution, 85.8% to Democratic federal candidates and 81.7% to Democratic Congressional candidates.

Jewish representatives Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler have received the maximum amount allowed from Facebook’s PAC, but Nadler has only received $5 from “individual donations,” which speaks to his genuine versus corporate support, whereas Bernie Sanders received over $109,000, all from “individual donations.” 54.2% of Sanders’s 2020 donations came from donation amounts of less than $200, which seems to suggest genuine popular support, however consistent support for Sanders by big tech as an institution, rank-and-file and management alike, also speaks to his alignment with neo-liberalism despite the tough talk. In point of contrast, almost 62% of Joe Biden’s campaign contributions so far have been large contributions. We can therefore begin to see who the Establishment prefers: the ready-made Establishment vessel over the coopted faux-revolutionary. For 2020, almost half of Donald Trump’s donations have been of the less than $200 variety; in the 2016 election, almost 20% of Trump’s money came from his own coffers, and a paltry 14% of his campaign donations were large contributions, which shows just how extreme the Establishment’s disfavor for him was in the midst of that election.

With all of this considered, the donations to candidates coming from the organization in the context of elections which I will discuss and have discussed them therefore encompasses both the organization itself, as well as its subsidiaries, affiliates, ownership, management, and employees along routes both relatively straightforward and circuitous insofar as they can be determined. The individual contributions from rank-and-file employees rather than senior management are clearly not going to be as much of a factor though again may be reflective of an “activist” culture of a Google or a Facebook. Logically we should be treating a donation from the CEO as one from the corporation. As the Center for Responsive Politics notes:

The patterns of contributions provide critical information for voters, researchers and others. That is why Congress mandated that candidates and political parties request employer information from contributors and publicly report it when the contributor provides it. In some cases, a cluster of contributions from the same organization may indicate a concerted effort by that organization to “bundle” contributions to the candidate…Showing these clusters of contributions from people associated with particular organizations provides a valuable—and unique—way of understanding where a candidate is getting his or her financial support. Knowing those groups is also useful after the election, as issues come before Congress and the administration that may affect those organizations and their industries.

Where relevant, I will treat and have treated the campaign donations as coming from the organization or business directly (“Google donated to…” for example) because once we cut through all the noise, that is essentially where these donations originate and the interests they will further, just by necessity at a remove or through more indirect means, sometimes unilaterally, sometimes through pooled resources. I will therefore disregard the obscurantism and call a spade a spade, especially when it is clear that policy decisions are being influenced by these donations.

The benefits to these “outsourced” donations are many, not least of which, as the Center for Responsive Politics states, is the ability to “mask the true nature of a highly political organization through non-disclosure and to take donations from individuals and corporations that may not want shareholders or customers to know they’re taking a stand on a controversial topic.” Some don’t care. We see the same phenomenon repeated as reflective of the interests and “corporate culture” or ideological orientation of the organization(s) in question.

With that in mind, in the 2020 election cycle, per the Center for Responsive Politics, we see Catholic Charities’ institutional support for the neo-liberal system through donations to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, Susan Collins, John James, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Joe Kennedy III, Kirsten Gillibrand, Adam Schiff, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Ilhan Omar, Jared Golden, Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez, John Lewis, Rashida Tlaib, Richard Blumenthal, Eric Swalwell, Ayanna Pressley, and Donald Trump. With three exceptions, we see all Democrats, and readers of “The Way Life Should Be?” series will recognize Maine Senator Collins as Establishment all the way. John James is a Republican of the Turning Point USA variety, in other words an “as long as they come here legally even if it’s the entirety of India” Republican.

Regarding lobbying, let’s consider the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS); in 2010, their lobbyists were focused on the passing of the following, per the Center for Responsive Politics:

• Comprehensive Immigration Reform DOS Reauthorization CIR ASAP (HR 4321) Supplemental Security Income for Refugees Haitian TPS Increase of Reception and Placement (R&P) funding for refugees Resume HIV testing for refugees Repeal the “shout test” for Haitians Humanitarian parole for Haitians Reuniting Families Act (S 1085/ HR 2709) HELP Act (HR 4616; S 2998) Increase appropriations for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) Increase appropriations for Health and Human Services (HHS) Increase appropriations for Migration and Refugee Assistance (MRA) account Increase appropriations for State and Foreign Ops Increase appropriations for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Family reunification for Somali refugees Refugee Protection Act of 2010 (S 3113)
• Refugee Protection Act (S.3113) Appropriations for MRA, ORR, IDA, and ERMA Comprehensive Immigration Reform Supplemental Security Income for Refugees Haitian Immigration Domestic Refugee Reform LGBTI Refugees HELP Act DREAM Act
• Refugee Protection Act State and Foreign Ops Appropriations Extending SSI Benefits Haitian Migration Comprehensive Immigration Reform Leahy Bill on Expedited Processing and Group Referrals DREAM Act (S. 3827) Colombian Refugee Resettlement
• Refugee Protection Act State and Foreign Ops Appropriations Extending SSI Benefits Comprehensive Immigration Reform DREAM Act (S. 3992) Leahy Bill on Expedited Processing and Group Referrals Darfuri Refugee Resettlement Immigration Reform

For Catholic Charities, pretty much every year they’re lobbying for “comprehensive immigration reform,” and we all know what that means.

Some of J Street’s 2019 lobbying priorities included:

• R. 1837 – United States-Israel Cooperation Enhancement and Regional Security Act – Codifying the Obama-Netanyahu memorandum of understanding on US assistance to Israel.
• R.6/S.874 – American Dream and Promise Act of 2019 – To authorize the cancellation of removal and adjustment of status of certain individuals who are long-term United States residents and who entered the United States as children and for other purposes.
• Res 299 – Condemning White Supremacist Terrorism and the Anti-immigrant Rhetoric that Inspires It Resolution -Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that immigration makes the United States stronger.
• R.2214/S.1123 – the National Origin-Based Antidiscrimination for Nonimmigrants Act or the NO BAN Act – To repeal the three versions of the Administration’s Muslim ban, strengthens the Immigration and Nationality Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion, and restores the separation of powers by limiting overly broad executive authority to issue future travel bans.
• Omnibus Appropriations – The final appropriations package provided the full $3.8 billion in annual military aid for Israel promised under the Obama Memorandum of Understanding.
• R. 4009/S. 852 – Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2019 – Extends protections of Title VI to groups who share a common faith, and includes the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, to also include the [c]ontemporary examples of antisemitism identified in the IHRA definition.
• R. 336 – Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019 – To penalize activity related to boycotts directed at Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
• Res. 236/S.Res 120 – A resolution expressing Congressional opposition to the global BDS movement

For Google, their 2013-4 lobbying along immigration lines looks like support for the following:

• Immigration Innovation Act of 2013 or the I-Squared Act of 2013 – Amends the Immigration and Nationality Act to establish an annual cap on H-1B visas…at between 115,000 and 300,000 visas depending upon market conditions and existing demand [would be an increase from the standard quota of H–1B visas of 65,000, whichwas temporarily increased to 115,000 for fiscal years 1999 and 2000 only; The first 20,000 petitions filed on behalf of beneficiaries with a U.S. master’s degree or higher are exempt from the cap]; Directs the Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) to: (1) authorize the accompanying spouse of an H-1B alien to work in the United States, and (2) provide such spouse with an appropriate work permit; Provides for the recapture of unused employment-based immigrant visas from FY1992 through the current fiscal year; Eliminates the per country numerical limitation for employment-based immigrants and increases the per country family category limit. Applies such provisions beginning with FY2014; Prohibits the Secretary of Homeland Security from denying a petition to extend the status of an H-1B or L-visa (intra-company transferee) nonimmigrant involving the same alien and petitioner unless the Secretary determines that: (1) there was a material error in the previous petition approval, (2) a substantial change in circumstances has taken place that renders the nonimmigrant ineligible for such status, or (3) new information has been discovered that adversely impacts the eligibility of the employer or the nonimmigrant; Directs the Secretary of State to authorize a qualifying alien admitted under an E-visa (treaty traders and investors), H-visa (temporary workers), L-visa (intracompany transferees), O-visa (extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, athletics, or the arts or films or television), or P-visa (athletes, artists, and entertainers) to renew his or her nonimmigrant visa in the United States; Eliminates the foreign student visa requirement that an individual has no intention of abandoning his or her foreign residence; Excludes from employment based immigrant limitations aliens: (1) who are the spouse or child of an employment-based immigrant; (2) who have a master’s or higher degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, and math) from a school qualified under the Higher Education Act of 1965; and (3) for whom a priority worker petition for an employment-based immigrant visa has been approved.
• A Chuck Schumer-sponsored bill which includes provisions like: “Makes 5,000 immigrant visas available in FY2014-FY2016 for individuals who were born in Tibet and have been continuously residing in India or Nepal prior to enactment of this Act. Considers a person to be a native of Tibet if such person was born in Tibet or is the son, daughter, grandson, or granddaughter of an individual born in Tibet”; “Increases the number of annual U-visas”; “Authorizes the spouse or child of a refugee or asylee to bring his or her accompanying or joining child into the United States as a refugee or asylee”; “Directs the Secretary of Labor to establish an H-1B recruitment website”; and which would raise the H-1B visa cap as well.

Liberal democracy in action, folks!

Americans (and to quote Revilo P. Oliver, “When I use that word, I mean Americans, descendants and heirs of the creators of the Western world; I do not mean all featherless bipeds that, ‘regardless of race, color, or creed,’ happen to be on our soil at the present time”) must decide what kind of nation—if one at all—they want moving forward.

[1] Monbiot, George, “The Zombie Doctrine,” April 16, 2016. The Guardian.

[2] Bradrick, Erin, “When Should a 501(c)(3) Consider Creating an Affiliated 501(c)(4)?” November 28, 2016. Nonprofit Law Blog.

[3] The Center for Responsive Politics, “The 10 Things They Won’t Tell You About Money-In-Politics.”

[4] Which is being expanded into a book with a wealth of new research with a foreword by Dr. MacDonald out on Ostara Publications later this year. Hopefully the reader will forgive such shameless self-promotion!

[5] “Jewish backers enjoy Romney’s rise,” October 23, 2011. Jewish Standard.

[6] The law “requires the State Board of Administration to identify all companies that are engaged in a boycott of Israel; requires the public fund to create and maintain the Scrutinized Companies that Boycott Israel List; and prohibits a state agency or local governmental entity from contracting for goods and services if the company has been placed on the Scrutinized Companies that Boycott Israel List.” According to Governor Scott: “For many generations, Florida and Israel have been close partners and allies. When I was first elected, I led a trade mission to Israel because it is imperative that we further our economic growth between Florida and Israel. I applaud Sen. Joe Negron, Rep. Ritch Workman, Rep. Jared Moskowitz and the many legislative leaders who honored our relationship with the Jewish people by sponsoring SB 86.”

[7] Ibid.

[8] Godfrey, Elaine, “Why So Many Democratic Candidates Are Dissing Corporate PACs,” August 23, 2018. The Atlantic.

[9] Kim, Soo Rin, “Mine, all mine: Single candidate super PACs, creeping down-ballot,” November 10, 2016. The Center for Responsive Politics.

[10] Gangitano, Alex, “Tech industry cash flows to Democrats despite 2020 scrutiny,” December 19, 2019. The Hill.

Everybody loves to hate taxes.  As the old saying implies, taxes are right up there with death among humanity’s least favorite things.  Yet they are as old as civilization itself; tax records have been found from as far back as the Ur III dynasty of 2,000 BC, and possibly older.  And we can be sure that its residents paid them grudgingly.  Tax resistance is a perennial theme in history, dating back to Jesus, at least, and his alleged “forbidding us to pay taxes to Caesar” (Luke 23:2).  Lady Godiva’s mythic ride through Coventry was allegedly on behalf of excessive taxes.  Dozens of wars, revolts, and uprisings in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries occurred over taxation.  We all know of the infamous “no taxation without representation” and the Boston Tea Party, leading to the American Revolution.  Thoreau was briefly jailed in 1846 over a failure to pay taxes, in an act of civil disobedience against the Mexican-American War.  Among the American public, there was significant resistance to tax increases during both World Wars and the Vietnam War.  Even today, scarcely a month goes by without some anti-tax action making the news somewhere in the world.

And yet, everyone except pure anarchists wants some level of service from their government, and thus we all more or less accept the inevitable.  Everyone has their favorite governmental program that they want funded; but they always want someone else to pay for it.  We all would love to get something for nothing from the feds.  But most of us realize that government cannot function without revenue, and that it cannot simply create money out of thin air—at least, not indefinitely.  And so we pay.

Most galling of all, I suppose, is income tax:  government “tribute” taken directly from our paychecks, before we see a single penny.  Long hard hours put in, the daily grind, dealing with obnoxious bosses and coworkers, moronic customers, deadlines, 60-hour weeks…and then the government steps in and takes its “fair share.”  We can sometimes get tricky and defer payment until Tax Day, but eventually the bill comes due; and we pay.  In the US, the average worker pays 20–25 percent of income to the federal government, and another 5 percent to state or local governments: upwards of a third of our income, gone, lost, squandered.

But what if we—most of us, anyway—didn’t have to pay any income tax?  What if we could have all the same governmental services that we do today, but surrender nothing from our hard-earned paychecks?  It may surprise the reader to know that, for most of the history of the USA, citizens paid no income tax at all.  And for decades more, only a very small percentage paid them.  For 150 years, it worked.  What if we could have that again?  And what if the lost funds could be covered, in large part, by that most prosperous of ethnic minorities?  There would be a sort of sublime justice in that, would there not?

A Short History of Taxation in America

Born out of tax revolt, the early United States government was uniquely sensitive to the question of taxation.  Much of the debate centered on the role and size of a federal government.  The so-called federalists, like Madison and Hamilton, argued for a strong central government and hence significant taxation, whereas others like Jefferson defended a small, decentralized, states-rights model that necessarily required lesser federal taxes.  But neither side wanted to tax the nation’s farmers and small businessmen, and so it was agreed that import taxes—tariffs—would be employed to fund the government.  These were easy to collect at ports of entry, and they had the added benefit of protecting nascent American industries.  Tariffs, along with a few selected excise taxes on specific commodities, funded the entire federal government.

Correspondingly, the early government was relatively small.  At no time in those early years did federal spending exceed 5 percent of the nation’s GDP; whereas today, the figure is around 21 percent.[1]  Jefferson’s argument evidently held sway, for well into the nineteenth century.  The US continued to rely almost exclusively on tariffs and minor excise taxes, right up to the Civil War.  Thus, for the first 85 years of its existence, the United States had precisely zero income tax.

With the advent of the Civil War in 1860, things changed, at least temporarily.  The Revenue Act of 1861 imposed a 3% tax on income over $800 (equivalent to about $25,000 today).  The income threshold was lowered the following year to $600, thus bringing in additional revenue.  In 1864, the rate increased to 5% for most wage-earners, and up to 10% for the highest incomes.  In any case, it was all justified only by the exigencies of war.  With Union victory in 1865, the on-going need vanished and the income tax was rightly abolished a few years later.

For the next two decades, the nation again relied on tariffs for the vast majority of its funding.  But meanwhile, pressure to reduce them steadily grew, in part to allow for lower prices for businesses and consumers on imported items.  Congressmen realized, however, that another tax would be needed to offset the lost revenue.  Hence came the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act of 1894, which reintroduced income taxes, now of 2% on earnings over $4,000—equivalent to about $120,000 today.  It was truly a tax for the well-off.

Unfortunately for the government, it was also unconstitutional.  When a New York company, Farmer’s Loan and Trust, attempted to enforce the law, a wealthy stockholder, Charles Pollock, objected, sued the company, and won in the Supreme Court.  It seems that, at the time, the US Constitution had no provision for a “direct” tax on income without a complex system of apportionment, i.e., payment back to the states.  In effect, by the court’s ruling, the income tax was functionally abolished.  For the next 20 years, the feds again had to rely on import tariffs.

This little dilemma was resolved in 1913 with the passing of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  It reads, in full:  “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”  There were some oddities connected with both the wording of the amendment and the ratification process, but I won’t go into those here.[2]  In any case, Congress wasted no time, and the Revenue Act of 1913[3] reduced tariffs but imposed a 1% tax on income over $3,000, rising to a rate of 6% on incomes over $500,000.  The income threshold of $3,000—about $78,000 today—effectively applied only to the top three percent of earners; a full 97% of Americans were unaffected.  The vast majority of people continued to pay no income tax.

The Revenue Act of 1913 was gladly signed into law on October 3^rd of that year, by first-term president Woodrow Wilson.  For his part, Wilson seems to have been the first president elected with the full blessing of the Jewish Lobby.  As Henry Ford saw it, “Mr. Wilson, while President, was very close to the Jews.  His administration, as everyone knows, was predominantly Jewish”.^[12]  His major political donors were Jews, including the likes of Henry Morgenthau, Jacob Schiff, Samuel Untermyer, Paul Warburg, Bernard Baruch, and Louis Brandeis.  Wilson was also the first president to fully reward their support; Morgenthau was named ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and Warburg was appointed as the first chairman of the newly-formed Federal Reserve.  Later, Baruch would assume vast powers in his War Industries Board, and Brandeis would become the first Jew on the Supreme Court.

Onset of War

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing in Europe.  A complex series of treaties and alliances, combined with the untimely assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, inaugurated the First World War.  For a full two years, the US avoided entanglement.  Wilson ran for his second term in late 1916 with the slogan “He kept us out of war.”  But to no avail; soon after winning, he declared war on Germany, in April 1917.

With the US now involved, revenues would need to be drastically increased, and one obvious means was via the income tax.  Hence the War Revenue Act of 1917: a quadrupled rate of 4% (still with a $3,000 per year income threshold), along with incremental marginal rates ranging from 1% to 50%.

Into the last year of the war, 1918, rates again increased:  combined rates ranged from 6% to 77%.  Also, the income threshold was lowered to $1,000 per year (for individuals), drawing in many more taxpayers—though still amounting to just five percent of all taxpayers.

Postwar, the US experienced both the Roaring ‘20s and the Great Depression of the ‘30s, all while retaining the same basic tax structure.  As Benjamin Ginsberg explains,

Prior to the New Deal [of the 1930s]…a high tax threshold and numerous exemptions meant that only about 3 percent of American adults were subject to [income] tax. …  The system depended on more or less voluntary compliance by a small number of well-to-do individuals.  This meant that income taxation was not at first a major source of federal revenue.[13]

Thus, right up until the eve of World War Two, and excepting for a few years during the Civil War, the vast majority of Americans paid no income tax at all—in over 150 years.  But that was about to change, thanks to Hebraic influence in the US Treasury.

Onset of War (again)

Just as Henry Morgenthau, Sr.’s political patronage of Wilson earned him a prime governmental post, so too his son, Henry Jr, earned the favors of the next wartime president, Franklin Roosevelt.  Henry Jr and FDR went back many years, well before the latter’s stint as governor of New York in the late 1920s.  As FDR prepared for his run for president, Henry and other Jews were there, happy to donate.  As Myron Scholnick explains, “A number of wealthy Jewish friends contributed to Roosevelt’s pre-nomination campaign fund: Henry Morgenthau Jr., Lt. Gov. Lehman, Jessie Straus, [and] Laurence Steinhardt.”  Once the primaries were out of the way, “Roosevelt’s campaign was heavily underwritten by Bernard Baruch”.[14]  As with Wilson, FDR did not fail to reward his donors; Morgenthau, for example, was named Secretary of Treasury in early 1934.

But it wasn’t only Morgenthau, of course.  In time-honored tradition, Henry brought in a host of fellow Jews to help direct American economic policy.  “Among those working for Morgenthau at Treasury were large numbers of Jewish economists and statisticians, including such contemporary and future luminaries as Jacob Viner, Walter Salant, Herbert Stein, and Milton Friedman, who helped to fundamentally change America’s tax system…”[15]  And change it they did.

War came again to Europe in September 1939, and by late 1940 it was becoming increasingly apparent that the US would get drawn in, one way or another.[16]  Total federal spending in 1939 was about $8 billion, of which around $1 billion (12%) came from personal income taxes.  But with war looming, Morgenthau and friends knew that spending, and thus revenue, would need to dramatically increase.  They had three options:  personal income tax, corporate income tax, and war bonds.   So they set to work; “in the realms of both taxation and bond sales, Jews played major roles,” writes Ginsberg.[17]

Special emphasis was placed on increasing personal income taxes, both by lowering the threshold for paying, and by increasing the tax rates.  The effect was dramatic.  The number of taxpaying adults increased from a very modest 1 million in 1939, to 5 million in 1941, to 40 million in 1942—at the time, constituting virtually all non-farm wage-earning adults.  Corresponding revenues soared from $1 billion to $40 billion by the last years of the war.  Revenue increases matched spending increases, as federal expenditures rose from $8 billion in 1940 to over $100 billion by 1945.

At the start of the war, however, the Treasury Jews knew that enforcement of new tax laws would be difficult.  Millions of Americans who had never even considered the possibility of paying an income tax were suddenly asked to contribute thousands of dollars.  What to do?  Morgenthau’s boys devised a clever plan:  “a number of Jewish economists [including Milton Friedman and Morgenthau himself] championed the introduction of payroll withholding, or ‘collection at the source,’ which to this day ensures a smooth, regular flow of billions of dollars into the federal government’s coffers”.[18]  That is, the government would work with employers to extract the worker’s share of taxes prior to paying their wages.  Corporations were much easier to coerce than unruly citizens, and rates could be arbitrarily raised in the future with little fuss.  This tactic was a “central feature” of the 1943 Revenue Act, and would remain in effect for all future years.  Thanks to payroll withholding, income tax evolved “from a minor tax levied on wealthy Americans into a major tax levied on all Americans”.[19]

With this glorious new cash cow in place, the Treasury Jews—currently headed by Steven Mnuchin—never looked back.  As a result, Americans today pay an astonishing $2.1 trillion in income and “payroll” (FICA, or social security plus Medicare) taxes, accounting for roughly 68% of all federal revenue.  In other words, over two-thirds of the entire funding of our federal government comes directly out of citizens’ paychecks.  This monumental burden is carried by 84% of all households, who pay either income tax, or payroll tax or, most likely, both.  Most of the remaining 16% of households—representing about 50 million people—earn too little to pay any income tax at all.

And yet even this is not enough for our voracious feds.  The $2.1 trillion is supplemented by some $760 billion in corporate taxes (income tax plus their share of payroll), and another $260 billion in excise and estate taxes.  In sum, the government currently takes in about $3.3 trillion.  But it spends around $4.1 trillion annually, mostly on defense and military-related costs, which approach a breath-taking $1.25 trillion per year.[20]  The difference—an annual deficit of about $800 billion—is pushed onto future taxpayers, in the form of additions to the federal debt, which currently stands at nearly $22 trillion.  We may be excused for holding the feds in contempt.

Return of the “3 Percent” Plan

So:  What to do?  Here’s one idea:  Let’s return to the old “3 percent” rule—that is, that the entire income tax burden should again be borne by the richest 3% of households.  It worked for the decades leading up to World War II, and it could work again.  After all, we’re not at war—the last formally-declared war was in fact World War II—and apart from sporadic ‘terrorist’ actions, the world is generally at peace.  In a peacetime economy, the wealthiest Americans should rightly bear the full cost of income taxation.

There are several ways to make this happen, but let me lay out one proposal here.  Data exists to make a reasonably accurate set of calculations.  Here are the numbers:

At present, we have about 160 million tax households in the US, representing our 325 million people.  The top one percent—that is, the richest 1.6 million households—earn an average of about $880,000 per year.[21]  The second-richest one percent earn around $400,000 on average, and the 3^rd one-percent about $325,000.  Altogether, our top 3% are paid about $2.6 trillion every year.

The problem, however, is that we need to raise $2.1 trillion in taxes from these folks.  The simplest way would be to tax them at a flat rate of 80%.  Imagine:  you earn a hefty $1 million per year from your vulture capitalist hedge fund, and you have to pay $800,000 to the feds.  Hard to make those yacht payments on just $200,000 a year.

Cruel, you say?  Perhaps.  Fortunately, we have an alternative.  It turns out, unsurprisingly, that most of our top 3-percenters (in terms of income) are also millionaires or billionaires (in terms of assets).  They have real assets—assets that can be taxed.  Each household in the top one-percent, in fact, owns an average of $22 million in assets—mostly in property, stocks and bonds, and corporate equity.  The second percentile household owns some $7.5 million, on average; the 3^rd percentile, $5 million.  In total, this group of individuals owns or controls about $56 trillion in assets—an utterly incredible sum, to say the least.

Here then is my proposal:  tax the upper 3-percenters income at a flat rate of 60%; this will raise about $1.5 trillion annually.  Then let’s also impose a mere 1% wealth tax on their assets, which will raise another $560 billion.  In sum, we get nearly exactly the desired total of $2.1 trillion.  Our richest people have fully funded the federal government.  And the remaining 97% of us—around 315 million people—get to keep all of our hard-earned income.  Imagine that.

And who, exactly, are these poor buggers who are about to personally fund the federal government?  We know the big names:  Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, the Koch brothers.  But they are just the tip of the iceberg.  When we run down the list of leading names, we find a striking fact:  around half of them are Jews.  Among the top ten, we find five Jews:  Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg.  Of the top 50, at least 27 are Jews, including Sheldon Adelson, Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Carl Icahn, David Newhouse, Micki Arison, and Stephen Ross.[22]  More broadly, we can cite once again Benjamin Ginsberg, who wrote, “Today, though barely 2% of the nation’s population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews”.[23]

Based on such data, we can infer that up to half of the top 3-percenters are Jews.[24]  As a whole, they therefore own or control up to $28 trillion in assets.  On my proposal, they will correspondingly pay half of the annual $2.1 trillion to keep our government afloat, and to fight foreign wars on their behalf.  As the prime beneficiaries of American economic policy, this is only fair.

At a minimum, some such proposal deserves wider discussion, given that it offers massive financial benefit to fully 97% of the nation.  By rights, something like this should be discussed in every political debate and on every nighttime news program.  The closest thing we have to this is Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposal: 2% on assets between $50 million and $1 billion, and 3% on assets over $1 billion.  By my estimates, this would apply only to the top 0.1% of households (versus my 3%), and would only bring in, she says, around $275 billion annually (versus my $560 billion).  It’s weak, but at least a step in the right direction.  And yet her proposal got almost no discussion, and virtually no endorsement.  This is unsurprising, given that our media bosses include multi-millionaire Jews like Bob Iger and Ben Sherwood at Disney/ABC, David Levy and Jeff Zucker at Warner/CNN, Noah Oppenheim and Andrew Lack at NBC, and Sumner and Shari Redstone at Viacom/CBS.  They certainly have no interest in any wealth tax, as it would hit them directly in the pocketbook.  By definition, if it’s bad for them, it’s bad, period.

Still, such a tax system, disproportionately falling on American Jews, would have vast implications.  Think of it:  A $1 trillion annual contribution from the American Jewish community, in order to provide for the health and security of all Americans.  It would go a long way toward burnishing their long-besmirched image, and lessening anti-Jewish hostility.  By draining away some of their excessive wealth, it would reduce their ability to meddle in government and the corporate world.  It would be a boon to the US economy, lifting millions out of poverty and allowing millions more to get out from under crushing debt.  It would serve as a measure of true economic justice.  And it would allow for an honest, transparent, fair, and just system of taxation.

But don’t hold your breath.

Thomas Dalton, PhD, has authored or edited several books, including a new translation series of Mein Kampf, and the book Debating the Holocaust (4^th ed, 2020).  For all his works, see his personal website www.thomasdaltonphd.com

[1] Federal spending is now about $4.1 trillion, which is roughly 21% of our current GDP of $21 trillion.  More on this below.

[2] See, for example, the work of Bill Benson and his book The Law That Never Was (www.thelawthatneverwas.com).

[3] Also known as the ‘Underwood Tariff’ or the ‘Underwood-Simmons Act.’

[4] To say that Stolypin was no friend of the Jews is an understatement.  He once wrote:  “It is important that racial characteristics have so drastically set the Jewish people apart from the rest of humanity as to make them totally different creatures who cannot enter into our concept of human nature” (in A. Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews, 1994, p. 6).

[5] News reports of these events, especially in the New York Times, consistently referred to “6 million” suffering Jews—but that’s a story for another time.  See my book Debating the Holocaust (4^th ed. 2020, pp. 53-64).

[6] In S. Singer, “President Taft and the Jews” (The Jewish Press, 23 Dec 2015).  Sazonov served from 1910 to 1916.

[7] N. Cohen, 1963, “The abrogation of the Russo-American treaty of 1832,” Jewish Social Studies 25(1).

[8] Prelude to Catastrophe (2010; Ivan Dee), p. 22.

[9]  Indeed—a “special effort” was made to get the support of Wilson, “whose influence was rising within the Democratic ranks” (p. 32).

[10] For a fuller treatment of this incident and its implications, see my book The Jewish Hand in the World Wars (2019).

[11]  The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911/1982; Transaction), p. 44.

[12]  Dearborn Independent, 11 June 1921.  The entire ‘international Jew’ series ran without a byline, and so for sake of convenience I attribute it to Ford—even though it is unlikely that he wrote the pieces himself.

[13] How the Jews Defeated Hitler (2013; Rowman), p. 57.

[14] The New Deal and Antisemitism in America (1990; Taylor and Francis), p. 193.

[15] Ginsberg, p. 56.

[16] Again, as with WW1, there was a prominent Jewish role in our entry into the war; see Dalton (2019)—supra note 10.

[17] Ginsberg, p. 56.

[18] Ginsberg, p. 57.

[19] Ginsberg, p. 59.

[20] Total annual military-related spending includes several categories, far beyond simply the Dept of Defense.  In 2019, it was reported that total military-related spending exceeded $1 trillion.  This includes:  base DOD budget ($550 billion), “war” budget, aka OCO ($174 billion),  DOE and nuclear spending ($25 billion), FBI defense-related ($9 billion), Veterans Affairs ($216 billion), Homeland Security ($69 billion), international affairs and foreign military aid (mostly to Israel) ($51 billion), military intelligence, CIA, and NSA ($80 billion), and lastly, defense-related share of the national debt ($156 billion)—for a total cost of $1.25 trillion.  For details, see “America’s defense budget is bigger than you think,” www.thenation.com (7 May 2019).

[21] Howard Gold, “Never mind the 1 percent, let’s talk about the 0.01 percent”, 2017 (https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/never-mind-1-percent-lets-talk-about-001-percent).

[22] Bloomberg Billionaires Index (2018).

[23] The Fatal Embrace (1993; Univ of Chicago Press), p. 1.

[24] For details, see my TOO article “A brief look at Jewish wealth” (7 Feb 2019).

Note: I wrote this article on March 30th.  After I finished it, I thought, “You’re ancient and losing it and unqualified to be writing about this topic.  Everybody is on board with how to come at this COVID-19 pandemic and there has to be something wrong with you.”  I set the article aside.  It’s now April 1st and I re-read it and went, “Oh, put it out there.  It’s your truth even if it isn’t the truth.  Readers will know enough to take it for what it’s worth.”   So here it is.

*   *   *

Leather couch in the title of this article refers to where I spend most all of my time these days in my living room.   I’m retired and geriatric old—80 next month—and I possess next to no energy, and spinal stenosis and arthritis are really bad, and in the morning, it’s all I can do to make breakfast and get the cereal with fruit and a cup of coffee and glass of milk to the leather couch to consume while I read The New York Times on my laptop, hell of a deal.

Today’s [March 30th] Times headline was “As U.S. Death Toll Climbs, Washington Weighs New Emergency Steps.” [April 1st, it is “Virus May Kill 100,000 to 240,000, Experts Say.”]  It’s online, but what I would call the front page of the Times had 13 stories—every one of them was about the current COVID-19 crisis.  There were 11 opinion pieces on the front page—same thing.

This has been going on for weeks.  The Times is really hyping this issue.   I’m told (I rarely leave the house except once in a while to go to the supermarket and to get books at the library, so I don’t really know for myself) that business activity is shut down and everybody is holed up in their abodes and washing their hands super carefully (I’m pretty good at that) and trying to keep from touching their faces (I could use some improvement there) and staying away from other people (my specialty).   The Times said that President Trump announced this arrangement is going to go on for another month.

I’m finding that one of the major activities in my old age, at least until the dementia sets in—or gets worse, whichever it is—is to sit on this leather couch I’m sitting on at this moment and watch, as it were, a rerun of my life’s movie being projected inside my head.

One of the very early scenes of my biopic, I was probably four, this was Minnesota, I heard a plane go overhead and pointed it out to my mother.

She replied, jokingly I now realize—or was she maliciously trying to scare me?—“That could be a German plane dropping a bomb on us.”

“A what?”

“A bomb.  We’re at war with the Germans.”

I didn’t know what a bomb, a war, or a German was at that time and I left it at that and went about my day, such as it must have been.  But for some reason that episode is in my movie over 75 years later.

Which is a lead-in to my first point in this writing:  No bomb has ever been dropped on me, literally or figuratively, in the whole of my life until now; this COVID-19 “bomb” has hit its target, I’m feeling it.   And to keep the movie scene connection going, I’m just about as clueless about what’s going on with this virus and the collective response to it as I was about the plane back in 1944.

All to say, I’ve got some personal investment in this COVID-19 issue—enough to get me to take the time to write this up—but I’m not trying to play expert here.  What I am trying to do is get across the thoughts of an average Joe—me–for your consideration.  This is what I would say to you if somehow you got yourself into the red easy chair that is six feet away from me sitting here on this couch.

*   *   *

As I sit here day after day—is it Tuesday or Wednesday?—I realize what little involvement I have had in the big events of my time on earth and how little impact they have had on me.  It’s the no-bomb-has-dropped-on-my-head point in the last section.  There was a polio epidemic in the ‘40s, and my mother told me going swimming in a lake was deadly bad (you could catch polio that way, or so she thought anyway), and I’ve been afraid of the water ever since.  That’s not much.  In grade school, I practiced getting under my desk like the teacher said so I’d be protected when the Russians dropped an atomic bomb on Saint Paul, Minnesota.  Though as I think about now, I’m not sure how much good being under the desk would have done for me if that had happened, and the truth is I never caught on to exactly why I was crouching under the desk in the first place.   The Korean War was a map in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press newspaper showing a battle line near the city of Pusan at the bottom of South Korea, and then there was the Inchon landing up near the city of Seoul, and then the Chinese driving us back from where we’d gotten in North Korea to about where things were when the war started, but what that had to do with anything, I couldn’t have told you.   I didn’t have to fight in Viet Nam because I had enlisted at seventeen and was out of the army before the war escalated, and anyway, I wouldn’t have been drafted because I was teaching in a high school.  9/11 was in Manhattan and I was in Vermont teaching at the university and going to movies and watching ballgames on television.  There was the Iraq war and the AIDS crisis, and I could list other major public occurrences, but everything stayed “over there” not part of my life.  But this current COVID-19 crisis, hysteria, pre-occupation, whatever to call it, is a whole different matter.  It’s not over there, it’s right here.

With the market plunge, hundreds of thousands of dollars in my retirement account, which I had spent a half century building up, have disappeared, poof.

I have a fifteen-year old daughter, a sophomore in high school, who lives in another state from where I live.  Despite our geographical distance and my decrepitude, we are very close.  She’s been ordered to stay away from her friends.  She loves school, and it’s shut down.  She’s an elite golfer.  No more high school golf team.  The country club she plays at closed.  She was set to go to Augusta and see the Masters golf tournament.  Postponed.  I’m worried that I’m not going to be able to support her golf, which is very expensive with the coaches, equipment, country club membership fees, and travel to tournaments, and get her clothes and the other things she needs, and college is coming right up.  I’m wondering who cares about that except me.

I live next door to a restaurant and went there some and got to know the service people.  The restaurant has shut its doors.   I’m asking myself, how are the people who worked there paying their rent and buying food and putting gas in their car and taking care of those who depend on them?

The library I go to is closed.

When I last went to the supermarket, shelves were oddly empty, and I found myself in a vague panic buying more than I need, and just now I checked my supply of paper towels and toilet paper.

*   *   *

I’ve noticed that lately there have been an increasing number of stories in the media about people, both celebrities and ordinary folks, coming down with COVID-19 (infected with it or they have a case of it, the terms are used interchangeably, which can be misleading).  Celebrities that come to mind are actor Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson, NBA star Marcus Smart, and the playwright Terrence McNally, who just died of it.  I remember this pattern with the AIDS epidemic—this person has it, and now this other one, and this other one; the menace grows greater, comes closer, and closer, and closer . . .

These revelations of people contracting the virus are coming across to me like death sentences, a brain tumor or something—oh my god, she/he has COVID-19!  I’m asking myself, what happens with people who are infected (or have a case)?  Are they gasping for breath or what?  How are Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson doing? I know they’ve been quarantined, but I haven’t read anything about them having actual symptoms.  The ballplayer Marcus Smart says he’s feeling fine.

USA Today this morning had a front-page story with the headline, “CBS Mourns Longtime Journalist Maria Mercader, Who Died at 54 from Coronavirus.”  Buried deep in the story, this sentence caught my eye: “Mercader battled cancer and related illnesses for more than 20 years and had been on medical leave for an unrelated matter since the end of February.”  Did she die from COVID-19 or from cancer and related illnesses?    Did the virus kick her over the edge the way hepatitis did with AIDS sufferers?   Hepatitis didn’t take them, really; it was the AIDS virus.  Would Maria Mercader have died if she hadn’t had cancer?   What’s the risk for healthy people getting COVID-19?

I just now checked and found out that Terrence McNally, who was 81, had lost portions of his lungs from lung cancer and at the time of his death was living with COPD, which usually means emphysema and bronchitis, shortness of breath, wheezing, and a chronic cough.  I don’t remember reading about the COPD in the stories about his passing.  Did McNally being 81, not 21 or even 41, and having COPD have anything to do with his death?  Was COVID-19 even a contributing factor?   Did he die with COVID-19 but not from it?  Does it make any difference that my daughter is a healthy 15-year-old, and that despite my age-related limitations, I’m a healthy 79-year-old?

There’s a big problem in Italy with coronavirus, so the media keep telling us.  We better be careful to lock everything down tight or we’ll be in huge trouble like Italy.  Because I’m writing this—I wouldn’t have done it otherwise—I went online and found out that the average age of death from coronavirus in Italy is 79, and only 2% of those who have died from it didn’t have pre-existing health conditions.  Of the first nine deaths from coronavirus in Italy, seven had “grave pathologies such as heart disease.”[1]

More online perusal, I couldn’t find case fatality rates (the percentage of people who die from COVID-19) by age in the U.S.  I did, however, find data for China, South Korea, Spain, and Italy.  For those four countries, the fatality rate of children under nine-years-old is zero; ages 10 to 19, zero except for China, which is .2% (one-fifth of one percent, two out of a thousand); for those 20–30, .2% in China and Spain, no data on the other two countries; and for those 30-39, between .1 to .2.

In the U.S., how many people who are otherwise healthy are dying from COVID-19?   Healthy or unwell, how many people under 40 are dying of it?   I’m just asking.  And I’m wondering who in the media, whose job it is to ask and answer these questions, are doing it.   And if they aren’t doing it, why not?  Is the mainstream media informing us or selling something to us?

*   *   *

To make sense of anything, it helps to compare it to something else.  There are two obvious phenomena to compare to COVID-19: the regular seasonal flu, and the 2009 swine flu pandemic.  It intrigues me why neither of those comparisons is made, or at least it isn’t jumping out at me.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, this flu season—from last October to now, the season goes from October to April each year, the cold weather months; as far as I know, April has never been the peak month with the flu—there have been 38 to 54 million cases of the flu (egad!), 17 million medical visits (!), 390,000 hospitalizations (!), and 29,000 to 59,000 deaths (!).  I don’t know why the ranges are so great with the cases and deaths numbers.  This isn’t an exceptionally bad year for deaths.  In the 2017–18 season, there were an estimated 61,000 deaths, and 34,000 in 2018-19.   Those data can be compared with a CNN report today [March 30th] of 161,698 cases of  COVID-19 and 3003 deaths in the U.S.  [April 1st: it’s 4,476 deaths.]  Why is COVID-19 causing this huge run on doctors and hospitals we’re hearing so much about and the flu isn’t?

It would help if, week-by-week, there was a chart comparing what’s happening with COVID-19 and the regular flu, and a discussion of it.  Is one of the two worse than the other?  Does one call for a different response than the other?   How does the way we deal with one inform our approach to dealing with the other?   The bottom line questions: Is COVID-19 basically no different from the regular flu?   Could the flu data this season—cases, deaths—have supported the same “the sky is falling!” media-and-politician reaction COVID-19 is getting?

Another comparison that looks promising to me is with the 2009 swine flu pandemic in the U.S.   I’m not seeing reference to that crisis in the public discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic.  Two pandemics, why not compare them?  The CDC reports that from April 12th, 2009 to April 10th, 2010 there were 60.8 million cases of the swine flu, 274,000 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths.[2]

How’d we deal with the swine flu health crisis just over a decade ago, and what can we learn from that experience?   I don’t remember the doomsday scenarios—“Millions will die if we don’t take drastic measures!”—that I’m hearing now, but perhaps I wasn’t paying attention.   I can say this for sure, though:  I was teaching in a university back then and I never missed a class (now my university is doing what it calls remote learning), and every restaurant in town was open.   My retirement account went south in the financial crisis in 2008, but nothing bad happened to it in 2009 and 2010.   I just checked: the Dow went down 34% in 2008, and it went up 19% in 2009 and 11% in 2010.   Now, I’m worrying about getting my daughter clothes for school and paying for college.  What’s going on?

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I’m concerned that when people get scared they become like race horses with blinders: they can’t see left or right, just straight ahead.  And to keep the simile going, straight ahead is the direction the jockey they’ve let get on their back is driving them in.

Everything that happens affects everything else.  We need to consider the various consequences, including negative ones, of whatever we do (we need to take the blinders off). What will it mean if what we do about COVID-19 results in an economic recession or depression with millions of people unemployed?   To standards of living, to people’s sense of self-worth, and to levels of despair, depression, family disruption, drug use, and suicide rates?

Congressional leaders asked President Harry Truman how he was going to get an increase in tax money going to the military right after World War II when everybody assumed the military would be, should be, downsized.  “Scare the hell out of people,” he answered.  What he meant was that if the masses are scared, they will unquestioningly go along with whatever the government, supported by its allies in the media, says and does (let the jockey put a saddle on them and ride them around the track).  The scare was the Cold War: the Ruskies are coming!  Build a bomb shelter and get under your desks at school and fork over your tax dollars and give us the power to do whatever we feel like doing and you’ll be safe.

Korea was called “Truman’s war” (actually, it was labeled a “police action” in order to stay away from him having to run it by Congress to get a declaration of war).  Young Americans, who had no choice in the matter, wound up fighting North Koreans and Chinese to the death—40,000 of them are in their graves for eternity—in 25 below zero weather, 6,000 miles from their homes.[3]   The jockey rides.

I recently read a biography of World-War-II General Curtis LeMay.[4] LeMay was the architect of a fire bombing raid on the civilian population of Tokyo in March of 1945.  Sixteen square miles of one of the most densely populated areas in the world was reduced to twisted metal and rubble; not a building stood.  One hundred thousand people—men, women, and children—were burned, broiled, and suffocated to death.   One million were left homeless.  The media celebrated LeMay’s action and the man himself—kudos in The New York Times, he was on the cover of Time magazine, schools were named for him.

Why the standing ovation for what sickened and disgusted me as I read about it in the book?   Because the Tokyo raid and the later atomic bombs dropped on civilian populations in two Japanese cities, were necessary to avoid the cost in lives and money of a ground invasion of Japan.  Who decided we had to invade Japan?  Where did our unconditional surrender demand come from?  Where was the dialogue and debate in Congress and in the society generally about a negotiated end to the war short of Japan’s unconditional surrender?

What happened in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki was barbaric, it was nuts.  Why did people go along with this insanity?  Especially when they are frightened (are race horses frightened?), people are capable of being driven to run as fast as they can go in crazy directions and believe in it.   Which is not to say definitively that’s what’s going on now with the COVID-19 crisis.   I’m just saying mass hysteria is possible.

Everyday people shutting off their minds and giving up their power has gone on all of my life.   The Cuban missile crisis in 1962, which could have resulted in a nuclear holocaust, was President Kennedy’s business alone.  We docilely gave up our personal freedoms after 9/11.

I’m getting a déjà vu feeling with this COVID-19 response.   The mainstream media fanning the flames; President Trump bossing the country around like it’s an episode of “The Apprentice.”  The message to us all, and that includes our elected representatives, shut up and don’t question the experts—like General LeMay, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara with Viet Nam, and now, the CDC and the Surgeon General—and give us your money and do what you’re told and you’ll be safe.   Two trillion dollars so far for relief; it took about two days to enact.  How’d that happen?   What part did your and my senators and congressman have in framing that bill?   What have they said about it?  What have you said about it?   Does anybody know what’s in the legislation?  Do you?  Have you heard any discussion of this law’s possible consequences?  Living on a fixed income, I’m prone to think about inflation, and I worry about the national debt.   Truman was right: scare the hell out of them.

Crises make dictators of all public officials.  Schooling in this country is the business of the people.  They elect a school board and the school board hires teachers and administrators and sets policy.  Educators work for the community and for the students and parents in a school.  It’s our schools, our children, not theirs.  With this health crisis, it has been a series of edicts from the school administrators in my daughter’s school; no explanations, no rationales.  No more classes until, first, March 23rd, and then April 27th, and, now, June 19th.  No teaching the regular curriculum until April 20th, which will then be taught on a remote basis.  Why?  None of your business.  Don’t contact us.  We’re working on it; we’ll get back to you.   I have the sense that the school people are getting off on this COVID-19 scare.  The journalist H.L Mencken said, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

I’m a citizen, not a subject.  I’m a human being, not a race horse.  I’m feeble and on the outside looking in these days, but I have a right to speak my mind in this country.  And that’s what I’ve just done, and now I’m going to stop and go make breakfast and read the Times.   I’ve been up all night.

[1] My apologies, I can’t retrieve the online source for the Italy numbers.  I’m very sure of their accuracy, however.

2 The Wikipedia entry, “2009 Flu Pandemic in the United States.”

[3] I highly recommend Hampton Sides’ book on the Korean war, On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle (Anchor, 2018).

[4] Warren Kozak, LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay, Regnery, 2011.   I wrote an article after reading the book, “On COVID-19 and Curtis LeMay.”