Reporters do not fear Ebola..
  • CM
  • Reporters do not fear Ebola more than they fear not having a story about Ebola...

What is rattling the American voter? According to USA Today, it's the Ebola virus, the Islamic State, and jobs/economy. These, of course, are not real problems, substantial dangers. But one might agree that the first two fears have no basis in reality, but the third has. The economy hasn't recovered from the crash, the job market still sucks, and so on. But this last and seemingly rational fear does not fit with the fact that, post-crash, 93 percent of the additional wealth generated in this society, around $300 billion annually, is going up to the top 1 percent of tax payers. As Wolfgang Streeck points out in his book Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, a book I read this weekend and I highly recommend as it clearly describes the major and complex social/political/economic changes that have occurred over the past 40 years in advanced capitalist societies (the transition from a postwar capitalism that was closely tied to democracy to one that is protected from the power of voters by a number of structural and institutional changes), market crashes have actually been a very good thing for the richest of the rich.

During the recovery in the early 1990s, the top 1 percent claimed 45 percent of all additional wealth. After the crash of 2000, that figure rose sharply to 65 percent. Now it stands at a dizzying 93 percent. If we have another crash, we can reasonably expect it to rise to the heaven of 100 percent. So, if crashes are benefiting the elites in a very big way, why should the rest of the society worry about them or recessions in the way that we do? Clearly, the market is not in bad shape. Clearly, the problem is not the economy but one of political economy—meaning, it's a classical matter of distribution.

The story that is not on the cover of USA Today? The recent Oxfam report that "the number of billionaires doubled between 2009 and 2014." This happened during a time when American voters were constantly worrying about their jobs. And more recently, worrying about Ebola, a problem that Nigeria, a very poor black African country with a weak state, has successfully contained. (Ebola is really not an intelligent virus. All you need is some "aggressive tracing" and much of the problem is solved.)