Trouble Ahead! Detour!

There is little good news to digest in the US. 

We are deep in the midst of an epidemiological crisis, with the US leading the world in infections and deaths. The daily totals have grown to 65,000 or more infections and over 1,100 deaths. To give context to the numbers, the total number of US Covid-19 deaths so far this year amounts to over 22% of all the US battle deaths since 1775. In the worst year of the Vietnam War (1968), combat deaths averaged over 1,400 per month. Those monthly totals are surpassed today in a day and a half, with the virus killing the most vulnerable, especially the elderly, African Americans, Latinos y Latinas, and the poor.

The US is losing the war against the coronavirus.

US infections account for as much as one-fourth of all infections globally, an embarrassing number for the supposed wealthiest country in the world, the self-styled beacon of democracy. How can a state claim to be democratic that cannot minimally guarantee the health and safety of its most vulnerable citizens? How can a state lecture, even intervene in other states to bring them the bounty to be won by emulating the US?

If democracy has anything at all to do with delivering the will of the people, then it must answer to the poor US showing against the coronavirus. A robust democracy would deliver a robust public health service, a universal and comprehensive system available to all, and not a broken, overwhelmed, profit-infected, catch-as-catch-can, class-privileged monstrosity. A real democracy would recall the failed career politicians, deny the soulless lobbyists, and sweep away the preening consultants who pollute our political system.

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The failed response to the coronavirus is only one aspect of the acute political crisis sweeping the US. With a little over three months to the national election, the two-party circus is reaching new lows. What has been a bi-partisan fiasco in response to the virus, has been politicized into universal finger-pointing. Democrats overlook the disastrous earlier outcomes in New York, much of New England, and now in California, while witlessly blaming Trump. Republicans refuse ownership of the deadly results coming from states suffering Republican governance, while boasting of mindless allegiance to Trump. And President Trump stumbles through contradiction after contradiction, while candidate Biden wins support through reticence, with a shamefully inadequate answer to the coronavirus.

When not blaming each other, the two parties blame The People's Republic of China (PRC).

With the compliance of the media, the two parties are ginning up a new Cold War hysteria against PRC and Russia unlike any seen since the missile-gap panic of the early 1960s. Trump and Biden are sparring over who can produce the tougher policy against PRC. This senseless conflict can only end in disaster for the world. 

It’s increasingly clear that the anti-PRC project reflects the growing consensus among US elites that the PRC economy is dynamic and resilient and the US economy is declining, posing a threat to US global dominance. Nor is it a secret that previously secure ties to international “friends” are fraying. While the UK remains supplicant, Germany, France, and many other allies are reluctant to turn on PRC or Russia, and resent the US’s demands for conformity. A stronger PRC and a weaker US will only accelerate this trend. The US is an empire in decline.

Trump’s previous renegacy-- rapprochement with Russia, the DPRK, and PRC, deserting NATO, leaving Syria and Afghanistan, etc.-- has been tempered or extinguished by the security services, the military, and the political Old Guard, leaving him an unconventional, conventional politician. Domestically, his tax policies won the allegiance of Wall Street and the super-rich, dispelling the illusion that the ruling class could not live with him, his vulgarity, and his ill-manners. 

While it may be understandable that sectors of the working class would have viewed him as representing an alternative to the unfriendly globalist, corporate vision offered by the Democratic Party, that illusion should now be crushed as well. And as his poll numbers shrink, his “wilding”-- his erratic behavior-- only intensifies. In conventional times, Trump would be a dead fish.

But this is not a conventional time. The Democrats have attributed their past failures to intervention and subversion. The last refuge for a decadent political party is to place the blame elsewhere: Julian Assange, Wikileaks, dirty tricks, RussiaGate, the Chinese, etc. etc. The Democrats have no electoral strategy other than to ridicule and demonize Trump. Their pre-convention set of issues is unremarkable. It will be further diluted when it becomes a platform. And it will be turned into tepid dishwater when it becomes policy, should Biden be elected. This is a pattern repeated election after election, and Democratic Party loyalists learn nothing from it.

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Looming over the election like an ominous storm cloud is a US economic crisis of unprecedented potential. Despite the stock market’s seeming independence from any reality, the collapse of employment and economic activity is real. 

Just as pundits think they see a flash of light from amongst the billowing clouds, the coronavirus strangles any tentative economic recovery. In the US, the great contradiction of 2020 is between a sinking economy and the deeply ingrained, wide-spread ideology of immediate satisfaction and narrow, individual self-interest that produces and reproduces tens of thousands defying the virus protocols. Decades of voracious, immoderate consumerism and the demagoguery of unqualified, personal rights have produced an allergy to selfless collective action. 

But the coronavirus is ideologically biased: it retreats before rational collective action and advances against self-centered, self-serving choices. Thus, the dogma of liberty as action without restraint, reason, or responsibility so widely preached in the US since the country’s birth comes face-to-face with a danger that devours its true believers.

Since the 1980s, finance capital has accounted for a greater and greater share of putative US economic activity. The character of that activity is further and further removed from productive activity and more and more engaged in accumulating and valorizing the chits of future and potential economic activity (speculation). Obviously, the viability of this process rests on thin subjective factors: public confidence. In a moment, economic disruptions can wash away the necessary confidence, resulting in a collapse as occurred in 2000-2001 and 2007-2009. We are there again.

Of course capitalism is resilient. But the disruptions of 2020 are far more dangerous than in the past, unleashing enormous, latent deflationary pressures. As investor and consumer confidence recedes, speculative “values” come into question, further eroding confidence and perceived value. A deflationary spiral ensues. And the tools available to Central Banks and Treasuries are depleted and less effective today. 

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If there is an encouraging development in the US, it is the remarkable burst of anti-racism activism that has spread from major urban areas to small Midwestern towns.

Impressively, white people in large numbers have joined, even organized these actions which began as outrage at police violence against Black people and enlarged to tackle the systemic racism of US society. This may well be the most significant counter to the crisis of racial justice since the Civil Rights Movement of the last century.

As a result of these actions, US public opinion has undergone a striking shift. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll (July 9-12) shows that 56% of the US people “hold the view that American society is racist”! 

Significantly, the most popular explanation for US racism with respondents was: “People of color experience discrimination because it is built into our society, including into our policies and institutions.”

In addition, 57% of the people surveyed “totally” support the “protests and demonstrations” that emerged after George Floyd’s murder.

Other significant findings of the survey include: 

● 75% of respondents “are encouraged that America is finally addressing long standing issues about racism in our society and working to ensure that all Americans are treated equally.”

● 71% of respondents “feel angry because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington, rather than it working for everyday people to get ahead.” [This number has only slightly changed since 2015].

● 50% of respondents “feel concerned that the protests on racial issues are creating social unrest and bringing too much change to the country, including erasing America’s history and significant figures in the country’s story.”

Arguably, there has never been a time in US history when a majority deemed US society to be racist and supported street action to oppose the injustices associated with racial injustice.

Surely this moment offers great opportunity and should not be wasted.

Fundamental to seizing this moment is clarity about the essence of racism, avoiding false steps, dead ends, and foolishness. Too many of today’s anti-racism warriors scratch away at the margins, confusing language, symbols, and postures with racial inequality. They attack straw men, words, statues, and buildings rather than the many barriers to equality. They fail to grasp that jobs, homes, security, and health are the substance of racial equality, and not the attitudes and interactions that spring from inequality. In the immortal words of the great Nina Simone: “You don’t have to live next to me, just give me my equality.”

Sensitivity training, street drama, and verbal hand-wringing will not remove the burden of low income, the absence of wealth, decaying neighborhoods, poor schools, and inadequate health care. They require political and economic solutions, redistributive solutions. The polls show that the US people are ready for a modern version of “forty acres and a mule,” a dedicated and effective round of economic affirmative action. Are the politicians? The leaders? The pundits? 

If this potentially historic moment is not to be lost, it must not be appropriated by Democratic Party politicians bent on using it as a bludgeon against the Republicans and subsequently cast aside. It must not serve as a frivolous expression of youthful rebelliousness, only to offend the forces now supportive of fundamental change.

The interdependence of these four crises--- epidemiological, political, economic, and racial-- offer a unique opportunity to enact fundamental change in the US. Does anyone believe that either Biden or Trump is up to the task?

The challenge requires a mature, committed, and ideologically sound Left to drive it. It is hard to disagree with BAR’s Glen Ford: “...the U.S. Left is so weak, it has been unable to put forward a narrative that explains the multiple crises that have been so devastating to the American people, or to even minimally fulfill our obligations in solidarity with victims of U.S. imperialism around the world.”

But that doesn’t change the urgent need to now forge a Left that understands the severity of the crisis, a Left that has a vision beyond capitalism, a Left that has a well formed notion of a socialist future, and a Left that has a proposal on how to get there. That is the job before us.

Greg Godels

zzsbloml@gmail.com

Searching for Meaning in a Pandemic

Driven indoors by a deadly virus, most people, especially in the wealthier, advanced capitalist countries, are facing uncertainties unknown in their entire lives. The virus’s ruthless defiance of borders and all but the most privileged social cleavages has cast a shadow over expectations and prospects, while bringing the global economy to a near-standstill.

What can We Learn?

For those who have money and power, their interests come before the health and welfare of the rest of us. Most bourgeois politicians, top corporate executives, bankers, and billionaire investors are willing to risk the lives of the vulnerable to secure their own status and restart the capital accumulation process. Every day, we see anxious politicians lobbied by the agents of monopoly capital. They are ready to ignore the advice of academics and professionals who are experts in disease control and public health in order to send safely isolated workers back into danger. 

In the US, we have private health insurance and market-based health services rather than universal, equitable health care. The fact that the victims of the novel coronavirus could not be promptly diagnosed, triaged, and given care, the fact that response was so uneven, and the fact that health care providers had to compete for the scarce, but essential means to combat the virus demonstrates the tragic inadequacy of an industrial model relying on the market, profit, and the fetish of “efficiency.” Tens of thousands of lost lives expose this failure.

Where politicians in other countries have callously shrunk their national health services for political expediency, they, too, must answer for the unnecessary deaths of thousands.

We should learn that health industry administrators, faced with medical supply shortages and accelerating demand, are prepared to make life-and-death decisions based on protocols devised by so-called “bio-ethicists.” Rather than rallying behind victims’ families and health care workers, rather than seeking emergency powers to ramp up production or purchases, rather than mobilizing volunteers or lobbying for a more rational distribution of national resources, hospital administrations opt to choose which victims deserve to live.
Misnamed “bio-ethicists” compete to find the most “humane” way to select those for death. Some will remember the righteous indignation over “death panels” during the Obama-era healthcare debates. With real life-or-death decisions being taken, the anti-reform zealots are remarkably silent. 

The all-too-popular slogan “We are all in this together” has proven to be nonsense. Class and race remain the decisive factors in determining who wins and who loses. It’s not that Black, Latino, and poor people are selected as victims by the primitive infectious agent, but that social neglect, inequality, and discrimination renders them more vulnerable to the virus. The behavioral choices, access to information and prophylaxis, health care, conditions of shelter, transportation options, and general resources available to the disadvantaged determine that they will more likely be victims, suffer, and die. The media feign shock at numbers that reveal the vast overrepresentation of African American cases and deaths, as though racism, urban segregation, and poverty were already conquered.

Similarly, the media are astounded by the miles of backed-up cars clogging highways waiting for relief from food banks, as though food banks came into existence when the virus struck. Before the virus, the needy were expected to stand in line in shame for their modest handouts.

The virus has shown the privilege of celebrities, the ultra-rich, and the political stratum, who have secured tests and expedited, preferred attention to the dangers threatened by the virus. Forbes magazine documents how a “loophole” in the recovery act could allow up to 43,000 of the richest people in the US to enjoy a gift of up to $1.7 million while everyone else tries to pay their bills and live on a $1,200 stipend from the US Treasury.

The bottom feeders-- the scam artists, the predators on the elderly, the price gougers, the hoarders-- have come out in force to take advantage of fear. Despite unleashing these vermin in an era of deregulation and laissez faire, the government that spies on everyone shows no desire to stop the predation of a populace experiencing unprecedented insecurity.

The lessons learned in the last economic disaster go unheeded. Once again, the banks and monopoly capitalist firms are assured that their vulnerabilities and missteps will be publicly covered, even rewarded. The once detested excuse of “Too big to fail” has roared back with a vengeance. Despite the collapse of real economic activity, the equity markets have begun to recover and, shamefully, bounce back when new, unparalleled unemployment numbers are announced. Even The Wall Street Journal is compelled to notice “..a confounding reality: soaring share prices and a floundering economy” (4-17-2020). Investors know that relief for capitalism will always be in the wings, even if there is no bailout for the rest of us.

We should learn to scoff at talk of “recovery.” Since 2000, “recovery” has only meant that global financial institutions will manipulate interest rates, juggle questionable, inflated assets, and create new financial games of chance in order to put lipstick on an ugly capitalist pig. That corpulent pig-- stuffed with near-worthless financial junk-- has threatened to deflate for over twenty years. Only persistent manipulation by central banks has re-inflated the global monster. The “product” that economists and statisticians purport to measure is really bloated equity markets, debt-driven economic activity, and unhinged property values; all connection to reality-grounded value is long broken.

While this fictional “recovery” has been heralded, the circumstances of those who work for a living has stagnated or sunk (median household income in the US has risen by less than 4% since 2000), buoyed only by taking on more and more debt. The “desperation”  indicators-- like the inability of 40% of the people to sustain even a $400 unexpected bill-- are well documented. The coronavirus crisis has only brought into the spotlight the desperation that has followed in the wake of low wages, gig jobs, grinding healthcare costs, unaffordable housing, student-loan debt, and declining public services. For the vast majority, talk of a recovery is an insult.

Should we not ask why it is that the People's Republic of China has avoided the worst consequences of the virus, especially since they were the first to face its devastation? Could we learn how it is that the International Monetary Fund expects that the PRC economy is expected to grow this year, while the US is projected to decline by 5.9% and the EU by 7.5%? Could it be that its state-owned enterprises were able to respond quickly and decisively? Should we see the fact that the PRC banking sector is largely publicly owned and able to put the prompt and rational distribution of financial assets above profit-taking? Does it matter that the political leadership of the CPC-- the Chinese Communist Party-- is more responsible to the public than the soulless bourgeois parties of the West? Is it a coincidence that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam has accounted for no coronavirus deaths? These are ideas that never enter the conversation in the West.

What can We Expect?

As with the last major crisis over a decade ago, this crisis spawns numerous analyses and prognostications. Uncertainty breeds speculation and “experts” feel compelled to venture opinions. 

The truth is that even the experts remain baffled by the course of the coronavirus. Its behavior and the effectiveness of chaotic Western public policy are uncertainties at this stage, rendering the media blame-game meaningless, if not harmful. The exposure of the systemic weaknesses of capitalism in arresting a pandemic and serving the people is far more significant and immediate than the Trump-Biden horse race.

The state of the US economy is another matter. The nearly universal declining numbers do not lie. Nor does the immediate expectation of further decline. We also know that, in many ways, the economic collapse is unprecedented in the lifetime of almost everyone living today. 

In a short span, JPMorgan Chase forecast an annualized GDP drop of 25% and a rise in unemployment to 10%, only to revise their estimates to a 40% decline in GDP accompanied by 20% unemployment. Goldman Sachs projects that the downturn “will likely be four times worse than the financial crisis [of 2007-2009] and the U.S. will see its highest unemployment rate since World War II…” But the forecasts turn more pessimistic almost before the ink dries.

Ahead is a massive restructuring of global capitalism. Where it goes depends, of course, on subjective, political factors. But history teaches that the trajectory of capitalism, when experiencing a severe economic collapse, will generate a process of what Joseph Schumpeter, an apologist for capitalism, euphemistically called “a gale of creative destruction.” What that process produces, of course, could be deflected or shaped somewhat by political forces of right or left, but the prevailing tendency will be for stronger countries to shift their distress to weaker countries. The tendency will be for big capitals to smash or absorb smaller capitals, for concentration. The tendency will be to use unemployment and its accompanying pain to cheapen the cost of labor, to increase the rate of exploitation. The tendency will be to shift the balance of economic and political power further toward elites. In short, capital will attempt to restore its health by shifting its problems to the weak, destroying many and much in the process. 

Whether this trajectory is repeated as it was after the 2007-2009 crisis depends upon subjective factors-- today’s politics. 

Sterile debates, like the argument between the debt scolds (advocates of minimal government spending, austerity) and the new-age proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (the uncoupling of money expansion from a long-thought rigid relation to negative economic consequences like inflation), are not helpful today, though they are crowding other political options off the stage. 

The last 20 years of persistent, deeply rooted global deflationary pressure have left the zealots for balanced budgets and “moderate” debt with no argument. Central banks have injected trillions into economies with barely a hint of inflation resulting. Relatively extreme monetary inflation has barely contained the underlying deflation plaguing world economies. Thus, none of the near-hysterical inflation warnings proved justified.

The Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) proponents took this relatively limited experience of mounting debt and tepid inflation to demonstrate that MMT was more than a policy of limited application to a specific time and place, but a universal theory of money. In fact, it is a conditional theory, conditional upon very specific, historically determined conditions being met. 

In practice, MMT disconnects monetary policy from any objective standard of value (like gold, for example) and attaches it to the ultimate subjective standard, a fiat national currency. In as much as subjective confidence persists, MMT can persist. But a subjective standard-- because it is decoupled from objective value-- masks the underlying dynamics of the capitalist system; it distorts, rather than settles the chronic problems that plague the accumulation process. The massive bailouts of the last decade and of today appear to use central bank monetary activity to restore equity markets and financial institutions, but they merely isolate the rot and postpone a day of reckoning. The underlying problem remains unresolved, only to surface again, triggering another deflationary spiral, an unloading of “assets” without real value.

It would appear that bourgeois politics has found no other policy approach than austerity or MMT. Austerity, the prescription of the right and much of the center, has failed again and again, bringing countries like Greece to the brink of collapse.

And MMT-- applying a sling to a broken arm-- is the last gasp of the social democratic left, a panacea that promises to bring the best of all possible worlds: giving more to the needy without taking from the greedy. MMT sells an easy tactic that kicks the can of capitalist failure further down the road.

What is needed today is a radical solution to radical, unrivalled problems. 

Standing in the way of an effective approach is a wimpy, Nostalgia Left. 

For most of the trade union leadership, the dream is a return to the 1950s when the pesky Reds were subdued, the bosses allowed wages and benefits to track productivity in return for labor's cooperation with imperialism, and Blacks and women were not disrupting labor peace. 

The current centerpiece of the US Democratic Party-- financially secure, suburban social liberals-- long for a time before Trump when politics were courteous and the vast, growing economic inequalities were an unsightly, unfortunate, but tolerable blemish on the harmony of US civil society. 

Nearly all that remains of the old Democratic coalition, today ignored by the Democratic Party leadership, dreams of the era before Reagan, when Democrats actually gave a tepid voice to economic justice and worshipped at the altar of equal opportunity. Devoted to a fading memory of the New Deal, they place their hopes in a Democratic Party soul transplant. It’s not capitalism, but its ugly stepchild, neoliberalism, that they abhor. 

Too many of the aging radicals of the Old New Left were terrorized by McCarthyism, leading them to forage for something distant from Communism, to the left or right of real, existing Communism. Their search dashed, they have settled for a stale, visionless pragmatism. Their old 1960s antagonists would surely be amused at the irony. 

Thankfully, there are new generations of the left searching for big answers to the big problems of the moment. The last twenty years have shaped a less-than-promising future for millions of young people. And the spring of 2020 only promises far, far worse. To meet these challenges, one can hope that their journey takes more and more of them to revolutionary socialism, to the socialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, to the socialism that animated the working class movements for most of the last century and a half.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Capitalism Kills!

On April 3, thirteen hundred, twenty people (1320) died in the US from Covid-19, the disease inflicted by the novel coronavirus. Deaths in the US account for nearly a quarter of deaths resulting from the virus worldwide on that day. And New York state, the epicenter of US deaths, accounts for over one-half of those deaths (almost as many as the entire UK on April 3). To give some perspective, during the week of Tet, February 11-17, 1968 in Vietnam, five hundred, forty three (543) US soldiers were killed, the most lethal week of the war. Many attribute those deaths in war to shifting popular opinion and bringing the anti-war movement to decisive heights. 

On April 3, nearly 40% of all new cases globally were located in the US. Clearly, the US is fast becoming the center of the viral attack, potentially the greatest victim.

At the same time, the response in the US has been woefully inadequate. New York needs 20,000 to 40,000 ventilators, but they have 2,200 stockpiled, with 4,400 coming from FEMA. The mid-Atlantic region has only 10% of its needed N95 masks and none of the 15,000 body bags requested. FEMA reports having only 9,961 ventilators on April 2. And so it goes, from state to state, each state competing with the others over scarce supplies, a glowing tribute to the virtues of the market economy.

Politicians and media gasbags who usually wrap themselves in the flag and spout patriotic platitudes in times of crisis are unusually subdued and circumspect. Except, of course, they are vocal in condemning, questioning, or misrepresenting the aid delivered by other countries, especially Russia and PRChina. There is a profound reluctance to admit that the US is not the shining city on the hill of long standing mythology, capable of overcoming any adversity without the help of others. 

As Russia delivers needed medical supplies to the US, neo-Cold Warriors warn of the hidden motives and self-serving agendas that are really behind these acts of solidarity. At the same time, the US government, incompetent to deal with its own apocalyptic domestic crisis, tightens the noose it holds around contrived foes-- Cuba, Venezuela, Iran-- denying them access to crucial supplies necessary to combat the coronavirus. 

Nothing demonstrates the extraordinary lengths to which the US elite will go to preserve its self-styled image of “free world” leader like its determination to deny the success of countries like PRChina or DRVietnam in defeating the virus. As new cases explode in the US, a wide range of media outlets, from the leading mouthpieces of the capitalist class, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, to  the “centrist” Washington Post, to the government-supported anti-Communist Radio Free Asia, to the wacko-right Daily Wire, are reporting that the wily Chinese have vastly under-reported the deaths in Wuhan and Hubei province.

Apart from man/woman-in-the-street anecdotal accounts blown into vast conspiracies, the gotcha-journalists build their case around a cremation urn-count supposedly made by unidentified “social-media sleuths” and the alleged report of one crematorium in Wuhan. The sleuths arrive at a figure of 42,000 virus deaths, “16 times the official number” for Wuhan. However, they fail to explain how, from an urn count, their sleuths can determine which urns contain remains from virus victims and which do not. This would be especially difficult since, given one estimate of the annual death rate in PRC (7.4/1000), one would expect a normal number of deaths in Wuhan and Hubei province in a four-month period of between 27,000 and 47,000 deaths. 

Bizarrely, Radio Free Asia arrives at their own count of 46,800 by simply assuming that Wuhan’s 84 furnaces have been running non-stop, 24 hours a day, with each cremation taking an hour. Again, no allowance is stated for “normal” deaths. 

If this gruesome numbers-mongering is reminiscent of hysterical Cold-War demonizing, it is because it follows the same pattern of blatant, evidence-free slanders that characterized that era.

Western media and our political aristocracy would better serve if they would devote attention to the ballooning “unnecessary deaths” amongst the so-called “advanced” capitalist countries. They should be condemning the shamefully misnamed “bioethicists” who are ready to concede that we must devise criteria to summarily allow some sufferers to die for lack of enough beds, ventilators, or attendants; this is the bioethics of Nietzsche or Mengele. 

Whatever other countries have done to save lives and are doing to help others should be celebrated rather than diminished.

Instead, Western pundits are pointing the finger and blaming others for the virus and the inadequate response, the economic collapse, and the growing human costs.

When not blaming the Chinese, it’s the Russians. Some point to “globalization” as the culprit, especially its just-in-time supply chains. Others blame the federal bureaucracy, a favorite target of the crazed government-is-the-enemy crowd. Or more specifically, it’s FEMA or the CDC, which certainly earned some blame for its smug, we-know-best negligence.

Liberals fault Trump, the Republicans, our imperfect, log-jammed “democracy,” or decades of fiscal austerity. 

Of course the most vile charge is to condemn the US people for their lack of discipline, their faulty choices, their failure to heed their clueless leaders.

The tragedy is that the culprit escapes, only to inflict pain another day. Even much of the US left hesitates to bring the enemy fully into the light of day, preferring to blame today’s miseries upon “neo-liberal capitalism,” “disaster capitalism,” “crony capitalism,” or a hundred other flavors of capitalism that, if we were just able to purify them, everything would be good again. 

But we are on the brink of an unprecedented disaster that will change everything. We need to accept that capitalism, not some aberration or deviation from capitalism, but capitalism itself, is bringing the Western countries to their knees, permitting the ravages of a virus to kill the weakest, most vulnerable of our sisters and brothers. It is capitalism that, despite commanding the most advanced science of history, allows possibly hundreds of thousands of people to succumb to a sub-life form, while other, poorer countries are able to meet that threat.

Surely these tragic events demonstrate that markets should not decide our fate, that profit must not govern our safety and security, and that we should not place our confidence in leaders who garner their stature from their proximity to wealth and power. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

War on the Working Class

“Whoever eats up, robs, and steals the nourishment of another, that man commits as great a murder… as he who starves a man or utterly undoes him. Such does a usurer, and sits the while safe on his stool, when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows, and be eaten by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders, if only there were so much flesh on him, that so many ravens could stick their beaks in and share it. Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves.... Little thieves are put in the stocks, great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk.... Therefore is there, on this earth, no greater enemy of man (after the devil) than a gripe-money, and usurer, for he wants to be God over all men.... a usurer and money-glutton, such a one would have the whole world perish of hunger and thirst, misery and want, so far as in him lies, so that he may have all to himself, and every one may receive from him as from a God, and be his serf for ever… Usury is a great huge monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste all… And since we break on the wheel, and behead highwaymen, murderers and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break on the wheel and kill.... hunt down, curse and behead all usurers.” (Martin Luther, excerpted from a footnote in Marx’s Capital, volume I)

According to Bloomberg News (3-24-2020), the billionaire hedge-fund and private equity-fund managers who met with the President on Tuesday, March 24 “are getting impatient with the national economic shutdown caused by coronavirus…” They urged that workers be released to return to their jobs from the government lockdown. The “concerned” billionaires, along with the President, do not want “the cure to be worse than the problem.” 

Another super-rich “humanitarian,” David Neeleman, a JetBlue and WestJet founder and currently an international airline mogul, voiced similar concerns to Bloomberg News, appealing to the plight of the neglected working man and woman:  “‘There’s too much confusion -- nobody has jobs, people are losing their houses, kids are home from school,’ he said by phone. ‘What we’re doing today, we have the worst of all worlds.’” No doubt US workers, threatened by a deadly virus, believe that Neeleman is only speaking for their interests.

Bill Hurley, a general partner in Benchmark Capital, a big-time investor in cutting edge startups with upwards of $3 billion in investments, also advocates for the common man, urging a restart to business. He foresees bankruptcies and suicides. He reminds us that “risk is relative.” It sure is, when you are willing to risk the lives of workers to get investments up and running.

William Ackman, another billionaire hedge-fund manager, posturing as a voice of compromise, says that we should impose a strict shutdown for two weeks more than the President suggests, but then send everyone back to work. He tells CNN: "Do we risk sort of dragging this out and really crushing capitalism if we can't fix it now and then move on and have it behind us? Yes. So the president is right… I call it the rip-the-Band-Aid-off strategy." Some have noted that Ackman had earlier made millions on bets against the economy after he had alerted CNBC and it’s audience that “hell is coming” with the virus. Nothing like leaping on opportunities!

Then there is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, who earned his spurs profitably selling financial garbage to his clients, a strategy that navigated his company through the crisis shoals of 2007-2008. Mr. Blankfein’s deep sense of justice raises the alarm that “crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue-and beyond.” Instead, he offers this nugget of sagacity: “Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.” Lower risk, Mr. Blankfein? Who is to decide? Not risk-free? Should workers leave their hospital beds to keep the wheels of industry spinning?

The White House economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, like his boss, a former TV personality, but with deep ties to Wall Street, offers an assurance: “We’re not abandoning the health professionals’ advice but there is a clamor to try to re-open the economy, perhaps make it less of a shut-in.” Yes, a “clamor,” a clamor from the capitalists to ignore the health professionals and restore the accumulation process immediately.  

Among the White House leadership pushing hardest for sending workers back into the teeth of the coronavirus gale are Domestic Policy Council Director, Joe Grogan, and Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. Grogan is a former lobbyist for a big pharma corporation and the point man for dismantling the already-inadequate national health care plan known as ObamaCare-- just the person you would look to in order to protect working people against an unprecedented viral plague.

And Mnunchin, a second-generation Goldman Sachs executive and hedge funder, has never demonstrated compassion for those working for a living. Not surprisingly, he is leading the charge against health professionals in the government who have relevant knowledge beyond shoveling wealth to Wall Street.

Apparently nothing is learned from the death of three autoworkers from Covid-19 while they continued to make profits for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles well after the life-or-death threat became apparent. They are among the first US martyrs to capitalist greed in this unprecedented crisis (Ford has announced plans to open now-closed plants on April 14 despite the geometrically expanding contagion).

The $2.1 trillion “Emergency Aid Bill” concocted by the US Congress bears the stamp of the majority millionaires and multi-millionaires constituting the elected US government and other top executive and judicial functionaries. With less than a third of the aid earmarked for unemployment insurance, direct payments to households, hospitals, veterans’ care, and public transit and the rest for government and corporations, it is crystal clear where their priorities lie. 

As economist Jack Rasmus notes, adding the Federal Reserve’s bailout program to the Congressional plan:

...the Federal Reserve US central bank has quickly allocated no less than $6.2 Trillion so far to bail out the banks and investors, even before they fail this time. And promises to do more if needed and for as long as necessary. It is writing a blank check for the bankers and investors.

Meanwhile Congress provides one-fourth that, and only one third of that one fourth, for the Main St., workers, and middle class families.

The unending hunger for accumulation driving capitalism reveals its ugly face most readily in a deep crisis. Whether it’s the mindless carnage of an imperialist war like World War I or the invisible threat to life of a new virus like today, the inhumane, anti-social, selfish soul of capitalism surfaces for all to see. Like the brutal, rigid generals of World War I who relentlessly sent their soldiers into the killing fields for the sake of their vanity, today’s money moguls and their servants are willing to add workers onto the growing list of victims of a killer virus for the sake of their stock portfolios.

Where Martin Luther wrote-- cited above-- of “a usurer and money-glutton, such a one would have the whole world perish of hunger and thirst, misery and want, so far as in him lies, so that he may have all to himself,” he surely could not conceive of the unbounded greed of our bankers and corporate leaders. They go well beyond flaunting “gold and silk” by capturing an obscene share of society’s wealth. If Luther, writing in the 16th century, thought that  we should “hunt down, curse and behead all usurers,” what would he have in store for today’s bankers and hedge-fund managers?

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com