I had written one of my early morning long, rambling notes...and then
it went away. No sign of it anywhere.
But I was moved to note, after reading the email, that our current
class struggle is noteworthy only because it is our current class
struggle. The pages of my history books tell of one class struggle
after another.
The story is always the same, the rich become fat and sluggish, and
the poor take over, and begin the story from the beginning, with new
characters but the same old plot.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/22/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Class War - Not the Media Hokey Pokey - Is What It's All About
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
21 May 20
Journalists aren't supposed to "bury the lead." But when death is the topic
and corporate power is the culprit, the connection routinely goes
unmentioned.
Class war - waged methodically from the top down - is so constant and
pervasive that it might seem unremarkable. The 24/7 siege to make large
companies more profitable and the wealthy more wealthy is going on all
around us. In the process, it normalizes avoidable death as a cost of doing
business.
Overall, news media are part of that normalization. While negative coverage
of Donald Trump has been common due to his handling of the pandemic, media
outrage has been muted in relation to the magnitude of the dying in our
midst - at a time when most of the dying could have been prevented.
Deaths tend to become less "newsworthy" as the numbers mount and shock
gives
way to tacit media acceptance. A new lethal reality is built on dominant
structures that keep serving the financial priorities of the powerful.
Emphasis is often less about saving lives and more about saving the stock
market. The storyline becomes more about "opening," less about dying, even
though opening is sure to cause more dying.
Patterns of economic injustice are so basic to U.S. society that they
amount
to deep cracks in its foundation. Under the weight of catastrophe, whether
hurricane or recession or pandemic, the cracks split wider and wider as
more
human beings - disproportionately poor and people of color - fall into the
abyss.
Corporate media narratives routinely bypass such core truths about cause
and
effect. Heartbreaking stories have scant context. Victims without
victimizers.
Fueled by ultra-greed, Trump's approach is a kind of scorched-earth nonstop
campaign, an extreme version of the asymmetrical class warfare going on all
the time.
"The world before COVID-19 was a deeply unequal place," the progressive
publisher OR Books noted in an email to supporters this week. "Now, in the
pandemic, those inequalities are only more stark. Across America and around
the globe are fabulous riches for a tiny few and deepening immiseration for
everyone else."
A swiftly infamous Instagram post by David Geffen ("net worth" $8.7
billion)
in late March, showing his $590 million yacht at sunset as the pandemic
took
deadly hold in the United States ("isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the
virus . I hope everybody is staying safe"), became a symbol transcending
avowed politics. Geffen is no right-winger. He's a liberal. In the 2018
election cycle he gave $1 million to Democratic Congressional super PACs.
He
went on to become a donor to Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign.
But the most pernicious and ultimately destructive actions of the
super-wealthy are not so overtly gauche. The poisons are laced with
soothing
PR, while the rich movers and shakers play by the rules that capitalism has
constructed for the voracious acquisition of wealth at the expense of
everyone else. In that sense, the worst class-war crimes are the ones that
adhere to the rules and don't get singled out for condemnation.
Consider the pathology of Jeff Bezos, reputedly the world's richest person,
who commented that he couldn't think of much else to spend his money on
besides programs for space travel, while back on planet Earth the extent of
misery due to poverty is staggering. Said Bezos: "The only way that I can
see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon
winnings into space travel. That is basically it."
For the likes of Bezos and other elite winners of riches, in the words of
songwriter Tracy Chapman, a future awaits: "I won't die lonely / I'll have
it all prearranged / A grave that's deep and wide enough / For me and all
my
mountains o' things."
A few months into 2020, capitalism is running amuck in tandem with the
coronavirus, like some headless horseman galloping over dead bodies.
Meanwhile, for U.S. news media, accustomed to covering faraway disasters, a
reflex has set in close to home - turning the page on deaths, increasingly
presenting them as numbers. An anesthetized pall of acceptance is
descending
on us.
"For the person who dies there is an end, but this is not so for the person
who grieves," psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has pointed out. "The person who
mourns goes on living and for as long as he [or she] lives there is always
the possibility of feeling grief." In his book "The Examined Life," Grosz
wrote: "My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling
fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and
then do something to permanently end our sorrow."
The corporate system is looking for its own forms of social "closure" in
the
midst of this pandemic's colossal deadly upheaval. Already, we're supposed
to accept.
Maybe you don't want to call it class war. But whatever you call it, the
system always makes a killing.