Covid-19 Profiteers Are Making a Killing
By Amber Colon Nunez, In These Times24 May 20
Here are some of the most outrageous capitalist responses to the pandemic.
Two months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared coronavirus a
global pandemic, the United States stands as the nation with the most
confirmed cases. The WHO warns that the worst is yet to come. Yet President
Donald Trump has signaled that he wants the economy to reopen as soon as
possible, despite countless warnings from public health experts that opening
too soon can cause a spike in deaths.
Big corporations and their head honchos have joined the president in
downplaying the dangers and gunning for a reopening. Elon Musk told SpaceX
employees that it's more dangerous to drive a car than to be exposed to
coronavirus. Hobby Lobby founder David Green made headlines when he claimed
keeping his stores open was a part of God's plan, and initially defied state
shutdowns. Corporate-funded conservative groups like FreedomWorks are
lobbying federal and state legislators and orchestrating astroturf
anti-lockdown protests at state capitols. In April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the president on phone calls to
discuss reopening the economy as soon as possible.
Perhaps denial is easy when you can afford to sequester yourself.
While Amazon workers across the country are now fighting to keep their $2
hazard pay raise, the nation's wealthiest are hiding out in apocalyptic
bunkers and making requests for private, at-home doctor's visits that cost
upwards of about $1,500. In mid-April, when doctor's offices nationwide
still faced a shortage of testing kits, Florida residents of Fisher
Island-the richest ZIP code in the nation-purchased 1,800 antibody tests for
themselves just in case Covid-19 penetrated their very gated community. In
New York, 40% of residents were unable to pay rent in April, according to
The New York Times. In New York City, the most affluent fled in droves,
emptying out well-to-do neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, the West
Village, SoHo and Brooklyn Heights by 40%.
It's clear that the 1% are playing by an entirely different set of rules.
84-year-old billionaire Ken Langone, co-founder of Home Depot, called up his
buddies at NYU Langone in February to get a feel for the severity of
coronavirus. "What I've been told by people who are smarter than me in
disease is, 'As of right now it's a bad flu,'" Langone told Bloomberg News
from the comfort of his North Palm Beach, Fla., home.
But it's become clear that the coronavirus is very, very different from the
common flu. The WHO has determined that Covid's reproductive number is
significantly higher: One infected individual can infect 2 to 2.5 more
people than the flu, whose sufferers typically only infect up to 1.3 others.
(Langone has since changed his tone on reopening, telling CNBC, "Our part as
citizens should be stay home, obey separation." Home Depot has instituted
temperature checks for workers, shorter hours, customer limits, paid leave,
hazard pay and no-co-pay healthcare.)
Due to the nationwide shortage of testing kits, it's hard to know exactly
how many people this pandemic is affecting. America's top infectious disease
expert, Anthony Fauci, is certain the approximately 80,000 reported
Covid-related deaths is a significant undercount. Some experts estimate that
total deaths in the U.S. may be twice as high as reported.
What can be more easily measured are the ways some companies are profiting
from the changes wrought by the virus. As Americans eagerly sanitized every
nook and cranny of their homes, cars and shopping carts, sales of Clorox
cleaning supplies rose by 32% in the first quarter of 2020. Zoom and Slack
Technologies have also seen increases in their profits as working from home
has become the new normal. Slack has added 80% more customers compared to
the previous quarter, while Zoom hosts more than 300 million participants
each day-boosting its stock price by 150%. In the first 23 days after the
initial lockdowns began, America's billionaire class raked in over $282
billion in personal wealth, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.
Profiteering on Covid began almost as soon as the crisis hit. The makers of
air purifier Molekule proclaimed in February they were "very confident that
this technology will destroy coronavirus," and rival Airpura claimed on its
website in March that its devices are 99.99% effective in removing
coronavirus. However, scientists hadn't tested the purifier's efficiency at
eliminating coronavirus molecules-only that of similar diseases, like
smallpox and Ebola. Experts say that coronavirus particles are too small to
be blocked by the filters in air purifiers. (Airpura later removed the
claim).
In March, third party sellers on Amazon began jacking up the prices on hand
sanitizer. Sniffing out the opportunity for a windfall, profiteers bought
out scarce supplies at grocery stores and resold them at exorbitant rates.
It wasn't long before Amazon curtailed the practice by banning new listings
for masks and sanitizer. But Amazon happily continued to turn its own
profit: The company's earnings increased by $33 million every hour of the
first quarter, even as its warehouses suffered coronavirus outbreaks and
workers walked out over unsafe conditions. Bezos, the world's richest man,
has accumulated an additional $25 billion since the beginning of this year,
putting him on track to become the first-ever trillionaire.
With a vaccine a year or more off and a president who keeps dismissing the
severity of the pandemic, U.S. consumers will continue to pour their money
into empty or uncertain promises. Online sales have spiked over the last
several weeks. In-store sales have declined while online shopping has peaked
to almost 40% after the first round of stimulus checks went out.
DoorDash, whose drivers are paid with a tipped minimum wage, is holding its
foot on the necks of other meal-delivery services like HelloFresh and Blue
Apron. Instacart is coming out on top and leaving major companies like
Amazon and Walmart in the dust with a nearly 500% increase in sales in
mid-April. Still, Instacart workers said the company was slow to hand out
PPE.
Meanwhile, with "non-essential" businesses ordered closed in many states,
more than 33 million Americans have filed for unemployment since early
March. The billionaires who own many of those businesses are panicking. As
they push for the economy to reopen, they've made one thing very clear: They
aren't the ones making their own wealth, their workers are.