The “moron” Trump’s COVID-19 capitalist cure: Back to work!
https://socialistaction.org/2020/05/08/the-moron-trumps-covid-19-capitalist-cure-back-to-work/
May 8, 2020
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By JEFF MACKLER
U.S. capitalism’s would-be savior, the “moron” President Donald Trump,
sees his re-election prospects tied to a “re-invigorated” economy based
on sending U.S. workers back to work close to the height of the deadly
COVID-19 pandemic. 77,000 Americans have died of this pandemic as of
this writing. Another 2,000 more perish daily. Yet “back to work” is
ever on the agenda of Trump and the ruling rich, whose statisticians
hunt for a “safe” mathematical formula that factors in ever-changing
rates of infections and deaths with corporate profits lost. Few deny
that whatever the calculations regarding the safety of a generalized
return to work, they will soon after become obsolete when an inevitable
second wave of this terrible disease, estimated to be far worse than the
present horror, takes its tolls.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield
reported on April 21 that “There’s a possibility that the assault of the
virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult
than the one we just went through… if the two respiratory outbreaks
exist [COVID-19 and the usual winter flu] at the same time. This would
strain the healthcare system in unimaginable ways.” In the absence of an
immunizing vaccine, estimated to be 12 to 18 months away, yet another
disastrous wave is on the horizon. And the first wave is far from over.
Many of the dead are low-paid workers, disproportionately Black, Latino,
and Native American and often part-time, from whom predatory capitalism
requires vital services to keep their super warehouses, supermarkets,
slaughterhouses, food processing plants, fast food chain conglomerates,
etc., running as fast as possible. The dead and stricken include health
care workers, public transportation workers, as well as civil service
personnel who repair damaged power lines and sewer systems, fight fires
and provide many other vital services. All are victims of a system that
has proved incapable of providing in a timely manner even the most
modest critical preventative tools, like effective face masks and other
PPE (personal protective equipment) to guard against infection, not to
mention test kits to detect the virus and then safely quarantine its
victims to prevent its insidious advance.
We live in a racist, white supremacist social system where Black, Latino
and Indigenous people always suffer first and worst. In Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, where Black people are 25 percent of the population, some 67
percent of infected COVID-19 victims are Black. Among the dead, 81
percent are Black. In Georgia, over 80 percent of hospitalized COVID-19
patients are Black. Capitalism always takes its greatest toll on the
poor and oppressed. The Milwaukee is not exceptional. It is only
exceptional in that it is one of the few cities to release the racial
breakdown of COVID-19’s victims.s
A disclaimer here is partially in order. It was Trump’s fired former
Secretary of State and previously ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson who first
privately attached the “f*****g moron” label to the president. He did so
after Trump had exited a National Security Council meeting, leaving
those who remained to ponder his suggestion that the U.S. increase its
tactical nuclear arsenal 100-fold! Trump’s reactionary views on the
three unfolding cataclysmic threats to humanity’s future now include his
denial of fossil fuel-induced climate change, his pursuit of a new
generation of nuclear weapon, and now his COVID-19 pandemic policies
that placed the U.S. first in the world in the number of people
afflicted and the number of those who have died. Needless to say, Trump
and his bi-partisan predecessors have been fully aware that the origins
of COVID-19 and similar viruses like MERS and H1N1, lie in the corporate
plundering of the world’s ecosystems – ever bringing humans in closer
contact with previously isolated disease-carrying species – and the
abject failures of scientific research practiced under profit-first
capitalism.
Trump suggests injections of Lysol or bleach
The statement with which the moron Trump – no quotations marks this time
– most outraged the medical community and others came on April 23 during
the president’s daily two-hour press conference, where Trump suggested
an “injection inside” the human body with a disinfectant like bleach or
isopropyl alcohol to possibly help combat the virus. “And then I see the
disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute,” Trump stated
following a presentation by William N. Bryan, an acting under secretary
for science at the Department of Homeland Security. Bryan, a Trump
bureaucrat with zero background in the biological sciences, was
discussing the virus’s possible susceptibility to bleach and alcohol, as
a cleaning agent on surfaces. “One minute,” the president stated,
interrupting Bryan, “And is there a way we can do something like that,
by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it [the
coronavirus] gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the
lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”
A day later the New York Times featured a front-page rebuttal entitled,
“Science Fires Back Loudly on Trump’s Cure All,” stating, “In Maryland,
so many callers flooded a health hotline with questions that the state’s
Emergency Management Agency had to issue a warning that ‘under no
circumstances’ should any disinfectant be taken to treat the
coronavirus. In Washington State, officials urged people not to consume
laundry detergent capsules. Across the country on Friday, health
professionals sounded the alarm. Injecting bleach or highly concentrated
rubbing alcohol ‘causes massive organ damage and the blood cells in the
body to basically burst,’ said the medical director of the New Jersey
Poison Information and Education System, Dr. Diane P. Calello. ‘It can
definitely be a fatal event.’” Clorox and Lysol manufacturers warned
Americans not to inject or ingest their products! A day later, the Food
and Drug Administration warned that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine,
two malaria drugs that Trump has taken to frequently recommending as
remedies for the coronavirus, can cause “dangerous abnormalities in
heart rhythm in coronavirus patients and has resulted in some deaths.”
The F.D.A. added that “The drugs should be used only in clinical trials
or hospitals where patients can be closely monitored for heart
problems.” There is no evidence that the drugs are in any way effective
at treating COVID-19. The New York Times, Trump has three family trust
funds that are heavily invested in the maker of
hydroxychloroquine.Trump’s medical idiocies were soon after covered up
by his obedient media team; in the case of injecting deadly chemicals
into one’s body they asserted that Trump was merely being sarcastic to
the “fake media.” The video of the media conference refutes this
assertion. Meanwhile, in Chicago, tragic reports of people dying from
ingesting such poisons have been broadcast on National Public Radio
channels.
The real state of the U.S. economy
The COVID-19 pandemic has brutally revealed that the U.S. economy was
NEVER in a healthy state, unless the skyrocketing casino stock market
and related speculative ventures that have made a handful of
multi-millionaires into billionaires – the “one percent” – are taken as
a measure of good health. Casino capitalism indeed! A system where the
house always wins and the 99 percent lose. It is these paper money
speculators and the corporate behemoths behind them, enriched by
unprecedented billions and now trillions of dollars in bailouts, and
even more in zero interest “quantitative easing” loans, who press for
their wage slaves to return to the workplace with little or no
medically-established criteria.
Within weeks of the bailout it has become clear that the promise of
increased unemployment benefits that would fully cover the lost wages
for each laid off worker, including freelance and part-time workers, is
a fiction. To date only 10 states have even begun making payments under
a new federal program to these groups who are not covered under the
typical unemployment insurance. And now we learn that the banks have
been allowed to deduct various amounts from the much hyped one-time
$1,200 “stimulus” checks, including overdrafts owed to the banks as well
as other forms of debt. Another provision in the new legislation,
supposedly aimed at helping small businesses, allows banks assigned to
distribute the money, like JPMorgan Chase, one of the richest on earth,
to circumvent application procedures and contact its “small business”
customers directly to facilitate the government payments. These “small
businesses,” defined as employing less than 500 workers, are often
multi-million – and even billion – dollar corporations. In a matter of
days, the initial $348 billion allocated to them evaporated while the
vast majority of mom and pop style operations were left at locked
starting gates.
Myth of the 3.5 percent unemployment rate
Trump’s touted pre-COVID-19 3.5 percent “lowest unemployment rate in
decades” has proven to be a terrible fraud, a product of Labor
Department statistical manipulation in the extreme aimed at excluding
categories of “discouraged” workers who have stopped looking for jobs as
well as workers who have worked perhaps a few days in a particular
quarter, part time workers and workers who are not receiving
unemployment insurance! Prior to COVID-19 the Department of Labor’s
official “labor participation rate,” a measure of the actual number of
all eligible workers with jobs, was closer to 65 percent. That is, the
remaining 35 percent were essentially jobless! With over 30 million
workers filing for unemployment benefits over the past six weeks – a
number surpassing the total number of net new jobs generated in the
economy over the past nine-and-a-half-years, today’s real jobless rate
is closer to the worst years of the Great Depression, where half the
workforce was either totally unemployed or working part-time jobs at
less than poverty wages.
Living on the edge in capitalist America
“The coronavirus pandemic has shown how close to the edge many Americans
were living, with pay and benefits eroding even as corporate profits
surged,” wrote Patricia Cohen in a front-page April 16 New York Times
article. Cohen continued, “But perhaps more significantly, the crisis
has revealed profound, longstanding vulnerabilities in the economic system.”
Cohen quotes Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, to wit, “We
built an economy with no shock absorbers… A lot of the people in the
economy are living at the edge, and you have an event like this that
pushes them over. And we are unique in the advanced world in having
people at the edge without a safety net below them.”
This absence of a safety net is no accident. One example is the massive
bipartisan cuts over the past decades in hospital and healthcare
expenditures coupled with a largely privatized heath care system based
significantly on employment at corporation that ever press for reduced
benefits. It is no coincidence that the U.S., touted as the richest
nation on earth, ranks first in the world in COVID-19 infections,
hospitalizations, and deaths.
The Times proceeds to recount the state of the economy and working class
life before COVID-19 pandemic, pointing to, in their terms: “Years of
limp wage growth that left workers struggling to afford essentials” with
“irregular work schedules that caused weekly paychecks to surge and dip
unpredictably. Job-based benefits were threadbare or nonexistent. In
this economy, four of 10 adults don’t have the resources on hand to
cover an unplanned $400 expense.” They note that “in less than two
decades, the share of income paid out in wages and benefits in the
private sector shrank by 5.4 percentage points,” reducing pay by $3,000
a year, and making it even harder for working families to “meet their
basic needs.” For millions of workers, health care costs rose twice as
fast as wages over the past decade.
Again, this was before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Today, the data
demonstrating a society in decay stands out as never before.
Lines of cars stretch for miles as families wait to pick up groceries
from a food pantry; jobless workers spend days trying to file for
unemployment; outside hospitals, sick people line up overnight to wait
for virus testing.
And 53.5 percent of all renters – millions of whom spend more than half
their incomes on housing – have lost their jobs in the pandemic.
Predatory capitalism unmasked
Most instructive about all of the above is that its source is the
nation’s “newspaper of record,” The New York Times, that before largely
limited its reporting to glib commentaries touting the nation’s strong
economy, rising stock markets and “historically low” unemployment rates
– factors they previously estimated would help facilitate Trump’s
re-election. Today the Times, perhaps the leading Democratic Party media
advocate, along with much of the corporate media establishment, finds it
convenient to place the blame on Trump for the nation’s deepening
economic crises.
In these strange new times the more sophisticated capitalist media
understand that a bit of criticism of the elite more generally is in
order so as to appear balanced in their explanations of why, seeming out
of the blue, such now widely understood injustices have come to pass.
“Powerful forces like advancing technology and globalization are partly
to blame for workers’ economic instability,” writes The Times, while
neglecting to explain that the replacement of human labor by advanced
machines and robots, that is, technological advances, and the offshoring
of what were once living-wage union jobs to nations that impose near
slave-labor wages, is inherent in the world capitalist system. Deadly
competition forces all corporations to struggle to maintain
ever-declining profit rates at the expense of their workers. That’s the
central reason for substituting machines for workers, for increasing
numbers of low wage zero benefit, part time jobs, for assembly line
speed up, for destruction of pensions, for increasing the use of mass
incarcerated prison labor at 50 cents per hour, for the
super-exploitation and persecution of immigrant labor and for
generalized union-busting that obliterates historic gains in union
contracts. And it’s the same for endless rounds of deregulation in every
field, from environmental protection to pharmaceutical drug testing.
It’s the same for the privatization of public education and the parallel
increasing privatization of social services. These are all inherent
features of today’s so-called “free market,” no government interference,
de-regulated neo-liberal capitalism, the modern-day version of the old
predatory system run in high gear to make U.S. corporations more
competitive on world markets. Add to this the endless wars abroad and
its ever-increasing production of fossil fuels – perhaps capitalism’s
two most profitable enterprises – and we come close to a succinct
explanation of capitalism’s raison d’etre!
In this context it is no surprise that the lion’s share of the present
and ongoing multi-trillion dollar federal bailouts go to the ruling
rich, who unswervingly “regulate” and oversee their capitalist system in
their own interests.
Trump estimates COVID-19 fatalities
Just a few weeks ago60,000 to 100,000 represented the range of U.S.
COVID-19 deaths estimated by the Trump administration. As we write
today, the lower figure has already been surpassed. The upper figure can
be expected to be reached within a matter of weeks, with no end in sight
and no reasonable expectation of the number of future deaths. A bare
fraction, less than one percent, of the U.S. population has been tested
for COVID-19, making any serious death toll figures impossible, since it
is impossible to know how many have even contracted the virus. Worse
still, reports from nearly every state indicate that test kits, not to
mention effective masks and related protections, are shockingly
unavailable. Thus, there are no hard facts to accurately tell us the
numbers or percentage of people infected with COVID-19 but still
asymptomatic who are capable of spreading the disease. Without serious
data on this critical matter, any notion of sending working people back
to work is tantamount to sending people to their death – a prospect that
is nevertheless being contemplated by those who invariably subordinate
human life to capitalist profit.
As of this writing, over one million in the U.S. have tested positive
for the virus. But again, less than one percent of the population has
been tested.
After the deluge: Workers to pay
In the mad rush to bail out the corporate elite most economists and
financiers have been relatively silent on the question, Who will pay for
these multi-trillion dollar sums aimed at bailing out capitalism’s
corporate elite? The present official U.S. debt today stands at $21
trillion, an unprecedented amount roughly equal to the entire annual GDP
of the U.S., that is the total market value of all the goods and
services annually produced in the U.S. economy. Federal Reserve chair
Jerome Powell has virtually sworn that there be no limits to ongoing
government bailouts, including amounts that dwarf the multiple trillions
gifted to the corporate elite during and after the Great Recession that
began in 2008, to fend off the wholesale failure of the nation’s banking
institutions while millions lost their homes to foreclosure and
otherwise suffered greatly in one of capitalism’s periodic and inherent
crises.
Taxing the rich to pay off these debts has never been on the ruling
class agenda. Indeed, the opposite has always been the case, exemplified
by the ever-increasing, always bipartisan Clinton, Bush, Obama and
Trump-era corporate tax cuts. Few doubt that the years ahead, as with
the decades past, portend anything other than deepening encroachments on
working class life, including the imposition of ever new forms of
regressive taxation and social cutbacks. This time, however, the
creeping assault on working people will shift into high gear.
The fightback begins
But this time, we can fully expect that yesterday’s relative passivity,
resting on the false hope that things will inevitably improve, perhaps
with the next election, will give way to massive working class
fightbacks fully capable of shaking the dread system’s very foundations.
Unprecedented millions, perhaps tens of millions, and more are today
keenly aware that they are not isolated individuals who must suffer
isolated and demoralizing fates. Predatory capitalism is being daily and
increasingly exposed in all its horrors, inequalities, injustices and
greed as never before.
Marx’s observation in his famous “Communist Manifesto” says it all:
“What the bourgeoisie produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”
Workers of the world unite! Today’s increasingly conscious working
class, for whom socialist ideals are emerging as immediate solutions,
will soon take to the streets in myriad forms to make them a reality.
Today, a fundamentally irrational capitalism digs ditches to daily throw
away incredible tons of all kinds of food that the billionaire
capitalists cannot sell for a profit while millions of workers stand in
long line at usually charity-based food banks to survive after their
jobs have been terminated by no fault of their own. And the food
conglomerates are rewarded with government billions to pay for what they
have wantonly destroyed. Wherever possible landlords look to serve
eviction notices to the millions who live month to month.
During the Great Depression, big business agriculture burned literal
mountains of potatoes while millions starved, a horror repeated with
impunity today. At this very moment in time, the U.S. is fully capable
of producing more than enough food to feed the entire nation, not to
mention much of the world. Yet increasing numbers here and everywhere
suffer and die daily from starvation. The problem, as a new generation
is rapidly coming to understand, is the capitalist system itself. It
cannot be reformed. The ruling one percent who own and control the
wealth of the nation and its associated means of production, must be
replaced by the democratic rule of the vast majority, the working class
in all its magnificent manifestations – its workers of all colors,
origins and ages, oppressed nationalities, immigrants, women, LGBTQI –
in short, the vast majority who produce the nation’s wealth yet are
excluded from directly and democratically deciding how it should be
allocated.
Winning this shining new egalitarian socialist future begins with the
construction of a mass revolutionary socialist party whose ranks stand
among today’s best fighters and whose united and massive mobilizations
point the way to storming the heavens and bringing a new and vibrant
society into being. Join us!
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Steven Pinker
“It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer.
But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming
naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's
highest callings.
[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]”
― Steven Pinker