American author Stephen Crane, who penned a masterpiece about war without having ever stepped foot on a battlefield, once wrote a short story called “The Open Boat.” It was a tale of a handful of survivors of a shipwreck who were stranding aboard a lifeboat, exposed to the elements, thrashing rain and a hot beating sun, which sapped what little strength they’d had. The boat rocks sickly through the open sea, and finally dumps the men into the wintry water as they make for a distant shore. The fittest and strongest of the bunch dies in the deep. The unfit cook, an injured captain, and a despondent correspondent all survive through good fortune. Some say Crane was mocking the ascendent Darwinian worldview, revealing the indifference of nature to our scrupulously mapped destinies and our inflated sense of our own power. Indeed, it seems an apt tale for modern times, when the fittest seem to have forsaken the public realm and left us scrambling through an undertow of political idiocy to evade one crashing catastrophe after another.
Foreclosing the ture
As the government mandated shut down extended into a second week with even more draconian measures being enacted by various politicos trying to appear variously heroic, brilliant, or serene. Everything lately seems like a pantomime of authenticity. You never get the real thing anymore.
We have Cuomo with his workman’s cap or police jacket on, mounds of medical supplies stacked behind him, flags of nation and state on either side. He gives the hard facts and grim realities and tells us with steely nerve that we will get through this. Or Trump with his bombastic bungling confection of lies, fantasy, and misperceptions, flanked by a phalanx of flag-draped federal authorities of the medical and emergency variety, and behind him the stone-faced icon of conservative gravitas Mike Pence. A pantomime of competence, a series of symbols bereft of substance. It is, though, a disorienting sight when the camera cuts back to the studio whether the anchor at hand (take your pick) falls right back into the shrill hysteria about the total death count—always interspersed with the shocking news that one of the fallen was under the age of sixty.
If this wasn’t surreal enough, one merely has to consider the state of the presidential race, which stumbles forward in fits and starts and staggering levels of buffoonery. The Atlantic published an article entitled “Stay Alive, Joe Biden” by the ballsy Alex Wagner, whose essay did not quite live up to its titular promise. Nevertheless, she stated what was on the mind of numberless liberal centrists. Biden must simply keep it together long enough to make it to the White House. Stagger to the summit, plant the flag, and collapse into the swivel chair in the Oval Office. We’ll take it from there, Joe. Wagner suggests that all that voters really care about is defeating Donald Trump. She gives Bernie voters the short-shrift, of course, but her general point was that it is the idea of Joe Biden, the idea of something other than a toxic casino mogul, that is more than enough for most of the electorate. But what about his obvious cognitive decline? Let’s not get sidetracked, people. Eyes on the prize. But what of his atrocious track record of writing that transparently racist crime bill, expanding the private prison industry, pushing for the Iraq War, and never letting an opportunity pass without clamoring for cuts to our beloved Social Security? Listen, do you want Trump gone or do you want to watch more children caged at the border by fascists in rattleskin jackboots?
And so, in a time of pandemic, it has come to this. Just keep it together, Joe. Read the cue cards. No need to ad lib. Avoid live interviews. Stick to the script. Look presidential. We’ll bundle you up on the caboose of a whistle-stop tour that steams across the heartland, stars and stripes rippling in the brisk air of middle America. All you have to do is smile and wave. Repeatedly.
The foolish and contemptible nature of this approach is confirmed weekly. Last week Biden stumbled through a series of feckless live appearances, while Sanders’ team nimbly put together a live cast where he interviewed Saru Jayaraman of One Fair Wage, an organization rallying support for the legions of service workers destabilized by the crisis (not that they were stable prior to the pandemic). Sanders has turned his organization into a fundraising crew for workers victimized by the virus, raising some two million on their behalf. Jayaraman explained what surely had to be a revelation for anyone who’s worked as a waiter or waitress, that tipping was rooted in slavery: 19th century businesses fought to retain tipping so that they wouldn’t have to pay proper wages to freed former slaves. The practice of tipping, to no one’s surprise, was popular even earlier among European aristocrats who polished their benevolent bona fides by dropping a few shillings in the hands of their houseworkers. Sanders’ live-streamed chat with Jayaraman felt like the kind of worker-centered discourse one might witness in a parallel universe where injustice was not a feature of every social transaction. Also, unsurprisingly, tipping, as one might expect, forces workers to maintain a smiling demeanor and tolerate drunken sexual harassment in order to score enough of a tip to meet the minimum wage.
And yet the rampaging democratic socialist has been had again. Bernie Sanders greatest legacy would be to ditch his backstabbing establishment pals and make one last desperate dash at the White House—as an unapologetic independent. Shafting the duopoly’s grip on the electorate and perhaps rousing a hefty chunk of the cynical non-voting population to make things interesting. But he won’t. He has once again reached the limits of his radicalism. His campaign has foundered on an unwillingness to savage the Democrats for tipping the scales in Biden’s favor through a confused mixture of voter suppression, very probable vote rigging, laughable media bias, and a series of pernicious false narratives. Such as that Sanders is too far left to gain traction in a general election. Whether it knows it or not, the DNC gets it exactly backward: it is his leftward politics that has attracted a bigger and more passionate base than any of his competitors. But the Democrats have been getting this wrong since McGovern. On purpose. If Sanders won, there’d be staggering capital flight from the coffers of the DNC, as their rich corporate donors decamped for friendlier if slightly more unhinged factions among the GOP. For the establishment, avoiding Sanders must feel like an existential crisis.
To their gleeful relief, Biden wins states in which he has spent nearly no money, opened no offices, made scant appearances, and had zero ground game. His television appearances have been appallingly bad, driving his defenders into a twilight zone world of effete denial and lunatic claims. Neera Taden, scold of all progressives left of Hillary Clinton, declared that, “Joe Biden is the candidate of a lifetime.” She was quickly wrestled to the ground by an apoplectic Twitter herd that could no longer bear such lazy liberal cognitive dissonance. Aside from voter intrigue, it seems that it is mainly Boomers, and older African Americans in particular, that are singularly unwilling to step onto the path less traveled, even though they are being frantically waved onto that path by hordes of younger voters, signalling like semaphores at a stock car race. Come over, they implore America, come over to the socialist side.
Slow-footed fools
Congress wastes a week bickering over the economic relief bill, before shoving through an inadequate double trillion-dollar deal. Finally, Uncle Sam mounted the dais, pulled a fat stack out of his striped-pants pocket, pulled off the rubber band with a perverse grimace, and started flinging tens and twenties into the hungry maw of the populace. Some for hospitals, some for small businesses. A bit for workers, a tad for the unemployed. A chunk for healthcare, a chunk for the DHS and the security infrastructure. A handful to small businesses like those in the service industries. And a whole lot to big business, which AOC rails about on the Senate floor, noting the disparity between the unconditional largesse to corporate elites and the miserly short-term, string-laden ration for the working class. The $500B for big business is intended to “capitalize” the Fed’s massive lending scheme (see below). Americans making less than $75,000 a year will receive a one-time check of $1,200 to “help” them through the forcible foreclosure of their means of earning a living. This piddling sum comes after Nancy Pelosi opened the bargaining by calling for means testing and signing off on a sick leave bill that might overlook 75 percent of those in need.
Meanwhile the Federal Reserve is lending trillions at bargain prices through ‘facilities’ that are off the table for average Americans. It will buy up bonds and lend out at dirt cheap rates trillions of dollars in “cash-for-trash” funds to major corporations. If it follows precedent, that money will likely be used to buy up businesses that go under, further consolidating the grip of monopoly capital on the country. A distressed asset sale for the ages. And then, after a brief respite, more stock buybacks, mergers, and the like. All this after pumping some nine trillion into the repo market since last fall. Most of these programs will run six months with an option to extend. Stack that up against the one-time payment to American workers, a bribe to look the other way while Wall Street opportunists exploit a pandemic. When apprised of an earlier government idea of taking a piece of each company it lent money to, Boeing huffily declined the loan in advance. Boeing only takes free money, you see. If all this feels vaguely familiar, it should. It’s more or less a replica of the 2008-2009 effort to bail out the rich and placate the poor, a grotesque policy prescription that led directly to Bernie Sanders on one hand, but Donald Trump on the other.
The unblinking march of war
As the nation and world speculate and trigger each other over COVID19, and medical staff across the world perform heroically in hellish conditions, the U.S. State Department and Pentagon move recklessly to advance their interests. While Cuba is busily dispatching doctors and drugs to countries in varying states of virus-induced meltdowns, the U.S. reminds the world that the Communist government in Havana “keeps most of the salary of its doctors and nurses” while sending them abroad into “egregious labor conditions.” It then implores needy nations to “scrutinize” agreements with Cuba and “end labor abuses.” Doubtful the grateful recipients of Cuban largesse in Italy, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Surinam, and Jamaica will pay heed to the State’s always stellar advice. Around this time, Secretary of State, court jester, and diplomatic buffoon Mike Pompeo goes on camera to declare that China, Russia, Iran and other “bad actors” are spreading misinformation about COVID19. This while in the White House press room, Pompeo’s own commander-in-chief is imparting his driveling anti-science about the outlook for the virus, a vaccine, and various natural cures he may have heard about in passing.
The U.S. Navy sails two aircraft carrier strike groups together in the Arabian Sea for the first time in nearly a decade, a provocation to Iran, which can barely lift its head from the virus long enough to glimpse the circling B-52s and their Super Hornet escorts. Iranian petitions for sanctions relief are met with a ratcheting up of sanctions. The Grayzone’s Aaron Mate interviews Alfred de Zayas, former UN Special Rapporteur, on the criminal nature of unilateral sanctions and how they could amount to genocidal siege during a global pandemic. And in a move even the ‘Gray Lady’ calls, “highly unusual,” the Justice Department indicts Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro with “participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy” and the State Department announced a $15M bounty for information leading to Maduro’s arrest.
In an effort to ape America’s parsimonious attitude, the Poles refuse safe passage over its airspace to Russian airplanes carrying doctors and medical aid to Italy. Of course, countries like Italy are partially debilitated by the virus because it has bought dozens of F35s rather than stocking up on medical equipment. The U.S. dumps a trillion and a half a year into the war budget, and has been pumping billions into the financial markets for more than a decade, and yet finds itself woefully short of hospital beds and masks, both reduced under Obama, as well as respirators and ventilators (thanks in NY in part to Cuomo’s cutting of medical budgets).
The groupthink gridlock
A Venn Diagram has been circling around that rehearses the verifiable but, one imagines, utterly futile, point that the Democrats and Republicans agree on more than they disagree on, including: unflinching support for Israel and indifference to their and Saudi barbarities; fealty to Wall Street white-collar criminals, always ready with a blank check and the fast and florid signature of the Fed; a fierce antagonism toward Russia, China, and Iran, the latest Axis of Evil, with its beggared underlings Venezuela and Nicaragua fenced-in by regional turncoats (In fact, earlier in the month the House passed a unanimous resolution agitating for more sanctions against the elected Democratic Sandinista government in Managua.); an unabashed commitment to global hegemony, of both a military and economic variety: sanctions or six-shooters, take your pick; a blase attitude toward the legalized purchase of elections, of Congress, and of the regulatory apparatuses; an ideological deference to neoliberal economics of austerity and war; that is to say, an institutional prioritization of profits over people. And this all on the flimsy rationale that profiteering will ultimately heal the sick and dispatch poverty through the magic of compound interest; and, last but not least, a duopolistic, monopolistic hold on shared power, which requires a pitiless and wolfish belligerence toward third parties and intraparty insurgents who must be, like Gabbard and Sanders and AOC, finally brought to heel as though they were political super-predators threatening to loot the private vaults in Georgetown and The Palisades. All of which makes the larger point that the whole pantomime of partisan bickering is a puppet show staged by a single party that hides its consensus beneath a thick muslin curtain of high drama.
And isn’t that last the real problem with this country, the fierce monopolies that have seized the levers of power in every government realm, in the corridors of corporate rule, in every marketplace of value, and in the mediasphere where the manufacture of opinion is the Manichean art that sustains the whole rotten edifice? Nothing should go unregulated, Friedmanesque fantasies of libertarian market equilibrium aside. And by the time companies merge and acquire and attain monopoly status, they have more power than the government tasked with their oversight. Successive administrations enervated by ratlines of re-election dollars eventually do what they’re paid to do: the public sector serves the private sector, the Leviathan laces Goliath’s boots. The oversight agencies are bled of funds, leeched of human capital, until finally the oversight itself is handed over to the industry meant to be contained. This is to say, regulation becomes nothing more than a rhetorical salve that placates milquetoast centrists who merely need a wink and nod to cede their vote to a virtue signalling neoliberal.
Meanwhile, capitalism never fails to cast aside its vestments during a crisis to reveal its amoral heart. Evidently, critical medical products like ventilators aren’t being produced in sufficient numbers because when companies do their production cost analyses, they realize they can’t move inventories at a scale that would render it profitable. Bootstrapped hospitals can’t afford the price tag, in other words. So the sick go without air, the poor go without testing, and the virus goes untreated. Now the administration has finally forced GM to produce ventilators, since the market mechanism was failing.
As Stephen Crane implied, the fittest do not always survive. Particularly when they are at the boot end of a repressive and pitiless system organined and managed by a parasitic class of extractive elites. This is surely the position of the American working class, as the pandemic brings into high relief. As always, it seems there’s a relevant quote from Karl Marx. He said that, “Capital is reckless of the health or length of the life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.” Have workers, who deliver surplus into the hands of capital on a daily basis, just not sufficiently compelled capital to alter its policy prescriptions? The demands have surely been voiced, full-throated and fierce, but perhaps not loudly enough to be heard on Capitol Hill, where jangling sacks of silver are the only social change on offer.
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America’s fever pitch
Chaos, panic, and pandemic
Posted on March 31, 2020 by Jason Hirthler
American author Stephen Crane, who penned a masterpiece about war without having ever stepped foot on a battlefield, once wrote a short story called “The Open Boat.” It was a tale of a handful of survivors of a shipwreck who were stranding aboard a lifeboat, exposed to the elements, thrashing rain and a hot beating sun, which sapped what little strength they’d had. The boat rocks sickly through the open sea, and finally dumps the men into the wintry water as they make for a distant shore. The fittest and strongest of the bunch dies in the deep. The unfit cook, an injured captain, and a despondent correspondent all survive through good fortune. Some say Crane was mocking the ascendent Darwinian worldview, revealing the indifference of nature to our scrupulously mapped destinies and our inflated sense of our own power. Indeed, it seems an apt tale for modern times, when the fittest seem to have forsaken the public realm and left us scrambling through an undertow of political idiocy to evade one crashing catastrophe after another.
Foreclosing the ture
As the government mandated shut down extended into a second week with even more draconian measures being enacted by various politicos trying to appear variously heroic, brilliant, or serene. Everything lately seems like a pantomime of authenticity. You never get the real thing anymore.
We have Cuomo with his workman’s cap or police jacket on, mounds of medical supplies stacked behind him, flags of nation and state on either side. He gives the hard facts and grim realities and tells us with steely nerve that we will get through this. Or Trump with his bombastic bungling confection of lies, fantasy, and misperceptions, flanked by a phalanx of flag-draped federal authorities of the medical and emergency variety, and behind him the stone-faced icon of conservative gravitas Mike Pence. A pantomime of competence, a series of symbols bereft of substance. It is, though, a disorienting sight when the camera cuts back to the studio whether the anchor at hand (take your pick) falls right back into the shrill hysteria about the total death count—always interspersed with the shocking news that one of the fallen was under the age of sixty.
If this wasn’t surreal enough, one merely has to consider the state of the presidential race, which stumbles forward in fits and starts and staggering levels of buffoonery. The Atlantic published an article entitled “Stay Alive, Joe Biden” by the ballsy Alex Wagner, whose essay did not quite live up to its titular promise. Nevertheless, she stated what was on the mind of numberless liberal centrists. Biden must simply keep it together long enough to make it to the White House. Stagger to the summit, plant the flag, and collapse into the swivel chair in the Oval Office. We’ll take it from there, Joe. Wagner suggests that all that voters really care about is defeating Donald Trump. She gives Bernie voters the short-shrift, of course, but her general point was that it is the idea of Joe Biden, the idea of something other than a toxic casino mogul, that is more than enough for most of the electorate. But what about his obvious cognitive decline? Let’s not get sidetracked, people. Eyes on the prize. But what of his atrocious track record of writing that transparently racist crime bill, expanding the private prison industry, pushing for the Iraq War, and never letting an opportunity pass without clamoring for cuts to our beloved Social Security? Listen, do you want Trump gone or do you want to watch more children caged at the border by fascists in rattleskin jackboots?
And so, in a time of pandemic, it has come to this. Just keep it together, Joe. Read the cue cards. No need to ad lib. Avoid live interviews. Stick to the script. Look presidential. We’ll bundle you up on the caboose of a whistle-stop tour that steams across the heartland, stars and stripes rippling in the brisk air of middle America. All you have to do is smile and wave. Repeatedly.
The foolish and contemptible nature of this approach is confirmed weekly. Last week Biden stumbled through a series of feckless live appearances, while Sanders’ team nimbly put together a live cast where he interviewed Saru Jayaraman of One Fair Wage, an organization rallying support for the legions of service workers destabilized by the crisis (not that they were stable prior to the pandemic). Sanders has turned his organization into a fundraising crew for workers victimized by the virus, raising some two million on their behalf. Jayaraman explained what surely had to be a revelation for anyone who’s worked as a waiter or waitress, that tipping was rooted in slavery: 19th century businesses fought to retain tipping so that they wouldn’t have to pay proper wages to freed former slaves. The practice of tipping, to no one’s surprise, was popular even earlier among European aristocrats who polished their benevolent bona fides by dropping a few shillings in the hands of their houseworkers. Sanders’ live-streamed chat with Jayaraman felt like the kind of worker-centered discourse one might witness in a parallel universe where injustice was not a feature of every social transaction. Also, unsurprisingly, tipping, as one might expect, forces workers to maintain a smiling demeanor and tolerate drunken sexual harassment in order to score enough of a tip to meet the minimum wage.
And yet the rampaging democratic socialist has been had again. Bernie Sanders greatest legacy would be to ditch his backstabbing establishment pals and make one last desperate dash at the White House—as an unapologetic independent. Shafting the duopoly’s grip on the electorate and perhaps rousing a hefty chunk of the cynical non-voting population to make things interesting. But he won’t. He has once again reached the limits of his radicalism. His campaign has foundered on an unwillingness to savage the Democrats for tipping the scales in Biden’s favor through a confused mixture of voter suppression, very probable vote rigging, laughable media bias, and a series of pernicious false narratives. Such as that Sanders is too far left to gain traction in a general election. Whether it knows it or not, the DNC gets it exactly backward: it is his leftward politics that has attracted a bigger and more passionate base than any of his competitors. But the Democrats have been getting this wrong since McGovern. On purpose. If Sanders won, there’d be staggering capital flight from the coffers of the DNC, as their rich corporate donors decamped for friendlier if slightly more unhinged factions among the GOP. For the establishment, avoiding Sanders must feel like an existential crisis.
To their gleeful relief, Biden wins states in which he has spent nearly no money, opened no offices, made scant appearances, and had zero ground game. His television appearances have been appallingly bad, driving his defenders into a twilight zone world of effete denial and lunatic claims. Neera Taden, scold of all progressives left of Hillary Clinton, declared that, “Joe Biden is the candidate of a lifetime.” She was quickly wrestled to the ground by an apoplectic Twitter herd that could no longer bear such lazy liberal cognitive dissonance. Aside from voter intrigue, it seems that it is mainly Boomers, and older African Americans in particular, that are singularly unwilling to step onto the path less traveled, even though they are being frantically waved onto that path by hordes of younger voters, signalling like semaphores at a stock car race. Come over, they implore America, come over to the socialist side.
Slow-footed fools
Congress wastes a week bickering over the economic relief bill, before shoving through an inadequate double trillion-dollar deal. Finally, Uncle Sam mounted the dais, pulled a fat stack out of his striped-pants pocket, pulled off the rubber band with a perverse grimace, and started flinging tens and twenties into the hungry maw of the populace. Some for hospitals, some for small businesses. A bit for workers, a tad for the unemployed. A chunk for healthcare, a chunk for the DHS and the security infrastructure. A handful to small businesses like those in the service industries. And a whole lot to big business, which AOC rails about on the Senate floor, noting the disparity between the unconditional largesse to corporate elites and the miserly short-term, string-laden ration for the working class. The $500B for big business is intended to “capitalize” the Fed’s massive lending scheme (see below). Americans making less than $75,000 a year will receive a one-time check of $1,200 to “help” them through the forcible foreclosure of their means of earning a living. This piddling sum comes after Nancy Pelosi opened the bargaining by calling for means testing and signing off on a sick leave bill that might overlook 75 percent of those in need.
Meanwhile the Federal Reserve is lending trillions at bargain prices through ‘facilities’ that are off the table for average Americans. It will buy up bonds and lend out at dirt cheap rates trillions of dollars in “cash-for-trash” funds to major corporations. If it follows precedent, that money will likely be used to buy up businesses that go under, further consolidating the grip of monopoly capital on the country. A distressed asset sale for the ages. And then, after a brief respite, more stock buybacks, mergers, and the like. All this after pumping some nine trillion into the repo market since last fall. Most of these programs will run six months with an option to extend. Stack that up against the one-time payment to American workers, a bribe to look the other way while Wall Street opportunists exploit a pandemic. When apprised of an earlier government idea of taking a piece of each company it lent money to, Boeing huffily declined the loan in advance. Boeing only takes free money, you see. If all this feels vaguely familiar, it should. It’s more or less a replica of the 2008-2009 effort to bail out the rich and placate the poor, a grotesque policy prescription that led directly to Bernie Sanders on one hand, but Donald Trump on the other.
The unblinking march of war
As the nation and world speculate and trigger each other over COVID19, and medical staff across the world perform heroically in hellish conditions, the U.S. State Department and Pentagon move recklessly to advance their interests. While Cuba is busily dispatching doctors and drugs to countries in varying states of virus-induced meltdowns, the U.S. reminds the world that the Communist government in Havana “keeps most of the salary of its doctors and nurses” while sending them abroad into “egregious labor conditions.” It then implores needy nations to “scrutinize” agreements with Cuba and “end labor abuses.” Doubtful the grateful recipients of Cuban largesse in Italy, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Surinam, and Jamaica will pay heed to the State’s always stellar advice. Around this time, Secretary of State, court jester, and diplomatic buffoon Mike Pompeo goes on camera to declare that China, Russia, Iran and other “bad actors” are spreading misinformation about COVID19. This while in the White House press room, Pompeo’s own commander-in-chief is imparting his driveling anti-science about the outlook for the virus, a vaccine, and various natural cures he may have heard about in passing.
The U.S. Navy sails two aircraft carrier strike groups together in the Arabian Sea for the first time in nearly a decade, a provocation to Iran, which can barely lift its head from the virus long enough to glimpse the circling B-52s and their Super Hornet escorts. Iranian petitions for sanctions relief are met with a ratcheting up of sanctions. The Grayzone’s Aaron Mate interviews Alfred de Zayas, former UN Special Rapporteur, on the criminal nature of unilateral sanctions and how they could amount to genocidal siege during a global pandemic. And in a move even the ‘Gray Lady’ calls, “highly unusual,” the Justice Department indicts Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro with “participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy” and the State Department announced a $15M bounty for information leading to Maduro’s arrest.
In an effort to ape America’s parsimonious attitude, the Poles refuse safe passage over its airspace to Russian airplanes carrying doctors and medical aid to Italy. Of course, countries like Italy are partially debilitated by the virus because it has bought dozens of F35s rather than stocking up on medical equipment. The U.S. dumps a trillion and a half a year into the war budget, and has been pumping billions into the financial markets for more than a decade, and yet finds itself woefully short of hospital beds and masks, both reduced under Obama, as well as respirators and ventilators (thanks in NY in part to Cuomo’s cutting of medical budgets).
The groupthink gridlock
A Venn Diagram has been circling around that rehearses the verifiable but, one imagines, utterly futile, point that the Democrats and Republicans agree on more than they disagree on, including: unflinching support for Israel and indifference to their and Saudi barbarities; fealty to Wall Street white-collar criminals, always ready with a blank check and the fast and florid signature of the Fed; a fierce antagonism toward Russia, China, and Iran, the latest Axis of Evil, with its beggared underlings Venezuela and Nicaragua fenced-in by regional turncoats (In fact, earlier in the month the House passed a unanimous resolution agitating for more sanctions against the elected Democratic Sandinista government in Managua.); an unabashed commitment to global hegemony, of both a military and economic variety: sanctions or six-shooters, take your pick; a blase attitude toward the legalized purchase of elections, of Congress, and of the regulatory apparatuses; an ideological deference to neoliberal economics of austerity and war; that is to say, an institutional prioritization of profits over people. And this all on the flimsy rationale that profiteering will ultimately heal the sick and dispatch poverty through the magic of compound interest; and, last but not least, a duopolistic, monopolistic hold on shared power, which requires a pitiless and wolfish belligerence toward third parties and intraparty insurgents who must be, like Gabbard and Sanders and AOC, finally brought to heel as though they were political super-predators threatening to loot the private vaults in Georgetown and The Palisades. All of which makes the larger point that the whole pantomime of partisan bickering is a puppet show staged by a single party that hides its consensus beneath a thick muslin curtain of high drama.
And isn’t that last the real problem with this country, the fierce monopolies that have seized the levers of power in every government realm, in the corridors of corporate rule, in every marketplace of value, and in the mediasphere where the manufacture of opinion is the Manichean art that sustains the whole rotten edifice? Nothing should go unregulated, Friedmanesque fantasies of libertarian market equilibrium aside. And by the time companies merge and acquire and attain monopoly status, they have more power than the government tasked with their oversight. Successive administrations enervated by ratlines of re-election dollars eventually do what they’re paid to do: the public sector serves the private sector, the Leviathan laces Goliath’s boots. The oversight agencies are bled of funds, leeched of human capital, until finally the oversight itself is handed over to the industry meant to be contained. This is to say, regulation becomes nothing more than a rhetorical salve that placates milquetoast centrists who merely need a wink and nod to cede their vote to a virtue signalling neoliberal.
Meanwhile, capitalism never fails to cast aside its vestments during a crisis to reveal its amoral heart. Evidently, critical medical products like ventilators aren’t being produced in sufficient numbers because when companies do their production cost analyses, they realize they can’t move inventories at a scale that would render it profitable. Bootstrapped hospitals can’t afford the price tag, in other words. So the sick go without air, the poor go without testing, and the virus goes untreated. Now the administration has finally forced GM to produce ventilators, since the market mechanism was failing.
As Stephen Crane implied, the fittest do not always survive. Particularly when they are at the boot end of a repressive and pitiless system organined and managed by a parasitic class of extractive elites. This is surely the position of the American working class, as the pandemic brings into high relief. As always, it seems there’s a relevant quote from Karl Marx. He said that, “Capital is reckless of the health or length of the life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.” Have workers, who deliver surplus into the hands of capital on a daily basis, just not sufficiently compelled capital to alter its policy prescriptions? The demands have surely been voiced, full-throated and fierce, but perhaps not loudly enough to be heard on Capitol Hill, where jangling sacks of silver are the only social change on offer.
Jason Hirthler is a writer, media critic, veteran of the communications industry, and author of two essay collections, The Sins of Empire and Imperial Fictions. He lives in New York City and can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.