Private equity ownership also leads to an intense focus on extracting profits, per Phalippou — a different model than the increasingly popular "stakeholder capitalism" that encourages executives to focus on employee wellbeing and societal impact, as well as shareholder returns. "This is a very different world that is shaping up,”
- A wall of money is ready for the post-pandemic economy (Julia Horowitz, CNN Money)
That “wall of money” is waiting. The market is spiking on preliminary vaccine developments, dreaming of a recovery next year and an orgy of “extracting profits.” The “post-pandemic economy” will really be a very different world. But perhaps not in the way those wall-builders are salivating about.
Iota, the 9th letter of the Greek alphabet (since we ran out of names this year), has become the 30th named storm this year, the 10th to rapidly intensify, the latest category 5 storm ever in the Atlantic basin. The ocean temperature is at record highs and is fueling all this rapid intensification and the record-setting 2020 hurricane season. That wall of money is really a wall of denial. It has no ability to, nor any interest in, changing the trajectory of the ocean, but that isn’t even considered in its calculations as it excitedly awaits the “post-pandemic economy.”
The true nature of Consumer Capitalism becomes clearer in times of crisis. And in this crisis it is revealing its true nature as a sacrificial cult. Sacrificing the planet for short-term profits and reveling in willing human sacrificial victims. Right-wing cranks have eagerly volunteered themselves and the rest of humanity to join them on the bloody altar; like Glenn Beck, saying “I would rather die than kill the country.” Or Jesse Kelley, “If given the choice between dying and plunging the country I love into a Great Depression, I’d happily die.” And, Dan Patrick, lieutenant Gov. Of Texas:
No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.
This has inspired some curiousity in me about this thing called “The Economy,” what it is for and why it exists. I always assumed that its purpose was to support human life. But I was wrong. It seems that there are many who believe the economy is, instead of something to serve humanity, something humanity should serve— even to the point of being willing to die in order to keep it functioning. Limiting its functioning in the effort to save human lives in the face of a nasty virus is, to these worshippers, unpatriotic heresy.
The economic Temple is considered primary and the Earth secondary —merely a resource mine and cost free trash heap — with no intrinsic value. The fact that there is a price to pay for treating the Earth this way is ignored, merely an “externality;” the Great Away — a magical place where free market angels disperse all unpleasant consequences with their gossamer wings, into the freedom of the air, like “cost free” CO2. The fact that there is, and will be increasingly, a terrible price to pay for this sacrifice is a diffuse and distant annoyance.
So when the Earth, with the merest flick of her little finger, crashes the world economy with a tiny virus, the fact - the awesome, unavoidable fact - that the economy is terribly subservient to the Earth and depends utterly upon it for its existence is made clear. And the fact that we are all terribly dependent upon this economy is also made clear.
But only to some of us. The recent election has clarified for me that there is only a very small minority who grasp the real nature of the problem.
the election results suggest there is no political penalty in many areas of the country for failing to heed the advice of public health authorities. There may, in fact, be a benefit in not doing so and in arguing that economic interests take precedence…
Republicans in North Dakota were also rewarded by voters, with the party managing to deepen its dominance of state government even as coronavirus cases jumped tenfold in the three months before the election.
Among the state’s more than 700 covid-19 deaths was a Republican candidate for the state legislature who died in October. He easily won election anyway, as did nearly every other GOP legislator.
— With pandemic raging, Republicans say election results validate their approach (Griff Witt Washington Post)
Consumer Capitalism is a powerful force. Its political power has been underestimated by those who, like me, were following the polls and hopefully expecting a massive Blue Wave landslide. I woefully underestimated the willingness of the populace to sacrifice themselves in service to the Economy. It is a sobering realization, even though I am overjoyed that Biden won. The sacrifice seems to be working, Covid-19 doesn’t seem to be denting Wall Street at all. The stock market keeps setting records. Tech stocks are exploding. The Pandemic is great for business!
Sales have soared during the coronavirus pandemic, as families forced to eat at home turn to ice cream to indulge themselves. Sales of Unilever ice cream eaten at home increased by 26% between April and June, and by 16% in the following quarter,
- This company conquered the ice cream market. Home delivery is the final frontier (Hanna Ziady CNN Business)
So, thanks to Consumer Capitalism, consumers can ride out the pandemic in front of the tv eating Ben and Jerry’s Netflix & Chilll’d, delivered by “essential workers” often driving their own fossil fueled vehicles and earning a fraction of what those lucky ice cream consumers who can work remotely are bringing in; said ice cream being “processed” in cold storage warehouses where other “essential workers” are droning their ways through heavily monitored, freezing, minimum wage jobs.
The massive burning of fossil fuels to deliver all that ice cream, to keep it cold, to ship it all over the globe is connected to that Category 5 monster bearing down on Nicaragua. As is the 6% of the world’s electricity used to power the Internet and stream those videos. But those connections have become severed in the daily lives of the denizens of modern consumer capitalism. The virus is knocking loudly on the door, but for now - and temporarily - such things can be denied in a bucket of ice cream and Netflix.
While there may be a “wall of money ready for the post-pandemic economy” that wall is full of cracks. Ever since the Republican Great Recession in 2008 there has been a flood of easy money and low interest rates, like a massive continuous rain of cocaine, stimulating a vast debt-for-equity rush of short term profits and stock buy-backs that has made the private equity market the only place for decent returns. The Market’s record highs start to look a little shabby in this light.
It is a crumbly wall of money and, even with all the willing Republican sacrificial victims, the whole system looks to me like a stumbling, washed out coke-addict, heading for collapse. But, the vaccine will come, and our addict will clamber up, brush off their expensive, but frayed suit and clamber into their BMW with the sputtering engine and make it to work barely on time once again.
Until the next crisis. Mother Nature bats last and this is only the first inning.