Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics Matt Stoller, Wired. Good stuff:
“[T]he coronavirus is going to introduce economic conditions with which few people in modern America are familiar: the prospect of shortages. After 25 years of offshoring and consolidation, we now rely on overseas production for just about everything. Now in the wake of the coronavirus, China has shut down much of its production; South Korea and Italy will shut down as well. Once the final imports from these countries have worked their way through the supply chains and hit our shores, it could be a while before we get more. This coronavirus will reveal, in other words, a crisis of production—and one that’s coming just in time for a presidential election.”
Thank you, globalizing neoliberals of both parties, for this predictable and predicted outcome. (I believe there more than an echo of The Bearded One [Karl Marx] in “production crisis,” but I also believe that by the allied concept “overproduction crisis” is meant the over-production of capital, not of goods; that’s why there’s so much stupid money sloshing about. It would be a savage historical irony if, as seems to be about to be the case, we had, simultaneously, so much excess capital we don’t know where to invest it, while at the same time a shortage of basic necessities due to supply chain collapse (and, underlying that, the neoliberal policy of gutting the manufacturing sector and shipping it to a country with a public health system too fragile to bear the burden.)
Lambert Strether