The people braying the loudest about rushing Americans back into the workplace and “getting the economy moving again” seem to fall into three categories: committed Trump cultists, so-called “serious”-minded pundits who specialize in economic chattery, and billionaires pontificating whimsically from their gilded perches and private jets. We can understand the crass motives of the first category, and ridicule the untethered fantasies of the second. But the third, the “billionaire” class with their outsize megaphones and prickly self-importance, are quite literally in a class by themselves.
Frank Rich, writer-at large for New York Magazine, shows us in this piece how the looming coronavirus pandemic, whose onslaught is still barely in its infancy even as it pitilessly bears down on our fragile medical system, is quickly revealing gaping cracks of inequality in our society that most have preferred to ignore for decades. In his weekly essay, titled “What a Plague Reveals,” Rich examines the motivations of those privileged few who are lobbying hard for a quick “return to normalcy,” calling for scaling back or abandoning outright the social distancing measures that, while protecting Americans from harm, threaten to sink the U.S. economy further in the mire.
Rich quickly dispenses with what we already know. Donald Trump, a proven sociopath, has no regard for human life beyond his own and neither do his cheerleaders who make up the right-wing Wurlitzer. Their only interest is Trump holding on to power and none of them—not the Larry Kudlows, the Glenn Becks, or the Brit Humes (all of whom have advocated cutting back on protective measures recommended by the CDC and NIH, among many others) can convince anyone they care about the lives that they are so willing and eager to sacrifice on the altar of Wall Street. Their moral depravity is a given.
Rich also skewers New York Times columnist (and billionaire-by-marriage) Thomas Friedman, who is also advocating for a quick return to the status quo, albeit after the entire medical system is flooded with accurate tests and equipment bespeaking an efficiency and capacity which the Trump administration hasn’t shown the slightest sign it is able or even willing to achieve. Rich thinks such pie-in-the-sky fantasies are worse than useless.
[I]n the reality-based world, the idea that we’ll have enough capacity anytime soon should be given as much weight as Mike Pence’s weeks-ago promise that 4 million tests were on the way. So whether you’re Kudlow or Friedman or a former partner at Goldman Sachs, to posit that a return to normal in “a few weeks” would be preceded by the sudden advent of “rapid, widespread testing” is disingenuous on its face.
So “testing” is a false hope—we aren’t going to have enough tests until well after the bodies are being silently buried, with family members looking on from behind the windows of their cars.
And even if we had the needed quantity of tests, the coronavirus has already left the barn in the United States; it is too late for mass testing to map the contours of a return-to-normal plan any time in the near or nearish future. Masks and other PPE, not to mention hospital beds and ventilators, also remain in desperate demand, and the White House, having lied for weeks that they’re on the way, is still refusing to use the federal government to mobilize their production.
But it’s the billionaire set, with their ready dispensations of “wisdom,” for whom Rich reserves a special circle of contempt. Such as Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of Goldman Sachs, who tweeted this out earlier this week.
It’s not only arrogance that is being revealed here, Rich notes, but the precious isolation that these billionaires enjoy from their vast wealth. Coronavirus is barely a concern to them when they can afford the best health care in the world. Lloyd Blankfein and his ilk will never have to wait for a ventilator, and will never be treated by a medical professional desperate for appropriate protective equipment. They all have “the means and the clout to cut the line for a coronavirus test and to secure immediate and attentive medical care away from an overflowing public hospital.”
Another example of this mindset, cited by Rich, is former Wells Fargo CEO Richard Kovacevich, who is quoted in a Bloomberg News profile this week.
Dick Kovacevich, who ran Wells Fargo & Co. until 2007, wants to see healthy workers below about 55 or so to return to work late next month if the outbreak is under control. “We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don’t know,” said Kovacevich, who was also the bank’s chairman until 2009. “Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you’ll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose.”
“Some may even die, I don’t know.” The complete absence of empathy in some of these folks is really rather astonishing.
But it’s hardly unique. Another billionaire, Thomas Golisano, who runs a payroll processing company, also profiled in the Bloomberg article, muses about the “pros and cons” of letting people die to keep his business profits rolling in.
“The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people,” said Golisano, founder and chairman of the payroll processor Paychex Inc. “I have a very large concern that if businesses keep going along the way they’re going then so many of them will have to fold.”
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“You’re picking the better of two evils,” said Golisano, who wants people to go back to their offices in states that have been relatively spared by the coronavirus, but remain at home in hot spots. “You have to weigh the pros and cons.”
The hollow disconnect that these financial titans (As Rich notes, Wells Fargo during Kovacevich's reign was one of the most predatory banks in American history) feel towards the lives of ordinary Americans is apparently rooted in the trappings they enjoy because of their wealth. As Robert Reich, quoted in the Bloomberg article, observes, they’re used to their needs taking precedence over everyone else.
The push to restart the economy makes a certain amount of sense to rich people, according to Reich, because they have come to expect disproportionate gains as the system’s top winners. “The one flaw in their logic this time is that the coronavirus doesn’t understand class,” he added. “The more people are infected, the more likely it is that Blankfein and other billionaires will become infected as well.”
And the inequality he sees as exemplified by these crass billionaires is playing out across the country, as the wealthy and connected readily receive testing while others are forced to wait, and as wealthy residents fleeing for their second homes at the seashore muscle out communities of the “lower-tier” year-long resident workers who support these privileged enclaves.
Overall, the pandemic has revealed in particularly stark terms that the extreme economic inequalities unmasked by the 2008 economic collapse remain unaddressed. There’s a titanic dynamic playing out now in real time. Celebrities and the wealthy are first in line for the lifeboats of coronavirus tests. Rupert Murdoch and his family protect their own health while profiting from a news empire that downplayed and outright disputed the threat of the coronavirus. The permanent residents of resort towns on the Eastern seaboard are being shoved aside by prematurely returning summer vacationers who are stripping shelves of food and flooding the limited local health facilities.
The coronavirus pandemic is already highlighting some stark truths about this country that have been pushed back under the rug since it came out of the Great Recession. The economic catastrophe is already impacting middle and lower-class workers far more acutely than the white collar sector, and we’re only at the start. As noted in a New York Times article last week, “Research suggests that those in lower economic strata are likelier to catch the disease. They are also likelier to die from it.”
If these trends continue and the American public begins to sense just how “more equal” some Americans are compared to others when their own lives are on the line, where the rich receive treatment and equipment as the less fortunate are left to die, we’re going to witness the kind of anger that, as Rich says, “may metastasize at least as fast as the plague.”