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My response to a friend who wrote this to his family copy to me:
On 4/18/2020 11:02 AM, ----- wrote:
Some may have to die to save the economy?
This headline in my paper today summarizes my opinion about the
"early" opening. It is easy to want a return to normality. Our Wall
Street government will lie and downplay the dangers. Our family
shouldn't be seduced.
Pops
Well I don't know. I've lived in the relatively good times, for anyone
in the American middle class especially. And now I feel as if I as one
of an age bracket most susceptible could go out, willingly, gloriously,
to save Trump by saving the economy and helping to make America even
greater again, for another term.
I have thoughts about these things. Something like this:
I can't for the life of me see how the economy recovers. First and
foremost there's the whole global environment collapsing and we're
either oblivious or frozen in place, business as usual, and it's coming
with its penumbra to our neighborhood as sure as we're sitting here. And
do we maybe think we're just going to wait alongside and watch it
happening somewhere else?
And what do we really know about this virus or possibly others to
follow, how long they last and spread in a closely-packed,
interdependent if seemingly remote slum, favela, barrio and ghetto
world, and how they relate to what we're doing to the environment and
where there might be prevention or testing or cure or vaccination or
some sort of magic foresight or scientific breakthrough?
And then because look, we all stop, supposedly just for the time being,
buying cars and washing machines and electronic gismos and chotchkies
and we stop going to the barbershop and the theater and the hardware and
restaurants and air travel and other tourism stuff and everybody either
loses their job or is cut so far back that nobody can pay the mortgage
or the rent or the utilities or the credit cards and loans or medical
and dental bills and the debt and interest pile up and shops, stores,
warehouses and offices and hospitals close down along with their
employees and municipal, state and local governments lose their tax
revenue and the supply chain that's supposed to ship us sustenance
collapses and big corporations eat more small corporations and strip
their assets and fire everybody and declare a big dividend and the
government prints endless currency without backing any place in the real
economy, the world of productive activity, and throw it out the window
of the helicopter Milton Friedman style, but only just enough monthly
for a couple of good lunches, a tank full of gas and a stiff belt. And
even that's late and its continuation uncertain and it doesn't go to
those who need it most, underneath the bridges.
And then we're supposed to have enough left over to start buying again?
So then we think the economy just picks up and marches on once the
honchos give the order to resume, even though before the virus showed up
no one was investing in productive enterprise because the rate of profit
has been higher in non-productive assets, and so the transnational
corporations just keep plowing it back into mergers and acquisitions and
stock and bond buybacks and military hardware and shoveling profits out
the door to Biden's Delaware or some island or some humongous capsule
out there in space colonies reserved for their class, Bezos-and-Musk-style?
And then Trump and Biden and the rest of our anointed political
protectors and their corporate ringmasters who haven't a clue or a plan
how to save anything except their own asses and sequester it someplace
for themselves and cohorts later, are supposed to come to our rescue? I
don't think so.
This may at first glance seem off topic but I heard Vijay Prashad
saylast week that right now in India 700 million people don't know where
their next meal is coming from. The repressive Modi government, backed
by US military supplies and by granting them, as convenient allies
against our enemy China, diplomatic, geopolitical, trade and narrow
class advantages has ordered that during this virus crisis all migrant
labor, millions on millions of displaced Indians, are to leave the
centers of production and go back to their villages, walk 1100
kilometers with no food and no cash, most ending up as unlamented,
unnoticed corpses on the roadside. And some in my middle class American
circle here actually say what has that got to do with me and what can I
do about it? If like most Americans we read only what's supplied to us
by our corporate media, haven't a clue as to how the world works,
therefore haven't been connecting the dots and we don't as products of
American exceptionalism see our place in all this.
But argue with me. Please. I could just be another Cassandra of course.
But if I'm going to die from exposure to the Wuhan virus to save Trump
and his legacy then I at least want to see as I go some light in the
tunnel even if it's as Miki says just an oncoming locomotive.
If I have it somewhat accurately, Sanders may just have lucked out. Can
you see him trying to deal with all this?
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