Wealth is simply a surrogate for power. Commerce is the principle means those not born to it acquire it in peacetime (pillaging and piracy requiring more dirty, hands-on work).
Salon’s David Masciotra joins me in considering our willingness to sacrifice others’ lives in service to the economy. Leilani Jordan, for example. The 27-year-old developmentally disabled woman worked and died of the coronavirus as a grocery clerk at Giant Foods. Her last paycheck was for $20.64. Economic cultists insist the poor and powerless serve the economy that enriches them. Same as it ever was. Thomas Jefferson owned about 200 slaves at the founding of this “economy.”
Masciotra writes:
The majority of Americans have less than $500 in savings. They simply do not experience the same “economy” as Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana, a Republican who described Americans dying as a result of “opening the economy” as the “lesser of two evils.” Hollingsworth is the 12th-richest member of Congress, with a net worth of $50.1 million, most of it coming from his father — the “silent partner” in Hollingsworth’s investment firm.
While Jordan and Hollingsworth might share the same country and economy, their conception of whose lost lives are acceptable casualties in propping up the stock market is (or was) likely very different:
The ideological disease that cripples the United States is the belief that society does not exist beyond its commercial activity. President Calvin Coolidge famously remarked that “the business of America is business,” while Joel Millman, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, once wrote, “America is not a nation … America is a market.”
Millman was making a neutral, analytical observation, but a similar thesis has guided America’s long succession of disastrous policy decisions that treat the “economy” — meaning profits for corporations and their owners or shareholders — as sacred. An entire set of religious assumptions follow, most significantly that people like Jordan are martyrs for the God of profit. Their deaths are acceptable losses in the name of God and country, which mutate together into the bloodless idol of commerce.
Masciotra believes the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to confront our market-based theology. But there is little sign of that philosophical reassessment. Because underlying the quest for wealth is something much baser and primal: the quest for power.
I wrote here in December 2017:
Power is why plutocrats and their pet politicians loathe unions; unions counterbalance the power of capital. Whether it is money or civil rights or geopolitics, the specifics are secondary. Power is the bottom line? Congress is filled with alpha males who dream of being the alpha dog.
Republicans know this on a gut level. Democrats think we should all just get along, and government action should lift all boats. What matters more to their rivals is whose boats get lifted most. To the point of sinking their rivals’ dinghies if that’s what it takes to show who’s yacht is master of the seas.
Those possessing the most power nearly always view others as a mean to that end and, if necessary, as acceptable casualties. Like Leilani Jordan, they are more likely to be women, especially women of color, as with promoting photo ID laws that make voting more difficult:
The Republicans’ argument is since voting restrictions in their majestic equality prevent rich and poor, Republican and Democrat alike from participating as full citizens without presenting IDs, nothing is amiss in passing and enforcing them.
But in professing concern for “election integrity,” fearful, white Republican politicians are playing percentages, displaying scorn not just for their opponents but their own supporters. They are willing to sacrifice the franchise of thousands, potentially, as acceptable casualties in elections, if that is what it takes to win, including their own sisters, wives, and daughters.
And in this pandemic season, forcing workers back into meat processing plants as human sacrifices to the Market is equally ecumenical. In demanding states reopen their economies, there may even be a subconscious calculation about whose 2020 voters will perish in greater proportion.
Don’t expect the acting president to mourn the Leilani Jordans any more than those who perish in meat processing plants. It is not in his nature. It would only make you angrier if he tried.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.