Wayne O'Leary

Lessons from the Pandemic

Here is what we know so far about this country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic: it’s been the worst in the Western world. Under the Trump administration, more Americans are infected than people anywhere else; more have died and will die. Lapses include no national stay-at-home order, no comprehensive nationwide testing, no centralized coordination in the dispensing of medical supplies. In short, there’s no one in charge at the federal level, and no one who wants to be in charge.

The president, who permitted the pandemic response team of the National Security Council to be disbanded in 2018, has absented himself from the crisis, which he downplays alternatively as either a hoax or a conspiracy to prevent his reelection; its seemingly worst aspects are that it keeps him away from MAGA political rallies and threatens to damage the institution he values above all others, the stock market. Concerning the transfer of needed medical devices from federal stockpiles to the impacted states, the chief executive grouses, “We’re not a shipping clerk.” On providing leadership and direction from Washington, he offers a bizarre reinterpretation of how the federal system should operate: “The federal government is merely a back-up for state governments.”

Donald Trump has set the tone for a servile supporting cast of characters at the White House — Anthony Fauci excepted — that changes almost weekly (five health spokespersons in about a month). Most reprehensible is the obsequious vice president, Mike Pence, whose designated role is to stand adjacent to and slightly behind the dear leader and gaze lovingly in his direction, much as Nancy Reagan did with regard to husband Ronnie. Then, there’s self-important son-in-law Jared Kushner, for whom the term smart aleck could have been created. Kushner, who imaginatively contributed the notion that federal stockpiles of emergency medical supplies belong not to the nation but to his extended family, gives nepotism a bad name.

This know-nothing crowd, the worst surrounding a chief executive since Warren G. Harding’s “Ohio gang,” is inept, corrupt, ignorant, and totally self-interested. Its members religiously follow the retrospective advice of old-time political boss George Washington Plunkitt, who ruled New York’s Tammany Hall in the early 1900s. A devotee of what he called honest graft, Plunkitt summarized his philosophy this way: “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.” Trump operatives slipped one such opportunity into the recently enacted Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in the form of a provision allowing certain hotel chains, including Trump’s, to qualify for “small-business” tax breaks and forgivable loans.

While the Trumpsters schemed to capitalize on a national crisis, Americans at large were doing less well. The last week of March saw 6.6 million claims made for unemployment insurance (on top of 3.3 million the week before), pushing the official jobless rate from 3.5% at the height of the economic expansion to 4.4%; employment experts say the unofficial (but more accurate) rate is closer to 10%, including the substantial number of workers quickly laid off from Trump properties when pandemic-driven recession loomed on the horizon. Predictions are it will go much higher, perhaps approaching or eclipsing the historical record (25%) established during the 1930s.

That projection should have meant the main economic thrust of the CARES Act would be to make average Americans whole again after the crisis, which is manifestly not the case. There are certainly federal funds directly allocated to helping workers and their families ($290 billion), expanding unemployment benefits ($266 billion), and funding emergency expenses at hospitals ($100 billion), but the bulk of the $2.2 trillion rescue package ($867 billion, or well over a third) goes to large and small businesses in the form of loans, largely forgiven if employment is maintained.

Fully 22.7% of the federal largesse ($500 billion) is earmarked for bailing out supposedly distressed big corporations, whether they really need it or not, in order to ease Wall Street’s anxieties. It’s easy money in the form of interest-free Federal Reseerve loans, and except for restrictions on using the cash for higher CEO pay or for buying back company stock, it can be applied to most anything — financing mergers, renewing plant and equipment, paying off bank loans, etc. At Republican insistence, the CARES Act arrived at President Trump’s desk as an economic bookend to the corporate tax cut of 2017, a classic giveaway that keeps profit making squarely in the middle of the war against the pandemic.

It’s just a short step from profit making to profiteering, and the entire GOP approach to the health crisis reeks of the latter. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has been busily acquiring needed medical supplies, most from China, and consigning them not to desperate US hospitals or strapped state governments, but to private companies for resale to the highest bidder. These companies, yet to be publicized, have subsequently marked up essential equipment, including protective masks, as much as 10 times their normal price — with the blessing of White House free enterprisers. Pressed to justify the scandal, an administration spokesman allowed as how the government’s role was not to disrupt “the supply chain” by eliminating the middleman. Business as usual would continue unabated.

The response points up a truth about the pandemic: it can’t be defeated by applying marketplace values, especially with Trump’s version of a corporatist state selectively guaranteeing swollen company profits. Such sanctioned profiteering equals death. Only an activist federal government superseding and by-passing private economic special interests can get help to where it needs to be in a timely fashion. By allowing greed full rein to frustrate the collective good, Trump and his GOP soul mates are crippling the decentralized state-based efforts they claim to endorse. Their crony capitalism can’t be allowed to stand.

There’s another truth that’s become self-evident during the pandemic. It’s this: Bernie Sanders was absolutely correct about the need for guaranteed universal health care. With jobs disappearing at a record pace, an outdated private health-insurance system based on employment no longer makes sense, if it ever did. Lose your job, and (for about half of Americans) you lose your medical security.

To the Trump Republicans, however, medical bankruptcy and increased fatality rates are small prices to pay for continued pursuit of the dollar. That’s why they can never again be trusted with government.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2020

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