For decades, Democrats and Republicans alike slashed social spending and welfare programs, funneling ever greater sums into the financial markets. In the process, it was proclaimed, corporations not only had the rights of human beings, the interests of corporations—and the financial oligarchy—were elevated above human beings.
Rick Scott: ‘Democrats Are Continuing’ All or Nothing Approach on COVID Relief
On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Evening Edit,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) expressed skepticism that a coronavirus relief deal will be reached and said that Democrats’ insistence on funding for state and local governments will prevent a deal from happening.
Host David Asman asked, “So, senator, will Democrats’ demands for state bailouts, specifically blue state bailouts, kill the deal entirely?”
Scott responded, “It sounds like it. It’s unfortunate. We need to help the people who have lost their jobs. We need to keep helping our small businesses. We’ve got to get these schools open. We still need more money for testing and vaccines. So, it’s pretty disappointing, but right now, it sure looks like the Democrats are continuing this idea that they don’t want anything unless they get everything their way.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
The pandemic and the normalization of death
The United States is in the midst of one of the most intense periods of mass death in the nation’s history. More than 16,000 people have died from the coronavirus in the course of just one week, an average of 2,300 every day.
By way of comparison, during the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, some 675,000 people in the US lost their lives over two years, an average of less than 1,000 people every day. In 1995, at the height of the horrific AIDS epidemic, 41,000 people died in a single year, amounting to approximately 112 people per day, or 1/20th the current rate of death.
Within the next few days, the total death toll from the coronavirus will surpass 300,000, or nearly one out of every 1,000 people in the entire country. The coronavirus is now the leading cause of death in the United States, surpassing heart disease and cancer.
Under conditions in which this level of death occurs day after day, week after week, month after month, the official response is to minimize the catastrophe that is unfolding.
Death has been “normalized.”
In the media, the death toll is reported every day. There is even, from time to time, reference to some particularly ghastly incident, such as the death of both parents or the wiping out of a family. But the subject is dropped, and the newscast moves on to the next item. There is no acknowledgment that this unmitigated catastrophe requires a massive and immediate response. There is no attempt to examine who is dying, where and under what conditions.
Trump, the fascistic would-be dictator in the White House, has treated the deaths as of no significance— “virtually nobody” is affected, as he put it earlier this year. The entire policy of the Trump administration has been based on preventing any coordinated response to stop the spread of illness and death.
As for President-elect Joe Biden, he casually observed last week that “we’re likely to lose another 250,000 people dead between now and January.” He presented this massive death toll as if it were an unavoidable cosmic event, requiring no immediate action. There was no demand for emergency action to prevent this forecast from being realized. Yesterday, Biden outlined his coronavirus policy, centered on the demand that schools must remain open, which is seen by the ruling class as essential in keeping workers on the job.
The normalization of death arises from the decision, rooted in class interests, to treat “economic health” and “human life” as comparable phenomena, with the former prioritized over the latter. Once the legitimacy of the comparison and prioritization is accepted—as it is by the political establishment, the oligarchs and the media—mass death is viewed as unavoidable.
It is from this awful calculus that the slogan emerges, “The cure can’t be worse than the disease.”
Under capitalism, what is meant by “the economy” is the exploitation of the working class. To the extent that the “cure”—that is, the most elementary measures to save lives—impinges on the process of profit accumulation, it is unacceptable. Anything that undermines the extraction of surplus value from the working class, or diverts this surplus value from the capitalists through emergency measures and social services, must be rejected.
From thence the conclusion: Workers must die. When Marx refers to capitalism’s “blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus-labor,” these are not just literary phrases. They express the horror of social reality.
The response of the ruling class to the pandemic within the United States and throughout the world arises out of the conditions that preceded it. It has been nearly four decades since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher assumed office, proclaiming (in the words of Thatcher) that there is “no such thing as society.” The right-wing libertarian “free market” ideology peddled by Thatcher and Reagan became a staple of every part of the political establishment, embraced by Democrats like Bill Clinton and Labourites like Tony Blair. Their reactionary “free market” nostrums are the basis of capitalist policies in every country.
For decades, Democrats and Republicans alike slashed social spending and welfare programs, funneling ever greater sums into the financial markets. In the process, it was proclaimed, corporations not only had the rights of human beings, the interests of corporations—and the financial oligarchy—were elevated above human beings.
In a financialized world, in which human life has only an abstract economic significance, those who are not engaged in producing surplus value—and whose cost of care subtracts from the mass of surplus value produced by the expenditure of labor power—are “worthless.” Wherever calculations of profit and loss are made, the ghost of Malthus is always present.
From this basic class logic flows the policy that has been implemented: the downplaying of the threat of the virus, the massive bailout of the rich, the campaign to reopen the factories and reopen the schools. The predictable consequences of this policy are now unfolding.
There are other factors that compound the indifference of the ruling elite. The coronavirus pandemic is a disease that affects primarily the elderly and the working class. Covid-19 spreads rapidly in factories and in-person workplaces, disproportionately affecting the working class who live in shared and multigenerational households and often lack opportunities for social distancing.
In the United States, 80 percent of those who have died have been older than the retirement age of 66. Just five percent of the country’s Covid-19 cases have occurred in nursing homes, but these facilities have accounted for 40 percent of deaths, or more than 100,000 people.
But even the spread of the virus into the ruling class, and into the White House itself, has no effect on the response.
Stopping the pandemic and saving lives are inseparable from getting rid of the social order that produced the catastrophe. The senseless and preventable sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives is the greatest testament to the reactionary and inhuman character of the capitalist order, and the necessity for replacing it with socialism.
Coronavirus Shutdowns to Bring ‘Total Restaurant Apocalypse’ to SF Bay Area
The San Francisco Chronicle is predicting a “total restaurant apocalypse” in the San Francisco Bay Area as a result of the region’s new coronavirus shutdown orders, forcing thousands of business to close and lay off employees in the near future.
The San Francisco region will be under stay-at-home orders for several weeks, into the new year. Much of the rest of California is also under stay-at-home orders by Gov. Gavin Newsom, though — for now — those orders will expire by year’s end.
Soleil Ho, the paper’s restaurant critic, warned Monday that while the economic devastation was not “inevitable,” it was almost certain, as restaurants that invested tens of thousands of dollars in outdoor dining would struggle to recoup their costs:
Outdoor dining has been paused in many Bay Area counties, including San Francisco and Alameda counties — a logical health policy step but a punch in the stomach for the restaurant industry. Restaurants have plunked down tens of thousands of dollars on outdoor dining structures and heat lampsand rehired staff to make an impossible situation work.
Restaurant workers will likely be laid off en masse again, just in time for the Dec. 31 expiration of emergency federal unemployment aid, and restaurant owners have told me that they’re wracked with guilt over the possibility of cutting people loose in the midst of a worsening pandemic. Everyone has bills to pay and mouths to feed, and life can only get harder from here. Without meaningful aid to help the country survive this next lockdown, this is bad news for restaurants, but, above all, awful news for people.
…
Here’s what I see ahead of us, in the likely event that the lockdowns will continue without no-strings-attached direct aid and commercial and residential rent relief: a huge wave of independent operator-owned restaurants closing in January and February, with “hibernating” businesses never waking up; further polarization of the dining scene as middle-end places drop out, with venture capitalist-backed fine dining establishmentsand chain restaurants proliferating; a worsening staffing crisis in the Bay Area, as workers seek more stable jobs in other industries; and undocumented and low-wage workers being driven to financial desperation, with their already-precarious food and housing security reaching even lower depths.
A new report this week by Bloomberg News showed that one in six restaurants has already closed nationwide due to the pandemic shutdowns.
More than 110,000 (17%) restaurants have closed permanently or long-term across country as per @NRAEF … late Nov survey of 6k restaurants found:
*87% reported avg -36% drop in revenue
*59% have higher labor costs than pre-pandemic
*58% expect more furloughs/layoffs next 3m— Liz Ann Sonders (@LizAnnSonders) December 7, 2020
While dining out is often thought of as a luxury, restaurant closures disproportionately hurt minorities, because black and Latino workers are prominent in the sector, and because restaurants are popular small businesses in minority communities.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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