16 March 2020
Over the weekend the coronavirus pandemic continued to rise throughout the world’s population, with the number of cases in Italy and the United States doubling and infections reported in 146 countries.
On Sunday, Italy announced a staggering 3,590 new cases, and 368 new deaths, while the United States added 834 new cases and 12 new deaths. Worldwide, the number of cases hit 170,000, with more than 6,500 deaths.
Over the weekend, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that “it’s possible” that millions of people in the United States may die from the pandemic.
A disaster of unprecedented dimensions is unfolding in the US and all over the world. Precious time and lives are being squandered by the failure of governments to respond to the crisis.
People walk past an electronic board showing Hong Kong share index outside a local bank in Hong Kong, Tuesday, March 3, 2020. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
Throughout Europe and America, the message is the same: the ill are being turned away from hospitals. Testing for the virus—the only way to seriously contain the pandemic—is unavailable for most people who request it, with less than 15,000 tests performed in the United States.
Countless viral social media statements from around the country document the Catch-22 of doctors and patients pleading for coronavirus testing, only to be told that they cannot be tested because they have not come into contact with anyone who had tested positive.
Beyond worrying about being infected with the deadly disease, millions of families in the US are worried over how they will take care of their children, with schools closing throughout much of the country, and how they will feed their families with store shelves emptied.
As the pandemic mounted, two developments over the weekend made clear the real priority of the capitalist class in responding to the crisis.
falsely claimed that the House of
Representatives had voted for legislation
that “secures… two weeks of paid sick
leave and paid medical leave for those
affected by the virus.”
In fact, the paltry bill does nothing for 80
percent of workers, exempting both large
employers and small companies that claim
hardship. Members of Congress argued that allowing paid
sick leave would encourage sick employees to stay home—which
is precisely the purpose of the program. As a result, workers will
be forced to choose between going to work sick and endangering
their coworkers or forcing their families to go hungry.
Nothing will be done for workers threatened by the deadly pandemic. But when it comes to bailing out the banks and propping up share values, there is no limit to the resources the government is willing to mobilize.
On Sunday US President Donald Trump announced that the Federal Reserve had just slashed interest rates to zero percent, in yet another hand out to the financial oligarchy. “I would think there are a lot of people on Wall Street that are very happy, and I’m very happy,” Trump beamed.
From the beginning, the Trump administration, speaking for the entire US political establishment, made clear that it sees the pandemic not as a public health crisis, but as a threat to the wealth of the financial oligarchy.
To that end, the White House and Federal Reserve have made effectively unlimited funds available to Wall Street, while doing nothing to actually combat the disease or provide resources for workers who fall ill.
In addition to slashing interest rates a full percentage point—faster than it had ever cut rates before—the Federal Reserve also announced that it would restart its quantitative easing program, pumping an additional half-a-trillion dollars into the financial markets.
The move followed an 0.5 percentage point rate cut earlier in the month, which was followed just 10 days later by an additional infusion of $1.5 trillion into the financial markets on Thursday—a figure two times higher than the original bank bailout implemented in 2008.
The message to Wall Street was clear:
The White House and Federal Reserve will
do whatever is necessary to prop up
stock values. No matter the cost, investors
will be made whole.
As usual, Trump expressed no sympathy for the 700 people who lost their lives worldwide on Sunday. He did not express sympathy for those suffering from the disease or those who have lost loved ones, and told people desperately seeking to find supplies on picked-over store shelves to “relax.”
As argued Friday, the ruling classes are carrying out a policy of “malign neglect” in response to the pandemic:
On the surface, this response appears to be chaotic, disorganized, and improvised. All of this is true. But out of this chaos a definite policy emerges, which can be defined as malign neglect. That is, governments are making a deliberate decision to minimize their response, to adopt an attitude of indifference to the spread of the virus.
Over the weekend, the British government made this unspoken policy explicit, with Sir Patrick Vallance, the Johnson government’s chief scientific adviser, declaring: ‘It’s not possible to stop everyone getting it, and it’s also not desirable.”
This is in line with a growing number of statements in the press advocating the infection of more people, with British Telegraph columnist Jeremy Warner declaring that “COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.”
On Sunday, William Hanage, a Harvard epidemiology professor, excoriated the British government’s policy, commenting: “Your house is on fire, and the people whom you have trusted with your care are not trying to put it out.”
But when it comes to the financial crisis sparked by the pandemic, the government is carrying out an unprecedented and massive intervention, putting all of society’s wealth at the disposal of the capitalist class.
Sunday’s developments make clear the urgent need for workers to intervene politically in the present crisis. The working class must demand that the trillions of dollars being funneled into shoring up the stock markets and banks be used to fund a massive expansion of testing and an unprecedented investment in public health. The necessary resources must be urgently allocated to building hospitals, buying respirators and ensuring medical workers and their support staff are provided with a safe environment.
The pandemic is exposing capitalism in the eyes of millions of workers and young people as a system whose only aim is to enrich the capitalist minority at the expense of the overwhelming majority.
Yet in Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, which was dominated by discussion of the pandemic, neither man said the two words critical to understand the disease and its impact: “capitalism” and “socialism.”
The fact is that the demand for a serious effort to fight the pandemic is inseparable from the struggle to end the capitalist system and reorganize society on a socialist basis.
Yet in Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, which was dominated by discussion of the pandemic, neither man said the two words critical to understand the disease and its impact: “capitalism” and “socialism.”
The fact is that the demand for a serious effort to fight the pandemic is inseparable from the struggle to end the capitalist system and reorganize society on a socialist basis.
While dumping their stock, US senators misled the public on coronavirus crisis
The actions of prominent US lawmakers, Democrats as well as Republicans, in seeking to secure their personal wealth while concealing from the public the catastrophic implications of the coronavirus pandemic and the measures needed to combat it sums up the response of the American ruling elite to the unfolding crisis.
According to reports published by the New York Times, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, National Public Radio (NPR) and ProPublica, and confirmed on the US Senate database for financial disclosures, at least four sitting senators, including the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican Richard Burr, and the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democrat Dianne Feinstein, in a textbook example of “insider trading” dumped millions of dollars worth of stock after a receiving a classified briefing on January 24. During the briefing, all members of the US Senate were informed of the “emerging public threat” regarding the novel coronavirus.
In addition to Feinstein and Burr, Republican senators James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who also sits on the Intelligence Committee, and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia sold off large amounts of stock while at the same time misleading the public about the danger of the virus and the lack of preparation on the part of the government. In all cases, the senators completed the sale of their stock well before the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 10,000 points beginning February 21.
The most blatant and criminal example of insider trading comes from the Senate’s newest and wealthiest member Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to fill a vacancy this year. Loeffler is worth an estimated $500 million, in large part due to her role as former executive and stockholder at the Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE. According to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, “ICE operates 12 exchanges and other subsidiaries,” including the New York Stock Exchange. ICE’s primary government regulator is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which reports to the Senate Agriculture committee.
ICE was founded in 2000 by Jeffrey Sprecher, whom Loeffler married two years after arriving at the company in 2002. Sprecher is still the company's chief executive and the largest individual shareholder. After being appointed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to replace retiring Senator Jonny Isakson without a single vote cast, Loeffler became a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee on January 6, 2020 and was now in charge of regulating her and her husband’s businesses.
After the classified briefings on January 24, which included reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Loeffler tweeted her appreciation for “today’s briefing from the President's top health officials on the novel coronavirus outbreak.” Loeffler and her husband expressed their appreciation by acting on the classified intelligence they received and hurriedly completing 27 separate sales of stock within 22 days. Between January 24 and February 15, Loeffler reported selling stock jointly owned between her and her husband worth between $1.275 and $3.1 million. Loeffler proceeded to purchase stock in only two companies: Oracle, a major technology company, and Citrix, which specializes in teleconferencing software, both on February 14 in the amount of $100,000 to $250,000, respectively.
When Loeffler wasn’t busy dumping soon to be worthless stock she took to Twitter to defend President Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed the lives of over 11,300 worldwide, including nearly 300 in the US as of this writing. In a February 28 tweet, Loeffler lied to her followers and the world, stating, “The truth: @realDonaldTrump & his administration are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy & safe.”
In a video appearance on Fox News Friday morning, Loeffler failed to convince viewers that she was unaware of the transactions and that she played no part in the sale of potentially $3 million worth of stock, stating that “there’s a range of decisions made that I’m not involved in.”
Joining Loeffler in seeking to profit off of the preventable pandemic were high-ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr and James Inhofe, and the former chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein. Members of the committee receive regular classified briefings to which other members of Congress are not privy, including CIA and military reports. The Washington Post reported Friday that the CIA was warning in such briefings as early as January of the outbreak in China mushrooming into a global pandemic. There is no doubt that these senators were well aware of the immense peril COVID-19 posed to the public.
Burr’s disclosures reveal that he and his wife sold 33 different stocks on February 13, worth between $628,000 and $1.72 million, the most stock he’s sold in a single day in the last 14 months. Burr’s largest sales were among companies most affected by recent lockdowns and travel restrictions, including $150,000 worth of shares in Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, which has lost two-thirds of its value so far this year, and $100,000 worth of shares in Extended Stay America, whose share value has decreased by 50 percent since Burr sold his stock.
Burr also sold up to $65,000 worth of stock in Park Hotels and resorts, whose stock is now a fifth of what it was before the sale. A week after the sale, the Dow Jones began its rapid descent.
Burr, like Loeffler, did not warn the public after having received the intelligence briefing. Instead, he downplayed the virus and sought to bolster the government's credibility. In a February 7 opinion piece for Fox News, coauthored with Senator Lamar Alexander, the pair stated that “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats like the coronavirus, in large part due to the work of the Senate Health Committee, Congress and the Trump administration.”
It was reported this past week that the federal government’s Strategic National Stockpile has approximately 12 million of the vitally important medical-grade N95 masks. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the US will go through approximately 3.5 billion masks if the outbreak lasts the duration of the year. That is, the US government has less than one percent of the masks on hand needed to meet the urgent demand and ensure the safety of health care workers risking their lives to fight the disease. Health care workers in the US have already resorted to reusing equipment and even relying on bandanas to protect themselves.
Burr, however, changed his tune when talking to prominent campaign contributors in his home state of North Carolina. Members of the Tar Heel Circle pay between $500 and $10,000 in dues to “Enjoy interaction with top leaders and staff from Congress, the administration and the private sector,” according to the group’s website.
In recordings obtained by NPR, two weeks before the Trump administration banned travel to Europe, Barr warned the Tar Heel Circle, “...you may have to alter your travel. You may have to look at your employees and judge whether the trip they’re making to Europe is essential or whether it can be done on the video conference. Why risk it?”
In contrast to his op-ed piece, Burr was more forthcoming to his elite audience in regards to the severity of the virus. “There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” he said, according to the recording of his remarks cited by NPR. “It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic,” he warned.
Upon news of Burr’s corruption, the senator claimed that his decision to sell a majority of assets was made after watching “CNBC’s daily health and science reporting out of its Asia bureaus at the time.” In an attempt to save his seat and blunt social anger, Burr has requested a Senate Ethics Committee review of his transactions.
Demonstrating that capitalist corruption is a bipartisan affair, multimillionaire Dianne Feinstein and her husband, billionaire investment banker Richard Blum, reported in Feinstein’s senate disclosures the sale of between $1.5 and $6 million worth of California biotech company Allogen Therapeutics stock between January 31 and February 18. A share of Allogen stock sold for $24.25 the day Feinstein dumped the stock. As of today, shares of the stock were trading at $19.25.
Feinstein, like Loeffler, pleaded ignorance of the seven-figure sales, stating on Twitter that she “held all assets in a blind trust of which I have no control.” Echoing Loeffler, she further declared that she “had no input” into any decisions her husband made.
Finally, Senator Inhofe sold as much as $400,000 worth of stock, including in companies such as PayPal, Apple and Intuit on January 31. Inhofe had previously been criticized for buying stock in defense contractor Raytheon while advocating for more defense spending. He is the current chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Inhofe joined his fellow grifters in pleading ignorance, telling the Tulsa World that he did not know about the stock sales and had “no control” of his investments.
There is little doubt that there are more members of Congress who have done the same, exemplifying once again that in capitalist society the first and foremost concern is the wealth of the aristocracy, not the health and safety of the population, even in the face of a global pandemic.
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