The biggest lesson from the pandemic is, of course, that first-rate political leadership at the top is critically important in a time of emergency. As suggested in previous columns (5/1/20 and 5/15/20 TPP), its absence in the present circumstance is glaringly obvious; more than that, it’s tragic. At a time when the very best was needed, our system produced far and away its very worst.
At least Americans have to wait “only” six more months to depose the destructive man-child currently occupying the Oval Office, assuming he doesn’t kill us all in the meantime. Luckily (if that’s the word), Donald Trump’s disaster-waiting-to-happen took place in his last year.
That’s the good news. The bad news is Trump’s lunatic party still controls the US Senate and numerous governorships in red-state America; six months is ample time for it to assist him in wreaking havoc and deepening the pandemic by rejecting implementation of sensible health measures.
For example, in Texas, GOP Governor Greg Abbott waited for weeks after leaders of the state’s largest cities and counties ordered residents to stay at home, until March 31, when he ordered Texans to stay at home unless they were taking part in essential services and activities. Then, on April 30, Abbott let his stay-at-home order expire, allowing retail stores, restaurants, movie theaters and malls to reopen under capacity limits, and he overruled local governments’ ability to enforce face mask requirements in public. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis resisted shutting down until early April, then allowed numerous mind-boggling exceptions that included leaving the public beaches open for communal recreation.
In South Dakota, Governor Kristi Noem, a Trump acolyte, has not only kept her state open, but refused to close a meat-packing facility responsible for hundreds of coronavirus cases. Noem says her alternative is to make South Dakota a test case for Donald Trump’s imagined virus cure, the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, thereby offering up her populace as guinea pigs for a bizarre unscientific experiment. At least they won’t be ingesting disinfectants. Good luck, Dakotans!
In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp impulsively granted premature public access (in late April) to massage and tattoo parlors, hair salons, bowling alleys, gyms, and similar intimate venues, defiantly daring the virus to spread. And in Nebraska, Governor Pete Ricketts will reportedly allow a huge public shopping center along an interstate highway to welcome customers — and infections. What could possibly go wrong?
Virtually all Republican governors (except for rational conservatives like Ohio’s Mike DeWine, Massachusetts’ Charlie Baker and Maryland’s Larry Hogan) are backing the president’s call to quickly end the economic shutdown and reopen America for business; they’ve even formed an anti-restriction coalition. Testing? Who needs testing? Mingle and shop; it’s the American way. After all, as Fox News alumnus Bill O’Reilly has assured us, the victims of COVID-19 are mostly disposable nursing-home residents, who are “on their last legs” anyway. A few hundred thousand more deaths in the name of reviving the economy is to GOP stalwarts a price well worth paying. For them, it’s all about the money.
Meanwhile, the Republican hard right, led by such luminaries as Federal Reserve reject and anti-tax fanatic Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, has been busy calling for demonstrations and civil disobedience against state shelter-in-place policies in a transparent attempt to revive the Tea Party movement of a decade ago. The resulting “spontaneous” protests against mostly Democratic governors, which began in Michigan and spread outward from there, have little to do with bogus demands for freedom and everything to do with 2020 politics.
Funded by GOP megadonors and marinated in MAGA-rally rhetoric, these astroturf protests are little more than a Republican reelection tactic. Remaining to be seen is whether the mainstream media, which publicized and energized the Tea Party revolt of 2010, will be duped once again.
The foregoing is by way of saying the Republican Party, at both the national and state level, is making the COVID-19 situation immeasurably worse and, like a rabid dog, needs to be put down for the sake of the nation’s health and literal survival. It can’t be trusted to rule now or for the foreseeable future because, under Trump, it’s degenerated into an extremist anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, anti-democratic, anti-government cult of personality and is no longer a responsible political party; that’s the larger political lesson of the coronavirus crisis.
But there are other lessons to be gleaned from the pandemic as well. Foremost of these is that it represents the downside of globalization. Actually, you could argue globalization has been all downside from the start. Certainly, any upside it’s produced has been largely on behalf of multinational corporations and their shareholders.
Globalization as we know it is fundamentally an economic phenomenon, an outgrowth of the revival of laissez-faire capitalism carried out in the 1980s under the aegis of conservative governments here and in Europe. The operable rationale held that should capitalism be unleashed from the fetters of restrictive government, it would create unparalleled wealth, which would eventually trickle down to the broader populace. Greed was, indeed, good, and self-seeking entrepreneurship would deliver the stuff of dreams.
The specific way those dreams would be realized would be to encourage corporations to base all their decisions on “shareholder value” — that is, profit maximization. Optimizing shareholder value meant, in turn, going global in search of the cheapest possible labor, in order to reduce production costs to a minimum and raise returns to the maximum. If the policy meant deindustrializing domestic economies, so be it. And so, in the US and elsewhere in the Western industrialized world, it was done, and the world duly shrank for the benefit not (as it turned out) for national populations at large, but for a privileged, unconscionably rich international economic elite.
Shrinking the world, a deliberate policy endorsed by co-opted governments, had one enormous unintended side effect: it kicked off the era of global pandemics, because what happens in Wuhan, China (or anywhere else) doesn’t stay in Wuhan. Instead, it travels the world — through global supply chains, accelerated population movements, and expanded air travel. Any disease generated overseas will soon be in a neighborhood near you.
How economic globalization impacts America’s Covid-19 crisis was illustrated recently in a New York Times op-ed by journalist Farhad Manjoo on the chronic US shortage of medical face masks. Twenty years ago, Manjoo pointed out, most hospital protective gear was produced domestically; today, most face masks are manufactured overseas, 80% of them in China.
Unquestionably, Trump and the Republicans have made a bad situation much worse, but at bottom, the problem is unregulated capitalism.
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, June 1, 2020
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