Capitalizing On Death: The Plan Of The American Establishment Is To Save Capital & Let The People Die

We are told we’re a nation at war. In real wars, we have higher taxes on the rich. This time, we are giving investors a tax cut.

By Hamilton Nolan
In These Times (4/6/20)

Fantasize for a moment that we could set aside politics and operate based upon common sense. What would the federal government do to best mitigate the devastation that this pandemic will visit upon human beings? It would, first of all, provide free healthcare to everyone. It would distribute medical resources nationally based on the greatest need. Then, to protect people from the necessary economic deep freeze we are all in due to social distancing, the government would pursue measures that would get everyone through this time in one piece: It would subsidize the nation’s payrolls, so that workers could stay in their jobs and businesses could restart easily; it would suspend rent, for people and businesses alike; it would send everyone a monthly basic income to pay for necessities until this is over; and it would avoid allowing small businesses to go bankrupt, because those represent millions of jobs that people need to return to.

We are navigating our way through this so that capital comes out okay on the other side. It is no exaggeration to say that tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans will die because we are choosing this approach, rather than an approach that prioritizes human life.

Those are all obvious steps to take if your goal was to protect humans. But imagine, instead, if you had an entirely different goal: protecting capital. What would you do then? Well, you would prioritize the health of corporate balance sheets, rather than human bodies. You would keep the healthcare industry, now booming, in private hands; you would stimulate consumer demand via unemployment benefits, rather than by keeping workers on existing payrolls, in order to create an enormous pool of cheap and desperate labor; you would pursue tax cuts for the investor class; you would welcome the opportunity to allow debt to pile up on individuals; and you wouldn’t be too sad about small businesses going bankrupt—they are, after all, just ceding market share to bigger, richer businesses. You would use this crisis to create a greater, not lesser, concentration of wealth. You would emerge on the other side with more, not less, inequality. The truth is, it would be easy.

Now, guess what the U.S. federal government is doing? It is allowing the unemployment rate to skyrocket, as tens of millions of workers are fired; it is allowing countless small businesses to go bankrupt, from incompetence and neglect; it has not even considered a national suspension of rent, nor a strong national policy of paid sick leave, much less a national system of free public healthcare; as millions of needy people struggle with decrepit and broken state unemployment systems and wait weeks or months for their emergency checks to come, and essential workers are forced to agitate or walk out to gain hazard pay, the administration plots a new bill featuring a capital gains tax cut and “a waiver that would clear businesses of liability from employees who contract the coronavirus on the job.”

Your country is not working for you

We are told we’re a nation at war. In real wars, we have higher taxes on the rich. This time, we are giving investors a tax cut.

Whether Americans know it or not, their government is not working for them. Their government is working on behalf of capital. Humans are now a mere second-order, instrumental factor to be considered based on how it affects capital. In this perilous time, capital must be protected and nurtured, and we must draw resources from our entire society in order to help capital survive, in the same way that the body will draw blood from other organs to save the brain. People can be sacrificed—capital is irreplaceable. We are navigating our way through this so that capital comes out okay on the other side. It is no exaggeration to say that tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans will die because we are choosing this approach, rather than an approach that prioritizes human life. They will die because…

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