Are You Rich Enough to Survive the Pandemic?

In a past post, the case was made that the coronavirus pandemic has revealed that America is a failed state when the measurement is serving the vast majority of its citizens.  Unlike western European nations, America has a very poor social safety net and how well one survives the pandemic crisis could ultimately come down to how much money one has if not working in an industry deemed essential and still providing an income.  Before the pandemic, upward social mobility in America had fallen precipitously and now one has been chances of upward mobility in "Old Europe" - a Republicans term of derision.  Blinding too many is the continued myth of American exceptionalism - a term bandied about by politicians of both political parties - that ignores and seeks to gloss over America's many systemic economic and social problems. As the pandemic grinds on, the wealthy know they will survive while the least fortunate wonder where their next meal will come from.  A long piece in New York Magazine looks at this reality and makes one wonder if Americans will ever demand the system be improved.  Here are highlights:

There was the pandemic, then there was the storm. Of all the natural disasters, tornadoes lend themselves the most to being read as Providence. Like hurricanes and wildfires, they can level everything in their path, but those paths can also be narrow enough, forgiving enough, to grind one house into debris while leaving the neighboring structure untouched. Metaphors become redundant in the face of such calamity; the thing to which you’d otherwise be comparing it is, too often, what it already is.

But when disaster looms, we grasp for deeper meaning. When the disaster is unfamiliar, our imaginations retreat to more familiar terms, even primordial ones, as with the notion that celestial forces control our fate. The need to ascribe our misfortunes to some grand plan makes it hard not to look for cosmic significance in the tornadoes that ripped through the American South on Easter Sunday, months after the novel coronavirus made itself known on U.S. shores and several weeks after any of us had left the house.

But if recent months have proved anything, it’s that most disasters we otherwise understand as “natural” have an uncanny way of reflecting human design. Randomness isn’t justice, even a perverse form, distributed equitably. It is a test of vulnerability — of your wherewithal to prepare, escape, recover.

The wrong lesson, of impartial vulnerability, will always be there, tempting. As, understandably, will be metaphysical rationales for physical phenomena — faith, myth. These have been instrumental in helping people navigate the otherwise unspeakable. But alongside them an insidious form of self-deception can take root: the lies we tell to reconcile our behavior, good and bad, with our idealized conceptions of who we are as individuals and as Americans. Faced with horrors so vast they make us feel impotent, we tell ourselves that crises invariably bring out our best; there’s no shortage of heroic anecdotes to reinforce this narrative, encompassing emergency response, provision of health care, neighborliness. But more often, these displays are too diffuse, too renegade, to overcome the scale of the disaster itself. The long list of crises that have taken America’s most brutal inequalities and enhanced them suggests the opposite conclusion, that a motivating shame should be our main takeaway from hurricanes Katrina and Maria, the 2008 economic crisis, the forever wars in which we’re now ensnared. For elected officials, in particular, pressure is high to sell a more flattering vision of U.S. culture — one defined by an unshakable belief that America, as a project, is singularly good, noble, and ripe with opportunity even in the toughest of times.

This vision regularly finds itself at odds with reality. Governor Cuomo knows as well as any that the coronavirus isn’t really “the great equalizer,” that generations of inequality cannot be erased simply by giving two people of differing economic backgrounds the same disease. You’d have to bury your head in the sand to ignore the obvious: By almost every metric, those getting the sickest and dying most frequently and being plunged into dire financial straits at disproportionate rates are the same people who were vulnerable and marginalized before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic.

A brief accounting: Hungry people have been stuck in traffic jams at the Forum in Inglewood, California, as thousands of motorists wend their way through the parking lot to pick up free groceries. Twenty-six million Americans have filed for unemployment since the middle of March, and a nationwide strain on food-bank capacity has resulted, with demand increasing by an average of 40 percent. “Lower-income workers, minority communities, communities of color, folks working in service jobs, folks living in public housing, folks with kids who are on the free, reduced lunch programs” . . . . “those are the folks who are really feeling the pain on this. And they were already in pain before.”

One could drive just off the Las Vegas Strip and see dozens of homeless people asleep in a taped-off parking lot while empty but still gaudily lit luxury hotels loomed above them. County officials have been unable to reach a deal with casino owners to house the houseless in their unused hotel rooms, where they might enjoy a modicum of safety and hygiene. Recent actions by the Vegas city council had already criminalized resting on sidewalks for even brief stretches of time; pressed for lodging options, many people were forced into cramped shelters that have since become hotbeds of infection.

Older people have been especially imperiled: for instance, the outbreak at the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, which killed 43 people and vivified COVID’s lopsided threat to the elderly. In nursing homes across the country, 11,000 have already died.

But the suffering is larger still than the dying. Recent polls indicate that as many as two-thirds of Latino adults have lost their jobs or seen their incomes reduced as a result of the economic downturn. Much of this is attributable to Latino workers’ high representation among wage laborers in service and hospitality industries, which have been decimated. Even as American life retreats indoors, ICE raids continue, bringing armed agents into people’s homes and risking the spread of infection, then transporting those they capture to detention facilities known for incubating diseases. In a cruel twist of irony, many undocumented agricultural workers, demonized for years by nativists, have been deemed “essential” for their role in maintaining the food-supply chain. Grocery employees, home health aides, social workers — the essential economy under the coronavirus is rife with traditionally undercompensated professions staffed largely by people of color, especially women . . .

Preliminary data points to some of the bleakest outcomes for black Americans, as anyone might have predicted even before that data began rolling in. Homeless, imprisoned, and impoverished people in the U.S. have and continue to be disproportionately black, with the accompanying health risks: higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, all reliable indicators of whether an otherwise manageable case of COVID could turn fatal. Black victims compose 40 percent of Michigan’s infected dead but 14 percent of the state’s population, for instance. They’re 70 percent of the dead in Louisiana, one of the country’s biggest epicenters outside New York, but just 33 percent of the population.

These are the people whose suffering is neglected when terms like equalizer are reduced to platitudes. But neglecting it in practice, as many officials have, also shapes our expectations of what returning to normal looks like. Social conditions that seemed intolerable six months ago have since acquired the sheen of an idyllic recovery. Getting back to work, earning wages again — these are broad improvements over what we have now that, nevertheless, won’t repair the long-standing circumstances of millions whose bigger problems were always structural. That many of us can’t even begin to expect or even conceptualize this — in a moment so desperate, so damning to the notion that America’s best feature is its ability to manufacture prosperity, a reopening where black doesn’t mean sicker, Latino doesn’t mean lower wages, and poor doesn’t mean unreliable food or housing — reaffirms that for millions, normality is cruel enough.

This is where the history that produced America’s undercastes is hardest to escape, where the flattering delusions that neglect suffering look less like personal coping mechanisms than a national inheritance. When Trump’s surrogates urge people to sacrifice their lives to resuscitate the economy, they aren’t just protecting his reelection prospects; they’re advancing a culture war fueled by resentment toward people who’ve long been understood as unworthy. It’s why Trumpist protesters brandishing the Confederate flag can storm the Michigan capitol calling on the governor to rescind her stay-at-home orders and have the emblem not seem incongruous.

Deception that obscures inequality isn’t just expedient. It infuses tragedy with a tacit moral dimension, where the worst suffering is presumed to be reserved for those who deserve it — whether by being too poor, too black, too proximate to either.

What happens when this magnitude of crisis befalls the entire country? There’s a liberal impulse to treat these disasters as emancipatory, freeing us from the illusion of an equitable status quo, the better to pursue the real thing with our vision unclouded. This might be true for some, though whether their awakening produces the requisite policy response is less clear. I’d say, in fact, it’s doubtful. The reality thus far, rather than solidarity, has overwhelmingly been individuals left to manage the fallout alone, in many cases owing to the absence of infrastructure whereby they might help one another. Dairy farmers in Wisconsin dump thousands of gallons of milk a day, citing less need from schools and restaurants, while food-pantry lines in San Antonio and Dallas stretch for blocks, and there’s no public entity to connect the two.

How societies mitigate the pain they cause at the margins is far more revealing — how much we invest, as Americans, in catching the vulnerable when the floor is ripped from beneath them. We may tell ourselves the pandemic is asking this question of us, but if we had the courage to look clearly, the answer was evident long before this crisis: in how our society distributes suffering, the stories we tell to make it compatible with our national self-regard; how aggressively so many insist on overlooking the foreseeable. The depth of havoc that the coronavirus wreaks on its inevitable victims was, and is, within America’s capacity to determine. We have few insights into the path it’s cutting today that we haven’t had for years and that we weren’t already ignoring.

The Pandemic Has Shown That America is a Very Broken State

If nothing else, the Covid-19 pandemic is revealing that years of Republican policies - both under George W. Bush, while the GOP held the U.S. Senate and obstructed the Obama administration efforts, and now under the corrupt and incompetent regime of Der Trumpenführer - have left America a broken state.  Some might even argue a failed state.  Clearly, America is not the nation that won WWII and was the unrivaled leader of the world in the post-WWII era, leading in technology, manufacturing, science and a government infrastructure and economy that worked for a majority of Americans.  The GOP has long sought to bring back the Gilded Age of the late 1800's and pre-WWI era when the robber barons and incredible rich payed little in taxes while the rest of the citizenry struggled to get bay.  Under the Trump/Pence regime, much of this GOP agenda has been realized with huge tax cuts for the wealthy, the rolling back of health and safety regulations, and an economic system designed to benefit the wealthy first and foremost.  Now, the pandemic gripping the nation has pulled back the curtain and revealed the consequences of GOP policies.  A very long piece in The Atlantic looks at where America finds itself and the decision that must be made as to where the nation goes from here.  The following are article highlights: 

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. 

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From [Trump] the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message. Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader.

[I]t should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. . . . . . All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s. Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen. Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying. Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future. If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.
 The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. . . . . . ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face. [T]he rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals. We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact. In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive. The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. [W]hen his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death. To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat. The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention . . . We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.