David Dayen is executive editor at The American Prospect. Read his article
from yesterday explaining the hidden — and horrendous — details in the pending Congressional “relief” bill slithering its way through Congress.
This bill is a good example of the malicious ways in which corporate capitalists exploit moments of national crisis. Naomi Klein’s important book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is now essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the economic times in which we
live.
Dayen details some of the ways that Disaster Capitalists, corporate vultures haunting the halls of power, eager to pick over the bones of America’s corona victims, are exploiting the current pandemic to further enrich themselves, just as they did in 2018.
Human nature never changes. As in ancient Greece, the haves are doing what they can for themselves, while the have-nots are suffering as they always do.
Below is an excerpt from the article “Unsanitized: Bailouts, A Tradition Unlike Any Other.”
“This is a robbery in progress. And it’s not a bailout for the coronavirus. It’s a bailout for twelve years of corporate irresponsibility that made these companies so fragile that a few weeks of disruption would destroy them. The short-termism and lack of capital reserves funneled record profits into a bathtub of cash for investors. That’s who’s being made whole, financiers and the small slice of the public that owns more than a trivial amount of stocks. In fact they’ve already been made whole; yesterday Wall Street got the word that they’d be saved and stocks and bonds went wild. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is running these bailout programs for the Fed, and could explicitly profit if the Fed buys its funds, which it probably will.
“This is a rubber-stamp on an unequal system that has brought terrible hardship to the majority of America. The people get a $1,200 means-tested payment and a little wage insurance for four months. Corporations get a transformative amount of play money to sustain their system and wipe out the competition…
“This bill is an outrageous betrayal, a testament to how power works and saves itself. And Congress is about to put itself on the hook for it. Schumer has the Senate under his thumb, and he praised this bill at 2am this morning, so that’s a done deal. Any House member could deny unanimous consent and stop this, but that would require getting to Washington, forcing everyone else back to Washington in the middle of a pandemic, and delay what is needed (if temporary) relief for everyday people. I doubt anyone will do it. Pelosi purposefully put this in place before turning to remote voting to make such an action toxic…”
Read the entire piece here.