The Other Disease
Trump still has COVID-19, as of this writing. But he has another disease, too, one that's even more corrosive to the public health: the disease of toxic individualism. Most of his party has it, as do many Democrats. The business class is a hot zone for it. It's hard to name a corporation, bank, or CEO that hasn't acted selfishly in this crisis.
Predictably, billionaires got much richer. How did they do it? Some snapshots:
Big Tech reportedly used the pandemic to double down on monopolization.
Nursing homes backed by private equity had higher rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths.
Vulture capitalists made a fortune off the pandemic by short-selling commercial real estate.
Wells Fargo reportedly gamed PPP loans.
Jeff Bezos, who scored especially big on the pandemic, exploited his workers and (through his corporation) targeted union organizers.
So did Boeing, which was saved from its own mismanagement -- and from the deaths of over 600 passengers from a botched tech rollout -- by the government. Uber, Lyft, AirBnB -- they cut every corner they could.
Vectors
But our culture continues to uplift corporate CEOs, without acknowledging the true formula behind their successes. And by formula, I mean something that looks like this:
(public resources + employee labor + own sociopathic drives/their greed + investor shares)
They use the wealth thus accumulated to corrupt our political process. The Republicans of today are largely inseparable from big-corporate culture. And when the Democratic Party tells members of Congress to spend four hours a day raising money, it's telling them to spend 28 hours a week steeped in this worldview -- a soul-killing task if ever there was one.
And with every hour spent on a donor call, the disease of toxic individualism spreads.
Houston, We Have a Problem
Would the genial Joe Biden be a better steward of this system than Donald Trump? I believe so. But he and the Democrats are still constrained in their thinking by corporatized individualism. Take the "cancer moonshot," headed by Vice President Biden at the close of the Obama era. It was a touching effort, when seen in the context of Beau Biden's tragic death. But the name and framing evokes the Apollo missions of an earlier era -- missions that were presented as the stories of individual heroes, most with military backgrounds, who conquered the skies (with the help of massive public spending on new technologies from defense contractors).
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