[P2P-F] Fwd: Back to work: A few deaths is just the cost of doing business

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: <douglas at rushkoff.com>
Date: Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 7:23 AM
Subject: Back to work: A few deaths is just the cost of doing business
To: <rushkoff at simplelists.com>


I published a piece on Medium
<https://gen.medium.com/we-wish-to-inform-you-that-your-death-is-highly-profitable-22c73744055c>
this morning, and I feel like it's the best one I've written in a while, so
I thought I'd share it.


Let them Eat Corona
Why the Economy will Always Trump Human Wellbeing

Have you heard the good news? Donald Trump is suggesting our freeze on
businesses as a measure to curb coronavirus may end as soon as Monday. Yes,
allowing people to go back to work could lead to more widespread infection,
but the deaths of a few hundred thousand — if not a few million — more of
us is a small price to pay for rescuing the American economy from collapse.
In the president’s words, “we can’t have the cure be worse than the problem
itself.”

Trump’s message is clear: The economy is not here to serve human beings;
human beings are here to serve the economy. Those of us who die in service
to the Dow Jones Industrial Average are mere externalities to the higher
priority of capital growth. Like the destruction of the environment, our
illnesses and deaths are a necessary cost of doing business. We cannot
surrender to the depressing verdicts of doctors and scientists, lest we
deflate the hope and optimism that make America great.

Those who will benefit most from our sacrifice — the billionaires whose
fortunes are based almost solely on the economy’s continuing ability to
grow — are already preparing for their escape. They’re booking private
jets, ready to depart for their isolated doomsday compounds once they feel
they themselves are at genuine risk.

It’s a variation on the “insulation equation” I wrote about a couple of
years ago after meeting a group of billionaires who wanted advice on how to
maintain security for their doomsday bunkers in the event of societal
collapse. The object of the game, as they see it, is to earn enough money
to insulate themselves from the very damage their ventures have both
directly and indirectly created in the first place. It’s a
self-perpetuating nightmare: The more environmental and social damage they
do, the more money they must earn to protect themselves from the
devastation they leave in their wake. And the more committed they become to
saving their asses and leaving the rest of behind when a real crisis
emerges.

To be fair, this worldview is a natural extension of a market ideology that
already accepted human casualties as a metric on the balance sheet. As
Trump fairly argued, “you look at automobile accidents, which are far
greater than any numbers we’re talking about. That doesn’t mean we’re going
to tell everybody, ‘No more driving of cars.’” We calculate the relative
cost of human lives every day as we go about our business, and we accept
the trade-off between, say, the cost of making an automobile safe and the
need to make it profitable.

This is, in certain respects, the American way. As Texas Lt. Governor Dan
Patrick told Tucker Carlson on Monday, “No one reached out to me and said,
‘as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in
exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children
and grandchildren?’… If that’s the exchange, I’m all in.” The underlying
premise is simple: Our coronavirus shutdown stalls the God-ordained
expansion of the U.S. economy. It is a misguided preservation of the weak
and elderly. Are we really going to let our great market go belly up?

This is a quasi-fascist worldview, where we stop forcing ourselves to make
decisions on behalf of the losers, and start making them on behalf of the
winners. Besides, as Ayn Rand taught us, the more we cater to the weak, the
more we weaken ourselves as a society and gene pool. This is natural
selection.

Of course, most of the people arguing we take these public health risks are
themselves in little or no danger at all. They’ve got private concierge
doctors working around the clock to obtain the necessary tests and
ventilators should they not make it to their hideaways in time. No, the
risks are entirely borne by those of us who can’t afford such measures.
It’s a lot easier for the wealthy to hang on to their positivity.

To be fair, though, there’s an internal logic to this approach — one as old
as the American spirit of optimism. When Trump tore into a TV reporter who
asked that he respond to Americans who fear for their lives, he wasn’t
simply obfuscating. He was chastising the press for undermining America’s
ability to apply positive thinking to the crisis. “You ought to get back to
reporting instead of sensationalism,” Trump replied crossly.

Remember, Donald Trump was raised in the church of Norman Vincent Peale,
author of the massively influential The Power of Positive Thinking — source
material for every bootstrapping spiritual movement from the “prosperity
gospel” to The Secret. From the age of six, Trump sat in the pews with his
family at Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church listening to his sermons about
how we can create the success we want through visualizing it — as Peale
tells it, “formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of
yourself as succeeding” — and never giving in to “fear thoughts.”

At least for Trump and his ilk, the choice to talk and act positively in
the face of all evidence to the contrary is not a cynical one. As late as
2009, when he was more than a billion dollars in debt and facing
foreclosure, he depended on “the power of being positive.” He told
Psychology Today that year, “What helped is I refused to give in to the
negative circumstances and never lost faith in myself. I didn’t believe I
was finished even when the newspapers were saying so.”

Seen in the very best light, Trump is attempting to apply the power of
positive thinking to both the economy and the virus. As far as the stock
market is concerned, there’s some sense to this. Markets are emotional.
There’s nothing like hope for the future to justify high price/earnings
ratios, stoke consumer spending, and spur investment.

But can hope kill the virus? We know the placebo effect is real. Can we
think and grow healthy the way Napoleon Hill told us to Think and Grow
Rich? That would be reason enough to keep a doom and gloom scientist like
Dr. Anthony Fauci off the stage at the press conferences.

But not even Trump is enough of a true believer to believe positive
thinking can wipe out the virus single-handedly. It can, however, galvanize
our resolve — however foolishly. That’s why he is calling on us to make
sacrifices, and to essentially wish the virus away.

For those titans of industry depending on perpetual economic growth, an
extended shutdown actually poses a greater risk than meets the eye. The
longer we pause from business as usual, the more time we all have to
reevaluate the economy we’ve been born into. Yes, we need food, water,
shelter, and maybe a communications infrastructure. But not a heck of a lot
else. At times like this, we can see the value in farmers, teachers, and
doctors… but all those guys in suits going to the city to trade
derivatives, make marketing plans, and coordinate global supply chains? Not
so much. The real danger here — what the billionaire preppers understand —
is that any one of these “black swan” phenomena could be “the event” that
destroys our willingness to keep running on the hamster wheel. They want us
to go back to work, but for what?

They say it’s to save the economy, but they’re not talking about the real
economy of goods and services. The American economy they’re concerned about
is based primarily on debt. Banks lend money to businesses who then pay it
back, with interest. Where does the interest come from? Growth. Without
growth, the whole house of cards comes down, along with the wealthiest
among us. We all have to believe in order to keep the hope alive and
billionaires in their bunkers.

As far as the ultra-wealthy are concerned, the virus to be afraid of is
less a medical challenge than a memetic one. We are waking up to the fact
that we’ve been slaves to an exponential growth curve for the past 40
years, at least, and really much much longer. And we’re witnessing how the
same exponential growth that gave the billionaires their fortunes is
responsible for the fact that 40% of Americans have less than $400 in the
bank for an emergency. The need for exponential growth also explains how we
surrendered basic manufacturing and food resiliency to tenuous global
supply chains. Sure, we can go back to work, but we can’t even make our own
respirators.

Imagine if our main reason for returning to work was to make and do the
things people actually needed to live good lives, instead of simply doing
our part to keep the wealthy safely protected from the rest of us.

Now that’s some positive thinking.
-

Here is a link:
https://gen.medium.com/we-wish-to-inform-you-that-your-death-is-highly-profitable-22c73744055c

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