By David Brooks on March 15, 2021
Photo: Bill Hackwell
On the first official anniversary of the start of the pandemic in the United States, more than half a million people have died from this virus, millions have become unemployed, and millions more have lost their homes, businesses, and savings. Hunger is increasing, above all among children. All this is taking place at the same time that the combined wealth of the richest 664 U.S. citizens increased 44%. The most fundamental news for understanding the situation in the United States is this: the ultra-rich got richer while the immense majority went through the most difficult and tragic year in decades.
During the worst pandemic of the past century in the United States, and perhaps the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the 664 billionaires of the country enjoyed an increase of 1.3 trillion in combined wealth in the past 12 months, for an accumulated total of 4.3 trillion dollars, according to the analysis of Project Inequality of the Institute for Policy Studies.
For the owners of the private healthcare industries – pharmaceutical industries, biotechnology, hospitals, etc. – the pandemic has been a great business opportunity. The fortunes of 27 of the U.S. billionaires derive from this economic sector, and one of them, The Thomas Frist family, majority shareholders of HCA Healthcare, saw their personal fortune double from 7.5 billion to 15.6 billion dollars between last March and now. Nine billionaires in the technology sector made more than 360 billion dollars during the pandemic, the Washington Post reported. “In my view, we can no longer tolerate billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk becoming obscenely rich at a time of unprecedented economic pain and suffering,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in an email to The Washington Post.
The Walton family, owners of Walmart, is the wealthiest in the country, with a combined fortune of more than 200 billion dollars, including 50 billion dollars that they made during the pandemic. This is equivalent to the combined wealth of all of the people in the 40% poorest segment of the US population. More than half their workers have reported that their families have struggled with hunger, but the corporation refuses to raise the minimum wage of their employees.
They are not the only ones: an attempt this month in the Senate to approve raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 dollars per hour failed, with eight Democrats joining 50 Republicans to defeat the provision. This would have benefitted more than 32 million workers. Almost two-thirds of the senators, including the Democrats who voted against this legislation, are millionaires, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The system has functioned perfectly well for the super-rich. Furthermore, in this current economic crisis just as in the last one in 2008 – and these two crises are related -when systemic greed took the whole system to the edge of collapse, the government intervened to subsidize and rescue the corporations drunk with power, in what some have called “Socialism for the Rich, Savage Capitalism for Everybody Else.”
It is revealing that Big Business, with some exceptions, did not oppose the massive $1.9 trillion dollars economic rescue package proposed by Joe Biden last week. Some of the rich understand that you cannot do business when the consumers don’t have any money to buy with or to pay their bills. The federal rescue program is considered one of the largest in the modern history of the United States, but its total value is only a little more than the increase in wealth of the 664 billionaires in the past year.
However, as liberal intellectuals Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich each individually have pointed out, this new package has, for the first time in decades, recognized that the government has a responsibility for the basic social welfare of the majority of the people, and may signify an end to the neoliberal era introduced in 1980 by Ronald Reagan. Perhaps so, but for now this tragedy for millions continues to be a great chance to do business for a few.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English