PANDEMIC PROFITEERS

Turn on the television today—or check your social media accounts—and you’re likely to see or hear stories about the punishing impact the current pandemic is having on the population. You’re more likely than not to hear about how COVID has increased joblessness, heightened hunger, and elevated the risk of evictions. You’re more likely than not to have heard about the hundreds of thousands who have had their last breath squelched by COVID, and how the virus has disproportionately snatched Black, Latino, and Indigenous bodies. And as you imbibe the constant stream of COVID stories, you may be more likely than not to sense that what we are experiencing is a shared suffering. That everyone is being pummeled by the pandemic. That COVID is the great equalizer, so to speak, and leaves no one behind.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

PLUNDERING AND PROSPERING

While millions of Americans have been plundered by the pandemic, a small slice of the population has prospered. Take, for instance, a recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). According to this study, between March 18th and December 7th, the collective wealth of America’s 650 billionaires increased by over 1 trillion dollars. By the end of 2020, the network of America’s billionaire club – a club that is largely White and male—clocked in at little more than $4 trillion.

That’s a lot of money, and it’s so huge it’s hard to wrap your head around it. In fact, if it were possible to stack up a just a quarter of that kind of scratch, the resulting pile of I trillion $1 bills would reach the moon and back four times.

The extent of the increase in the net worth of these 650 billionaires is more than enough to drop 3 grand each on the 330 million persons residing in the United States, rivals total federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid for 120 Americans, and is large enough to plug completely and easily the forecasted $500 billion budget shortfall faced by the nation’s state and local governments. And it’s quadruple the amount sent out as stimulus payments to 159 million Americans earlier during the year.

Notably, the $4 trillion net worth of these 65 billionaires is approximately twice as much as the wealth held by the 165 million Americans who constitute the bottom of the population. And of those 65 billionaires, four of them– Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg—are rich enough to qualify as “centi-billionaires,” meaning each of them is worth $100 billion or more. This centi-billionaire club is small, powerful and, exclusively White and male. And like the “poorer” members of the billionaire’s club, the “centi-dudes” have managed to prosper in the pandemic.

THE REALITY FOR THE REST

The reality is vastly different for millions of other Americans. For them, the pandemic story is not one of increasing wealth but, rather, it’s a tale of falling deeper and deeper into economic misery. During the same time frame in which billionaires have made out like bandits:

22 million jobs have gone kaput, with some economist predicting that it’ll take at least another three years before the lost ground is made up.

21 million Americans have contracted a case of COVID and, thus far, more than 350,000 have died from the virus.

15 million have lost employer-based health insurance.

8 million have plunged into poverty.

Adding salt to these economic wounds is this: Some of the largest corporations that have made a killing during the pandemic –along with the astronomical increase in net worth of their founders and shareholders—have done next to nothing to protect the safety and economic welfare of their workforce. They’re raking in big cash but, at most, throwing chump change to the frontline workers risking their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, by clocking in on the daily.

Case in point: Since the start of the pandemic, the stock prices of Amazon and Walmart have risen by 70% and 36%, respectively. Collectively, their 2020 profits exceeded the previous years by $10.7 billion. And what how much of this bonanza was shared with workers? You know, the persons risking their health and possibly their lives by coming in to work? Well, they got pennies on the dollars for their sacrifice.

Here’s how a recent Brookings report puts it:

"Through the end of 2020, the total additional COVID-19 compensation Amazon and Walmart will have provided their frontline workers represents only a small fraction of the companies’ extraordinary earnings, and an even smaller percentage of the stunning, pandemic-fueled wealth created for the richest shareholders. Stock prices for Amazon and Walmart soared 70% and 36%, respectively, since the start of the pandemic. Meanwhile, worker wages will have grown only 7% and 6% by the end of the year, even after the new December bonuses that the two companies announced earlier this month."

In general, then, while the shareholders and founders are out here running the table during the pandemic, the frontline workers are being paid what amounts to a few extra pennies an hour in exchange for running the risk of catching a case of COVID.

GOING IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION

I believe that it’s morally obscene that a small group can prosper amid a pandemic while millions must fight not only to get their basic needs met but to also must struggle to make sure they don’t come up sick or perhaps even dead. It’s morally odious that, amid a deep recession, 650 persons can clock crazy loot while millions must settle for an increase in a few cents per hour. What does it say about a nation that tolerates such a disturbing disparity in economic well-being?

We need to go in a different direction. A direction that prioritizes the needs of people over increased wealth and power of plutocrats. And we can begin to head in that direction by, first, rejecting the notion that what is, is what must be. That our social and economic arrangements follow some iron-clad law of physics that handcuffs our ability to do otherwise, to dream otherwise, to build otherwise.

Nothing is further from the truth. We make our economy as much as our economy makes us. Within is our hands is the power to “unmake” what has been made by human hands. We can demand—and fight for—the rights of workers to organize; we can demand—and fight for—a tax on excess wealth. We can demand—and fight for—policies that protect the least of these.

What we see is not preordained.

We have the power to resist.

The choice is ours.

Catch you on the flip side,

Doc Greene