The US was sick long before coronavirus
As
if things were not bad enough, Trump's coronavirus performance quickly became
an even more horrifying spectacle with the ascension of Jared Kushner - first
son-in-law and preferred presidential adviser - to the position of de facto commander of
the US response to the pandemic. And
how are Kushner's own "ratings"? Well, at least he is keeping viewers
on their toes.
'Shadow'
taskforce
After
initially reportedly assuring Trump that coronavirus was
no big deal, Kushner was naturally deemed to be the best person to attend to
the ensuing disaster - despite his own role in fuelling it and his utter lack
of qualifications in any relevant field. (Judging from Kushner's numerous other
assignments resolving everything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the opioid crisis,
"qualifications" are perhaps no longer a thing.)
He
is now heading up a "shadow" coronavirus taskforce, not to be confused with the official
coronavirus taskforce headed by Vice President Mike Pence. Kushner's force
involves his own former roommate - current
US foreign investment tsar Adam Boehler - as
well as a bevy of private-sector executives.
By
all lucid accounts,
the Kushner group's manoeuvrings have simply bumped an already chaotic
government response up to obscene new levels of confusion. Kushner
is furthermore "essentially operating without accountability", as
Jordan Libowitz - communications director for Citizens
for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington - pointed out in an April 6 article for NBC News. The shadow taskforce
is being run "off the books, with closed-door meetings and private
email accounts"
- which, Libowitz suggests, could potentially
be a good way to "steer emergency government funds into your family's bank
account without people finding out". After
all, there is no better time than a global pandemic to make the rich richer.
Kushner
will 'get us all killed'
Kushner's
latest enterprise has prompted news headlines like: "Lawmakers Want to Know:
WTF Is Jared Kushner Doing?" As for his known activities, these include scoffing at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's
claim of a ventilator shortage (New York now has almost 20,000 coronavirus
deaths) and throwing a hissy fit over the outrageous presumption by
individual US states that they might somehow be entitled to access the national
stockpile of medical equipment.
In
a super-sketchy sequence of events, a health insurance company linked to
Kushner and his brother was tasked with developing a coronavirus website for
the US government - before the project was "mysteriously scrapped".
As
it so happens, the Kushner family real estate business could also "be
a prime beneficiary of a provision in the federal [coronavirus] recovery bill
that allows owners of apartment buildings to freeze federal mortgage payments
on low- and moderate-income properties", according to a Politico analysis.
In
the midst of Kushner's coronavirus machinations, even the New York Times felt
compelled to run an op-ed titled "Jared
Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed" (though the heading was later toned
down).
But
while this concern is certainly valid, we should not forget that the US has
been in the business of killing people for a long time - and that the
prioritisation of profit over human life far predates the existence of Kushner,
as transparently repugnant a figure as he may be.
All
sorts of death sentences
Beyond
the matter of the US's predilection for waging wars that have slaughtered unthinkable
numbers of people
across the globe, it is worth recalling that the US military is also one of the primary
polluters on the
planet - and as such has made significant contributions to climate change,
which was what was getting us all killed before the coronavirus interlude.
Meanwhile,
the fact that the US throws gargantuan sums of money at its military killing
machine rather than at, you know, domestic healthcare programmes or other more
helpful endeavours is itself effectively a death sentence for many Americans.
It
is also how we end up with US nurses wearing rubbish bags to protect themselves from
coronavirus - and the news that uninsured Americans could be slammed with $75,000 in medical
fees if hospitalised for the disease.
Of
course, poverty - another defining feature of the landscape in one of the
world's "richest" countries - has long been proved to
be deadly.
And sure enough, coronavirus has hit low-income communities the hardest. "Above
all," a Bloomberg editorial notes, "it disproportionately
kills black people."
Over
at the Wall Street Journal, a short dispatch on "coronavirus
capitalism" and its "darker side" laments that, in March, a
two-pack of Purell hand sanitiser was listed on Amazon for $99.95. The author
concludes that, while epidemics may come and go, "human nature,
unfortunately, stays the same" - a rather sweepingly inaccurate assessment
given that the history of the world shows plenty of good examples of
non-capitalist human populations.
But
in the US, capitalism is not just dark; it is a veritable plague.
Underlying conditions
Although
Trump and his co-star Kushner are certainly committed as can be to the darkest
sides of capitalism - eg, a willingness to throw countless Americans onto the
coronavirus pyre to save the economy - it turns out they are not even
that good at managing the system to effect their nefarious ends.
In
a recent email to me, evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big
Farms Make Big Flu,
remarked that, while bourgeois political economy dictates that the state
"act as capital's handmaiden", Trump & Co are dropping the ball:
"A family who has had every underwear picked up by ill-paid staff can't
even envision what's involved in servicing the logistics and infrastructure
capital needs to accumulate from one side of the world to the other."
American
power, he wrote, is "on the hook for cleaning up pandemics" that
capital helps to create, thereby keeping the world on the same catastrophic
developmental path. But as it currently stands, we are down to Jared Kushner,
who, "reading a couple articles, is cleaning up the COVID fix with what is
tantamount to mass murder."
Ultimately,
though, Kushner's pathologies could be diagnosed as symptomatic of the US's
underlying conditions. Long before coronavirus, the country was critically ill.
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