It has been a difficult week. In fact it has been a difficult couple of months, and the last week feels like it’s spanned as long as another month. I had been avoiding writing about the impending COVID-19 outbreak, though following it closely, for several reasons. Mainly I am not an expert in epidemiology or medicine, or disaster crisis situations. I am not an expert in most of the things I write about, but these areas particularly seem better left to experts, without commentary. I’ve also been avoiding the subject because it gives me and millions of others terrible anxiety as our world is being turned upside down and inside out.
However, I realize that we cannot look away from a government that is criminally neglecting and sabotaging it’s people. I mean we literally cannot look away, we are stuck at home with nothing else to look at. And there has been so much to absorb. I could discuss the insider trading that senators undertook, using common sense about a crisis while maintaining the criminally ignorant line of “everything is perfect” coming out of the White House. Or I could combat the incessant attacks coming out of deplorable Twitter that maintain this is all a hoax, China created the virus to attack Trump, and celebrities are lying about diagnoses to make him look bad. Or the enormous strain on our thinly stretched social safety services like unemployment, that are not ready for the fallout. I could write about those things, and I probably will, and it will be exhausting.
But I look at what I wrote last week, about pushing progressive policies under a less than progressive presidency, and realize it is even more relevant this week. Particularly after reading an Independent piece by Tim Mullaney, that insists it is a bad idea to undergo fundamental changes in the wake of a crisis. I understand the point of not using this crisis to package old political talking points and special interests, which is certainly happening amongst Republican senators like Rand Paul. But we cannot use caution as an excuse to ignore the deep economic and systemic flaws that this crisis underlines. If the suggestion it to wait until we weather the storm to fix the leaks in the ceiling, we’ll all be lost in the oncoming flood.
Mullaney specifically took aim Elizabeth Warren’s proposed stipulations for any corporate bail out bill, which she posted on twitter. She proposed any companies receiving bailouts (airlines, casinos, travel and service industry are among those with their hands out) be required to agree to give employees paid sick leave, fifteen dollar minimum wage, health coverage and refrain from stock buybacks for up to three years. She also proposed cancelling student debt, providing non-conditional unemployment pay and free medical care. Those very progressive policies are being proposed as solutions to this financial and systemic crisis. They may very well be the only way out of it, and even if Joe Biden doesn’t believe in the policies, he may very well end up using them as the best solution.
It is nonsensical and hypocritical to argue against making these large, expensive policy changes that can all help weather the storm, all while supporting a large and expensive economic stimulus to help boost the stock market and give people just enough money to shelter at home for a few months. In addition to applying a band-aid to the financial fallout of this crisis, policy plans like these start at long-term healing by requiring companies to help shoulder economic burden after they receive government stimulus. These are the same companies that have been using surplus to buy back stock for years, hoarding economic profits while still forcing employees to work long hours for too little pay, with minimal sick leave or benefits. To provide them short term relief with no strings attached would be letting them hold our crippled economy and desperate workforce hostage.
Just look as what happened after we staunched the bleeding from the 2008 housing crisis. By the way that is the most common comparison for this economically, but it is woefully insufficient as this crisis will leave thousands dead, and we will be in the middle of it for much longer. Banks that had made billions by selling shares of faulty mortgage loans, received billions of dollars in stimulus money just so our economy continued to function. That money came with almost no conditions, and was completely removed from any sort of worker or homeowner financial support. The bill that followed over a year later to try to hold those banks accountable, or at least prevent them from doing the same thing, was the Dodd-Frank act. Before it even passed it was hobbled of enforcement, and the very banks it was meant to regulate were handing the power to write rules about the self-applied regulations. This is a direct result of capitulating to those banks without any stipulations, empowering them to influence legislation before it could regulate them. Now under a Republican administration and Senate that receives lobbying money from these banks, regulations have been relaxed to the point that banks don’t undergo stress tests, or have to ensure consumer protection, and they are repeating the same actions that caused the financial crisis int he first place.
We are already seeing this very thing happening with the immediate legislation passed to respond the the coronavirus crisis. In the $8.3 billion spending bill that was passed last week to help pay for necessary medical equipment, expand drug manufacturing and research a vaccine, big pharma companies lobbied hard for certain exemptions. Despite efforts by Senate democrats to ensure any virus drugs were affordable and available, Senate Republicans passed a version that included language that forced the government to not interfere when it came to pricing for coronavirus drugs. This legislation not only ensures that drug companies will come out of this crisis with huge profits, but prevents congress from being able to protect patients from massive debt or not being able to afford necessary treatment. Even in the talks of a relief bill that includes making every test for COVID-19 and treatment free, it only ensure that the government (and therefore taxpayer) foots the bill rather than extremely profitable drug companies.
This is why non-binding emergency measures are not enough. They are worse than not enough, but extremely detrimental to our long-term economic and physical health. As long as we do not address the issues that allow large corporations to profit off of crisis, at the expense of workers, low-income, under-insured or sick American people, we are setting our country up for a bigger and worse crisis next time We cannot just pay individuals and rely on them to continue to drive the economy that will hoard profits for large companies that can influence laws. We cannot keep up a healthcare system that put necessary treatment behind a paywall, and only creates medical breakthroughs via huge profit incentives. We cannot come out of this crisis just to put major travel and amenity companies back into their monopolies that allow them to take workers for granted and not provide adequate compensation. That is exactly how this country has responded to every other crisis, and now the crises are coming bigger, more often and more sudden, and more of us are devastated in its wake. If we continue to only save those that are too big to fail, soon there will be nothing left.
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