A righteous rant: "Re-opening" isn't about saving ordinary workers-It's about saving the 1%"
A righteous twitter rant:
Covered Dish People
@doctorow
“Re-opening” isn’t about saving ordinary workers and earners. You can’t save someone by infecting them with a deadly disease. In a world without contact-tracing, therapeutics, tests, PPE, santizing products, etc, more contact means more risk of illness and death. 1/
“Re-opening” is about saving investors: the 1% who constitute the major shareholders in large firms whose calculus goes like this: “30% unemployment means that for every worker who dies on the job, ten more will apply to take their place.” 2/
These people are willing to risk workers’ lives and shoppers’ lives because they believe they do not have a shared microbial destiny with the rest of us. They think they won’t get sick, and if they do, they think they’ll get better. 3/
That’s because they never had to go without medical care because they lacked insurance or because their insurer-imposed rationing denied them the care their doctors advised them to get, so they are less likely to have chronic illnesses and other comorbidities. 4/
They can afford premiums to gougers for PPE for shopping trips, and if they do get sick, they can afford private rooms, hoarded ventilators, and home care (with PPE for the workers who care for them). For the investor class, “re-opening” is low risk and high reward. 5/
There’s only one fly in the ointment. People don’t want to throw themselves in a volcano to appease the economy gods. The vast majority of Americans think re-opening is a bad idea. 6/
That’s why the gloves are off, like in Ohio, where bosses can use a confidential snitchline to rat out workers who won’t come back for fear of their lives: these workers will lose their unemployment benefits, their homes, their grocery money. 7/
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The right loves to talk about “moral hazard” in the context of social safety nets (“if we let people see a doctor without paying, they won’t take steps to keep themselves from getting sick or injured”). 21/
But reality demonstrates, time and again, that the real moral hazard comes from letting investors socialize their costs and privatize their gains. eof/
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