LA Times: How coronavirus -- a 'rich man's disease' -- infected the poor
I know that Trump likes to blame immigrants for spreading the disease, but what about rich people? After all, only they had the means to travel all over the world to various hot spots places like Italy, New York and the UK. Even in the U.S., you had Brazilian diplomats visiting the White House and celebrities like Tom Hanks among the early folks getting COVID-19.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-08/how-the-coronavirus-began-as-a-disease-of-the-rich
People called it a “rich man’s disease.”
Pandemics throughout history have been associated with the underprivileged, but in many developing countries the coronavirus was a high-class import — carried in by travelers returning from business trips in China, studies in Europe, ski vacations in the Rockies.
As infections initially concentrated in better neighborhoods, many poor and working-class people believed the disease wouldn’t touch them, as if something terrible but rarefied. The misperception was fed by elites, including the governor of Mexico’s Puebla state, Luis Miguel Barbosa, who said in March: “If you’re rich, you’re at risk, but if you’re poor, you’re not. The poor, we’re immune.”
By now it is clear that COVID-19 spares no one and disproportionately harms the hungry, the forgotten and those with preexisting illnesses and substandard healthcare.
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I do not know why even some Democrats buy into this idea that the rich should be off limits. Even Bernie Sanders sometimes uses the euphemism of the "establishment," rather than explicitly referring to the rich. Yet, Trump has a green light to scapegoat Mexicans (build the wall), Asians (the China virus), women ("nasty women"
, and African Americans (black lives matter and NFL protesters).
With all that explicit racism and sexism, the fact of the matter is that COVID-19 was spread by the rich jet setting around the globe, which is why the early cases hit businesspeople, celebrities, and tourists who traveling around the world and spreading the disease.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/2020-primary-warren-biden-democrats-should-be-pragmatic-and-wage-class-war.html
Policy visions vary. Democrats disagree about how their party should go about solving America’s problems. But when it comes to describing those problems, there is only one question that bitterly divides them: Does their story of middle-class decline need a ruling-class villain?
Warren and Bernie Sanders say yes. In their account, the true name of our affliction isn’t inequality but oligarchy. It isn’t an impersonal, abstract force that’s immiserating working people — it’s an extractive economic elite. “How did we get here?” Warren asked rhetorically, in her campaign launch video. “Billionaires and big corporations decided they wanted more of the pie. And they enlisted politicians to cut them a fatter slice … Our government is supposed to work for all of us, but instead it has become a tool for the wealthy and well-connected. The whole scam is propped up by an echo chamber of fear and hate, designed to distract and divide us.”
When moderate Democrats hear this kind of talk, they think of guillotines and George McGovern. Some object on principle, viewing the history of economic populism through Richard Hofstadter’s jaundiced eyes. Pitting “the people” against the “one percent” might not be as bad as pitting whites against “illegals,” these Democrats might allow, but liberalism shouldn’t traffic in demagoguery of either kind. Rather, the aim of liberal governance should be to balance the competing interests of disparate factions, in service of a unifying national interest. Joe Biden has signaled his fealty to this point of view by criticizing Warren for her obsession with “punishing the rich,” and insisting that “the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor” even if “Bernie doesn’t like me saying that.”
