By David Rovics
March 18th, 2020
What do Donald Trump, 1848, Covid-19 and Winston Churchill have in common?
So much is changing so fast, by the time I publish this piece, it will
likely sound very yesterday very soon. But particularly now, there seem
to be some salient points worth making, and a few recent moments worth
recounting.
Over the past several weeks — which up until Sunday morning included a
visit to Australia, which I cut short in order to return to the US — I
have been following a wide spectrum of news from many different
countries, largely while driving the very long distance from Brisbane to
Sydney and back.
I began the trip with a bit of a fatalistic attitude about the whole
Clovid-19 development. By the beginning of March, when I left for
Australia, many things were already abundantly clear. The virus was
spreading in the community in various parts of the US, including in the
Portland metro area, where I live. The tests that had been distributed
by the CDC didn’t work, while tests that did work were ignored, for
entirely political reasons. Trump was saying everything was going to be
fine. It seemed obvious the US government was in no state to tackle
the situation effectively, and therefore whether I stuck with my plan to
visit Australia for two weeks didn’t matter one way or the other. I’d
either get the virus or I wouldn’t, along with everybody else, I
figured, and whatever measures my government was going to take were
clearly going to be inadequate.
At the beginning of March, most people were staying home from the
airports, canceling trips and big events. The fact that there was about
a twenty-second wait in the security line at PDX was a news story, and
two TV reporters were at the Portland airport, covering it. As I was
waiting for my first flight, to LAX, to board, the headlines were that
there was a Clovid-19 case in one of the international terminals there.
I landed at LAX, made my connection at an international terminal there,
and flew to Brisbane. I was asked, along with everybody else on the
flight, whether I had been to China or Korea in the past two weeks. No
one mentioned the outbreak that had just occurred at the airport we had
all just come from, either in LA or in Brisbane.
By the time I ended my trip early and flew back to LAX last Sunday, a
ban on travel from Europe had been added to the ban on travel from China
to the US, and moves were afoot to start getting more serious about
social distancing and other efforts to flatten the curve of the
contagion. There was lots of talk about how you mostly get the virus
from touching surfaces, and about the importance of washing your hands
and using hand sanitizer. But coming in to LAX last weekend, there was
no hand sanitizer to be seen, although everyone going through
immigration had to touch the same touch screens, one after another.
During the Ebola crisis in parts of Africa it became very standard to
have hand sanitizer available outside every storefront, at the entrance
of every bus, and lots of other places. But none at LAX, weeks into the
crisis. The news was full of stories about O’Hare and other airports
where more obvious incompetence on the part of the authorities was being
demonstrated.
And of course as all of this incompetence was on display, financial
journalists were striving to find the right word to describe the state
of the global stock markets, frequently resorting to terms like
“unprecedented,” “nosedive,” and “apocalyptic.” The Trump
administration responded by lowering interest rates. Most people,
including me, have no idea how that was supposed to help anything. Then
his son-in-law jumped into the fray, and there were allegations of the
most absurd forms of political corruption, with efforts to capitalize on
a global disaster by buying the patent to the vaccine, when it is
created.
All of this spiraling madness went on day after day, until Tuesday,
March 17th, when the US, UK and other G20 governments made major,
reassuring announcements about massive spending programs to keep all of
the suddenly unemployed service sector, gig economy and other workers
housed, fed, and ventilated, if need be. Things that would have been
virtually impossible to imagine only weeks ago — sending every US
taxpayer a $1,000 check — while totally haphazard by European
standards, was a far more sensible move than many people would have
thought possible, particularly for an administration as kleptocratic and
nepotistic as this one. Plans for limiting the spread and responding
to outbreaks are also are starting to look serious — whether serious
enough is another question. With millions homeless, millions in
overcrowded prisons, and millions more in overcrowded eldercare
facilities and hospitals, even if the virus-related health care is
offered for free to everyone who needs it, there is an inherent weakness
to an infrastructure like that. The cities of the United States were
already public health disasters, long before Clovid-19 arrived.
There is much talk of 2008, 1987 and other stock market crashes. There
are many stories circulating about the different impacts of the 1918 flu
epidemic that killed millions around the globe — virtually sparing
cities like Copenhagen, but killing every adult in many Alaskan
villages, with the effect on the rest of the world’s population being
generally somewhere in between. These are obviously relevant historical
references, of course.
But there are a couple others that come to mind. As many students of
history have observed, it is often not the individuals or political
parties at a given time and place that are actually responsible for
making history. They may get the credit for it on Wikipedia, but if you
dig deeper into history, you’ll find it wasn’t them that really made
things happen. Those in power generally want their subjects to think
that the rulers act out of the goodness of their hearts as benevolent
actors, but what is usually going on in reality, on the occasions when
despots make moves to support the common welfare, is they are responding
to external events and trying to mitigate damage, in order to keep the
heads on top of their shoulders of their fellow billionaires.
The reason the stock market was free-falling into the abyss up until
very recently is because many wealthy investors understand a basic
fact: that the continued existence of their wealth is dependent on the
rest of society consenting to be governed by the government; and that if
this consent is withdrawn, their system can suddenly collapse, since it
only exists in our collective imaginations in the first place. They
never talk about it in public, but they know that if tens of millions of
people are suddenly unemployed and unable to pay their rents or
mortgages, there will be pandemonium of a sort far worse than that which
the worst flu epidemic is likely to deliver. In combination, it could
be an atmosphere with revolutionary possibility.
It is in moments like this when the fundamental dysfunctionality of
late-stage capitalism is laid bare. We live in a society where most
people have inadequate health care in the best of times, and where most
people are in no financial position to pay the rent next month after
being laid off this month. In such a sudden economic crisis as this,
even the capitalists know something has to give. This bailout package
is the first big effort on the part of the federal authorities to
preserve their capitalist system, by applying some classic Keynesian,
FDR-style economics. Which FDR did for the same reason, as he made
clear himself.
But it is more Churchill that this moment evokes than FDR, though they
were instituting similar policies, at the same time in history. Unlike
Roosevelt, Churchill was no progressive, prior to the outbreak of the
Second World War. He was more known for advocating the use of poison
gas against coal miners who wanted to unionize. But when society had to
be mobilized for the global crisis at the time, World War 2, things
changed. Winston Churchill would have been one of the last politicians
to institute a government-run program of food rationing, making sure
that even the poorest war refugees in the country were able to eat
throughout the war. But it was under the food rationing policies in the
UK during the war that the children of Britain ate better, overall,
than they have at any time since, under a more “free market” framework.
It was necessary, if not necessarily desired by the heartless
capitalists that ran the country at the time, to make sure everyone had
enough food, temporarily, to keep the peace — and to win the war.
Similarly, in 1846-48, when another catastrophe hit that wasn’t quite
global, but did cover all of Europe — another disease, this time one
acquired by monocropping plants, a potato blight — it caused hunger
throughout the land. The price of any kind of food went up so much that
all the factories closed, because the vast majority of European
societies were spending most of their earnings on food, and nothing
else. In the extremely potato-dependent and brutally colonized island
of Ireland, there was widespread famine. Millions died.
All this, of course, caused things to spiral out of control. There was
no $850 billion bailout package back then, so there were massive riots
and revolts all over Europe, and tens of thousands died in them. The
equivalent of the big bailout came after most of Europe’s monarchies
were violently overthrown — after they crawled back to power, tails
between their legs, bringing houses of parliament with them, as a
gesture of reconciliation with the armies of torch-wielding peasants who
had so unpleasantly disrupted their royal lives, in many cases by
ending them. There was even a little bit of land reform in some
countries.
Gradually, as a direct result of those rebellions and others that
followed, major concessions would be granted by governments that didn’t
want to be overthrown. None of those monarchs were planning on sharing
their wealth or power with anyone else, until they were forced to, by
the situation. That’s why all the monarchs of Europe had the same idea
at the same time. This sort of thing doesn’t tend to happen by
coincidence. It was radical action taken by otherwise completely
disinterested cabals of otherwise out-of-touch rich people, brought
about by an external crisis.
It is in times of crisis that we see this kind of bipartisanship — in
this case both in the US, and in many other countries simultaneously.
Not because the people in power have changed, but because they recognize
the ramifications of the situation, and they want to keep their power.
Only days ago, there were advocates of the hard-pressed restaurant
workers and rideshare drivers and touring musicians who are suddenly
facing long-term unemployment, talking about organizing a national rent
strike, with a degree of seriousness that would have been a fantasy only
a few weeks ago. Today, many of those folks might be just waiting to
see if that $1,000 check is coming in the next two weeks. I am, too,
though it’s high time for a nationwide rent strike either way.
Those are the thoughts that come to mind when I try to make sense of the current moment, today. Tomorrow, who knows.
David Rovics has been called the musical voice of the progressive movement in the US. Since the mid-90’s, Rovics has spent most of his time on the road, playing hundreds of shows every year throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Japan. He has shared the stage regularly with leading intellectuals, activists, politicians, musicians and celebrities. In recent years he’s added children’s music and essay-writing to his repertoire. More importantly, he’s really good. He will make you laugh, he will make you cry, and he will make the revolution irresistible. Check out his pamphlet: Sing for Your Supper: A DIY Guide to Playing Music, Writing Songs, and Booking Your Own Gigs
