Pandemic leads to massive concentration in the marketplace

"Pandemic leads to massive concentration in the marketplace"
By Grace Blakeley
[This interview published on 12/24/2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, «Die Pandemie führt zu einer massiven Konzentration auf dem Markt» | WOZ Die Wochenzeitung,]
She is one of the best-known young business journalists in England: a conversation with Grace Blakeley about the profiteers of the corona pandemic, the failure of individual provision and the growing chances of a Green New Deal.
Green hope: "The call for a green revolution could unite diverse elements of the left": Grace Blakeley.

WOZ: Grace Blakeley, the Corona crisis saw the return of the strong state: around the world, comprehensive rescue packages were put together for the economy. Are we looking at the end of neoliberalism?
Grace Blakeley: Not necessarily. It's true that people often associate this ideology with a lean state, and in that regard it's actually true that we're seeing a shift during the pandemic: toward more government spending. But this conception of the term does not get to the heart of neoliberalism.

What, then, do you think is the core?
It's about in whose interest the state acts. In recent decades, it has become the servant of capital interests and elites. Take the reforms in the financial sector in the 1980s: The state did not withdraw from the financial markets, but introduced regulations and tax schemes to support the financial sector. Later, it gave huge subsidies to large companies, such as oil companies, or granted tax breaks to tech companies. The dependence of big business and big finance on the state became apparent in 2008, when governments supported private companies with huge sums of money. Today, in the pandemic, the same thing is happening - we are witnessing a continuation of the neoliberal model.

How does this manifest itself in the UK in concrete terms?
During the Corona crisis, bailout money is not flowing into investments that promote long-term economic growth, nor is it going to the individuals who most need help. Granted, the government, under pressure from the unions, has introduced the so-called "furlough scheme," a kind of short-time work, and that has helped workers. But the state has also showered money on large corporations and financial institutions, including airlines or outsourcing companies that have taken over state functions. Easyjet, for example, received a large loan from the Bank of England.

Who else is among the crisis winners?
There are some companies that are benefiting from the crisis because the consequences of the pandemic fit into their business model. These include online distributors such as Amazon, streaming services such as Netflix, and healthcare groups. Because most of the economy is struggling and there are fewer investment opportunities for investors, these corporations are also attracting a lot of capital.

What about support for smaller businesses?
For them, the situation is completely different: They are currently reporting more modest profits, have poorer relationships with financiers, and often none at all with the government. For these companies, the situation is precarious. In the long term, many will be bought by larger companies. This will further increase market concentration. In addition, money is very cheap at the moment.

What impact do low interest rates have in this phase?
They mainly help institutions and individuals who already have a lot of money. These big monopolistic companies can put the cheap money into corporate bonds - and use it to buy up more companies. We are already seeing an increase in corporate buyouts, and I expect that to increase after the crisis: One of the main consequences of the pandemic will be massive market concentration.

The economic crisis, company bankruptcies and a rise in unemployment were programmed. What could the government have done differently?
It could have put the money into the welfare system. Originally, the welfare state was designed as an insurance system to protect people from the predictable side effects of working life - including unemployment, illness, pensions. The idea was that the majority of the population could rely on this assistance. But under neoliberalism, the risks, as well as their insurance, have been privatized.

Instead of the collective, the individual is liable.
Exactly. The idea of neoliberalism is that if you become unemployed, it's up to you to deal with it. So people have bought their own homes or invested in a private pension, while the government provision of housing or pensions has been eroded. But only the rich can rely on their investments.

Recently, there have been press reports that even people from the British middle class have been hit so hard by the Corona downturn that they have to turn to soup kitchens and food banks. It's remarkable that today even people who have followed the free-market liberal default and put money aside for lean times have to rely on collective social welfare. Now they see that this system does not provide enough money to survive. This is especially true for people with special needs - people with disabilities, people in large families, people with mental health problems. Yet the state could have afforded to put enough money into the welfare system. It could have been shifted back more from individual provision to a collective insurance system, so that people don't have to invest their savings in the stock market.

Overall, you don't sound very optimistic that economic lessons will be learned from the Corona crisis.
I'm not necessarily pessimistic! But I don't think capitalism will heal itself unless we do something about it. If the response to the crisis turns out to be what it was after the 2008 financial crisis, then the situation will get worse. But that is entirely preventable: There are many politicians and campaigns advocating fundamental change in the system.

In your latest book, you propose a Green New Deal as a way out of the crisis.
This idea has gained enormous popularity in recent years, and a lot of intellectual groundwork has been done. First, there is an urgent need to avert climate collapse, and second, green stimulus programs are estimated to create three times as many jobs as normal programs. But whether they are implemented ultimately depends on the success of political campaigns.

The British left is in a weak position following Labour's heavy defeat in December 2019. How will it be able to drive such a development?
Certainly, the left is not particularly strong at the moment, especially in terms of institutional politics, i.e., the Labour Party. But that doesn't mean that the Jeremy Corbyn era has left no legacy. The ideas that Labour developed and popularized under his presidency, in terms of the Green New Deal, but also the communitization of services, are still working. I see two possible routes to regaining influence. The first is through the labor movement.

Is it interested in a Green New Deal?
In recent years, it has been interesting to see that the eco-socialist movement has been very successful in winning over the larger unions. For a long time, many unions with large membership, the workers in industry or aviation, were not particularly interested in the green transformation of the economy. But now most of these organizations support the Green New Deal. They see that it will be very important for their members in the future.

Where does the second opportunity for influence lie?
In the protest movements. In the last five years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people participating in the political process - through demonstrations, campaigns, or direct action. I think of Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, or the groups working within the Labour Party, like Labour for a Green New Deal. At the same time, polls show that the public is making climate change an increasingly high priority. There is broad agreement that something needs to be done, and done quickly. In the midst of crisis, it's difficult to organize campaigns, but if this can be done again, I imagine that the demand for a green revolution can unite different elements of the left: the social movements, the labor movement - and what remains of the progressive part of the Labour Party.
The left voice
Grace Blakeley (27) is an economist and activist in the Labour Party. Formerly the economics commentator for the weekly New Statesman, she now writes for Labour's Tribune publication.
In her first book, "Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation" (2019), Blakeley traces how the UK financial system is damaging society. In September, she published her latest book, "The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism."
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PANIC AND CONFUSION
A psycho-gram of the USA in the election campaign
by Thomas Frank
[This 2020 article published in Le Monde diplomatique is translated from the German on the Internet, Panik und Konfusion (monde-diplomatique.de).]

It's the most horrible year of our, of my life, but at least I had a pleasant summer. I spent the entire month of July in the house where I grew up, a somewhat battered clapboard building in one of Kansas City's leafy suburbs. Here I spent a month reading novels about World War II, fixing up the house, watching old movies over Missouri wine, and quite often managing to forget the deadly pandemic and economic collapse all around. In the morning hours, when the sun was shining, the flowers smelled beguiling, and there were hardly any cars, I would get on my bike and cycle down my workload. Afterwards, I took my newspaper out of the mailbox and looked around on Twitter.

And there it all was again: panic, confusion, accusations, accusations. Videos of people shouting at each other in the open street, waving guns around, driving their cars into a group of protesters, hysterically quoting whole passages from the writings of our country's founding fathers. New symptoms of mental decay every day, and above all: the growing sense that no one knows what the hell is going on.

Two dispatches from the Kansas City Star of July 14, 2020. The first: a man enters a barbecue restaurant, wearing a red Trump cap, and he's not wearing a mask. The boy at the register (who makes $8.50 an hour, the paper notes) asks the man to cover his nose and mouth, as is required in the city. He then lifts up his shirt like Clint Eastwood in an Italian western to show the boy what he has underneath: a gun.

Second news story, on the front page: Kansas is experiencing an "uncontrolled spread of coronavirus." However, this statement is not based on an analysis of reports from different areas of the state, but on a national epidemic map on the Internet. The originators of that map, sitting somewhere, had upgraded Kansas from the red (bad) category to the dark red (worse) category. And that decision by a remote entity became the headline that shocked 2 million people in the Kansas City metropolitan area.

What one might think is simply journalistic laziness is a phenomenon typical of the U.S. today. Regional newspapers can't sift through all the news from their state because they no longer have enough people to do it. The Kansas City Star, like many similar local media outlets, has been passed from one owner to another in recent years. The last ownership company went bankrupt in February 2020, and the paper was bought out by a New Jersey-based hedge fund in July.

This is what it's come to in the United States of 2020: no one knows for sure what's going on; and not just because of newspaper deaths. The unprecedented quarantine measures make personal contacts difficult. Public buildings are inaccessible or difficult to access. The murder rate skyrockets. Fear of flying is growing. School lessons take place only online. People act like they're in wacky cowboy movies. Your elderly father is blinded by Fox TV with images of violent demos. And when his old-fashioned landline phone rings again, he hears a computer voice threatening him with jail if he doesn't immediately transfer a thousand dollars to the computer's account.

Depression is universal. Decay everywhere we look, and no one in sight to set things right. When I was younger, politicians in this country went out of their way to reassure people in dark times. Today's man in the White House, on the other hand, has only one thing on his mind: how to get out of taking responsibility. The egomaniac Trump, who can't get an honest sentence past his lips, reacts to his nation's agony like the traumatized witness of a horrific car accident who talks of nothing else.

What the Corona times mean for our perception of reality was summed up by the mayor of Kansas City. In response to a reporter's question about the deployment of federal police - but which no one had sighted in the city - he replied with frustration, "It's unverifiable because you can't verify anything."

Where nothing can be verified, imagination takes over. And it doesn't take much imagination to stir our fears. All of us here see the end of the world coming, or the end of our way of life, or the end of something infinitely important without being able to name it exactly.

There are currently at least a dozen overheated collective fears in this country: the fear of police officers who can beat and kill with impunity. The fear of street riots. The fear of losing your job if you don't act progressive enough. The fear of people who don't wear masks. The fear of masks being perceived as a muzzle imposed by unknown forces.

But the number one fear - we are, after all, in an election year - is of politics: our democracy is sick and threatens to tip over into a dictatorship. That's been the tenor of liberal-progressives' fears since Trump took office. For years, Trump was made out to be a Russian agent by prominent journalists and social media stars; and not a day went by without comparisons to Nixon and Watergate.

Today, Trump's opponents have no need to talk about Russiagate. The Covid-era imperative to trim every issue to maximum panic has allowed earlier fears to grow into a hurricane of anxiety that grows in strength as the election date approaches. The daily topic in the press and social media is now the alleged threat of a coup d'état.

It is fascinating - and at the same time terrifying - that Trump supporters claim to be trembling with fear for the same reasons: Indeed, there will be a coup, they too say, but it is being planned in the progressive political camp and by the media establishment. At the same time, ironically, the right-wingers justify their fear of a left-wing takeover by the cries of others about a right-wing seizure of power. All the warnings from the liberal camp about Trump's attack on democracy, they say, only proves that these people are planning an attack on democracy themselves.

Because of the Corona epidemic, Democrats and Republicans alike have had to cancel their party conventions in the usual format and replace them with TV spectacles. The result was four evenings each of poorly staged appearances by party celebrities. The main difference was that the Republicans shouted and threatened more, while the Democrats made more reference to the ethnic diversity and ethical merits of their leaders. Overall, however, both party conventions were very similar: in staging a panic that asked the audience to think only the worst of their political opponents, but also to hope that if only the right candidate came through in November, the country would return to wholesome normalcy.

In terms of scare tactics, the Democrats had the easier game. All they had to do was repeat what they and their media have been putting forward for four years: Donald Trump is a threat to our traditional form of government, he caters to religious fanatics, he has screwed up our pandemic strategy, he casts doubt on the electoral process in many ways. Democrats had an advantage because each of these charges is more or less true.

Tammy Duckworth, senator from Illinois, called Trump a "commanding coward" who is failing our soldiers with his softness against the Russians. Pop singer Billie Eilish proclaimed that Trump is "destroying our country and everything we care about." Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York State, presented himself as the epitome of administrative competence, as he so often does, insinuating that Trumpism is some kind of virus.

By far the most effective appearance, however, was made by former President Barack Obama, who professionally and coolly summed up what is so dangerous about Trumpism. He himself, Obama admitted, had expected the billionaire television personality Trump to grow into his new role. "But that never happened," rather Trump is running the highest political office like "a reality show that serves him to get the attention he craves." Furthermore, Obama held his successor fully responsible for the coronatots and accused him of destroying the "global reputation of the United States" - whatever one may understand by that.

The second salient message of this party convention was that candidate Joe Biden is quite a pal. Obama called his vice president a "brother." Bernie Sanders described him as "insightful" and "sincere" and "decent." Biden's decades of work in Washington barely came up, in part because in Corona times all conflicts must be reduced to the formula of "good versus evil."

Biden himself stated simply that he was concerned with ending "the time of darkness." All elections are important, he said in his endearingly gauche way, "but fundamentally we know this one is even more significant." November, he said, will decide what the U.S. will look like "for a long, long time." It's not just about character and empathy of the candidates, he said, but also "about political decency, about science and about democracy." The ex-vice president entered the realm of facts only briefly when he noted that the country had "by far the worst record of any nation on earth" in the pandemic. But overall, Biden was at pains to remain on the spiritual plane, where battles are fought over abstract ideas. "May historians someday be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here on this night, when love and hope and light unite to fight for the soul of the nation."

Back in the day, Democratic party conventions always had a very expectable leitmotif: We are the party of the middle class, looking out for your economic interests and making sure the powerful play by the rules. While that message had less and less to do with reality, it remained the party's historic hallmark, and it made sure to emphasize it over and over again.

But not this year. Of course, there were occasional references to the victims of the economic downturn, for which Trump's Corona strategy was to blame. But overall, the problems of the middle class were not a big issue this time. That was a bit odd for someone like me, who has spent a lifetime writing about capital and labor, about neoliberal deregulation and inequality-in short, about class. Where were all the questions that had always preoccupied me? Where were the Democrats who had always raised the issue of inequality so persuasively? Where had the class issue gone in Corona times?

There was one place where it made a surprise appearance. A week later was the Republican Party convention. And here the old Democratic issue came up on the very first night. Right after the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, young Charlie Kirk took the floor. The founder of a college group that denounces leftist professors, he called his audience to class warfare: "For decades, ruling class leaders in both parties have engaged in selling out our future - to China, to anonymous corporations and to self-serving lobbyists." You couldn't believe your ears. There was a Republican raging against corporations and lobbyists and ruling the rulers: They had engaged in the sell-off only "to maintain their own power." People who "manipulated the system to suppress the good, honest middle-class patriots who want to raise a family and have a decent life." The next speaker then attacked the teachers' union.

In this year of the corona pandemic, panic is the sexy excitement that everyone wants to capitalize on. And in this panic race, Democrats - with their warning of systemic racism and of Trump's threat to democratic institutions - are hopelessly outgunned by their opponent. For the Republicans are the champions in the discipline of apocalyptic visions of terror. They play the piano of fear like Vladimir Horowitz once played his Steinway grand piano. If you vote these liberals back into power, they fervently warn, you will see not only the threat to democracy, but the very end of civilization: Then there will be bloody riots, as in the demos against police violence this summer. Property will be destroyed, monuments will be razed, the better white neighborhoods will be flattened. And there will be no fair reporting on any of this, because the media as well as the pundits will be mesmerized by the clamor of the blindly anarchic liberal mob.

A selection of floor speeches at the Republican convention that appealed to the fears of the middle class:

- "Look at what's happening in America's inner cities: Crime, violence, and mob rule ... Democrats won't let you go to work, but they will let you riot" (Tim Jordan, congressman from Ohio).

- "In radical Democrats' America, your families will not be safe ... the mob stirred up by their media allies will try to destroy you" (Mark and Patty McCloskey, a wealthy St. Louis couple who threatened demonstrators with firearms outside their home).

- "This election is a battle for the soul of America ... they want to destroy this country and everything we have fought for and preserved. America! It's about everything!" (former Fox host Kimberly Guilfoyle, a close friend of the Trump family).

And finally, Donald Trump Jr, the president's son: "In the past, both parties believed in the virtues of America ... This time, the other party is attacking the basic principles upon which our nation was founded: Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the rule of law."

And all this on day one of the Republican Party convention! The other nights were all about spinning an alternate reality in which Trump is acquitted on all Democratic charges: In the fight against Corona, the president has done all that could be done; China is responsible for the pandemic; economic recovery is just around the corner; Trump is not a racist. It fell to a squad of black ex-football stars to make the latter claim, though it should be noted that their speeches were nowhere near as well received as the endless tributes to panic.

But to really understand this year's election, you also have to see how the mainstream media has been trashing the current president for four years. The Washington Post, for example, regularly publishes three to four opinion pieces per day attacking Trump in the harshest terms. The purpose of the exercise, of course, is to damage his popularity, but ironically, such attacks are very likely to make it easier for the attacked to counter-strategize. Day in, day out, the man is described as a miserable worm, a person devoid of virtue, a monster of the worst kind who may be a traitor. What if the Republicans present evidence that Trump is in fact a good guy who cares about his fellow man?

Such a zillion-volt surge of cognitive dissonance through the nation's brain would be reward and justification enough for the whole effort. The party convention also provided that in the one great moment of undeniable triumph: the grand finale, when, after endless boring sentences from dull speakers, Ivanka Trump made her video appearance before an empty hall. The elegant president's daughter stepped out of the White House through a trellis of American flags, to the applause of a real audience consisting of real people without masks - a shocking challenge of the corona virus.

With the perfect hairstyle of an heiress to the throne, blow-dried by a light breeze, Ivanka strode across the lawn in front of the White House to a microphone to take us to an alternate reality. A reality in which Donald Trump, the people's president, as the "champion of the American worker," the "voice of the forgotten men and women of this country," is the good guy. And everyone else - whether media people or politicians - assholes, liars, abject failures. The president, said his daughter, is loved by his grandchildren. He is also loved by "sober mechanics and steelworkers" who fight tears when they meet him. He harbors "a deep compassion for people who have been played unfairly," especially prisoners. And he will do anything for the dairy farmers of Wisconsin, she tells them, and that he felt quite bad when he had to sacrifice "the strongest, fairest economy in generations" and order the lockdown "to save American lives."

At the end, Donald Trump himself took to the podium. After accepting his party's nomination and declaring that he felt normal human emotions, he turned Joe Biden's Manichean view of the world around: "America is not a country sinking into darkness; America is the torch that lights the whole world." About Biden, Trump said he is exactly what he himself is often accused of being: a phony who deceives the working class. Biden "took workers' donations, hugged them and even kissed them and told them he felt their pain, and then he flew back to Washington and voted for legislation to move our jobs to China and many other faraway countries." The message was: everything you thought you knew was wrong.

And the "political class?" All crooks, without exception. "Washington insiders begged me to allow China to continue stealing our jobs, ripping us off, and totally looting our country, but I kept my word to the American people." According to Trump, the diabolical, conniving, power-obsessed Democrats will implement a completely insane program if given the chance. They will "erase" the U.S. borders "in the midst of the global pandemic"; they will give illegal immigrants "taxpayer-funded lawyers" while spending less money on police, inciting riots, and releasing 400,000 criminals "onto the streets and into your neighborhoods." If the old ruling class returns to power, we are headed for doom, for these people will mercilessly push proud Americans into misery while they themselves bask in their moral superiority.

The reckoning culminated in a long register of sins by these hypocritical liberals: "They want to abolish free choice of schools, but place their own children in the best private schools in the country. They want to open the borders, but they themselves live behind the walls of their gated communities and in the best neighborhoods in the world. They want to cut funding for the police, but they themselves have armed guards protecting them. We need to say goodbye to these failed political classes forever in November."
Trump's grain of truth
If I can't brush aside all the absurd Trump talking points that don't stand up to a fact check with a grin as outright falsehoods, there's a reason for that: there's a grain of truth in this concentrated load of bullshit.

It's common knowledge that a certain strain of left-wing politics is considered chic in upper-crust circles. We see it in the radicalization that has been taking place for years among the U.S. quality media, the most prestigious universities and cultural institutions, for example, National Public Radio (NPR). The cult station of well-heeled left-wing intellectuals recently made itself the megaphone of an author who has written a book entitled "Defense of Looting." And the other day I saw with my own eyes a luxury T-shirt that read, "We Should All Be Feminists."

Trump said in his nomination speech, "They're coming after me because I'm fighting for you." This is false, of course, because Trump is not fighting for "us" at all. What is correct, on the other hand, is that "they" are after him. And if "they" hate Donald Trump, many of his supporters only feel vindicated: Trump is the enemy of their enemies, so their hatred is quite welcome.

This, I suspect, is exactly what much of the U.S. population sees as the number one conflict in this scary year. So not Russiagate, not Trump's destruction of legal norms or his abusive use of the military, and not even his incredible failure to fight the pandemic, where Trump's incompetence is measured by tens of thousands of deaths.

No, the central theme is this peculiar class conflict: Trump versus the more enlightened circles of "Upper America," who are coalescing against him in a hermetic upper-class solidarity the likes of which we have never seen before. Their hatred of Trump by no means makes an objectively terrible president a good one. But it does help Trump win over many people who normally would want nothing to do with a vain fool of his ilk.

The anger at this "Upper America" is about all Trump leaves us with. The proud, humming economy is now just a smoking wreck of a car in front of a tree; the valiant, industrious citizens he celebrates are now confined to sitting out in front of the boob tube a deadly disease that other industrialized countries have brought under control. Fear of moralizing liberals is literally all this man can muster in the final spurt to the polls.

Where does this contempt for "the liberals" come from? The answer is right in front of our eyes, everywhere. Progressive politicians may no longer like to talk about the middle class, but they always and fervently talk about the good people, that is, themselves. And about their contempt for less cultured people, that is, the others.

The scolding of progressives is the result of this contempt, and in times of Corona it is everywhere. A video is currently being shared on social media showing a demonstration for Black Lives Matter (BLM) (a cause I believe in). In it, some BLM supporters are harassing a woman sitting in a sidewalk café; they are yelling at her to raise her fist like they did. When you see something like this, you begin to understand what it was like to live in the McCarthy era.

Social media seems to be flooded with similar scenes day after day - an entire society drowning in a swirl of accusations and charges. Three of my closer acquaintances - all clearly to the left of the liberal camp - have experienced attacks on their good names. And in all three cases, the trial in which they were found guilty was so hair-raisingly unfair that it resembled a political show trial rather than a rational weighing of arguments. I would venture to guess that millions of other citizens know similar stories from their neighborhoods.

Admittedly, this doesn't have much to do with Joe Biden's efforts in recent weeks to appeal to the moderate following of Republicans in suburban neighborhoods. Give Biden credit for being apparently an honest character - the individual relic of a culture that still knew ways to tolerate or forgive the moral failings of ordinary people.

In normal times, such a person would easily beat the incompetent bungler still in the White House. But the times are not normal. And looking at the broader political panorama, the outcome of the November elections is far from certain. Almost daily, the impression is growing that liberal politics has become the project of an upper class that relies on intimidation and character assassination.

To say that many people hate and fear this form of partisan politics is a gross understatement. Panic, confusion, recrimination, clamoring denunciation - this is the world we are descending into. Many U.S. citizens do not see Trump as to blame for this decline. They see the blame with progressives, and by that they mean: with the rich. But - a final paradox - they do not count Donald Trump among them.

Thomas Frank is a journalist and author. Most recently published: "The People, No. A Brief History of Anti-Populism," New York (Metropolitan Books) 2020.