Lies the Pandemic Has Already Debunked

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

“When a man knows he is to be hanged. . . it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” — Samuel Johnson (1777)

Humans can be a cruel, selfish and self-deluding species. We Americans are no exception. For decades, we’ve kept some eleven million undocumented immigrants among us in a state of serfdom, without the basic protection of health and safety that the rest of us take for granted. We’ve forced an additional thirty-seven million working poor to labor with no or inadequate health insurance, unable to see a doctor (without risking bankruptcy) when sick or injured in the wealthiest nation on Earth.

We’ve “justified” doing so with patent lies. They don’t deserve it, we tell ourselves. We can’t afford to change; it would cost too much. Giving them succor would only make them dependent and weaken their character. Our privatized health-care system would lose too much profit. The cost of medical care would rise for the rest of us. There aren’t enough doctors and nurses to go around. Keeping undocumented workers healthy would only attract more. And on and on.

Many could see through all these claims for what they are and were: transparently self-serving lies. The clear-sighted ones were mostly Democrats.

In contrast, Republicans forged the lies into enduring cultural myths. Why? Because doing so served their political purposes. The GOP’s business wing enjoyed the “gift” of diligent, hard-working undocumented workers who (for fear of deportation) never dared to complain about anything, let alone to unionize. Their low wages and generally miserable working conditions helped meet another consistent and obsessive GOP goal: low prices for everything, regardless of cost and social consequences.

At the same time, by constantly threatening to deport the serfs, without actually doing so, the GOP’s political wing could inflame racism, xenophobia and native laborers’ jealousy among the rubes, without actually changing anything. It never quite let slip the obvious truth: that building a “Big, Beautiful Wall” won’t “keep out” the eleven million hard workers for low pay who are already here. The ever-nascent Wall just makes it harder, in theory, for the serfs to visit their families, even once a year, while they feed us.

Our eleven million serfs are a gift to the GOP that keeps on giving. They give the oligarchs cheap labor while giving the Party cheap propaganda. It’s a GOP win-win!

But once the logjam broke, it cleared quickly. The cause of course was the Covid-19 pandemic. When looming contagion from the eleven million serfs and the thirty-seven million working poor threatened the oligarchs in their ivory towers, not to mention the vanishing lower-middle class that is Trump’s “base,” things changed on a dime. From January 22, when Trump lied, “We have [the pandemic] under control. It’s going to be just fine,” to the passage of the so-called “CARES Act” (aka the pandemic “bailout”) on March 27, only 65 days elapsed—a little over two months. This after decades of callous inaction.

Of course the CARES Act does not solve the problem permanently or completely. But it does let the undocumented and the working poor get tested, get help if sick, and even (in some cases) self-quarantine without losing their jobs. How quickly the hangman’s noose of a deadly pandemic focused the mind!

By April 2, only 71 days after Trump’s “just fine” assurance, the nation’s millions of undocumented farm workers also got a sliver of relief from serfdom: letters calling them “essential” workers during the pandemic. These letters don’t protect them from being deported; they are only vague reminders of a temporary change in immigration policy, which balks at deporting non-criminal workers who keep us fed, at least while the pandemic ranges.

What we have so far is a long way from complete relief. Heaven forfend! Neither the CARES Act nor the “essential worker” letters come anywhere near to providing undocumented workers or the un-and-under-insured working poor with anything like complete health care or reliable protection from losing their jobs while sick. But the speed and political ease of this 180-degree turnaround reveals just how transparent were the lies underlying their serfdom and defective health care in the first place.

These worker-friendly provisions account for a minuscule portion of the CARES Act’s total cost. [Scroll down to “Action at the Federal Level.”] Of the Act’s $2.2 trillion total, less than $4.2 billion was targeted directly at families and workers: $3.47 billion for temporary paid sick leave, paid family leave tax credits, and free testing; $425 million for mental-health and substance abuse needs; $200 million for Covid-19 telehealth programs; and $100 million to health centers for Covid-19 response. That’s about 0.2% of the total. The overwhelming majority (99.8%) of CARES Act expense was aimed at businesses, the general economy, and state and local government, in that order.

This lopsided expenditure shows the Trump Administration’s priorities—business over people—in stark relief. Economist Paul Krugman made this same point in a different way, noting how long it will take for money to get from private businesses and government agencies that will receive nearly all of it down to the people who need it.

But the lopsidedness has another, even more serious lesson. It shows how little real expense would be required to bring all workers laboring within our borders under basic health-care protection, and how cruel, harsh and short-sighted our public-health policies for them have been. In an era of exploding deficits, including the $1.5 trillion for Trump’s unneeded and unasked-for 2017 tax cuts, the mere billions that could help fix public health for our undocumented serfs and working poor are chump change.

Can we change, now that the pandemic has revealed how utterly false and cruel are the lies we have been telling ourselves? Political revolutions often begin with catastrophes, which teach us what really matters. So we can hope.

Permalink to this post