Insights tiny few and deepening immiseration for everyone else”. A swiftly infamous Instagram post by David Geffen (“net worth” $8.7-billion) in late March, showing his $590-million yacht at sunset as the pandemic took deadly hold in the United States (“isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus . . . I hope everybody is staying safe”), became a symbol transcending avowed politics. Geffen is no right-winger. He’s a liberal. In the 2018 election cycle he gave $1-million to Democratic congressional super PACs. He went on to become a donor to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. But the most pernicious and ultimately destructive actions of the super-wealthy are not so overtly gauche. The poisons are laced with soothing PR, while the rich movers and shakers play by the rules that capitalism has constructed for the voracious acquisition of wealth at the expense of everyone else. In that sense, the worst class-war crimes are the ones that adhere to the rules and don’t get singled out for condemnation. Consider the pathology of Jeff Bezos, reputedly the world’s richest person, who commented that he couldn’t think of much else to spend his money on besides programmes for space travel, while back on planet Earth the extent of misery due to poverty is staggering. Said Bezos: “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it”.
6 ColdType | June 2020 | www.coldtype.net
For the likes of Bezos and other elite winners of riches, in the words of songwriter Tracy Chapman, a future awaits: “I won’t die lonely / I’ll have it all prearranged / A grave that’s deep and wide enough / For me and all my mountains o’ things”. A few months into 2020, capitalism is running amuck in tandem with the coronavirus, like some headless horseman galloping over dead bodies. Meanwhile, for US news media, accustomed to covering faraway disasters, a reflex has set in close to home – turning the page on deaths, increasingly presenting them as numbers. An anaesthetised pall of acceptance is descending on us. “For the person who dies there is an end, but this is not so for the person who grieves”, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has pointed out. “The person who mourns goes on living and for as long as he [or she] lives there is always the possibility of feeling grief”. In his book The Examined Life,
Grosz wrote, “My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and then do something to permanently end our sorrow”. The corporate system is looking for its own forms of social “closure” in the midst of this pandemic’s colossal deadly upheaval. Already, we’re supposed to accept. Maybe you don’t want to call it class war. But whatever you call it, the system always makes a killing. CT Norman Solomon is co-founder and national director of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Sam Pizigatti
Civil disobedience, billionaire-style
E
arly last month, billionaire Elon Musk defied local public health officials and reopened his flagship Tesla auto assembly plant in Fremont, California. Public safety
officials had ordered that plant shut down – over Musk’s fierce opposition – almost two months earlier. “Dumb” concern about the coronavirus, Musk had raged
