It’s all about class war

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Bob Geffen’s $590-million yacht.

Norman Solomon It’s all about class war

Journalists aren’t supposed to “bury the lead”. But when death is the topic and corporate power is the culprit, the connection routinely goes unmentioned.

Class war – waged methodically from the top down – is so constant and pervasive that it might seem unremarkable. The 24/7 siege to make large companies more profitable and the wealthy more wealthy is going on all around us. In the process, it normalises avoidable death as a cost of doing business.

Overall, news media are part of that normalisation. While negative coverage of Donald Trump has been common due to his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, media outrage has been muted in relation to the magnitude of the dying in our midst – at a time when most of the dying could have been prevented.

Deaths tend to become less “newsworthy” as the numbers mount and shock gives way to tacit media acceptance. A new lethal reality is built on dominant structures that keep serving the financial priorities of the powerful. Emphasis is often less about saving lives and more about saving the stock market. The storyline becomes more about “opening”, less about dying, even though opening is sure to cause more dying.

Patterns of economic injustice are so basic to US society that they amount to deep cracks in its foundation. Under the weight of catastrophe, whether hurricane or recession or pandemic, the cracks split wider and wider as more human beings – disproportionately poor and people of colour – fall into the abyss.

Corporate media narratives routinely bypass such core truths about cause and effect. Heartbreaking stories have scant context. Victims without victimisers.

Fuelled by ultra-greed, Trump’s approach is a kind of scorched-earth non-stop campaign, an extreme version of the asymmetrical class warfare going on all the time.

“The world before Covid-19 was a deeply unequal place”, the progressive publisher OR Books noted in an email to supporters this week. “Now, in the pandemic, those inequalities are only more stark. Across America and around the globe are fabulous riches for a