The Corporate Pandemic: How America's Hypercapitalism Laid The Groundwork For Disaster
On Friday afternoon, as the Stock Market crawled near the final bell of one of its worst weeks in history, Donald Trump hosted a press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House to address the growing coronavirus debacle. He declared a national emergency, which is news enough, but what really grabbed attention was the phalanx of Fortune 500 CEOs that surrounded the failed president. There was the CEO of Walmart, the CEO of Target, the CEO of Walgreens and CVS. All of them took a turn at the microphone Trump had just fondled and swallowed, possibly infected considering his litany of reckless interactions with coronavirus positive individuals of late, and promised their multi-billion dollar businesses were on the case and wouldn’t let a pandemic slow America’s economy down.
Of course, these businesses have done everything in their power to lay the groundwork for the coronavirus epidemic. Walmart, in particular, has gutted out middle-American and ensured its employees, and every other citizen within a fifty mile radius, would be denied basic healthcare and a living wage. The cultural and societal damage done by Walmart is almost impossible to gauge or measure, but now Americans will be able to drive their cars to the site of their town’s murder and get tested for a disease they can’t pay for because Walmart exists and is a deadly black hole that can never, ever be sated.
The stunt did what it was designed to do, though. It told Wall Street that Trump was flanked by BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS WHO KNOW HOW TO GET THINGS DONE. It was a wink and a nod to a frightened economy that had lost every shred of trust for Trump and needed to know that not only were CEOS on the job but that there was most definitely profit to be made. And make no doubt about it, there’s plenty of profit to be made.
Unfortunately, it’s just another in a long line of indignities for the American people. Generations worth of Americans have been kept from preventative care, kept from regular visits to healthcare providers, and, by design, subject to insurance and coverage that is intentionally poor and ensures that even those who are covered will have shorter, sicker lives. This pandemic was a result of the many actions of the people responsible and their constant war on experts, science, and basic common sense. That there are still people on Fox News trying to convince their viewers this is a hoax, particularly their older viewers, is only testament to just how evil the disease of American hypercapitalism is.
But there are the obvious reasons for the pandemic and the chaos we’re suffering now. The less blatant ones lie in corporate culture, or more specifically the corporate culture of public relations and risk management, those two entities doing more to destroy the concept of truth and human dignity than nearly anything besides capitalism itself, racism, and political tribalism, though, certainly, all of those are facts that created public relations and risk management as “necessary” fields.
The link between the Trump Administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic should strike a cord for anyone who has recently tried to call a corporate help line or 1-800 number and attempted to navigate the byzantine web of options. These systems are set up specifically to keep callers from reaching a real, live human being and, in some cases, discourage the caller altogether and inspire them to hang up and live with whatever problem they’re dealing with in the first place. It is a strategy of anti-customer service, and with the Trump Administration we’re seeing this corporate profit ethos play out in the political world.
The point is to provide no service while appearing to provide a service.
Let’s be clear, Donald Trump was not elected to govern. Trump is a post-political authoritarian who was elected because of his status as a corporate mascot of cultural rage. His governance is anti-governance, a dismantling of the government to clear the way for corrupt and accelerated profit while telling the world he is governing ethically and effectively. This is the corporate mindset, and it is endangering each of us.
With every crisis, the corporation - and we are all so, so familiar with this now - undergoes a hurried math and calculus that examines the crisis and determines whether it needs handled at all. The bottom line for the company is considered and weighed, as well as the possibility that admitting there is a crisis might actually create a larger PR crisis than letting the crisis itself play out. The process plays out as needed. Say nothing about the crisis, deny the crisis, deny you’re responsible for the crisis, stress you’re looking at the crisis, find a “solution” that looks like a real solution but still saves the bottom line, rely on someone else to deal with the fallout.
This is the reality of the world we live in now. Watch any corporation lawyer and PR their way around a crisis and you’ll understand how the Trump Administration not only failed in the coronavirus pandemic but how they’re handling the fallout from that failure. It’s how Trump himself has handled every scandal of his political career.
As is the case with every corporate decision, you and I are not the priority. The sociopathic obsession with profit over everything, the type of obsession that leads corporations to peddle cancerous tobacco or addictive opioids even while they understand exactly what they’re doing is the type of obsession that keeps Trump and his cronies from actually addressing this pandemic or their failures in addressing the pandemic.
To be frank, that obsession is a disease unto itself on the human race. It has led to the subjugation of peoples, the enslavement of peoples, the damning of peoples to shorter, more miserable lives, and it continues even while human society nears the brink of collapse. The men standing around Trump will do their best to help the problem, but bet your bottom dollar they’re going to figure out a way to make some money while they’re doing it.
Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, Newsweek, and elsewhere. His most recent book is American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of Writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.