Readers Write In #706: Did the ‘rich eat us’ during the pandemic?

By G Waugh

It is only recently that I have been hearing a term called ‘Eat the Rich’ in magazines and web portals. Some films made world over in the last one and half decades are often slapped with labels such as these and a few of them have drawn international attention as well- the Oscar-winning Parasite, for instance. Glass Onion, The Menu, Joram, all three of which I liked immensely also fall under the same category and there are some interesting, unifying themes in all of these. These films display a strong contempt for the elite, the super-rich especially those who write rules for the rest of the world to follow.

These films in my opinion are a manifestation of the massive economic inequality that has widened in the decades following the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1970-80s where post the collapse of the Soviet Union, corporations and financial institutions have gained so much control over not only resources but also over our lives and the frustration stemming from the widespread disenfranchisement of millions of working people are getting reflected in films such as these.

But even in this light, when I re-considered the term ‘Eat the Rich’ last month, it sounded to my taste, too inhuman, misanthropic and even a bit cannibalistic. Why should we end up eating the rich even if they are sinister, venal and unapologetically ruthless?

Last week, I had the opportunity to read a book titledDavos Man written by the Global Economics Correspondent of the New York Times. By the end of the 200^th page, my already soiled opinion about the rich had taken a further shift towards the worse.

‘What will happen if we don’t eat the rich?’

‘They will eat us dammit!’

‘Are you sure? Being a Marxist sympathiser already, aren’t you already overblowing your visceral hatred for them?’

‘No, I am not. I am just saying what they already did.’

‘What did they do?’

‘They ate us, in millions’

‘When?’

‘In the pandemic of 2020 and 2021’

***

Gilead Sciences, an American pharmaceutical company had developed a drug called Remdesivir for treatment of the Ebola Virus and certain liver diseases in the late 2010s. Since the effectiveness of the drug in treating these infections was not proven, the company had to retain most of the manufactured stock at their godowns unsold. 

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic set the stage for the drug’s revival. The higher management of the Company had cultivated contacts in the Trump administration and the President of the United States in 2020, when the pandemic was ravaging across the country bringing much ignominy to his method of managing the emergency, badly needed something out of his hat. Despite knowing full well that the Remdesivir was not a very effective drug to treat COVID, the Trump administration gave the go-ahead and the drug was marketed across the country in millions. The drug’s potency was very much confined to merely reducing the number of days a patient spent in the hospital’s emergency room and there was no sign of it fighting the virus effectively and saving the life of the afflicted.

The drug’s price per dose was initially fixed at $12000 by the Company which according to Goodman, was determined based on the cost savings a patient can accrue by getting out of the Emergency ward two days in advance. Goodman points out the sinister profiteering that went into the calculations of fixing the price for this drug that was administered to millions of patients fighting for their lives in hundreds of emergency rooms across hospitals all over America. The drug whose cost of production could not have exceeded even a hundred dollars was finally agreed by the provincial governments across America to be procured for close to $2000 per dose from the pharmaceutical company. 

The extent of the heinousness of the act perpetrated by Gilead Sciences upon its taxpayers across the U.S comes out in full relief only when we take into consideration the humongousness of the size of grants sanctioned by the Fed towards research work undertaken by these pharma companies- 10-15$ billion annually.

***

TeamHealth is a group that outsources physicians for emergency medicine, anesthesiology, critical care, obstetrics, orthopedic surgery, general surgery, ambulatory care to thousands of hospitals all over America. This group was acquired by the investment firm BlackStone in 2017. During the early months of the pandemic, TeamHealth had instructed its doctors not to wear masks during their working hours despite having prior, sound knowledge of the means and extent of the spread of the virus. The instruction was meant to not scare regular non-COVID patients away, many of whom might be coming in for elective procedures and tests. According to Goodman, a big chunk of the profits generated by the hospitals every year came from these elective procedures and tests and if panic about the pandemic spread owing to masked doctors and medical staff, the balance sheets at the end of the year might not actually look good. So TeamHealth as well as senior managements of hospitals across the U.S instructed their staff for weeks together to work unmasked even as the harmful effects of not masking enough were growing every day for everyone to see.

Goodman lists instances of similar scenarios that happened in the warehouses of Amazon where workers were advised not to wear masks in order not to spread panic and scare their colleagues away from work. The company continued to penalize employees who did not follow orders and those who blew the whistle finally had to do that at the cost of losing their jobs.

***

When Trump introduced a package of more than $3 trillion to stimulate the economy and rescue the most affected due to the pandemic and the vulnerable, private hospitals tried and succeeded in getting millions and millions of dollars as compensation from the government for taking care of emergency COVID patients in place of regular non-COVID patients who were usually much more profitable customers than the former. 

Hundreds of corporations managed in getting thousands of millions of dollars as part of the CARES and the Paycheck Protection Provisions (Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, 2020) from the government which were supposedly to be used for managing losses due to lockdown restrictions and shrinking demand from the market. This fund was actually brought in to prevent worker retrenchment by these corporations but auditing provisions to monitor how these funds were spent were actually far from robust. The end result was that these corporations pocketed the money, fired their workers en masse and paid fatter dividends to their shareholders, according to Goodman.

***

Goodman coins a new term calling it ‘Davos Man’ referring to the super-rich of the world comprising people like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Marc Benioff of SalesForce, Larry Fink of Blackrock, etc. who huddle together at Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum Meet. He lists the similarities between all these people – super-rich elite men running major corporations with a great deal of control over resources and the market, enjoying great clout in the political spheres of both the U.S and the Western Europe, financing right-wing politicians while waxing eloquent about liberalism and democracy in public forums, arm-twisting these politicians into writing laws that favor enormous tax cuts for themselves and those that destroy even the last vestiges of the vast Welfare State that was created post World War-II all over America and Europe.

Goodman attributes the colossal failures of regimes beginning from Sweden to the United Kingdom in managing the pandemic that cost the lives of millions solely to the ‘Davos Man’ clique who continue to enjoy benefits even today with abandon and impunity.

Goodman also ponders over solutions to get rid of these consequences of unbridled crony capitalism through measures such as Universal Basic Income, improved provisioning of welfare services, all of which at the cost of penalizing the ‘Davos’ Man through one or other kind of a Wealth Tax.