The Pandemic Has Been Much Worse For The Worst Off So Far, But... Have You Ever Heard Of Trickle Up?

COVID-45 by Nancy Ohanian

This list is each state in order of population:

• California- 39,937,489
• Texas- 29,472,295
• Florida- 21,992,985
• New York- 19,440,469
• Pennsylvania- 12,820,878
• Illinois- 12,659,682
• Ohio- 11,747,694
• Georgia- 10,736,059
• North Carolina- 10,611,862
• Michigan- 10,045,029
• New Jersey- 8,936,574
• Virginia- 8,626,207
• Washington- 7,797,095
• Arizona- 7,378,494
• Massachusetts- 6,976,597
• Tennessee- 6,897,576
• Indiana- 6,745,354
• Missouri- 6,169,270
• Maryland- 6,083,116
• Wisconsin- 5,851,754
• Colorado- 5,845,526
• Minnesota- 5,700,671
• South Carolina- 5,210,095
• Alabama- 4,908,621
• Louisiana- 4,645,184
• Kentucky- 4,499,692
• Oregon- 4,301,089
• Oklahoma- 3,954,821
• Connecticut- 3,563,077
• Utah- 3,282,115
• Iowa- 3,179,849
• Nevada- 3,139,658
• Arkansas- 3,038,999
• Mississippi- 2,989,260
• Kansas- 2,910,357
• New Mexico- 2,096,640
• Nebraska- 1,952,570
• Idaho- 1,826,156
• West Virginia- 1,778,070
• Hawaii- 1,412,687
• New Hampshire- 1,371,246
• Maine- 1,345,790
• Montana- 1,086,759
• Rhode Island- 1,056,161
• Delaware- 982,895
• South Dakota- 903,027
• North Dakota- 761,723
• Alaska- 734,002
• DC- 720,687
• Vermont- 628,061
• Wyoming- 567,025

And this is a list of states listed by number of coronavirus cases per one million population. The number grew in every single state between Wednesday and today. That's not the kind of curve movement anyone wants to see. The number in parenthesis is the actual number of cases as of Thursday.

• New York- 13,690 (268,581)
• New Jesery- 11,258 (99,989)
• Massachusetts- 6,738 (46,023)
• Connecticut- 6,450 (23,100)
• Rhode Island- 5,921 (6,256)
• Louisiana- 5,519 (25,739)
• DC- 4,910 (3,361)
• Michigan- 3,544 (37,053)
• Delaware- 3,484 (3,308)
• Pennsylvania- 2,897 (35,684)
• Illinois- 2,881 (36,934)
• Maryland- 2,621 (15,737)
• South Dakota- 2,263 (1,956)
• Georgia- 2,089 (21,512)
• Colorado- 2,036 (11,262)
• Indiana- 1,964 (13,039)
• Mississippi- 1,724 (5,153)
• Washington- 1,713 (12,494)
• Nevada- 1,440 (4,208)
• Florida- 1,439 (29,648)
• Vermont- 1,320 (825)
• Virginia- 1,307 (10,998)
• Tennessee- 1,307 (8,266)
• Ohio- 1,262 (14,694)
• Iowa- 1,253 (3,924)
• New Hampshire- 1,243 (1,670)
• Alabama- 1,196 (5,816)
• Utah- 1,186 (3,612)
• New Mexico- 1,137 (2,379)
• Nebraska- 1,115 (2,124)
• Idaho- 1,068 (1,802)
• Missouri- 1,038 (6,321)
• California- 996 (39,009)
• South Carolina- 992 (4,917)
• North Dakota- 943 (709)
• Wisconsin- 874 (5,052)
• Kansas- 853 (2,482)
• Arizona- 830 (5,769)
• Arkansas- 824 (2,465)
• Texas- 787 (21,944)
• Kentucky- 784 (3,481)
• Wyoming- 779 (453)
• Oklahoma- 770 (3,017)
• North Carolina- 764 (7,759)
• Maine- 703 (937)
• West Virginia- 536 (981)
• Oregon- 521 (2,127)
• Alaska- 456 (337)
• Montana- 424 (442)
• Hawaii- 419 (596)

Horrible, right? Want a silver lining? Trump's crisis mismanagement is alienating seniors, the nation's most dependable voters-- and voters that supported Trump in 2016 and oppose him in polls now. Josh Kraushaar wrote that "by turning the coronavirus crisis into a partisan issue so quickly, Trump ensures that he’s on the losing side of the debate. Just look at the numbers. Even as small protests against stay-at-home orders have percolated in several states, public polling shows minimal opposition to statewide restrictions. A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that just 22 percent of Americans supported the protests, with only 36 percent of Republicans in agreement. Far from agreeing with the president’s Twitter demands to 'liberate' states with stay-at-home orders, they agree with his administration’s more cautious guidance.

Going against the tide of public opinion carries serious political consequences. This column has pointed out the downward trajectory of Trump’s approval ratings as he struggles to demonstrate competence in this crisis while failing to offer clarity about the path forward. But he risks doing greater damage by going against the interests of his own voters.

For a preview on how things could get worse for the president, look at the evolving political views of seniors, one of Trump’s most supportive constituencies in the previous election. They are also the most concerned about the coronavirus, given they have a much greater risk of dying if they become infected.

The latest Morning Consult poll found that 65-and-older voters prioritized defeating the coronavirus over healing the economy by nearly a 6-to-1 ratio. And over the past month, they’ve become the group most disenchanted with Trump’s handling of the crisis. In mid-March, seniors were more supportive of Trump than any other age group (plus-19 net approval). Now, their net approval of the president has dropped 20 points and is lower than any age group outside of the youngest Americans.

Those findings were matched by a new NBC/WSJ poll, which tested the presidential matchup between Trump and Joe Biden. Among seniors 65 and older, Biden led Trump by 9 points, 52 to 43 percent. That’s a dramatic 16-point swing from Hillary Clinton’s showing in the 2016 election; she lost seniors by 7 points to Trump (52-45 percent).

Seniors are among the most engaged voters in the country (71 percent went to the polls in 2016), and were critical to Trump’s victory. They’ve remained supportive of him for much of his presidency. And they’re counting on the president to protect them at a particularly precarious moment. If Trump’s desire to quickly reopen the economy ends up backfiring, they’ll be the first to abandon him and deal his reelection prospects a crippling blow.

Poll after poll keeps finding that a majority of American voters say that Trump is the least trusted to make decisions about reopening the economy. Across every state in the new Change Research survey of battlegrounds, state and local governments are more trusted to make those decisions-- and with the exception of Ron DeSantis-- governors, including the Democratic governors whom Trump has been criticizing, earn better marks than Trump for their handling of coronavirus.

Not many people alive today experienced the Great Depression but older Americans certainly heard all about-- in horrific terms-- from their parents. Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz told The Guardian that Trump's incompetence is pushing us right into a second Great Depression. "The numbers turning to food banks," said Stiglitz, "are just enormous and beyond the capacity of them to supply. It is like a third world country. The public social safety net is not working... We have a safety net that is inadequate. The inequality in the U.S. is so large. This disease has targeted those with the poorest health. In the advanced world, the U.S. is one of the countries with the poorest health overall and the greatest health inequality... If you leave it to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, we will have a Great Depression. If we had the right policy structure in place we could avoid it easily."

Stiglitz said Republicans had opposed proposals to give those affected by coronavirus 10 days’ sick leave, meaning many employees were going to work even while infected. “The Republicans said no because they said it would set a bad precedent. It is literally unbelievable.”

...Stiglitz said that as a result of Trump’s mismanagement, the White House office responsible for pandemics had been closed, funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been cut, and the US had gone into the crisis without enough testing kits, masks and protective gear. Encouraged by Trump, some parts of the US were determined to reopen in a way that would facilitate the transmission of the disease and lead to a fresh outbreak, he added.

“In those circumstances it won’t be the government enforcing the lockdown, it will be fear. The concern is that people are not going to be spending on anything other than food and that’s the definition of a Great Depression.

“We were unprepared but, even given the degree of unpreparedness, Trump’s decision to make this about politics rather than about science has meant we have responded far more poorly.”

No, Trump Is NOT Acting In The Best Interest Of Americans-- Nor Will He Ever

OK... What Now? by Nancy Ohanian

Last night we took a brief look-- almost in passing-- at Amy Goodman's important interview this week with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. I'd like to look at his remarks with the seriousness they're due. He started by reminding us that "In the 2008 crisis, Rahm Emanuel, who was the chief of staff of Obama, said, 'You shouldn’t let a crisis go to waste.'" We saw yesterday how the Trumpist Regime is using the current crisis to advance it's extremist right-wing agenda. Stiglitz continued that the moderate Obama adminsistration "did let that crisis go to waste. We needed to reform our financial system. We needed to reform our economy. And we didn’t. The money went to the big banks, and we didn’t get the money to the people who really needed it. So, the question is, as your very-- as your excellent clip from Naomi Klein said, 'What will we do with this crisis? Will this reinforce the ugly tendencies we’ve had for growing inequality, for corporate welfare, or will it actually succeed in reforming our economy?' You know, it’s remarkable. Just a little while ago, people said we couldn’t afford this program helping college students with immense debt, or we couldn’t afford providing healthcare for everyone. And all of a sudden, the president is talking about a $1 trillion, $2 trillion bailout. We always could have afforded these things. It was just our prioritization was wrong."

Stiglitz is a fan of the talk around DC-- everywhere but in Pelosi's office-- of "sending checks to everyone. I think the amounts that they’re talking about are inadequate, and it’s not just a one-time thing. If, as many epidemiologists say, this is going to last for several months, there will have to be a second and third and fourth... If we don’t do that, people whose income is collapsed, people who are left unemployed-- remember, we have the worst unemployment system of any of the advanced countries-- all these people who are not going to be able to pay their bills, and we’ll have a cascade of problems. And while it’s a good thing that the Trump administration has ordered federal agencies to stop evictions and foreclosures, it doesn’t apply to the private sector banks. And their evictions and foreclosures may well go on. And that’s where most of the evictions and foreclosures will occur. So we need to get that money into the system, and we need to get the money to ordinary individuals."

Stiglitz, like all progressive economists took issue with the corporate bailouts the Trumpists are planning, particularly "giving money to the airlines or the cruise ships... [A]irlines had a huge bonanza from the tax bill of 2017. And rather than use that money to build up buffers in times of emergency, they had billions and billions of share buybacks. So, if we give them money, we have to make sure that they satisfy certain conditions, conditions corresponding to the environment, to governance, to labor. And we need warrants. That’s a way of making sure that the American taxpayer is protected against the risk. And then there are whole set of things that the bailout-- that the package doesn’t address. Our state and localities are going to be facing a very difficult time. Their revenues are plummeting. They don’t have the luxury of running deficits. Most of them have what are called balanced budget frameworks. So, if their revenues go down, there’s going to be a cutback in education, in health, in the basic ingredients of making-- that ordinary people need so much. So, a higher priority than bailing out the cruise ship companies is helping the states and localities. So we need a massive revenue-sharing program between the states and localities."

He continued that "the Trump proposal is another instance of trickle-down economics-- give money to the corporations, and maybe, maybe, it will trickle down to ordinary citizens. And we know from the past it’s not going to happen. The 2017 tax bill did not lead to more investment, did not lead to significantly higher wages. It led to bigger-- almost a trillion dollars of share buybacks... [W]e need is a bottoms-up approach... if you give money to these industries, they aren’t going to necessarily behave well. And you see that so clearly in the fight that the big companies fought against paid sick leave. And let me say why that’s really important. It’s not just helping the workers; it’s helping all of us, because if they don’t get sick leave, they’re going to go to work. And if they go to work, it will help transmit the disease. So, we need a system that people can say, 'If I’m sick, I don’t need to go to work.' And the decision of the Trump administration to fight having universal sick leave is another example of their contributing to the spread of the virus and making the pandemic all the worse."

We created economy without resilience. I illustrate that by the cars today that don’t have spare tires. You save a little money in not having a spare tire. The fact is that when you get the flat tire, you realize what a mistake that was. Not having a spare tire makes-- in short run, it looks like you’ve saved a little money; in the long run, you really suffer. And we’ve created a whole economic system that is extraordinarily fragile-- just-in-time production with no inventories. And as we’ve created this system, where you try to squeeze every ounce out of the-- of waste out of the system, you’ve also squeezed ordinary workers. And that is what’s contributed to this growing inequality. And those two are the same-- you know, different sides of the same coin.

So, our growing inequality and our increased fragility are issues that-- hopefully, the lessons that we learn from this crisis is we need to construct a different kind of capitalism, a different kind of economy, that I call in my book “progressive capitalism,” but it recognizes that the market doesn’t work very well in addressing the major problems our society faces-- resilience, inequality, climate change, you name it. They haven’t done a good job on it.

...Why don’t these people at the very top say, “Well, at this moment of crisis, we’re all in it together. I’m going to cut off my multimillion-dollar pay. I’m going to go make a major sacrifice, and I’m going to give everybody paid sick leave, paid family leave. I’m going to show that from the top down. And, of course, I hope that you will be equally generous”? But it should start from the top. And that’s what’s so bad about both the administration and the example that you just gave. Leadership should start from the top by example. And obviously, we’re not getting that in this country.

...Because of the devastation of our administration, of our government, that has occurred in recent years-- you know, they disbanded the White House pandemic task force; they defunded the Centers for Disease Control, which is the basis of getting us information and developing our response to a crisis like this-- we are less able to respond. And that means it’s almost a fantasy to believe that we can get checks out in two weeks.

That’s why some of the other things I talked about are so important. We have to make it absolutely clear that nobody is going to be evicted, there’s going to be no foreclosure, not only on the part of the government, but on the part of the banks, landlords. People can’t have their utilities cut off, because those checks won’t be there, and there’s a lot of Americans living on the edge. Data I talk about it in my book about the fraction of the population, a very large fraction of the population, that has reserves of less than $500 or $1,000. They’re living from paycheck to paycheck. And right now there are no paychecks. So, this inability to respond is going to be a major problem.

And then the other point that you made has gotten a lot of attention more recently, that even companies that have said that they have sick leave policy, when employees ask for the sick leave, they get punished. And so, we have to set up administrative mechanisms that say, “We will hold the companies that don’t grant their workers these benefits-- we’re going to hold him accountable.” Of course, with the president saying, “I’m not responsible,” you might ask, “What does that mean?” But what that means is that there needs to be significant fines on any company that deprives any worker of his basic rights, including the right to sick leave.





The point that this crisis makes clear is that we’re all in it together. The virus doesn’t discriminate. Just like the virus doesn’t have a nationality, the virus doesn’t discriminate on the basis of nationality, of race, of religion. And so we’re all in this together. So this is a moment-- it should be a moment of national unity.

And as Naomi pointed out, there are two directions we can go. We could either exacerbate the divisions, or we can say there’s another direction. One of the reasons I wrote my book, People, Power and Profits, on progressive capitalism, was to lay out that alternative agenda, to make it clear that we-- there are a lot of ideas about how to transform our society into the kind of society that deals with the problems that we’re facing-- the problem of inequality, climate change, the moral turpitude that we’ve seen, so pervasive in the financial sector, Dieselgate, in the drug companies, in the food companies. There is an alternative. And so I actually think we have the ideas with which to respond. And they’ve been articulated in the primary contest, many of these critical ideas.

So, my hope is that as Americans realize how badly things have gone, how the kind-- that this crisis, we didn’t turn to the private sector to solve it. We turned to the government. We realize that we have to do this collectively, that if we’re all on our own, it won’t work. The private sector did not provide the masks, did not provide the tests on its own. And a failed government-- and the Trump administration is a failed government-- didn’t work. But there is a different kind of government that can work, and we’ve seen that in a number of countries, where things are going much better. So, we can see that if we pull together, there is an alternative, and one which will protect us against this disease, but also-- also-- can create a society with greater shared prosperity and address the climate crisis.

...[T]he stock market reflects investors’ expectations about what is going to be happening in years to come. And when Trump became the president and gave this huge tax cut to the corporations, they celebrated. They had a big party. And they focused on the short term, not the long term, not the risks that Trump represented to our economy, to our world. They celebrated the additional money they had in the pocket. And that meant the stock market went way up. It was a shortsighted perspective.

Now that optimism has turned, has flipped into extreme pessimism. They know that the president is incompetent. They know that this is beyond the capabilities of the administration. We’ve seen this incompetence in the areas of testing and the response to the coronavirus. And quite frankly, they’re very worried, and rightly so, as the economy goes down. And one of the things about the stock market is it’s very risk-averse. It always thinks about, when things go bad, the worst possible scenario, just like when things are good, they think about the party going on forever and ever, just like they did before the crisis of 2008. So, what we’re seeing now is, as they focus on the worst-case scenarios, there’s a flight out of the stock market. And interestingly, there was a flight out of the bond market yesterday. People want cash. They’re not sure what’s going to happen to the market. And cash gives them a little bit more security than anything else they can have... here will be follow-on effects from the collapse of the stock market. But the stock market is reflecting a deeper problem. You know, if you go back to the Great Depression, the stock market helped bring on the Great Depression, but the stock market was a reflection of some deeper problems that our economy was facing. So it was both cause and consequence. The same thing is true now. The stock market is going down because the realization that the economy is going to be very constrained. People are not going to work. Businesses are shutting down. And at this point, to a large extent, this stock market is reflecting the economic reality that things are not going well.

But going forward, the fact that so much wealth has been destroyed on people’s balance sheet, people-- retirement accounts have been wiped out-- that will mean that when the economy recovers, when the disease gets under control, people may be not in position to spend in the way that they were before. And so, it could help prolong the economic downturn, unless we take appropriate measures.

And the kind of measures that the Trump administration has proposed are obviously not the right kinds of measures. Let me illustrate. He began by saying, “We ought to have a payroll tax cut.” A payroll tax cut isn’t going to get money into individuals’ pockets. It’s going to put in jeopardy the Social Security program, be underfunded. And so it’s not going to make people more confident about the future. It’s not going to allow them to spend. It just increases the potential of undermining our social safety net, particularly for our elderly. So, it will be undermining the fiber of our economy. So, that’s an example of the wrong kind of economic policy. It doesn’t help now, and it really hurts going forward.

...[W]e are facing a real problem, the spread of disease. Epidemiologists, anybody who understands epidemiology, would have realized two months ago that there was a great risk. And obviously Trump didn’t. He’s not surrounding himself with anybody with the competence to be able to do that. And that’s why he ignored the warnings.

But you don’t have to shut down an economy to bring it under control. Singapore has provided as a very good example where their economy has continued. They do testing. They do tracing. Whenever there’s a source of contagion, they identify it and make sure it’s contained, quarantined. So they’ve shown that you can bring the disease under control without shutting down the economy.

Now, to the extent that you need to restrain the economy to reduce contact, one can-- one needs to address the issue of how are ordinary people going to survive. You know, it’s one thing for a well-off hedge fund to say, “Oh, shut down the economy. I have millions, maybe billions, in my bank account. I’m not gonna worry.” But for ordinary Americans, who have $500 or less in their bank account, no paycheck coming in puts them at great risks. So, I think the answer to that is this proposal of sending everybody a $2,000 check-- the $1,000 is not going to be adequate-- suspending all evictions, suspending all foreclosure, making sure that the credit card companies don’t charge the usury rates that they’ve been charging-- say, going during the period of this pandemic, you can’t charge more than maybe 3, 5% interest rate; after all, the T-bill rate is down to zero-- a suspension of student interest-- interest on student loans. We will have to respond to the exigency, the crisis of the moment, in ways that make sure that those who are the restaurant workers, those who are low-income workers, wherever the sector they’re in, can survive with dignity and don’t have to be excessively stressed by how they’re going to live.

Yesterday, in an essay for The Atlantic, Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality Did This, Adam Serwer showed exactly were responsibility for the virulence of the pandemic in the U.S. lies. Trump, he wrote, "is a menace to public health...The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity... [S]oon after the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China, the rest of the world began to regard it as a threat to public health, while Trump has seen it as a public-relations problem. Trump’s primary method of dealing with public-relations problems is to exert the full force of the authoritarian cult of personality that surrounds him to deny that a problem even exists. This approach has paid political dividends for the Republican Party, in the form of judicial appointments, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a rapid erosion of the rule of law. But applied to the deadly pandemic now sweeping the planet, all it has done is exacerbate the inevitable public-health crisis, while leaving both the federal government and the entire swath of the country that hangs on his every word unprepared for the catastrophe now unfolding in the United States. The cardinal belief of Trumpism is that loyalty to Trump is loyalty to the country, and that equation leaves no room for the public interest."

Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable. They are the predictable outcomes of the president’s authoritarian instincts, his obvious incompetence, and the propaganda apparatus that has shielded him from accountability by ensuring that the public is blinded to his role in the scale of this disaster.

Trump’s first public remarks on the coronavirus came during an interview with the CNBC reporter Joe Kernen on January 22. Kernen asked, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?” To which Trump replied, “No. Not at all. And-- we’re-- we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s-- going to be just fine.” In February, he falsely declared that “we are very close to a vaccine” and that “within a couple of days [the number of cases] is going to be down to close to zero.” In early March, he was still urging Americans to ignore the issue, saying, “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

One might argue in the president’s defense that panic serves no one. It is important, in fact, that political leaders urge calm in the face of a crisis, even as they prepare for the worst.

Except Trump was not preparing. He was consciously contradicting his administration’s own public-health officials at the time. In February, while Trump was lying to the public about being “close to a vaccine” and that “cases were going to be down to zero,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official Nancy Messonnier was telling reporters that Americans should get ready for “significant disruption to our lives.” The day after Trump told the public that “it will go away,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to Congress that “we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now." Trump wasn’t trying to maintain firm resolve in the face of a crisis. He was lying to the public about the dangers it was facing in order to preserve his public standing.

Nor were the president’s dismissals of the dangers posed by the coronavirus an attempt to buy time for the federal government to appropriately respond. Trump has dealt with the pandemic with all the competence you would expect from someone whose main experience is pretending to be a tough businessman on television. The administration failed to ramp up testing capacity in time to determine the scope of infections, while lying to the public that “millions of tests” were available; it failed to mobilize federal resources such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Disaster Medical System, or the Army Corps of Engineers. Trump declared a state of emergency only on March 13, reportedly concerned that doing so earlier “could hamper his narrative that the coronavirus is similar to the seasonal flu and could further agitate Wall Street.” As of Tuesday, according to the New York Times, the Army Corps of Engineers was “still awaiting orders.”

In the meantime, doctors, nurses, and EMTs are getting sick. Medical workers are running out of face masks and gloves. The United States does not have enough ventilators for critically ill patients who need them. States lack sufficient testing capacity to measure the scale of the outbreak. Emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Hospitals are running out of beds. The president is tweeting praise of himself.

Nor has the president’s party evinced any greater sense of civic obligation than the president himself. Instead, as Trump downplayed the potential consequences of an outbreak, did nothing to prepare the federal government to curtail one, lied to the public about the availability of coronavirus tests, falsely claimed the number of cases was going down, and misled the public about measures being taken to contain new infections, Republicans were echoing the servile praise of conservative media outlets and Trump officials, even as they quietly understood that the nation was about to be overwhelmed by a global pandemic, having been briefed in late January about the seriousness of the contagion. But instead of informing their own constituents about the danger they were in, several allegedly attempted to profiteer off of a pandemic by selling stocks right before one of the biggest Wall Street market crashes in American history. Properly warning the public of impending catastrophe might have drawn condemnation from the president, so they watched the cataclysm silently while turning a profit.

Other nations not led by Trump have also struggled to restrain the spread of the coronavirus. But the United States had advance notice of how bad the pandemic would get not just from China, but from Italy, where the potential severity was apparent in late February. South Korea, whose first case of the coronavirus was detected in late January, around the same time as the first case in the United States, has already contained its own outbreak by rapidly developing and implementing a widespread testing regime. Trump spent the intervening weeks trying to pump stocks and lying to the public about having everything under control, while the conservative propaganda apparatus that surrounds him did the same. Even public-health officials were forced to serve two masters, having to juggle their responsibilities coping with the widening coronavirus pandemic while maintaining a Juche-like commitment to lavishing the president with praise.

The bizarre ritual of public-health officials fawning over the president during coronavirus briefings is not some trivial matter. In fact, it illustrates how democratic backsliding during the Trump administration has damaged the federal government’s ability to respond to emergencies and the credibility of its public statements on matters of life and death. Authoritarian leaders prize loyalty over expertise, and part of the way such leaders determine loyalty is through demanding sycophantic praise from underlings, smoking out those unwilling to bend the knee. This is how you end up with the president’s unqualified, pampered son-in-law, his foggy brain addled by Fox News propaganda, using his influence to undermine officials trying to turn back the outbreak.

A pandemic is precisely the kind of situation that shows why it is important to have a government staffed by qualified civil servants, rather than whimpering toadies who can’t deliver bad news to a mercurial president whose main priority is protecting himself. At least part of the federal government’s delayed response, Politico reported, is because Trump “rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news.” The president’s fragile ego is proving deadly.

Trump is hardly the first politician to lie about the scope of a problem to preserve his public image. The distinction here is that, having decided that he would downplay the dangers of the coronavirus, the authoritarian cult of personality built up around the president and maintained by conservative media reverently amplified the president’s messaging. The conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, told his listeners that “this virus is the common cold.” The Fox News host Sean Hannity proclaimed that the president’s critics were attempting to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” while his colleague Pete Hegseth told viewers, “I feel like the more I learn about this, the less there is to worry about.” The network aired a parade of medical experts offering bogus health advice about the coronavirus, including the claim that the “worst-case scenario” is that “it could be the flu.” Republican legislators appeared on the network urging Americans to defy federal health officials’ advice to avoid large public gatherings and work from home if possible, with Representative Devin Nunes of California telling Fox News on March 15, “It’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant,” or “go to your local pub.”

Trump and the conservative-media apparatus have had the predictable impact of persuading audiences not to take health officials’ warnings seriously, viewing them as just another liberal “hoax.” One pastor in Arkansas told the Washington Post that “half of his church is ready to lick the floor, to prove there’s no actual virus,” adding that “in your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you. It’s interpreted as liberalism, or buying into the hype.”

Conservatives have argued that it is the mainstream media’s fault for being so relentlessly negative about the president. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tweeted that “one of the dangerous consequences of having a totally dishonest left wing news media was that most Americans discounted their hysteria as phony.” Gingrich’s attempted indictment of the mainstream press is a backhanded acknowledgement that the conservative media do not conceive of their job as informing the public.

It’s true that the media often make mistakes; they are, after all, made up of human beings. Media conventions can be subverted, facts can be misunderstood or misreported, sources can mislead, reporters can succumb to confirmation bias, and editors can fail to see the big picture. For the most part, though, these outlets are trying their best to inform the public.

Trumpist media outlets, by contrast, have created a bubble of unreality where nothing but the most effusive praise of Trump is acceptable, where anyone who disagrees with or criticizes the president is part of a grand conspiracy to destroy him, and where the only facts that exist are those that reflect well on the president. Many conservatives don’t distrust the mainstream media because they are biased; they distrust the media because the media do not tell them what they want to hear, and their own outlets have trained them to believe that the truth can only be exactly what they want to hear.

Nor can mainstream media bias explain why many Trumpist media outlets, supposedly so much more committed to the truth than their mainstream counterparts, consciously endangered their audience by disregarding and dismissing public-health warnings. Fox News told its audience that the coronavirus was a minor problem their heroic leader was quickly resolving, while quietly having its staff follow the very precautions its hosts were ridiculing on air. The mainstream press didn’t force Fox News to do that.

The coronavirus pandemic provides a rigorous case study in the priorities of most of the conservative press: Faced with a choice between informing their own audiences about dire threats to public health, and propping up a Republican president, they chose the latter, because informing the public is not their job. The job of outlets like Fox News is to ensure that the conservative masses believe that their leader is infallible, even if it causes them tremendous personal harm.

As cases began flooding into hospitals and medical facilities all over the country, the president shifted his tone, finally recognizing the reality of the pandemic and the economic catastrophe that threatens both the health and livelihoods of millions of Americans. On Tuesday, Trump declared that “this is a pandemic,” and that “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Having denied that the coronavirus was a major issue for months, the president sought to recast himself as an oracle, and conservative media followed suit, shifting their tone from downplaying the severity of the pandemic to praising the heroic efforts of the president to address it.

Predictably, Trump drew praise from some cable-news personalities for doing a passable job of portraying a president on television, even as the administration’s failures continued to exacerbate the personal and economic toll of the pandemic. This is somewhat understandable; Americans want to believe that their leaders are competent, engaged, and concerned about their well-being. Recognizing that the presidency is occupied by an incompetent narcissist whose major life accomplishment is parlaying an inherited fortune into reality-show celebrity is rather less comforting, but it is the world we live in.

Yet the incentives for the president and the conservative media have not changed. All that has changed is that it is now in the president’s personal and political interest to cushion the terrible impact of the coronavirus pandemic. This is a positive development as far as it goes, in that, for the moment, the national interest and Trump’s interests are one and the same. But Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality persists, and where maintaining the image of the infallible leader conflicts with the needs of Americans affected by the pandemic, the former will take precedence. The president is a relentless scammer at heart, and even during a pandemic he will attempt to get what he wants while providing as little as possible in return, as though he were trying to save cash by stiffing a contractor.

Having failed to will the coronavirus pandemic into nonexistence, the president, his party, and his propaganda machine will seek to rewrite history to render the false impression that Trump was aware of the threat of the coronavirus pandemic all along, and that he acted decisively to address it. The truth is that, in the weeks and months Trump and the conservative press were busy pumping stocks, juking stats, and misleading the public, valuable time to prepare for the pandemic was lost. Americans, both those who get sick and those whose workplaces and businesses will close as a result, will suffer dearly.

A global pandemic would have been a challenge for any administration, for any government. But the scale of this tragedy was not inevitable. America’s shuttered storefronts, overflowing emergency rooms, and shattered families are the toxic fruit of a political culture in which Donald Trump’s image, as the avatar of the will of the people, matters more than actual people do.

Barrons just reported that "Goldman Sachs is now projecting a massive U.S. economic contraction in the second quarter of the year. The bank is forecasting a 24% decline in economic activity next quarter, compared to their previous forecast for a 5% decline. That’s because U.S. economic data (specifically manufacturing data) have already started to miss economist estimates, even before Americans started to stay home to avoid spreading the coronavirus... If Goldman’s economists are right, that means the U.S. is approaching the sharpest single-quarter decline in gross domestic product since the U.S. started measuring GDP in its current form." And, apparently, Trump's p.r. approach is working-- at least for now. Believe it or not, 55% of respondents approve of Trump’s management of response to the pandemic, while just 43% are savvy enough to disapprove.

Welcome To The COVID Economy

Sure, there's a Trump tweet for occasion; but there's also a George Carlin video for every occasion as well. You may prefer how Carlin explains what we're going through as a society now but economist James Galbraith is slightly less pessimistic. In fact, he wrote a piece for The Nation this week about how to confront the side-effects of the pandemic, namely the economic one. He looks at it square in the eyes and wants you to accept it: "a house of cards has fallen. An entire world of illusions, self-deceptions, and sophistries has died. We’ve come to the end of a very long string. The string has been unspooling since the triumphs of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, conventionally thought of as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but rooted equally in Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, in Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and in the Bushes and Obama and many lesser figures. A binational, bipartisan coalition of catastrophe in the Anglo-Saxon realm of ideas. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are consequences, not causes, of this mental failure. The delusion is economics as we’ve known it. Here, two concepts have ruled: self-organization and the veil of money. The first argued for markets, for all of society to be mediated by the forces of supply and demand. Its supposed virtues were competition, flexibility, incentives, efficiency; the reality is a fragile web, woven in strands of glass. The second submerged the financial system-- the banks, traders, speculators-- rendering those people and institutions as mere messengers, unimportant and invisible."

He wrote that "our leaders now plan to send out cash, as 'stimulus'-- as though a market response will organize itself. It is another delusion. In Europe "border controls are back" and America "is breaking apart." I agree with him that "federal officials, with few exceptions, are predatory, indifferent, or merely stupid [and that] congressional leaders appear stymied. The few steady hands are those of some governors-- in both parties-- many mayors, county judges, and other local officers." I don't know what he means by governors of both parties. The only governor who appears to be doing a genuinely good job at confronting the pandemic-- not a cosmetic job-- is DeWine, an Ohio Republican.

For the population, it is a test of character. Ordinary Americans are for the most part community-minded, prepared to follow instructions and do right, if others will do likewise. Around me in Austin, people are curtailing activities while going about their day jobs in the face of increasing risk. Pools and playgrounds and libraries are closed—we’re told, for several weeks. Everyone knows it could be months and months.

As everyone also knows, there has been far too little testing. There is no reserve of hospital beds or equipment. Global supply chains are broken, and medicines of many types will run short. The only possible advantage to being in America right now is that it is a large country; many people live in more space and can self-isolate more easily, for a time. This is not a consolation for the poor, nor for New Yorkers, nor for those reliant on assistance that they may not be able to get.





It is hard to look past the imminent swamping of the health system, but there are deeper disasters afoot. In California, nearly 6 million elderly have been told to stay home. Many of them live alone or in pairs. Who will feed them? To this, the governor replied, “Good question.” The reality is, we’ve done a good job in this country of keeping many frail and elderly people alive, a very poor job of keeping them healthy, and we have no system for keeping them fed. We may not even know where they are.

We are told there is plenty of food in the country. Can it get to the stores? Yes, for now; but for how long? How long will people be there to stock and sell and run the checkout counters and maintain security? Distribution and security are the weak links in the food chain. The market has given us efficiency and a high living standard. It has by the very same token not given us resilience, spare capacity, coordination, or leadership. It has, instead, given us fragility. A web of glass. Panic is both the rational response and the enemy. If panic takes control, it will destroy whatever is left.

The American economy must convert, in full and at once, to fight the pandemic. A public corporation-- the Health Finance Corporation, based on the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the Depression and World War II, with power to borrow and allocate and meet problems as they arise-- is needed now. The National Guard and the Army and all their resources must be deployed. And every civilian resource, including all available human beings, must be enlisted.

The immediate medical need is supplies, beds, personnel. Hospitals can be built in days, we have learned. Space can be requisitioned; hotels and dormitories are empty. The military is said to know how to deal with mass casualty events. The Defense Production Act gives authority to command companies to make masks, oxygen tanks, respirators. Unlimited jobs are available for people to clean and perform other basic functions. It’s risky work, and it must be decently paid. Guarantee the jobs, and people will do them. China managed that much, and many people volunteered.

The next need is to stabilize priority civilian supply: food, drugs, cleaners, paper goods. The existing system may hold up for a while. The essential is to lock it in place, supporting the people doing their jobs so that they can continue: drivers, stockers, checkout clerks, cooks and kitchen help, and scrubbers. If the necessary goods keep coming in, people will stay calm and get along without the rest. As in Korea, ride-share and taxi drivers can be trained to disinfect and mobilized to drop off meals and medicines. Suddenly, all these workers are essential and must now be treated that way.

All the information services should now be drafted and basic customer bills should suspended for the duration: cable, cellular, landlines, Internet. Let the federal government compensate the companies for basic costs. Having secure communications and entertainment will help keep people at home. The boost in disposable incomes will help in exact inverse proportion to wealth; those losing work income will benefit most.

Among the most necessary big corporations right now are those who run mass distribution networks: Amazon, Walmart, FedEx, UPS, and the drugstores and major fast-food chains. They should be run as public utilities for the duration. That means giving delivery at cost on essential goods and stop-orders on frills. Top executives should contribute their time. The workers should get raises and medical care and protective equipment and unions. In return for staying on the job in the emergency, those workers too should emerge in an entirely different position after this ends.

Many large, medium, and small employers are down for the count and may be bankrupt soon: airlines, hotel chains, shopping malls, convention centers-- more than anyone can list. The equity will be gone; there must be financing to maintain essential operations and to hold the physical and engineering assets in place, and a debt moratorium to stave off the creditors and the vultures. Needless to say, evictions and foreclosures and utility stoppages must be stopped immediately; if necessary, it is better to ration the supplies. As businesses go down, so will the bankers. After the wave passes, we’ll see what can be rebuilt.

Through it all, the people must be reassured. Those at home must be cared for. And those who remain healthy must be given useful work. Solidarity, organization, determination: These are the words for us now.

Changing times... very changing times requires agile, competent leadership which is in short supply in our ruling class. Take the idea of bailouts. The airlines near our money to stay in business? OK, our tax dollars should go towards buying their stock. As Aaron Gordon wrote at Vice yesterday, "U.S. airlines have spent the last decade shoveling billions in profits to stockholders. Now they want your tax dollars with no strings attached. Fuck that."

The last decade has been very good to U.S. airlines. Industry consolidation, stuffing more people into smaller spaces on planes, and stacking fees upon fees have resulted in unprecedented prosperity for the country’s Big Four (American, Delta, United, and Southwest). From 2012 to 2016, these four airlines were the most profitable in the world, walking away with a combined $42.3 billion, according to an analysis by L.E.K. Consulting. In the two subsequent years, 2017 and 2018, the US airline industry raked in an additional $27.3 billion in profits. They then used nearly all of that money, a whopping 96 percent, to buy back shares from stockholders-- a move that enriches investors while doing nothing for the company itself-- and handsomely compensating executives.

Now, the airline industry, like nearly every other industry, is suffering due to the unprecedented coronavirus travel restrictions. The airlines are asking the federal government or a bailout of almost $60 billion, to be paid for with our tax dollars.

To which I say: Fuck that. The airlines shouldn’t get a dime from American taxpayers unless there are so many strings attached it can support a 787.

If a working class person had handled their finances in the same way the airlines have, it would be a caricature of a Republican talking point about individual responsibility. During the good times, airlines spent all of their money on financial chicanery and self-enrichment while saving virtually nothing for a rainy day. Now that the good times have stopped, they’re rapidly running out of cash, which is what tends to happen when you don’t have much sitting around. It’s like a meme about millennials and avocado toast except it’s about the boomers who run airlines.

You could be excused for doing this once, but not twice. The airlines should have learned their lesson after the September 11 bailouts that they are not normal companies. The industry, already in financial trouble, saw demand collapse all at once after which the feds gave them $18.6 billion in direct assistance and loan guarantees. The lesson here ought to have been that airlines are uniquely vulnerable to huge shocks and need to plan accordingly. These do not happen often-- oh, once every 20 years, thereabouts-- but often enough. That was not the lesson the airlines learned.

I suppose the airlines did have a plan. The plan was to get bailed out by us.

Fair play to the airlines, because they almost certainly will. Congress, which is comprised of some of the most frequent fliers and loyal airline customers in the country, will oblige them. Our political leaders will almost certainly meet the airlines on the industry’s terms because Congress overvalues the airlines themselves relative to the average American. A 2018 survey by an air travel industry group found 52 percent of Americans didn’t fly at all in 2017, and nearly three quarters of all trips were personal, not business. And airline flyers are disproportionately higher income, with the majority of airline trips coming from Americans with an annual household income of at least $75,000, well above the median household income (the most frequent fliers by income group, according to the airline industry survey, make more than $150,000 a year).

Airlines and other pro-business groups will argue a bailout is necessary in order to prevent massive job losses, an argument that made sense in 2001 when airlines were bearing the brunt of the recession following September 11 and mandatory flight groundings. But that argument doesn’t make sense today, because everyone is hurting just as much. The airlines, while experiencing massive revenue losses, can get in line with every other industry experiencing massive revenue losses, including but not limited to the entire hospitality and travel industry.

Even within the transportation industry, airlines don’t have a special case for bailouts. Public transportation is experiencing a similar shock, with ridership and revenue drops in line with what airlines are experiencing. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, they employ the same number of people. Public transit agencies-- which, it’s worth bearing in mind, are publicly owned and operated, not private corporations-- are also asking for federal funds so they can keep running service for critical workers like hospital and grocery store staff, but they’re asking for about $13 billion, or about one-fifth of what the airline industry wants.

Fake Magic by Nancy Ohanian

Some, like Florida Senator Rick Scott, have argued against bailouts of any kind for anyone, including the airline industry. At the very least, industries like airlines that quite clearly have embedded federal bailouts as part of their long-term plans need to have their courses corrected.

The exact details are up for debate, but fundamentally, the government must set a precedent for corporations that spend the boom years enriching themselves and their shareholders only to crawl to Capitol Hill hat in hand. Rather than filling up the hat, they ought to get a kick in the butt.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren laid out a plan (of course she did) of what this might look like for companies that get federal funds including: a mandatory $15 an hour minimum wage for all employees, a permanent ban on stock buybacks, no dividends or executive bonuses for three years, and criminal penalties for CEOs who violate any of these rules. It’s a start.

We must also stop the cycle of corporations privatizing profits while socializing costs. Why should we, the taxpayers of the United States, spend $50 billion or $60 billion or whatever it may be when we see nothing in return? As of this writing, the total market cap of the Big Four US airlines is $54 billion, almost exactly the value of the bailout being proposed. What if, instead of bailing out the airlines, the US government became the majority shareholder of each so it could profit from its investment?

This is not some pie-in-the-sky proposal. It’s exactly what happened with Conrail, a government-created railroad entity formed in the 1970s out of the bankruptcy of a bunch of private railroads including Penn Central. The government bought the bankrupt railroads for dirt cheap then privatized Conrail in the late 1980s once it started turning a profit, netting some $3.7 billion in 2020 dollars for taxpayers.

Whether or not that specific model is right for the airline bailout is up for debate. But the general idea, that the public needs to stop subsidizing the irresponsible financial behavior of large corporations while the average taxpayer suffers, needs to be the focus of Congress going forward. Maybe, just maybe, we can come out of this mess with a fairer and more equitable relationship between corporations and the American public. And, while I’m dreaming, with some minimum leg room requirements, too.

Economic Inequality And Economics Theory-- Stiglitz To The Rescue

I used to be in the music business. Like in many businesses, there was always a tension between executives who put all their energy and resources into the current quarter and executives who felt a responsibility towards creating long-term (future) shareholder value. Bonuses-- which could be 6 or 7 figure amounts-- tended to be based on the short-term approach. That's, at least in part, why so many music companies have gone under.

Recently Business Insider ran a piece about Davos that deals with the problems around economic inequality, which stems, at least in part from 1970s stagnation, where chasing quarterly profits has resulted in a toxic short-termism. The piece is primarily about how Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz views this short-termism. Short version: "I want to emphasize that it was, in this period, not only activist shareholders but Milton Friedman," the late economist and fellow Nobel laureate, who was to blame for this prevailing ideology. "And he was wrong." Reporter Richard Feloni noted that "In his highly influential 1962 collection of essays, Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman proclaimed that in a free economy, 'there is one and only one social responsibility of business-- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud.'"

We followed up with Stiglitz after the Davos panel, and he told us that Friedman's assertion "was not based on any economic theory." He then gave some background on the origins of this debate.

Friedman made his assertion as a natural extension of a defining passage in Adam Smith's definitive The Wealth of Nations from 1776, that of the "invisible hand." Smith wrote that an individual laboring in his own interest is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

Stiglitz pointed out that indeed the invisible hand's existence was "proven" in 1954 by the economists Kenneth J. Arrow and Gerard Debreu. Arrow and Debreu were able to show the existence of an equilibrium between supply and demand in a free, competitive economy-- but they also made clear that this could only exist if a given set of assumptions about the economy and consumer behavior were true.

And the latter part is essential, said Stiglitz.

"Then some of us, beginning in the late '60s, asked the question, 'Well what happens if those conditions aren't satisfied?'" he told Business Insider.

Stiglitz said that he and the economist Sandy Grossman investigated this question throughout the '70s. In 1980, they published a paper that declared that while market equilibrium can exist in theory, it was "impossible" for it to exist in a competitive economy in reality. Following this line of thinking, then, Friedman's argument falls apart. And therefore, existing solely to please shareholders will not-- as Friedman argued-- benefit other stakeholders, such as employees, consumers, and society as a whole.

Stiglitz respected Friedman (who died in 2006) for his work on consumption that won him a Nobel prize, he wrote in his 2012 book The Price of Inequality, but the two had several arguments about this idea of the free market. "I remember long discussions with him on the consequences of imperfect information or incomplete risk markets; my own work and that of numerous colleagues had shown that in these conditions, markets typically didn't work well. Friedman simply couldn't or wouldn't grasp these results."

Friedman's ideas, however, would take hold in the US for the next few decades.

When Stiglitz cites what he considers to be the problem of Friedman, he explained, he's using him as the figurehead for a movement that took advantage of the societal trends [Henry] Blodget mentioned. This movement was led by the Chicago school of economics, the free market ideology developed at the University of Chicago in the mid-20th century.

As Stiglitz sees it, Americans, particularly on the right, embraced the Chicago school's way of thinking because it appeared to be the efficient solution to stimulating a stagnant economy.

Within this free market ideology, pursuing short-term value is simultaneously a pursuit of long-term value. If you accept this, prioritizing short-term gains comes through the optimization of management and spending, which allows the company to grow, in turn supplying higher returns, more jobs and other benefits to society, and better products.

It is a rejection of a fundamental Keynesian belief, Stiglitz noted.

British economist John Maynard Keynes published his revolutionary book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, in the wake of the Great Depression. In it, he differentiated between short-term and long-term value, and expressed his frustration with the way the American stock market encouraged public companies to prioritize short-term gains, better for the majority of contemporary investors, over long-term gains, better for society as a whole. The basic premise of the argument Keynes had with his peers is the same as the one today.

"The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future," Keynes warned.

More Americans in positions of power began gravitating toward the Chicago school's ideas in the '70s, and Friedman became an adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

Not only did Friedman have the ear of the leader of the free world, but the Chicago school's theories around lawmaking for the intended purpose of market efficiency also came to fruition.

In his 2015 book Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy, Stiglitz said that the normalization of shareholder primacy was solidified under the Reagan administration through changes to federal income tax law and securities law, including relaxed antitrust laws. This fostered the rise of activist investors.

"If all of this had led to more efficient and innovative corporations, that would have been one thing," Stiglitz wrote. "But in fact, the new 'activist' investors pushed for seats on boards and pressured management into policies that were viewed as more 'shareholder-friendly'-- meaning friendlier to short-term investors-- including increasing dividends and buyouts."

The Securities and Exchange Commission continued this trend through the early 1990s.

And while the increasingly linked nature of CEO pay and stock performance was ostensibly to keep CEOs accountable to their shareholders, Stiglitz argued, it instead materialized as "an incentive to manipulate stock prices by using company money to buy back shares in order to drive prices higher." That's how you got from the average ratio of CEO-to-median-level-employee pay from 20-to-1 in 1965 to 295-to-1 today.

For Stiglitz, the outrage isn't that individuals making that much is a moral outrage by itself, it's that it's happening at the expense of the entire economy.

Stiglitz told us that this decades-old debate about how to balance the creation of short-term and long-term value is recently gaining new life in the US because of the venomous class class tensions and ugly politics arising out of income inequality, and because people in positions of power are looking at the big picture and realizing that something has to change.

And regardless of the performance of the stock market this year, the economy overall is not doing too well, Stiglitz argued, when you look at it from the perspective of GDP growth.

"When we were growing at 4% we might have been able to grow even faster," he said. "But we took the 4% and enjoyed it. But when we're growing at 2-2.5%, and we had been growing at 3.5%, the natural question is, 'What's happened? Is there something wrong?'"

What we're seeing today is largely the result of the ideas championed by the likes of Friedman that seemed so promising to those in power in the '80s, Stiglitz argued. It's contributed greatly to this combination of inequality and low growth in America.

Stiglitz said that while CEOs aren't going to solve inequality on their own, the reason they exist in society is to grow the economy, and more are realizing they need to make changes.

It's why, for example, someone like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, as the head of the largest asset manager in the world, has felt compelled to take a stand against short-termism. In a letter to CEOs this year, Fink announced that BlackRock will only do business with companies that have clearly defined long-term strategies that benefit in society in some way.

"Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential," Fink wrote. "It will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders. It will succumb to short-term pressures to distribute earnings, and, in the process, sacrifice investments in employee development, innovation, and capital expenditures that are necessary for long-term growth. It will remain exposed to activist campaigns that articulate a clearer goal, even if that goal serves only the shortest and narrowest of objectives."

For Stiglitz, Fink's letter and similar declarations from large companies like Unilever aren't calls to feel good and congratulate each other, but are arising out of a sense of urgency. It's an urgency to shed the Friedman doctrine.