Upstream - COVID and The Rot of The American Ruling Class with Doug Henwood

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

Continuing our focus on the coronavirus pandemic and its intersection with capitalism, in this conversation we speak with Doug Henwood, an economist and host of the radio show and podcast Behind the News. Doug is a regular guest on our show, and in this conversation he helped make sense of much of the economics surrounding the coronavirus, explaining the failure of the government's response, the different possibilities of how we might come out of this pandemic in the long run, and what coronavirus has taught us about the failures of capitalism. The interview was conducted by Upstream producer, Robert Raymond. Upstream's theme music composed by: Robert Raymond. Thanks to Haley Heyderickx for the intermission music.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Ah The American elite now has just had it, everything has gone their way now since, you know, early 1980s, late 1970s. And they are absolutely afraid of yielding anything to popular demands. The lowering of expectations is one of the great achievements of neoliberalism. And they're afraid to do anything that might reverse that because if people start getting benefits out of government, you know, they're going to want more. benefits out of government, you know, they're going to want more. And despite what could be an extremely popular appeal of such programs, they just don't want to do that because it would undermine their class authority. And they really don't want any part of that. I think in a crisis, you just have to spend money and not even think about where it's coming from. I can understand

the rationale for that. But, you know, coming out of this, or if we want to come out of this in a decent and civilized fashion, we need to do things very, very differently. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Continuing our focus on the coronavirus pandemic and its intersection with capitalism, in this conversation, we speak with Doug Henwood, an economist and the host of the radio show and podcast Behind the News. Doug is a regular guest in our show. And in this conversation, he helped us make sense of much of the economics surrounding the coronavirus, explaining the failure of the U.S. government's response, the different

possibilities of how we might come out of the pandemic in the long run, and what the coronavirus has taught us about the failures of capitalism. This interview was conducted by Upstream co-producer Robert Raymond. It's great to talk to you again. Thanks for coming back on Upstream. Oh, it's good to be here. So I guess, yeah, just to start off, what have you been up to? How are you doing during the quarantine? Well, I'm in my rather pleasant apartment in Brooklyn with my wife and kid.

And we're all getting along pretty well, but we'd rather be somewhere else doing things, living our normal lives. But we're lucky enough to have the resources and privilege to shelter. And we got food and all the essentials. And a lot of people dying around us. A few weeks ago, we heard many, many more sirens. The frequency has died down some. But the other thing that's striking is, in the sounds of daily life,

is that we live below the flight path to LaGuardia Airport. And it used to be a plane would come in every minute or two. And now it's down to about one an hour, I guess. So the combination of hearing sirens, ambulance sirens, plus no airplanes is really an audio underscore of just how strange things are. But, you know, we're just soldiering on. I've been pretty much sealed in for about six weeks, and the rest of us for about four or five. And one gets stir-crazy, but I guess it's better than getting coronavirus disease. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, it's also, I find it pretty hard to concentrate on anything serious. It's just the attention span is somewhat limited, the sense of dread and anxiety and displacement and weirdness, to concentrate on anything serious. You know, it's just the attention span is somewhat limited. The sense of dread and anxiety and displacement and weirdness sometimes overwhelms one's sensorium. But, you know, getting by, I guess. Well, not to add to your sense of dread, but I guess one of the first things I wanted to ask you about is, so we're talking on Tuesday, to ask you about is, so we're talking on Tuesday, the 21st of April, and just yesterday, we saw oil futures plummet. And yeah, I guess just to start, can you just sketch a picture of what's going on with this recession, I suppose we can call it, in terms of the different varying causes as far as like the oil price wars, coronavirus,

and that kind of thing? Yeah, I mean, the oil price wars had weakened the oil price, but obviously it's the collapse in demand that is really driving this most recent decline to the point where there are certainly weird technicalities in the futures market that made this happen. But there was a point yesterday where oil was trading at minus $34 a barrel. It means if you owned it, you had to pay somebody $34 to get rid of it. That's because of the lack of storage capacity. There are also people who have hired tankers that are filling them up at very, very low prices and hope to profit from a rebound. We'll see what that happens. The market is pricing in a recovery, the oil market, but also I think the stock,

the financial markets generally, are assuming there'll be a fairly sharp recovery later in the year. But we have to really take a measure of just how severe this damage is. The New York Fed, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is doing a weekly, more or less real-time estimate of GDP. And they released one this morning. It has GDP down pretty much the same as last week, minus 11%. To put that into perspective, that is about the worst year of the 1929 to 33 collapse, that's 1932. It's about a little under half of what we experienced during that whole four-year

slide. And it's, I think, about three times the worst quarter in the Great Recession of 2009. So we're seeing, in a matter of just a few months, a decline on the order of half the Great Depression, four years of slide. What we've seen in the job market, the initial claims for unemployment insurance, 22 million people applied. That probably underestimates the degree of dislocation because the state unemployment systems are so overloaded that they're not processing them quickly enough. So we're going to see probably worse numbers when we get the new ones on Thursday morning. So 22 million, 25 million, whatever it's going to be, decline in employment. It's just a remarkable, remarkable

decline. I think we're likely to see unemployment rate around 15%, either for May or June, maybe higher. It's just a savage dislocation. And the amount of misery this is causing is really, you know, I'm sure it's very, very intense. People who are just completely broke. We see all these images of people lining up for miles just to get a bag of food worth $50. It's the distress. And what's making this all so much worse is the insane American healthcare finance system, the under-preparedness of our public health infrastructure, and the complete absence of a safety net. The relief that's coming out of the unemployment insurance enhancement that passed Congress a few weeks ago, That's good, but it's still well short of what it should be,

and it's temporary. So it's just the insane lack of a welfare state in this country is really making this far, far worse than it has to be. And then the erosion of state capacity, the lack of the government at every level, in most cases from the president on down, has been just stunning. They have bungled the management of this thing so dramatically that it just takes the breath away. But I guess that's what 40 years of neoliberalism does to you.

I read these stories in the Financial Times, especially of what other countries are doing. And they've just been so much more competent. Everybody's getting hit by this pretty hard, but they've really managed to mitigate the damage through far more effective planning and a far more robust welfare state in many cases, or just better, more skilled state management of the crisis. So we're really experiencing about the worst hit in the developed world. Now, of course, the poorer countries are doing very, very badly. I mean, Africa is going to get hammered badly. Haiti is getting hammered badly. But among the richer countries in the world, the US is just doing so much worse than just about everyone else. Yeah, I definitely think this pandemic has revealed a lot that many people probably knew

already, but that many people didn't realize how under equipped and unprepared and unwilling our country is to really step up when it comes to, you know, big crises like this. And I'm still waiting on my stimulus check. I'm wondering, could you just sketch out what has the US government done in terms of the stimulus package and a lot of the bailouts that have been happening over the last couple weeks? Can you give us an idea of sort of where that money is going and who is, I guess, benefiting the most from these government stimulus packages? Well, we got several angles in this. One is what the Federal Reserve has been doing, mostly by creating money out of thin air,

which is the Federal Reserve's power to do. They've pumped, I've lost count of how much, but trillions of dollars into the financial system to try to keep it from imploding. You know, it's distressing to see this happen, but if the financial system implodes, we'd be worse off than we are already. But what's distressing about that is the fact that all this money is going just to try to restore the status quo ante, as we did in 2008, 2009. It's just spending enormous amounts of what is basically funny money. It's mostly not taxpayer money. But the amount of effort mobilized to try to preserve the status quo, well, any kind

of transformation. It's breathtakingly depressing. And you just don't see any attempt to have the financial system emerge better than what it is now. Then, of course, was the bill that Congress passed, and there's another one that they're about to pass, probably, although it's still not finalized as we speak. But the $2 trillion package, the so-called CARES package that Congress passed a couple of weeks ago, has several components. One is that $1,200 stimulus check, which a lot of people are not getting. I checked in the IRS website and said it couldn't find any information for me. I don't know what their problem is. And it's $1,200 per person. I think $500 if you've got a kid,

a dependent kid, which is certainly better than nothing, but it's not very much. It's about, I don't know, 10 days of the average household's income. That's just, for most people, that's not going to get you very far, especially if you've lost your job and lost your health insurance and have a lot of other debts to pay. It's really going to be pretty bad. And then the other parts of it are aid to business. And there is a large business component, about, I think, about $500 billion, which Trump is pretty much wanting to administer as he sees fit. It was just reported yesterday or today that he's looking to bail out the oil industry, which is just a grotesque thing to do. We should be trying to think about how to wind down the Carmen business, not bailing it out. But Trump wants our great oil and gas industry, as he put

it in a tweet. He wants to keep that going for years to come. So he's got that $500 billion to do pretty much what he wants with, it seems, because he has promised not to pay any attention to what the inspector general says or not share any information with him. Then there is this another, what, 250 years, $300 billion devoted to small business assistance, which by many accounts is a complete disaster. I've got a friend who owns several small restaurants in Brooklyn and her bank wouldn't give her any of this aid even though she's well qualified for it. She's the kind of business that you'd think

that the small business aid would aim to assist. Just on technicalities, like she had a checking account and a line of credit with the Bank of America but they said, oh no, you don't have a credit card with us so we can't give it to you. It's just random nonsense. But now we're seeing reports that large businesses are getting some of this small business aid through, I don't know, loopholes or just violating the law, I don't know what,

but the Financial Times had a count of 83 reasonably large public companies that are getting aid under the small business assistance program, which they shouldn't be. The Ruth's Chris Steakhouse chain got money under this program, a company with 5,000 employees. That's not a small business by any measure. The Shake Shack, the restaurant chain, got some, got 10 million bucks. They were embarrassed by the publicity and gave it back. But yeah, this is just a total disaster. And this is one of the things that makes me worry about how we can have any kind of recovery out of this if and when this disease ever lifts, that so many small businesses are just not going to be able to survive a couple of months of closure. And they just won't be able to reopen if the all clear ever sounds.

The restaurants, retailers, things like that, which employ a lot of people and are also very important to the fabric of social life, are going to be very hard to reopen. And so who's going to rehire people if these entities don't exist? Large businesses are getting all this aid too. Companies that squandered billions of dollars buying their own stock over the last decade, they're getting bailouts. The airline industry, Boeing, a lot of the financial sector. So it's just the people who don't deserve to be rewarded or supported are getting rewarded and supported, and those who do are not. That's pretty much the American way. You know, this always

has a long history, of course. Always with Trump is the case that things were always kind of bad, but he's made them worse. And we're seeing that right now. All these deep fissures in American society, class, race, region, geography, you know, they're just being exposed so nakedly now that they've been long in the making. But now it's just reached this point of crisis and breakage. and other sort of folks in the media when we make demands for things like universal health care or, you know, robust social safety net programs that the question always comes up, you know, how are we going to pay for these things? And I'm curious what you think of that in terms of how, like, where does this money come from? And why is it suddenly appearing out of thin air right now when it comes to things like actually creating programs that could help prevent a lot of the crises that we are currently experiencing? What are your thoughts on that? Where is the money coming from and why can't we allocate this money in more preventative ways?

Well, you know, money is never short when it comes to reinforcing the status quo. That seems to be the issue. And there was this great, very revealing editorial in Businessweek magazine, I think it was 1947. When we're coming out of World War II, a lot of people were afraid the depression was going to return. And there was some people wanted to have sort of welfare Keynesianism, public housing, social welfare packaged as Britain was doing at that time. And then, of course, the alternative was building up the military. And as Businessweek sagely pointed out, the kinds of public welfare programs undermine

the social hierarchy, whereas the military reinforces it. Therefore, we should go with the military Keynesianism and not the social democratic kind. And that thinking, you know, 70 years later, 73 years later, still dominates. There's always money available to support the existing hierarchies, but there's never any money available to do anything that might undermine them. And the American elite now has just had it, everything has gone their way now since, you know, early 1980s, late 1970s.

And they are absolutely afraid of yielding anything to popular demands. The lowering of expectations is one of the great achievements of neoliberalism. And they're afraid to do anything that might reverse that because if people start getting benefits out of government, they're going to want more. And despite what could be an extremely popular appeal of such programs, they just don't want to do that because it would undermine their class authority. And they really don't want any part of that. I think in a crisis, you just have to spend money and not even think about where it's coming from. I can understand the rationale for that.

But coming out of this, or if we want to come out of this in a decent and civilized fashion. We need to do things very, very differently. We need a different kind of healthcare finance, Medicare for all. The public health infrastructure has just been cut, cut, cut, predating Trump. It's been going on for 10 or 20 years. The CDC has been defunded. Again, Trump has made it worse, but all this stuff predates Trump. The absolute lack of income support for people who are broke, student debt because we don't have a decent free public education system. All these things that would help us

get out of this in a civilized fashion would be impossible under our current political structure. But if you look at, I think what we really need to get out of this is something like the Green New Deal, meaning both parts of that. The green part, because we do need to get out of this is something like the Green New Deal, meaning both parts of that. The green part, because we do need to address the climate crisis.

And as the climate change gets worse, we're going to see more pandemics. And public health and the climate crisis are really very, very tightly linked issues. But also the New Deal's part, the infrastructure. The country is absolutely falling apart in many crucial ways. We need to rebuild it, but in different ways, with a clean energy system, with a clean transportation system. This would help us get out of this crisis. If we had the welfare part of a Green New Deal, we would have a decent civilized social welfare state. So these ideas are actually right now,

very, very practical, because it's hard to see how we're going to recover from this economic and social shock in any way that doesn't involve that kind of redistributionist public investment agenda. But, you know, it's really hard to imagine with Trump in the White House and the Senate and Republican hands and the House in pretty centrist mainstream business Democrat hands. It's hard to see how that's going to happen. And it's hard to imagine if Joe Biden wins, which I don't know, it doesn't seem very likely, but it's hard to imagine him turning into some sort of FDR figure. So what seems very practical, like this kind of Green New Deal approach to recovering economically and socially from this crisis, it also seems impossible for our political system to achieve. So you mentioned that the US is, our response is looking pretty bad in terms of

the overall developed countries internationally. I'm wondering, are there any countries that you would say are doing things right or doing things on the right path that we might want to aspire to? Just maybe some specific examples of some of the policies or interventions that they've introduced. Yeah, well, quite a few countries are offering help to small businesses to keep people on the payroll, keep them open, which, as I said, is really crucial to have some kind of economic recovery. We need to have these businesses alive when we're allowed to emerge from our houses again. Germany is doing that. Denmark is doing that. Even Britain is doing that. Tory Britain is doing a better job of that. But then on the public health side, Taiwan, South Korea, China after a slow start,

Germany, they're doing testing, isolation, tracking, all the things that you should do from a public health point of view. They're doing it. And it's showing results. The death toll, of course, New Zealand has been remarkable, but New Zealand is a small and isolated country. So it is in some degree a specialized case. But the public health interventions that they've done are just textbook stuff and they've done everything right. And their death toll shows it. We've done everything wrong and our death toll shows it. We've basically done nothing but delay for months and blame other people for our problems. Of course, some of the governors are doing better than the federal level, but now we've got all these idiot southern governors

rushing to open their states up. Georgia now is going to open up nail salons and gyms. If you wanted to pick a list of businesses you shouldn't reopen, it's ones where people are close to each other and exchanging bodily fluids. It's remarkable. But the governor of Georgia did campaign ads like blowing things up. He's going to blow up government spending. He walks around with his gun. He's got a big pickup truck he's going to haul all the illegals out in. This is the mentality that a good bit of the country is governed by now.

That's obviously visible in the White House. The coastal states are doing better, the Pacific states. The governors have a compact to come up with some kind of joint strategy to recover from this. Five or six states in the Northeast have a similar compact. So there's some intelligence happening at the state level, but at the national level, and this is a national problem, it's just not there. And it's a global problem as well, for which we need global cooperation. And the president has just got his xenophobic Jones on, and he wants to ban all the

immigrants and insult the Chinese. That's not what we need to do. We need to study what other countries are doing, and we need international cooperation and solidarity. But we're not seeing too much of that coming out of Washington. It's a depressing thing. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with economist Doug Henwood. Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm

Mmm Mmm Mmm Face me Face me Face me, face me entirely Tell me, tell me what's wrong wrong Is it the bridge of my nose or the backs of my skin

Is it the pull of my hips that you couldn't let in Is it the bridge between worlds that makes you feel alone Well I wish that I had known Between worlds that makes you feel alone

Well I wish that I had known You're alone Well I wish that I had known Is it the bridge in my hair or the back of my skin? Is it the weight of the room that you couldn't hold in? Is it the bridge between worlds that makes you feel alone? Well, I wish that I had That was No Face by Hayley Hendricks. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with economist Doug Henwood.

So there's this idea that when there are crises in society, that at times they can open up gaps where new ideas, and this is an idea that like Naomi Klein and Rebecca Solnit in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, this idea of like disaster socialism, disaster collectivism, whatever you want to call it, that these can be opportunities for folks on the left to seize. And alternatively, there's the idea of disaster capitalism, where, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste. And we see like a lot of examples globally, and also in the United States of disasters and crises, which have been opportunities for people with more nefarious intentions come in and sort of make a profit off of. So I'm curious, do you see this pandemic, you think it's going to be ultimately a threat to global capitalism and an opportunity for the left? Or alternatively,

do you see it shoring up global capitalism? Well, I think both things are happening simultaneously. Obviously, some very bad people are trying to do very bad things. Just the hoarding of face masks and things like that is just remarkable to watch. The most ghoulish features of capitalism are just threatening people's lives in such large numbers. And God knows what these people, you read these stories of hospitals trying to acquire equipment, ventilators or protective equipment, and being afraid that somehow Homeland Security is going to hijack it. I mean, what is, our government is hijacking supplies and we don't even know what they're doing with it. I mean, I imagine they're like hoarding it to sell, I don't know, or for Trump to give to his friends in Texas. I don't know what he's got in mind, but it's certainly bringing out the worst in people. But on the other hand,

like I said earlier, that Green New Deal is really a very practical idea when you look at the situation we're in, when the kinds of things we need to get out of this problem are to support people, to provide them more income in periods of crisis, to provide them with good health coverage, to recreate a decent public health infrastructure, which has been totally ravaged, to address the climate crisis, which is going to create more pandemics and other kinds of natural disasters, or natural in quotes, disasters in the coming years. So this is all very practical stuff we need to do. It's not, you know, as Nancy Pelosi said, the green dream, whatever. No, it's really, it's something that's very practical. So it just looks really urgent. And you're seeing some shifts

in elite opinion. I was surprised to see Jamel Bowie, a New York Times columnist who has been a very conventional Democrat, liberal Democrat, but he never liked Bernie Sanders in 2016. Quoting Rosa Luxemburg on the choice being between socialism and barbarism. I was just amazed to see that in the op-ed page of the New York Times the other week. You have Financial Times columnists saying things like we need to, an editorial is saying, we need to reorient our priorities away from supporting, cutting government, cutting the public sector, and supporting big business towards rebuilding the public sector and redistributing income. It's the Financial Times, which calls itself the world's business newspaper. So you do see in some corners of elite opinion a shift towards a more kind of social democratic

mode of thinking. And I think despite the fact that Sanders dropped out of the race, the movement that he leaves behind, and not just the movement behind his personal candidacy, but also political organization at the state and local level has been greatly stimulated by his candidacy and the growth in Democratic Socialism in America and such. These things linger. DSA got about 4,000 new members the day that Sanders dropped out, which was exactly opposite of what I was afraid of. So that's encouraging. There is this willingness to organize, to press for more radical solutions to our problems. A little opening at the elite level, but on the other hand, the political establishment, the business establishment is just digging in its heels and just sticking with stupidity and greed. So I think we have this very contradictory moment.

It could break either way. Like I said, I can't imagine Joe Biden turning into FDR should he become president, but I guess anything is possible. Yeah, it's totally true. You see on both sides a rush towards people who, I guess, just in the last couple of days were out protesting because they wanted to open the economy back up. And you see it's almost like people rushing in to die for capitalism. And then at the same time, you see people pushing things like rent strikes and trying to shift the conversation in terms of exploring whose labor is actually essential. And I think one of the interesting things about this pandemic is it's really revealed which workers are actually the most important and how the pay structures that we have in place in this country are just so ass backwards.

Yeah, I mean, it's been striking. We've heard at least since the late 90s that the origin of economic growth and innovation and productivity is the creative class or technology or intangibles or all kinds of mystical stuff that got popular during the new economy days in the late 90s, and then experienced something of a revival about three or four years ago. But what we're seeing now is it's ordinary workers who really make everything go. And watching the desperation of the capitalist class to get their ordinary workers back to work has been fascinating because they understand the origin of their profits is in that labor. And without that labor, they don't make anything.

And as a friend of mine said the other day, this proves the labor theory of value is correct, that workers are the origin of all value. So there is this moment of intense visibility for the fact that ordinary workers are really what make everything run. And people praise them, but they don't pay them. They don't protect them. And it would be really nice if we could change those priorities around. It's been impressive also to watch some workers organizing, Amazon workers, Whole Foods workers, Instacart workers, organizing for better pay and more physical protection on the job. So there is, at least it seems, some degree of class consciousness and rebellion spreading around. People organizing rent strikes, yeah, that's

impressive. Although people just don't have the money to pay their rent, but it's nice if they do it as an organized strike and not just as a private action, because it might force the politics into a better direction. Now, these open-up demonstrations that we're seeing around the country, they're mostly pretty small. They're mostly organized by far-right organizations. And I think a lot of the people there are small business owners. So they're being presented as some sort of, you know, authentic voice of the working class that just wants to go back to work. I think a lot of them are small business owners who want everything to open up again

so they can put their workers' lives on the line to keep them going. And I think they get a little bit too much coverage. You see these yahoos with Confederate flags and Nazi flags and anti-Semitic signs and stuff like that. Yeah, we shouldn't really think them as being very representative of anything but a kind of Yahoo right-wing small business constituency. And it's kind of reassuring that they are rather small. This is not a mass movement. You look at the polling. Most people are concerned about going back too soon, not staying mass movement. You look at the polling. Most people are concerned

about going back too soon, not staying closed too long. And they're suffering. There's no doubt that people are suffering because of these closures, but they understand that if we don't do this for a while, it's only going to result in more death and dislocation. So yeah, I don't think those folks have too much support, but it always makes for a good TV to show a bunch of yahoos with their guns, causing trouble. Yeah, well, it's definitely a spectacle to see that kind of stuff. Despite yet, it is heartening to hear that it's relatively minor, in terms of the larger scale. And yeah, so I'm not asking you to predict the future necessarily. And this might be, you know, we might be a little bit too early on to even be thinking about this. But I thought. And this might be, you know, we might be a little bit too early on to even be thinking

about this. But I thought I would just ask you, you know, in terms of, do you have any sense of when you think the economy might start recovering or when things might end up going, you know, quote, back to normal? And that's a whole other thing, too. It's like this return to normalcy is definitely something that we don't want. Normal was a disaster and a failure in many ways. So yeah, I'm just wondering, what do you think about that? What do you think are some of the long-term, maybe short-ish, longer-term implications of all of this?

Yeah, on the question of returning to normal, I saw an article in the British newspaper, The Independent, the other day that said that a lot of people in Britain don't really want to go back to normal. You know, they don't like being locked up in their houses and not being able to live their lives with some degree of freedom. But on the other hand, they welcome the relief from stress and enjoy having a bit of time to spend with their family. And they're seeing the normal in a new light, perhaps, perhaps more critical light. So yeah, there is that, which is interesting. But, you know, it all depends upon, of course, the disease takes, you know, if we can get people tested, if we can get some kind of treatment or, I don't know, a vaccine seems like a pipe dream, but, you know, some kind of better treatment, get people tested and isolated and actually get those public health kinds of interventions correct for a change, then, you know, who knows, by June, July, maybe, you know, people can start emerging from their

house arrest. But I think it's going to take quite a while for the economy to recover from this. There's the aspect I mentioned before, just the amount of damage that's being done to so many businesses who might not be able to reopen, or if they can reopen, they'll be very crippled by debt and insolvency. And it's hard to predict the psychology of what people will be like as they emerge from this. Will they be cautious and be reluctant to go out and live normally again? Will they be afraid of their neighbors? Will they be afraid of public spaces? We don't know. Or will they have the opposite reaction, which is, I want to go on a party. Like, you know, I've been deferring things for so long.

Let's just be extravagant. I don't know. Either is possible. But the way I think is most likely, which is not what Wall Street sees. A lot of people on Wall Street think that we're going to see a pretty rapid recovery late in the year. I don't see that. I think, you know, there's been so much damage and it's going to take so long to recover

from this. And there's also a lot of psychological damage, you know, like the fear and loneliness are going to affect people for some time to come. So, yeah, I think both the economic and social recovery from this could be fairly protracted and difficult. And, yeah, speaking of like the psychological part, and this comes from a relatively privileged position because there are a lot of, a whole lot of people that are still out there on the front lines, grocery workers and nurses and folks that are delivering stuff, like all sorts of people are still working. But for those people who have really had the pace of their lives change in terms of maybe working from home or maybe not having to work as much and that kind of thing. I'm just curious, what's your sense of maybe just personally, but also speculating on

others, the sense of how unsustainable the pace of our lives had been before this? And do you see people emerging out of this with a sense of like, oh, wow, this is what it could be like. I don't have to go into work to get my job done. Or, wow, I'm feeling maybe not a lot less stress because being quarantined is stressful in other ways. But just in terms of our hyper productivity, in terms of our jobs and the pace of our life, do you think this might have some kind of effect on people as they come out of it? And maybe people will have a sense of what could be instead? Yeah, I wonder about that because I suspect that people

who are working from home are nowhere near as productive as people who are working in an office. There's too many distractions and also the stress and distractions of the crisis itself probably are making people not work at their peak.

And so the bosses may want people back in the office where they can supervise them and kick them in the butt if they don't look like they're working hard enough. So there may be that kind of struggle about how to organize work as we emerge from this. But you're suggesting that people are going to say, wow, why do I have to work so hard? What is the point of all this? And I find that one of the difficulties I have in concentrating on things sometimes is like, what really matters? You know, does it really matter that I finish this thing?

Isn't, you know, life and love more important than the meeting of productivity goals? It'd be nice if people got a sense that there are things more important than life than just working and accumulating. And maybe they're going to taste that. I don't know. It's hard to read what the likely outcome is going to be, but I would hope that some good things could come out of this miserable experience. That kind of change in consciousness,

but also the kind of change in politics and policy that might lead to a more humane order. So I guess we can go either way. It could get more brutal, more oppressive, meaner, and more competitive, or it could turn in a more humane direction. I hope we go in the more humane direction, but given the course of American history, that's a little hard to imagine, but I guess anything is possible. Yeah. Well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see. And yeah, I guess just to wrap up here, I'm curious, you have been working on a book, I believe, that you mentioned the last time I spoke with you about the rot of the American ruling class. And I'm just wondering, do you have an update on that? How's that going? You're still working on that? And yeah, what else have you been up to? Yeah, I'm doing a piece for Jacobin, a long piece for Jacobin on the ruling class, which is kind of yet another rehearsal for this longer book project

I've been thinking about for a decade, but that'll contain the core of the argument. And it's very visible in this crisis now. We have a governing elite that is just so greedy and stupid and destructive that it's damaging the society as a whole. You know, it'd be nice if we had a society that wasn't organized this way and we actually had, you know, self-government and egalitarianism and all those things that socialists dream

of. But the society as it exists depends very importantly on the skill of its governing elite. And we have a governing elite that is looking really, really, really shabby. People blame Trump, and certainly he's a part of the problem, but this goes way back before Trump. And a society that can produce a leader like Trump has some very serious problems too. I mean, he's a symptom as much as he is a cause of anything. So yeah, the rot of the American elite has been very destructive to the broad society. And one of the reasons I think they've gotten so rotten is that they have faced so little in challenges from below.

After the defeat of the working class in the early Reagan years, early 1980s, they've just gotten their way with everything. And they don't have to make any concessions and they can just be as brutal and greedy as they like. And I'm hoping that period might be coming to a close now, but it's a sad spectacle. It sure is. We're living through it right now. Yes. Well, thanks so much for your insights and your time. Really love having you on the show and really appreciate it. And best of luck with the book project and with getting through the self-isolation. And yeah, thanks again. Okay, well, thanks for having me. Always good talking to you.

You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Doug Henwood, part of our ongoing series on the coronavirus pandemic. Thanks to Haley Hendricks for the intermission music. pandemic. Thanks to Haley Hendricks for the intermission music. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. Because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit organization Independent Arts and Media, any donations you make to Upstream are tax exempt. You can listen to any of our past documentaries and conversations at upstreampodcast.org and you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Upstream Podcast. I'm going to go ahead and do that. Thank you.