John Nichols - Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis

CORONAVIRUS CRIMINALS
AND PANDEMIC PROFITEERS

CORONAVIRUS CRIMINALS
AND PANDEMIC PROFITEERS

ACCOUNTABILITY FOR THOSE
WHO CAUSED THE CRISIS

John Nichols

First published by Verso 2022

John Nichols 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-377-9

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-425-7 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-424-0 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Garamond by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

In memory of Steve Cobble

Contents

Accountability Is a Dish
Best Served Fresh, and Hot

When I interviewed New York Assemblyman Ron Kim, a hero of this book, he told me, Theres no justice without accountability. The legislator was not merely suggesting that accountability for coronavirus criminals and pandemic profiteers equaled justice. Rather, he was explaining that the systemic change that might assure a more humane and equitable response to the next catastrophe will never come if the wrongdoers of this epoch are let off the hook. We need accountability to get to the justice that we need, whether its systemic changes or anything. But if we dont have accountability at the front end, we cant get to any of the changes.

Kims reference to getting accountability at the front end reminds us of an essential premise in the struggle for social progress. It is best to demand change when memories of callousness and cruelty are fresh. The passage of time dulls the appetite for necessary action to address fundamental flaws in the organization of any society, and that is especially true in Western democracies that make a great show of the peaceful transfer of power. There is a pressure to forgive and forget, to reshuffle and rehabilitate the personalities who possess great political and economic power. As a result, we often get the theater of change without the reality. A game of musical chairs may put different individuals in different seats. But, without accountability, it is the same game, with the same people sitting in the same chairs.

The only way transformative change occurs is if the bad players are told they cant play the game anymore. And that only happens if their lying, cheating, and stealing is called out at the point when anger over this wrongdoing is intense enough to write a new set of rules. This isnt an untested concept. It is as old as the story of mans inhumanity to man. But in the political sphere, it is a notion that must be regularly reintroduced.

The greatest polemicist of the past century, the British writer and parliamentarian Michael Foot, understood the power of an immediate demand for accountability. When Britain found itself in the worst of all circumstances, at the beginning of a world war in which victory was far from assured, Foot and a pair of his fellow journalists at the London Evening Standard asked the essential question: How did we get into this mess? They answered that question with a short book, Guilty Men, which called out the British political leaders who had appeased Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s.

Their enormously influential book made a fierce assertion about the war effort in which everyone had become engaged. The fight would not be won if the appeasers were allowed to return to positions of power. Accountability was not, in Foots view, a narrow project involving the settling of partisan or ideological scores. It was a vital strugglea JAccuse !that sought to dismiss from the political stage the weak and compromising leaders of the past so that a new and bolder generation might save Britain and the world.

To that end, Foot and his compatriots, Frank Owen and Peter Howard, opened their book with a seventy-six word preface:

On a spring day in 1793, a crowd of angry men burst their way through the doors of the assembly room where the French Convention was in session. A discomforted figure addressed them from the rostrum. What do the people desire? he asked. The Convention has only their welfare at heart. The leader of the angry crowd replied, The people havent come here to be given a lot of phrases. They demand a dozen guilty men.

The book Guilty Men was slightly more ambitious than the Jacobins. It identified a cast of fifteen of the worst players, most of them Tories, all of them men. The names were named. The crimes were charged. Yet, Foot and his co-writers did not merely call out the ignoramuses or poltroons or cowards. They proposed a cleansing liberation.

Foots biographer, Kenneth Morgan, explained that the publication of Guilty Men assured that everyone knew who the villains of the thirties were, and why they could never be forgiven. Foot admitted that the book, written in a rush and a rage, aimed, simply, to secure changes in the men running the war. Yet, eighty years on, it seemed to me the most relevant reading during the long months of the coronavirus pandemic.

This book, inspired by Foot and the pamphleteering tradition he embraced, casts a somewhat wider net. It features guilty men and guilty women. Instead of twelve, or fifteen, there are eighteen offendersreflecting, I would argue, the wider array of wrong-doing during the course of the pandemic. The focus is, primarily, on the political class that, in a democratic republic, is supposed to be able to set things right. But it does not stop there. It considers, as well, the most egregious offenders among the economic and social elites.

The point, which I will return to in the concluding chapter, is to demand accountability in our moment as Michael Foot did in his. It will make you fiercely angry as you read, declared a review of Guilty Men in 1940. And it is anger that is needed to sweep these relics of appeasement, incompetence and muddle out of public life.

It is this justified anger, this righteous fury at those who caused thousands of unnecessary deaths, and at those who enriched themselves in a time of crisis, that remains Americas best hope for achieving accountabilityand for the justice that extends from it.

In February of 2020, I was on the campaign trail, covering the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. March was going to be a busy monthwith a book festival and union events in Tucson, then the mad rush of rallies, town hall meetings, caucuses, and primary elections that would lead to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee and the Republican National Convention in Charlotte. But March didnt go as planned. After a speech to the Ohio Federation of Teachers in Columbus, and a last dinner with my friend and comrade Amy Hanauer, I was off the road. The country was locking down. People started getting sick, and dying, from Covid-19. The economy stalled. The stock market crashed.

Suddenly, I found myself covering a different story. Some of the first articles I wrote were on transit workers who were dying at a shocking rate as the coronavirus pandemic overtook New York and other cities. Then I wrote about machinists working around the clock to produce ventilators. And members of Congress passing massive spending bills to deal with an overwhelming crisis. And a president denying the crisis. While the pandemic may have been unprecedented in some senses, the predictable patterns of political chicanery and corporate profiteering quickly emerged. I recognized that nothing would change unless, this time, we kept a record of the ways in which even the most challenging moments are corrupted by those who refuse to recognize the common good. My longtime editor Andy Hsiao was seeing what I was seeing. We started talking about this book. Andy and I have worked together for two decades and I cherish our partnership. I also value the rest of the team at Verso, my publisher for many years, which embraced this project from the start. I want to extend special thanks to Mark Martin, for his patience and support, and to Jeffrey Klein, for wise suggestions regarding the manuscript.