EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
From March through mid-October, as Covid-19 spread, the wealth of US billionaires collectively increased some $931 billion—or nearly one-third. The very richest grew even richer as more than 225,000 Americans have died and lost work. The pandemic is not, as some expected, a “great equalizer.” It has exacerbated the cruel inequities of the US political economy, preying on the vulnerable while plutocrats profited.
This juxtaposition exposed the falsehood in President Trump’s claim to have built the “greatest economy in the history of the world” and the delusion in his promise that next year will be the best ever.
As the pandemic forced the shutdown of much of the economy, well-positioned companies and monopolies—in online retail, the pharmaceutical industry, telemedicine, videoconferencing services—thrived. The net worth of some of the world’s richest people—including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who owns the The Washington Post) and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—shot up. But others also profited.
Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
Katrina vanden HeuvelTwitterKatrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation, America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture. An expert on international affairs and US politics, she is an award-winning columnist and frequent contributor to The Guardian. Vanden Heuvel is the author of several books, including The Change I Believe In: Fighting for Progress in The Age of Obama, and co-author (with Stephen F. Cohen) of Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers.