The Elite Response to Catastrophe: Beat, Prey, Shove

With piles of furniture on curb-sides becoming a common sight all over the country as evictions ramp up because tens of millions of people have no jobs and no money to pay the rent, former First Lady Michelle Obama went on Instagram over the weekend to show her empathy with the exploding American underclass.

She posted a picture of herself lounging barefoot on an overstuffed sofa she'd transported all the way up to the rooftop terrace of her Washington, DC mansion. It was a way not only of demonstrating solidarity with all those losing the very roofs over their own heads, but of reassuring her millions of concerned fans not to worry about her and the self-diagnosed "low level depression" brought on by the pandemic lockdown. She is doing just fine compared to the "folks" out there working for "the rest of us."

Her self-righteous motto "When they go low, we go high," has been duly augmented by "When I feel low, I go high. And so can you!"

So, proles, stop feeling so down and out just because you're down, and literally out on the street. You, too, can live the elite al fresco lifestyle and perhaps even take up Michelle Obama's therapeutic bullet-journaling hobby on your very own outdoor sofa as you wait for the movers to take your earthly possessions to the auction block or the junkyard.

 If you're especially feeling low, and a rooftop terrace or Martha's Vineyard escape is not available at the moment, then you could opt to do what record numbers of your fellow Down and Outs awaiting their "deaths of despair" started doing long before Covid-19 ever hit the scene. You can go high on drugs and alcohol.

Of course, the Down and Out population is not really the intended audience to whom Michelle Obama has so magnanimously written:

There’s no reason to worry about me. Like I said in that conversation with @Michele__Norris, I’m thinking about the folks out there risking themselves for the rest of us—the doctors and nurses and essential workers of all kinds, I’m thinking about the teachers and students and parents who are just trying to figure out school for the fall. I’m thinking about the people out there protesting and organizing for a little more justice in our country."

If her idea of "a little more justice in our country" does not explicitly include a rent freeze, an eviction/foreclosure moratorium and legislation for the construction of tens of millions of new affordable housing units, it is likely because Michelle's husband had deliberately chosen not to include such relief on his own agenda during his eight years as president. The Obama administration's conscious choice to allow banks to throw millions of people out of their homes after the 2008 financial meltdown actually helped set the stage for the current catastrophe. "Folks" have never recovered from the first eviction/foreclosure crisis of more than a decade ago. Fully 94 percent of all the wealth "lost" as a result of Wall Street's greed-fueled housing bubble and subsequent bursting geysered up to the richest one percent of Americans - Michelle Obama's class, or what she seems to mean by "the rest of us."

As Binyamin Applebaum writes in a New York Times editorial:

The government dismissed the woes of homeowners and renters as personal tragedies that did not require the attention of the Treasury Department. The government was wrong. The millions of individual tragedies required action. A nation is a collection of people; the first job of government is to keep people from harm.

 Even on its own terms, the government’s indifference was a mistake. The massive dislocations shredded communities, as families were replaced by abandoned homes. Schools struggled to help displaced children, whose test scores declined and behavioral problems increased. Businesses lost their customers. Cities starved for property tax revenue slashed spending: Colorado Springs turned off one-third of its street lights.

 The accumulation of individual tragedies left lasting scars on the economy and on society.

Applebaum is being unnecessarily kind when he calls the manufactured cruelty of the Obama years - itself a manufactured prelude to the Trump years  - a "mistake." Crime against humanity, or at least depraved indifference to human life, would be a more apt description.

There is plenty of tone-deafness afflicting the elite circles basking at the level of Michelle Obama's rooftop terrace, of course. 

Donald Trump's own executive order halting evictions is no such thing. The language merely promises to "consider" some sort of eviction relief.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's idea of "a little justice" in the deliberate absence of any congressional relief for regular people was to do Michelle Obama's Instagram post one better, and post a prayer for "responsive justice." The gist of the sanctimonious plea to her Democratic caucus is to pray "even harder" for the GOP sadists than they pray for their unseen and forgotten constituents.

If prayers by Democratic politicians do not miraculously provide food, clothing and shelter for millions of hungry and evicted Americans, then their oligarchic task-masters have offered to vaguely think about helping the exploding Down and Out population themselves, sometime within the next 10 years or so.  

"A new non-profit, the New York Jobs CEO Council, will work with universities, the city and other groups to create new curriculums (sic) and apprenticeships over the next decade," announces the New York Times.

The pledge to prepare 100,000 Down and Outs for the jobs of the future was signed by more than two dozen of the wealthiest tax-averse corporations and oligarchs:

Details are scant, but the initiative has attracted the support of many of the most powerful chief executives in the country, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Laurence D. Fink of BlackRock, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Google.

 “We started with the C.E.O.s for a very specific reason,” said Gail O. Mellow, who will run the new council and most recently served as president of LaGuardia Community College. “We wanted that buy in.”

Of course, some of the same Wall Street and corporate predators who evicted millions of people after the first financial crisis and bought up the foreclosed properties with a vengeance, only to begin evicting millions of people anew during the pandemic, now again try to present themselves as their victims' saviors.

There is seemingly no limit to how low they'll go for their endless high profits.

As we brace ourselves for next week's Democratic Convention, and speeches by the Obamas and Clintons and Nancy Pelosi, the Times assures us that while the hearts (sic) of Wall Streeters aren't necessarily with Joe Biden, their wallets most assuredly are.

It helps, the article states,  that he's been historically viewed as a "distressed asset" which can be bought low.

They also think that marginalized, jobless, evicted, perennially exploited people can be bought low and brought even lower. 

Is there no pain that these prayerful predators will not try to commodify and consume?

One consolation, as more and more commodified humans protest on the streets (for a whole lot more than "a little justice") is that the ruling elites are displaying their arrogance and ignorance and cluelessness in ever more entertaining and inspiring ways with every passing day. 

Their very existence is a clarion call to action for us to get off our curbside sofas. Our furniture and worldly possessions might disappear, but we cannot and we must not. We must refuse to be part of their planned development, their commodified human refuse dump.