(PHOTO CREDITS: Courtesy Tax Justice Network)
As economies crumble under coronavirus pandemic, powerful interests are hoping to get rich from huge government bailouts. A well-informed Washington D.C. insider described the latest U.S. bailout package, for instance, as a “corporate coup” to reshape the U.S. economy:
“it’s really really bad, and much of the bad stuff is not being included in the sleazy marketing materials . . [it is] a Christmas wish-list of corporate lobbyists.
. .
The bill establishes a series of boring-sounding slush funds [with] alphabet-soup names . . that’s where the real money is.”
Economist Gabriel Zucman has described it as literally a $170 billion tax cut for real estate tycoons.
With President Trump declaring that “I’ll be the oversight” for the bailout, and potentially receiving a personal bonanza from it, this looks bad. And the pandemic is giving other authoritarians elsewhere opportunities to erode political freedoms further.
But on the positive side, governments are having to throw out broken old orthodoxies and bring in progressive policies — such as versions of universal basic income, or nationalisations — that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago. Everyone is scrambling for money.
