“Capitalism Kills” could have been a headline in Pravda, the official “newspaper” of the former Soviet Union.

Instead, it’s billionaires themselves who are responsible for such a sentiment. They are doing their level best to persuade workers: “I regret that I have only one life to give for my CEO.”

Richard Kovacevich is the former CEO of Norwest Bank (1966 – 1998) and Wells Fargo (1998 – 2007). He wants healthy people under age 55 to return to work in late April if the outbreak is contained enough.

There are two major problems with this:

1. There aren’t enough test kits to screen everyone for possible signs of the Coronavirus.
2. Many of those who carry the virus show no signs of infection.

“We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die. I don’t know,” said Kovacevich.

He might just as well have added: “I don’t care.”

“Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you’ll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose.”

If President Donald Trump gets to choose, the nationwide social distancing practices that health professionals say are essential to saving lives during the Coronavirus outbreak will end on April 30.

He originally chose Easter as a pretext for doing this: “You’ll have packed churches all over our country. I think it would be a beautiful time.”

The real reason: He wants to return to return to holding his mass public rallies—which some have compared to the Nuremberg rallies hosted by Adolf Hitler. There he can spew hatred at everyone he dislikes and bask in the worshipful glow of his fanatical base.

Fortunately, the rising tide of COVID-19 cases forced him to abandon his original April 12 date. 

And many highly-paid executives in American corporations are itching to put their employees back at work—and on the Coronavirus firing line. 

“The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people,” Tom Golisano, the founder and chairman of the payroll processor Paychex Inc. told Bloomberg. “I have a very large concern that if businesses keep going along the way they’re going then so many of them will have to fold.” 

Forbes estimates Golisano’s net worth to be $3 billion.  

Like Richard Kovacevich, he wants states that haven’t been hit hard by the virus to return to normalcy.

Tom Golisano

Penale52 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

Lloyd Blankfein, the former head of Goldman Sachs, wrote on Twitter: “Crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue—and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.”

There’s no question that keeping businesses closed across the country—as scientists and health professionals are urging—will inflict large-scale economic damage.

But rushing people back to work would prolong the outbreak and overwhelm the healthcare system. And it would certainly increase—perhaps exponentially—the number of dead and infected casualties of the pandemic. Economists from Northwestern University calculated that keeping social distancing practices in place until cases decline could save 600,000 lives nationwide.

Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warns that the United States could experience 100,000 deaths and millions of viral infections from the Coronavirus pandemic.

Ignoring these facts is Right-wing TV and radio host Glenn Beck, who, according to Forbes, was worth $90 million in 2014.

“I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working.  Even if we all get sick, I’d rather die than kill the country,” Beck, 56, said on his show “The Blaze.”

Of course, Beck works alone in his own studio—and is thus highly unlikely to come in contact with an infected carrier.

Glenn Beck

George Skidmore photo

Like Beck, millionaires and billionaires can afford to socially distance themselves from others and still accumulate huge piles of wealth.

“I think what we are doing with the shutdown is good but in a few weeks people will need to be around people,” said billionaire Tilman Fertitta, owner of a casino, hotel and restaurant empire.

He certainly needs “people to be around people.” His businesses depend heavily on huge numbers of customers willing to spend money.

And, in this case, to risk their lives doing so.

Adds Fertotta: “Otherwise you are going to go into an economic crisis that is going to take us years to dig ourselves out of.”

Fertitta’s income is estimated at $4.4 billion, according to Forbes.

For men like Richard Kovacevich, Tom Golisano, Lloyd Blankfein, Glenn Beck and Tilman Fertitta,, the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt have no meaning: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”

For Republicans and their wealthy benefactors, “pro-life” means strictly anti-abortion. Any other form of life—the elderly, the ill, victims of pollution, those slaughtered with military-style weaponry used by criminals—are totally expendable.