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Neoliberal logic then intervened, dictating that the government
could not act to overcome the gross market failure, which is now
causing havoc. As The New York Times gently put the matter, “The
stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap, easy-to-use ventilators
highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-
-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximi-
zing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of
preparing for a future crisis.”
Putting aside the ritual obeisance to the benign government
and its laudatory goals, the comment is true enough. We may
add that focus on maximizing profits is also “not always consis-
tent” with the hope for “the survival of humanity,” to borrow the
phrase of a leaked memo from JPMorgan Chase, [the U.S.’s] lar-
gest bank, warning that “the survival of humanity” is at risk on
our current course, including the bank’s own investments in fossil
fuels. Thus, Chevron canceled a profitable sustainable energy pro-
ject because there’s more profit to be made in destroying life on
Earth. ExxonMobil refrained from doing so, because [it] had never
opened such a project in the first place, having made more rational
calculations of profitability.
And rightly so, according to neoliberal doctrine. As Milton
Friedman and other neoliberal luminaries have instructed us, the
task of corporate managers is to maximize profits. Any deviation
from this moral obligation would shatter the foundations of “civi-
lized life.”
There will be recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, at severe and
possibly horrendous cost, particularly for the poor and more vul-
nerable. But there will be no recovery from the melting of the polar
ice sheets and the other devastating consequences of global war-
ming. Here, too, the catastrophe results from a market failure — in
this case, of truly earth-shaking proportions.
The current administration had ample warning about a likely
pandemic. In fact, a high-level simulation was run as recently as

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