As horrific as the coronavirus and Covid-19 outcomes might be, the disease may be the last chance that humanity can undo what it has done to the planet through the capitalist concept of continual (cancerous) growth on a finite planet.

The stay-home orders that have been declared across the U.S. and most of the rest of the world have had some remarkable results: waters have become clearer in a short time (maybe not clean, but clearer), the sky can be seen over cities that have seen deadly smog for decades, wildlife has become emboldened to venture into the streets and roads of cities and towns, and dolphins have been spotted in the vicinity of Venice, the Italian city whose waters have been the brunt of many jokes over the years.

In other words, the near cessation of human activity has done what no amount of warning from scientists whose lives have been dedicated to the study of pollution and climate change and global heating. These warnings have been available for many lifetimes, but to no avail, since there have been “leaders” of nations who ignored the science in favor of profit. And, it's not only profit that the capitalists around the world wanted, they wanted more profits or, as some would describe it, “obscene profits.” The whirlwind is being reaped in our time.

If it were not for the virus, there are cities where their inhabitants would be able to wander the streets without masks, which they often have used in recent decades to protect their lungs from disease-inducing particulate matter. Those skies have become clear, if not clean. It's because of the diminution of human activity, similar to what China did in Beijing in preparation for the most recent Olympics, when industries surrounding the city were shut down for months before the games. It didn't clean the air and water as they need to be cleaned up, but it did make the air and water mostly bearable for the athletes, although some said they would not compete in some games.

What the lock down of most of the U.S., except for essential businesses and operations, has shown the people is that they can survive without the admonition to buy more and buy often. Since the U.S. became a service nation, the driver of the economy has been consumption, a consumer society, itself driven by advertising and public relations...and propaganda. The nation's consumption of all things goes far beyond needs. What is being discovered in lock down is what is actually needed, and it's a lot less than what the average American has been consuming in recent decades. Americans have learned how to live with less, with frugality, as the millions of poor families have known as a way of life for generations.

Illustrative of the failures of the monopolistic U.S. economy is the food system which pretty much decides what Americans will eat, when they will eat it, and how much nutrition will be contained in that food. The empty shelves in supermarkets are not just in the paper products aisles, but it has become routine for the pasta products to be in short supply, since that's what poor people can afford to eat when times are tough. The emptiness of the meat and fish coolers in the markets is a warning. Those who eat meat and fish will soon see that even an occasional purchase of those foods will be out of reach of the small pocketbooks of most workers. In the past week or so, some of the biggest meat processors in the country have informed the government that they will be shutting down, because of the large numbers of their workers who have become ill from COVID-19 and the transmission would only get worse if they kept the kill lines in operation. It is impossible for workers in these places to practice “social distancing.”

The result has been that farmers and ranchers have no place to send their cattle and hogs from their ranches and farms. Many are contemplating killing them where they are, even though there are millions of people who are hungry and in need of the food. Same is true of dairy and those farmers are dumping milk by the millions of gallons, because the end users of milk and other dairy products have been shut down (schools, restaurants, and cheese makers, and businesses that have been closed). All of that is desperately needed by workers and the poor, but with the monopolies that have been set up in the economy by Corporate America, any disruption in those systems can bring the whole thing to a halt. That's what is happening. Potatoes and onions are going to rot in the fields or are going to be plowed under, because the market has been brought to a halt.

A few big money people have tried to pick up the slack by providing truck transportation to take the products from the fields to the food banks and other places where it can be delivered to people who are hungry and in need. This is a nice gesture, but one that barely starts to fill the massive need, as evidenced by the long lines of cars that are lined up at food distribution centers in most cities, where a bag or two of groceries are placed in the trunks of cars, so that human contact is not necessary. Many are turned away, when the food supply runs out for that day. They can only be told to try again.

In short, the system has ground to a halt and no amount of executive orders is going to make it start again. The disease has had its way with the U.S., including its economy. When the miracle of technology has fixed it so that complex systems must run at full tilt only in the way they were designed, there is bound to be a comeuppance. When a small monkey wrench (or a big one) is thrown into the works, things stop. The U.S. has stopped.

If size matters, Corporate America has outdone itself in the size department. The coronavirus shows that the rulers of the economy and the nation, in general, can't control what they have created. The machine is too big and too unwieldy. With finance and banking and much of the rest of the economy in few hands (not to mention the execrable GOP majority in the U.S. Senate), the lines of production, from raw material, to the consumer, anything that goes wrong anywhere along the line is a disaster. That disaster has been visited upon the nation. The lesson here is that the controllers can't control everything and, at times, they can control nothing.

Monopolies can seem to be no harm to the common good, but they are also disasters lurking behind the rocks. They are there, but you don't see them if you're not looking. When they fail, however, people may start looking and find that monopolies can be deadly, as deadly as disease pandemics. That's why, at the beginning of the last century, there were laws against monopolies and trusts, in which so much of national life was controlled by very few. But, the brutality of the power of money and wealth usually can surmount any obstacles and anti-trust laws were just another bump in the road for the powerful. Now, monopolies rule and the disaster has struck, the nation is immobilized, with an incompetent at the helm. The past three years have been bad enough, but the U.S. ship of state in the time of coronavirus is without a rudder.

What can be done? For one thing, it's time to break up the monopolies and never mind that they are “too big to fail.” The “work” that they do can be done by smaller entities, by small companies that are concentrated somewhere near you. Whatever the product, the supply chain, if broken, does not become the disaster that the U.S. food supply chain is becoming. And, that goes for any product, but it is expecially true of food, which could have its origins on farms in our own counties or even in our own neighborhoods. In 1850, farm families made up 4.9 million, or about 64 percent, of the nation's 7.7 million workers. The farm population in 1920, when the official Census data began, was nearly 32 million, or 30.2 percent of the population of 105.7 million.

In 2020, there are reportedly 2 million farms, about one quarter of the farms that existed in 1935, when there were 7 million farms. That is concentration of an “industry.” We put that in quotes because, in the past in the U.S., farming was considered a way of life, not just a job. Today, it is very much an industry and part of the industrial production of food-like substances, which Corporate America offers the people every day. CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) should not be considered farms, but industrial operations that produce beef, pork, and poultry. They are polluting industries and they take advantage of workers at the low end of the wage and benefit scale and the giant corporations that own them intend to keep it that way.

It was Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state and advisor to many presidents, who said, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” In the U.S., governments and Corporate America destroyed family farming over the past 120 years. And, at this time, some 95 percent of world grain reserves are either owned or controlled by six agribusiness corporations. Why? The fewer the number of farmers, the easier it is to control them and, in turn, to control the people of any given nation. When there were more than five or six times the number of farmers in the U.S., there was great diversity, from region to region, from state to state, from valley to valley.

If bio-diversity is good for the Earth generally, it certainly is good for the production of food to provide for the billions of humans that live on the planet. For example, if there was a breakdown in one piece of that food chain, the others could fill in the gap. Not so in a monopoly system. One of the answers to one of the problems faced by all of humanity is to regain some of that bio-diversity, at least in the food supply chain. It will not be easy, but monopolies need to be broken and the genius of humanity needs to be released at every level. The world and its nations cannot be run by oligarchs and plutocrats and authoritarians.

An entity that can't even speak or think is teaching us that.