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| The April heat will make the virus go away Trump 2-10-20 |
Richard
Mellor
Editor
Facts For Working People
Afscme
Local 444, retired
As the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc around the world, the barbaric market
driven US health system stands out as the miserable and tragic failure it is. “The US has the greatest number of confirmed
cases and deaths in the world.”, wrote John Tozzi in BusinessWeek’s
June 11th edition.
Tozzi
points out much we already know and what many people live through in the real
world. The US healthcare system is the most costly of all the advanced
capitalist economies consuming 18% of US GDP. We spend almost $4 trillion a
year on health care. lt's also the most inefficient. Even blockaded Cuba has a
better infant mortality rate than the US and a similar life expectancy (CIA
Factbook). It is that way because in
the US, health care is a business, a commodity. If you can pay for decent
health care, you get it, if you can’t you don’t. Private sector spending on health care is triple that of comparable countries according to studies.
Despite all this and the incredible profits in what
I prefer to call, the industrial sickness industry, the US response to the
pandemic is that of an impoverished third world country. That is because when
it comes to taking care of the public, we are impoverished. “Hospitals with billions of dollars in
revenue couldn’t secure dollar masks to protect staff”, Tozzi wrote. And when we consider the conditions among
Native Americans we are talking catastrophe. In the Navajo Nation, the worst
hit in the country, 30% of the people have no running water and 40% no
electricity. The issue of disease hits close to home with Native Americans as
millions of them died from diseases brought in by Europeans that they had no
immunity to.
As an example of the refusal of US capitalism to
fund public health (or pretty much any public services) Business Week gives an
example of the Milwaukee Health Department where, prior to the pandemic, the
public health department’s budget serving 600,000 people amounted to $33 for “every city resident”.
Of
course, it’s been this way for a long time for millions upon millions of
people. We all know that health care is the leading cause of bankruptcy or that
people buy health care (and food) with their credit cards. Millions of people
put off necessary procedures because they don’t have the money. Thousands
travel across the Mexican and Canadian borders to get life-saving drugs that
are priced out of reach in the US.
“If you can’t pay you can’t play” warns a common
US slogan. That your ancestors worked and paid taxes all their lives, (barring
African Americans whose ancestors received no taxable wages for three hundred
years) fought in wars and possibly died or were physically and mentally damaged
in them, is not considered a sacrifice worth rewarding with something as basic
as decent health care. Cannon fodder indeed.
The BusinessWeek
article points out that the US spent $94 billion on public health in 2018 which
amounts to less than three cents of every dollar spent on health care. Yet despite being
in the middle of a pandemic of historic proportions, public agencies citing
shortage of funds, due to declining tax revenue, are cutting services and
reducing staff. Recently, Trump proposed
cutting the discretionary funding for the Centers For Disease Control and
Prevention by 9% ($700 million). Meanwhile, as BusinessWeek points out, “…..five for-profit health insurers together
returned $13.9 billion to shareholders in dividends and stock buybacks—an
amount greater than the entire CDC budget.”
We
live in the belly of the beast here. All public policy, political debate,
allocation of capital, which is the wealth workers create through the labor
process, is determined on the basis of profits not social need. Housing,
education, health care transportation, environmental protection, all these and
other critical social needs are subordinated to profits. “Despite
the trillions of dollars the U.S. devotes to health care…”, Business Week
adds, “…the country lags behind many
other developed economies on health measures such as life expectancy and infant
mortality.”
So
the pandemic has simply exposed the system for the miserable failure it is. The
recent mass protests against police violence and the disproportionate murder of
black people and other people of color by the state security forces is
centuries in the making. The pandemic has hit all poor people hard but black
people more so because racism is an institutional aspect of capitalism that has effected every aspect of their lives in an extremely negative way.
Housing is worse
in these communities, so is transportation, employment, health care, access to
decent food and so on. The police are armed occupiers in these communities to
ensure the anger that eventually breaks through the surface is suppressed or at
least contained within them.
Here is a famous
speech by Martin Luther King on the Homestead Act and the ridiculous ideology
that those who have, as opposed to those who don’t have, “pulled themselves up by
their own bootstraps”. The ruling elite or the 1% as some refer to them, promote this ideology to defend their social position which is a product of theft and violence.
As King explains, it is as one example of how the
white racist ruling class in the US needed to create a solid economic base on
which to rest and maintain its rule, the poverty stricken European peasants,
exploited as they were, were offered this carrot in the form of the White Race identity. The white faces we see in powerful positions of government and business have no love for the white worker, this decision was simply a business decision. And in the long term and the wider sphere of things has been harmful to the material interests of the European/white working class. See The
Invention of the White Race by Theodore Allen two volumes covering Ireland and
the Anglo-American colonies.
For those without
the time or the inclination to struggle
through two volumes of US history here is a PDF that covers the issue and is
considerably shorter. Class
Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery.*
BusinessWeek continues: “Beyond those specific failures, underlying inequities
make some Americans more vulnerable than others. The virus spreads quickly in
settings where people have little power to avoid it: nursing homes, homeless
shelters, meatpacking plants, and prisons and jails that detain the world’s
largest incarcerated population. Covid-19 kills more people who live in denser
cities and crowded homes and work in lower-paying “essential” jobs. Black
Americans, who have higher rates of chronic illnesses such as diabetes and
asthma, are disproportionately harmed and killed by the virus.”
Reading the serious
journals of capitalism it is obvious there is a significant concern within the
US ruling class over this disastrous failure of capitalism to deal with an
emergency like COVID-19.
“Once we come out
of this pandemic, there is going to have to be some kind of an evaluation
around, Do we need to be spending more on public health?”, Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute tells
BusinessWeek.
All the so-called experts have been shaken by US capitalism’s
disastrous failure here. The health care situation has been pretty bleak in the
U.S. for a long time, a poor system kept in place by the powerful lobbyists in
the hospital and pharmaceutical industries and the doctors that get rich off of
sick people. It has been made easier for them through the collaboration of the
heads of organized labor who have refused to lead a movement against this
madness. How do we get to a point where the physical health of 31% of young
adults make them ineligible for military service?
Naturally,
BusinessWeek, owned by the billionaire Michael Bloomberg, points to the American
character for being so individualistic, anti-government and selfish. We are opposed to the government providing
health care for all is the implication. “The idea that the government should invest
in the health and well-being of its citizens has always been in tension with
America’s predilection for individual liberty”
What
does it mean to say America has a predilection for individual liberty? The
individual liberty of Carnegie, Jay Gould, their successors Bill Gates and Warren
Buffet is what BusinessWeek means by individual liberty. But US history is full
of examples that prove working class
and all oppressed people have achieved any “liberty”
at all through collective action; through recognizing that there is such a
thing as class interests.
The right to join unions was not won from the most brutal ruling class on the
planet by people obsessed with individualistic Rambo tactics. They realized individual liberty was linked with
collective liberty and class solidarity. This solidarity and class
consciousness has been successfully weakened with tragic consequences for
people of color and to the detriment of all workers through conscious racist policies
and the introduction of “white” as a
racial definition and the white supremacy ideology, that arose in the mid to late 17th centuries.
Another
expert, David Blumenthal, President of the Commonwealth Fund adds his two
cents, “Our failure to deal with the
pandemic reflects a deep flaw in our system of governance and our political
culture,”
We
can see how concerned some of the more astute sections of the US capitalist
class are in the wake of the pandemic and the huge widespread response to the
George Floyd murder and racism and racial violence in particular.
The
quote above doesn’t explain what “our
system of governance” is. Is it a feudal system? A slave system? Of course
not; we live in a capitalist system of production where the means of producing
the necessities of life are in private hands and these means are set in motion
on the basis of profits.
Capitalism
is constantly championed in the media as the most productive, fairest and “only” system of production that works.
The media and its apologists conveniently forget this important fact when
reporting on catastrophic failures of this system which is responsible not only
for the virus itself as a by-product of industrial food production, but the failure
of the US government to deal with it. The destruction of the environment is market driven.
The
“flaw” according to Blumenthal, is to
be found in the collective US character. We hold “continuing hostility and distrust toward government” in addition
to this Rambo like obsession with individual liberty.
From
the first time European capitalism set foot on this continent, there was class
tension between the labor they brought with them and the merchants who were
seeking wealth. There is much evidence that blacks and whites joined together
in order to improve their conditions, conditions that were so appalling and the
death rate so high that many fled to the safety of the local native
communities. Lerone Bennett: “ ………….the
available evidence, slight though it is, suggests that there were widening
bonds of solidarity between the first generation of blacks and whites. And the same evidence indicates that it
proved very difficult indeed to teach white people to worship their skin.” The Shaping of Black America, P62
Nothing
will be the same after this. We’ve seen massive protests against police
violence and against lack of resources and money to fight the pandemic. The US
working class has stepped on to the world stage in a big way and has sparked
off similar movements globally given fuel by the degenerate misogynist and
racist in the White House. It has generated concern and divisions in the US
ruling class that they are trying to rectify.
Moneyis being thrown at the movement by corporations and racist images are being removed from brands and public places. We must beware of Greeks bringing gifts as the old saying goes.
As
I have pointed out, we are witnessing the US working class in motion, it is not
the industrial working class or the organized working class at this point but
the working class nevertheless. If the organized working class were to overcome
the obstacle of their own pro-capitalist leadership and join this movement, something
that is inevitable at some point, this will open up great opportunities for
working people and our families.
* Also more information here: The Developing Conjuncture Jeffrey B Perry
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