NC

Well, first of all, we should recognize that unless we get to the roots of this pandemic, it’s going to recur, probably in worse form, simply because of the manipulations of the capitalist system which are trying to create circumstances in which it will be worse, for their benefit. We can see that in the stimulus bill, among many other things.

Now, second, because of the global warming which is going on and puts all of this into the shadow, we will recover from this at severe cost. We’re not going to recover from the ongoing melting of the polar ice sheets. And if you want to understand how contemporary capital is looking at this, take a look at Trump’s budget. It’s true that this is a pathological extreme of the normal capitalist systems and maybe it’s not fair to use it as an example, but that’s what we’re living with.

So, on February 10 while the epidemic was raging, and going to get worse, Trump came out with his budget proposals. What were they? First point: continue the defunding of health-related elements of the government. Throughout his term he’d been cutting back on funding of anything that doesn’t benefit private power and wealth, corporate power. So all the health-related parts of the government had been increasingly defunded. He killed programs, all sorts of things.

February 10, let’s continue with it. So further defunding of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other health-related parts of the government. But there were also compensating increases in the budget, more subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. So, let’s not only to kill as many people as possible now, but let’s try to destroy all of society. That’s basically what the words mean. Of course, there was more funding for the military and for his famous wall.

But these two things stand out very brightly as an indication of the criminality that is first of all endemic but is highlighted in the sociopathic White House; brings it out radically. But, of course, Trump can’t be blamed for all of this. It goes back, and we better think about it.

After the SARS epidemic in 2003 — also a coronavirus — it was well understood by scientists that other recurrences of one or another coronavirus was going to come, probably more serious. Well, understanding is not enough. Someone has to pick up the ball and run with it. Now there are two possibilities. One is the drug companies, but they follow normal, capitalist logic. You do what makes profit tomorrow. You don’t worry about the fact that in a couple of years everything’s going to collapse. That’s not your problem. So, the drug companies essentially did nothing. There were things that could be done. There was plenty of information circulating. Scientists knew what to do. There could have been preparations. Somebody’s got to pay for it. Not the drug companies. Well, in a rational world, even a capitalist world prior to Ronald Reagan, the government could have stepped in and done it.

That’s pretty much the way polio was eradicated, through a government-initiated and -funded program. When Jonas Salk discovered the vaccine, he insisted that there be no patents. He said, “It’s got to be public, just like the sun.” That’s still capitalism, but it’s regimented capitalism. That was ended at a stroke by Ronald Reagan. Government’s the problem, it’s not the solution. Let’s legalize tax havens. Let’s legalize stock buybacks costing tens of trillions of dollars to the public in pure robbery.

Government is the solution when the private sector’s in trouble, that’s understood. But if it’s just when the public needs something, government’s not the answer. So, going back to 2003, government couldn’t step in. Actually, it did to a slight extent step in, and it’s very revealing to see what happened. Obama, after the Ebola crisis, recognized that there are problems. We have to do something.

Obama did several things. One of them was to try to contract for ventilators. Ventilators are the big bottleneck in the system right now. That’s what’s forcing nurses to decide who to kill tomorrow. There aren’t enough of them, but the Obama administration did contract for the development of high-quality, low-cost ventilators. The company was quickly bought up by a bigger one which sidelined the project — it was competing with their own expensive ventilators — and then turned to the government and said they want to get out of the contract, it’s not profitable enough.

That’s savage capitalism. Not just capitalism, but neoliberal capitalism. It gets worse. In January and February of this year, when US intelligence services were pounding at the door of the White House saying, “Hey, there’s a real crisis. Do something.” Couldn’t do it. But the Trump administration was doing something, namely it was exporting ventilators to China and other countries to improve the trade balance. That went on into March.

Now the same manufacturers and shipping companies that were sending them out are bringing them back, double profit. This is what we’re living with. It can easily go on. So, if you look back over the whole thing, at the base is a colossal market failure. The markets simply don’t work. It can work for selling shoes sometimes, but if anything significant happens, it’s none of their business. You have to operate as Milton Friedman and others pointed out: just by greed. You do things for your own welfare, wealth, nothing else. It’s a built-in disaster. We’ve had so many examples; I don’t have to review it. So, at the beginning is a market failure. Then comes the extra hammer blow of savage capitalism, neoliberalism, which we’ve been suffering from over the world for forty years, goes beyond ventilators.

Hospitals in the United States have to be run on a business model. So, no spare capacity. It doesn’t work even in normal times. And plenty of people, including me, can testify on that in the best hospitals. But it kind of works. However, if anything goes wrong, you’re sunk. Tough luck. Maybe that’s okay for automobile manufacturing. It doesn’t work for health care. Our health care system altogether is an international scandal. But the business model, of course, just makes it a built-in disaster.

And some of the other things that went on are just too surreal to discuss. USAID had a very successful program detecting viruses that are in animal populations, wild populations that are getting to closer contact with humans because of habitat destruction and global warming. They were identifying thousands of potential disease viruses, working in China as well. Trump disbanded it. He’d been defunding it, but then he disbanded it with exquisite timing in October.

I could go on and on. This is the picture you get. A bunch of sadistic sociopaths in the White House intensifying deep market failures that go much farther back. And now intensifying it further. The rich are not waiting to see how to build the next world. They’re working on it right now, making sure it comes out the right way. Further subsidies to fossil fuels, destroy EPA regulations that might save people but harm profits, this is all going on right in front of our eyes and the question is, will there be counterforces? If not …