Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

User avatar
kidoftheblackhole
Posts: 318
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 6:09 pm

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Sat Apr 18, 2020 1:12 pm

blindpig wrote:
Sat Apr 18, 2020 1:02 pm
solidgold wrote:
Sat Apr 18, 2020 7:09 am
chlamor wrote:
Fri Apr 17, 2020 2:55 pm
Virtually the entirety of the ruling class has parroted your argument that COVID is an actual "killer virus" that requires some forms of lockdown
Not necessarily true. The "narrative" isn't as consistent as you think. There are currently right-wing protests in front of the capital just a few miles from me. Their motives are different than yours, but the rhetoric is similar.

The ruling class IS missing [ignoring] the context behind COVID-19 deaths--I'll give you that. But no one else is. POC are dying in overwhelming numbers because of pre-COVID-19 conditions (ex. pre-existing health issues, poor quality of living). No evidence shows meddling there. Yeah, that's different than COVID-19 being a killer per se. Maybe the numbers eventually plateau to look similar to other flus; until then, COVID-19 is expediting the working class to the morgue in a very short timeline. I don't think the *real reasons* behind the death refute the seriousness of that.

Outside of that, I'm surprised anyone can hold a firm opinion right now. Nothing seems certain.
We got a prez up for re-election, the likelihood of his administration inflating the numbers is zero. Quite the opposite. And like you say, he ain't alone, not just ideologues but a lot of the very small businesses on the ropes. I live with one, outraged that companies with hundreds of employees get millions while her 3 employee shop got beat out, not a dime. A gift to the monopolists, clearing their petty competition without lifting a hand.
Would like to talk about monopoly capital sometime because what you have formulated there is not even close to being an example.

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 18, 2020 2:13 pm

Could it be that the real pandemic is capitalism?
Mission Truth

Apr 14 · 9 min read

Image
The corpse of a deceased by coronavirus, abandoned at the gates of a Guayaquil medical center. Photo: EFE

These weeks it has become customary to hear or read that the new coronavirus has come to change everything.
The virus that has shaken a good part of the planet so far in 2020 has been presented to it from a perspective that borders on the apocalypse between projections of sudden and total changes that cover the entire ideological spectrum.
The trigger
Although the pandemic represents an international crisis full of uniqueness, and also dangerous given the rising death toll it is leaving, it is also not true that the general effects it has had on the population, politics and the world economy are due to the virus in itself.
The truth is that the coronavirus has been the trigger for a general crisis in capitalist society that has been incubating since the financial collapse since 2007–2008, when the fall of the American corruption giant Lehman Brothers infected the entire economic and financial system. of the planet leaving millions of people in ruin.
This financial and civilizational crisis bequeathed us the epidemic of aberrant inequality, job insecurity and flexibility, combined with the powerful virus of rectors in basic social services, chronic unemployment and unpayable family and national debts.
The combination of social epidemics resulting from the capitalist and neoliberal management of society, has made the new coronavirus have this ability to destabilize everything. And it is that the virus can kill people with the specific traits that we all already know (previous pathologies, weakened immune system, etc.), but when that death encompasses thousands of inhabitants and disrupts the operation of entire societies, leading them to economic crash and social responsibility is not the power of the virus but the social and political conditions where it occurs.

Image
The fall of Lehman Brothers, and consequently of the world economy in 2008, was the result of the dogma of neoliberalism. Photo: Forbes

When the fascist elites of neoliberal capitalism took the helm of the international system after the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1990s, privatizations and labor flexibilization policies that reduced state power to record lows were debasing and weakening the society as a whole, in the course of a dystopia marked by debt, poverty, strenuous and poorly paid work and the prohibition of basic rights such as health.
For these reasons the virus has been so shocking, because it mixes, and also powers, the epidemics of capitalism that have already been killing millions for reasons that we have been naturalizing over time.
Every day thousands of people die from hunger, from lack of clean water, from obesity, from diseases caused by the food and productive system. And the new coronavirus has allowed us to make visible the fragility in which we find ourselves.
The "apocalypse" announced
Before the new coronavirus appeared, the world was already adrift. Already in late 2016, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expressed that the economy presented signs of stagnation .
The institution assured at the time that "eight years after the global financial crisis, the recovery remains precarious and poses the threat of persistent stagnation."
In 2018, the agency raised the tone of uncertainty by affirming that the conditions for a new financial crisis were brewing due to the slow growth of the world economy.
A year later, the World Bank (WB) stated that “the ratio of debt to GDP of developing countries has increased 54 percentage points to reach 168% since debt began to accumulate in 2010. On average, this ratio has it has increased by about seven points. ”
For the World Bank, this “debt surge” would hinder economic development and lead to difficult financial strains to manage.
A new catastrophe was to come, with or without coronavirus. It was announced.
For its part, the report by the NGO Oxfam on global inequality on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland), offers a bleak picture.

Image
Military convoy transfers the dead by coronavirus in the Italian city of Bergamo. Photo: Archive

A report by the Spanish magazine Ctxt assures that along with these pressures from employers, the city with a growing spike in infections had to face a privatized health system and without the capacity to serve so many people.
“The medical personnel spent a week working without protection; a good number of hospital health workers were infected and spread the virus among the population. The infections spread throughout the valley. The hospital turned out to be the first major source of infection: patients who entered due to a simple hip problem ended up dying from being infected with coronavirus, ”the report states.
According to the magazine, Bergamo's main industries are owned by wealthy Italian families with transnational connections who, in turn, have historically supported the neoliberal agenda that destroyed public services in the European country.
It is worth remembering that Bergamo was the city where a convoy of soldiers transported the dead by coronavirus. An image that describes how the coronavirus has strengthened the combat munitions of capitalist elites.
Other Dantesque cases
A similar story to that of Italy occurs in the residences for older adults in the Spanish State, places that have become sources of contagion causing a death toll of more than 8,000 elderly people.
The private administration of these care centers and the cuts of the neoliberal governments in Spain transformed the residences into precarious care sites, saturated, dismantled in their infrastructure and with difficulties for workers. This has been going on for a long time.
In June, as reported by eldiario.es ,
"The workers of the residences of the Domusvi group in Galicia (29 centers in that autonomous community) denounced the deterioration conditions after years of precariousness and cuts. They adduced conditions close to slavery and neglect of the elderly. ”

Image
A woman walks with her baby in Chicago (USA), a city where 70% of coronavirus deaths are from African-American people. Photo: Reuters

Austerity policies in Spain represent a decisive factor in these deaths, since the residences were in the process of being dismantled well before the arrival of the virus. And it is that the lack of attention and little investment in residences shows how Spanish capitalism takes advantage of the pandemic to facilitate the reorganization of these infrastructures.
Beds are freed for new seniors without costing them a penny.
When work kills
But this metabolism of capitalism in times of pandemic is transnational. For example, in the United States it is already known with certainty that the African American population, located in ghettos and precarious and forgotten cities, is the most affected by Covid-19.
The British newspaper The Guardian reveals that "Louisiana reports that 70% of coronavirus deaths are black," while "Alabama says African Americans die at a disproportionate rate."

The Confidential of Spain argues :
“Close to 60% of the deaths with coronavirus in Washington DC are African-American, a disproportionate number considering that they only represent 46% of the city's population, mostly white. In Milwaukee, African Americans account for 70% of coronavirus deaths, being only 26% of the population. In Michigan, with 854 deaths, African Americans are 33% of the infected and almost 40% of the dead, despite the fact that they only represent 14% of the state's population. A quarter of the deaths in the entire state of Michingan correspond to Detroit, where the black population is 79% ”.
The Associated Press , for its part, indicates :
“When race data is known, of just 3,300 of 13,000 Covid-19 deaths, African Americans account for 42% of deaths. Those data also suggest that the disparity may be higher in the south. For example, in both Louisiana and Mississippi, African Americans account for more than 65% of known Covid-19 deaths. ”
The reason why the African American population has been so affected lies in its position of labor within the economic model.
Historically excluded from social mobility mechanisms, blacks work largely "in the education and health services industry and 10% in retail (...) African-Americans are less likely than generally employed people to work in professional and business services, the types of jobs most susceptible telecommuting ", reports the middle Science News .
Retail and other shipping services have not been limited by the US government, increasing the exposure to contagion of an African American population that, compared to whites, "only 44% (...) own their own home", and that the medical services that come with contracting Covid-19 cannot be paid for.
While the middle and upper middle classes in the United States can cope with the situation using their savings, working via Skype, Zoom or collecting unemployment benefits, blacks are condemned to precariousness and, in the "best" case, to Finding a job at Amazon that will put them dangerously close to the Covid-19 contagion, and without the salary enough to cure them.
The pandemic has also reached the favelas of Brazil where problems of extreme poverty and scarce public services is the norm. While the Bolsonaro government, pressured by businessmen, has resisted general confinement to maintain the circulation of labor, the local administrations are pursuing quarantine to prevent the collapse of health.
In Guayaquil, Ecuador, a city that will be remembered forever by displaying corpses on the public highway, it is also in poor areas where the virus has hit the most.
In this line, the contagion map of Colombia indicates that the most vulnerable areas and where work is compulsory and in precarious conditions, the pandemic is increasing.
Covid-19 has become a pandemic of such severity because capitalism, the free market, the dissolution of borders and the rights of workers, created all the conditions to take us to this precipice.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/no ... 07a80e0a57

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 19, 2020 12:57 pm

Would like to talk about monopoly capital sometime because what you have formulated there is not even close to being an example.
You are correct, that more an expression of my aggravation with my very local situation....

Meanwhile Henry McMaster is beginning to 're=open' the state starting Monday starting with beaches and retail stores. It is mentioned that North Carolina and Florida have opened their beaches and if beaches are open in tourist season in heavily dependent tourist states can rooms & restaurants be far behind? THe impetus behind this is undoubtedly the SC Chamber of Commerce. They, more than any body or individual call the shots, as is proper in a capitalist republic. In any and every major controversy they are the ultimate deciders: Blue Laws, gambling, removing that goddamn flag from the Statehouse and then the grounds too. And now this.

If there was intent among the Big Boys to effect a lockout in order to 'discipline' labor in the US it looks like that will fail in the face of the indiscipline of local capital. Other southern states especially are raring to go. With the effective abandonment of 'social distancing', inadequate testing and virtually no contact tracing the graphs gonna look like the Piedmont, hills and valleys.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:03 pm

Searching for Meaning in a Pandemic
Driven indoors by a deadly virus, most people, especially in the wealthier, advanced capitalist countries, are facing uncertainties unknown in their entire lives. The virus’s ruthless defiance of borders and all but the most privileged social cleavages has cast a shadow over expectations and prospects, while bringing the global economy to a near-standstill.


What can We Learn?


For those who have money and power, their interests come before the health and welfare of the rest of us. Most bourgeois politicians, top corporate executives, bankers, and billionaire investors are willing to risk the lives of the vulnerable to secure their own status and restart the capital accumulation process. Every day, we see anxious politicians lobbied by the agents of monopoly capital. They are ready to ignore the advice of academics and professionals who are experts in disease control and public health in order to send safely isolated workers back into danger.


In the US, we have private health insurance and market-based health services rather than universal, equitable health care. The fact that the victims of the novel coronavirus could not be promptly diagnosed, triaged, and given care, the fact that response was so uneven, and the fact that health care providers had to compete for the scarce, but essential means to combat the virus demonstrates the tragic inadequacy of an industrial model relying on the market, profit, and the fetish of “efficiency.” Tens of thousands of lost lives expose this failure.

Where politicians in other countries have callously shrunk their national health services for political expediency, they, too, must answer for the unnecessary deaths of thousands.

We should learn that health industry administrators, faced with medical supply shortages and accelerating demand, are prepared to make life-and-death decisions based on protocols devised by so-called “bio-ethicists.” Rather than rallying behind victims’ families and health care workers, rather than seeking emergency powers to ramp up production or purchases, rather than mobilizing volunteers or lobbying for a more rational distribution of national resources, hospital administrations opt to choose which victims deserve to live.
Misnamed “bio-ethicists” compete to find the most “humane” way to select those for death. Some will remember the righteous indignation over “death panels” during the Obama-era healthcare debates. With real life-or-death decisions being taken, the anti-reform zealots are remarkably silent.


The all-too-popular slogan “We are all in this together” has proven to be nonsense. Class and race remain the decisive factors in determining who wins and who loses. It’s not that Black, Latino, and poor people are selected as victims by the primitive infectious agent, but that social neglect, inequality, and discrimination renders them more vulnerable to the virus. The behavioral choices, access to information and prophylaxis, health care, conditions of shelter, transportation options, and general resources available to the disadvantaged determine that they will more likely be victims, suffer, and die. The media feign shock at numbers that reveal the vast overrepresentation of African American cases and deaths, as though racism, urban segregation, and poverty were already conquered.


Similarly, the media are astounded by the miles of backed-up cars clogging highways waiting for relief from food banks, as though food banks came into existence when the virus struck. Before the virus, the needy were expected to stand in line in shame for their modest handouts.

The virus has shown the privilege of celebrities, the ultra-rich, and the political stratum, who have secured tests and expedited, preferred attention to the dangers threatened by the virus. Forbes magazine documents how a “loophole” in the recovery act could allow up to 43,000 of the richest people in the US to enjoy a gift of up to $1.7 million while everyone else tries to pay their bills and live on a $1,200 stipend from the US Treasury.


The bottom feeders-- the scam artists, the predators on the elderly, the price gougers, the hoarders-- have come out in force to take advantage of fear. Despite unleashing these vermin in an era of deregulation and laissez faire, the government that spies on everyone shows no desire to stop the predation of a populace experiencing unprecedented insecurity.


The lessons learned in the last economic disaster go unheeded. Once again, the banks and monopoly capitalist firms are assured that their vulnerabilities and missteps will be publicly covered, even rewarded. The once detested excuse of “Too big to fail” has roared back with a vengeance. Despite the collapse of real economic activity, the equity markets have begun to recover and, shamefully, bounce back when new, unparalleled unemployment numbers are announced. Even The Wall Street Journal is compelled to notice “..a confounding reality: soaring share prices and a floundering economy” (4-17-2020). Investors know that relief for capitalism will always be in the wings, even if there is no bailout for the rest of us.


We should learn to scoff at talk of “recovery.” Since 2000, “recovery” has only meant that global financial institutions will manipulate interest rates, juggle questionable, inflated assets, and create new financial games of chance in order to put lipstick on an ugly capitalist pig. That corpulent pig-- stuffed with near-worthless financial junk-- has threatened to deflate for over twenty years. Only persistent manipulation by central banks has re-inflated the global monster. The “product” that economists and statisticians purport to measure is really bloated equity markets, debt-driven economic activity, and unhinged property values; all connection to reality-grounded value is long broken.


While this fictional “recovery” has been heralded, the circumstances of those who work for a living has stagnated or sunk (median household income in the US has risen by less than 4% since 2000), buoyed only by taking on more and more debt. The “desperation” indicators-- like the inability of 40% of the people to sustain even a $400 unexpected bill-- are well documented. The coronavirus crisis has only brought into the spotlight the desperation that has followed in the wake of low wages, gig jobs, grinding healthcare costs, unaffordable housing, student-loan debt, and declining public services. For the vast majority, talk of a recovery is an insult.


Should we not ask why it is that the People's Republic of China has avoided the worst consequences of the virus, especially since they were the first to face its devastation? Could we learn how it is that the International Monetary Fund expects that the PRC economy is expected to grow this year, while the US is projected to decline by 5.9% and the EU by 7.5%? Could it be that its state-owned enterprises were able to respond quickly and decisively? Should we see the fact that the PRC banking sector is largely publicly owned and able to put the prompt and rational distribution of financial assets above profit-taking? Does it matter that the political leadership of the CPC-- the Chinese Communist Party-- is more responsible to the public than the soulless bourgeois parties of the West? Is it a coincidence that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam has accounted for no coronavirus deaths? These are ideas that never enter the conversation in the West.


What can We Expect?


As with the last major crisis over a decade ago, this crisis spawns numerous analyses and prognostications. Uncertainty breeds speculation and “experts” feel compelled to venture opinions.


The truth is that even the experts remain baffled by the course of the coronavirus. Its behavior and the effectiveness of chaotic Western public policy are uncertainties at this stage, rendering the media blame-game meaningless, if not harmful. The exposure of the systemic weaknesses of capitalism in arresting a pandemic and serving the people is far more significant and immediate than the Trump-Biden horse race.


The state of the US economy is another matter. The nearly universal declining numbers do not lie. Nor does the immediate expectation of further decline. We also know that, in many ways, the economic collapse is unprecedented in the lifetime of almost everyone living today.

In a short span, JPMorgan Chase forecast an annualized GDP drop of 25% and a rise in unemployment to 10%, only to revise their estimates to a 40% decline in GDP accompanied by 20% unemployment. Goldman Sachs projects that the downturn “will likely be four times worse than the financial crisis [of 2007-2009] and the U.S. will see its highest unemployment rate since World War II…” But the forecasts turn more pessimistic almost before the ink dries.


Ahead is a massive restructuring of global capitalism. Where it goes depends, of course, on subjective, political factors. But history teaches that the trajectory of capitalism, when experiencing a severe economic collapse, will generate a process of what Joseph Schumpeter, an apologist for capitalism, euphemistically called “a gale of creative destruction.” What that process produces, of course, could be deflected or shaped somewhat by political forces of right or left, but the prevailing tendency will be for stronger countries to shift their distress to weaker countries. The tendency will be for big capitals to smash or absorb smaller capitals, for concentration. The tendency will be to use unemployment and its accompanying pain to cheapen the cost of labor, to increase the rate of exploitation. The tendency will be to shift the balance of economic and political power further toward elites. In short, capital will attempt to restore its health by shifting its problems to the weak, destroying many and much in the process.


Whether this trajectory is repeated as it was after the 2007-2009 crisis depends upon subjective factors-- today’s politics.


Sterile debates, like the argument between the debt scolds (advocates of minimal government spending, austerity) and the new-age proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (the uncoupling of money expansion from a long-thought rigid relation to negative economic consequences like inflation), are not helpful today, though they are crowding other political options off the stage.


The last 20 years of persistent, deeply rooted global deflationary pressure have left the zealots for balanced budgets and “moderate” debt with no argument. Central banks have injected trillions into economies with barely a hint of inflation resulting. Relatively extreme monetary inflation has barely contained the underlying deflation plaguing world economies. Thus, none of the near-hysterical inflation warnings proved justified.


The Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) proponents took this relatively limited experience of mounting debt and tepid inflation to demonstrate that MMT was more than a policy of limited application to a specific time and place, but a universal theory of money. In fact, it is a conditional theory, conditional upon very specific, historically determined conditions being met.


In practice, MMT disconnects monetary policy from any objective standard of value (like gold, for example) and attaches it to the ultimate subjective standard, a fiat national currency. In as much as subjective confidence persists, MMT can persist. But a subjective standard-- because it is decoupled from objective value-- masks the underlying dynamics of the capitalist system; it distorts, rather than settles the chronic problems that plague the accumulation process. The massive bailouts of the last decade and of today appear to use central bank monetary activity to restore equity markets and financial institutions, but they merely isolate the rot and postpone a day of reckoning. The underlying problem remains unresolved, only to surface again, triggering another deflationary spiral, an unloading of “assets” without real value.


It would appear that bourgeois politics has found no other policy approach than austerity or MMT. Austerity, the prescription of the right and much of the center, has failed again and again, bringing countries like Greece to the brink of collapse.


And MMT-- applying a sling to a broken arm-- is the last gasp of the social democratic left, a panacea that promises to bring the best of all possible worlds: giving more to the needy without taking from the greedy. MMT sells an easy tactic that kicks the can of capitalist failure further down the road.


What is needed today is a radical solution to radical, unrivalled problems.
Standing in the way of an effective approach is a wimpy, Nostalgia Left.


For most of the trade union leadership, the dream is a return to the 1950s when the pesky Reds were subdued, the bosses allowed wages and benefits to track productivity in return for labor's cooperation with imperialism, and Blacks and women were not disrupting labor peace.


The current centerpiece of the US Democratic Party-- financially secure, suburban social liberals-- long for a time before Trump when politics were courteous and the vast, growing economic inequalities were an unsightly, unfortunate, but tolerable blemish on the harmony of US civil society.


Nearly all that remains of the old Democratic coalition, today ignored by the Democratic Party leadership, dreams of the era before Reagan, when Democrats actually gave a tepid voice to economic justice and worshipped at the altar of equal opportunity. Devoted to a fading memory of the New Deal, they place their hopes in a Democratic Party soul transplant. It’s not capitalism, but its ugly stepchild, neoliberalism, that they abhor.


Too many of the aging radicals of the Old New Left were terrorized by McCarthyism, leading them to forage for something distant from Communism, to the left or right of real, existing Communism. Their search dashed, they have settled for a stale, visionless pragmatism. Their old 1960s antagonists would surely be amused at the irony.


Thankfully, there are new generations of the left searching for big answers to the big problems of the moment. The last twenty years have shaped a less-than-promising future for millions of young people. And the spring of 2020 only promises far, far worse. To meet these challenges, one can hope that their journey takes more and more of them to revolutionary socialism, to the socialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, to the socialism that animated the working class movements for most of the last century and a half.


Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:59 pm

The US Is Preparing to Default on Debts Owed to China
April 17, 2020Stalker Zone

The repeated accusations of White House against Beijing concerning a coronavirus epidemic have ended in demands not to pay debts. Since China remains the largest holder of US government bonds, it is essentially a selective default. RIA Novosti looks at how justified such an initiative is and how it can turn out for the American economy.

Give money!

“In order to punish Beijing for hiding information about the outbreak in Wuhan, which started a planetary-scale health crisis, we need to write off some of the American debt in the reserves of the Chinese Central Bank,” said Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn.

It was supported by the well-known Senator Lindsay Graham, the author of several bills on sanctions against Russia and Nord Stream 2. “This is the third pandemic from China. They come from these dirty markets where they have mice and monkeys with a virus, which is then carried through food,” said Graham to Fox News on Monday.

In his view, “the whole world should bill Beijing for the pandemic” and force it to “fork out big”. “And I want to start writing off part of our debt to China, because they have to pay us, and not visa-versa!” said the senator.

Blackburn and Graham are by no means alone in trying to monetise the Chinese origin of the coronavirus. Senator Josh Hawley, co-authored with three other colleagues, has already introduced a bill in Parliament on the need for an international investigation into Beijing’s actions during the coronavirus outbreak and the establishment of a “compensation mechanism”.

All of this is accompanied by a large-scale propaganda campaign involving top government officials. For example, on Wednesday, Pentagon head Mark Esper said in an interview with Fox News that “China continues to hide a lot about COVID-19, as in the initial stages of the epidemic”.

“China could be more honest and provide more information to make it easier for us to cope with the infection,” said Esper, calling for putting “pressure” on Beijing and bringing out the whole truth about the origin of the virus.

READ: Rostislav Ishchenko: Why the EU and US' Vigorous Anti-Russian Activity Is in Vain
Conspiracy theory
Botao Xiao, a former employee of the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, was the first to write about the biological leak on the Internet. He pointed out that one of the research laboratories was six metres from the wholesale seafood market where the epidemic had arisen.

Botao suggested that the “deadly coronavirus is probably created in a laboratory” and it was accidentally brought into town. However, he soon deleted the publication, explaining that the hypothesis had not been confirmed.

However, the narrative of the artificial origin of the virus was immediately picked up by Western media and then by Washington officials. On February 17th, Republican Senator Tom Cotton announced that the infection had emerged from a biochemical laboratory in China’s Wuhan, and promised to bring “those responsible for spreading the deadly pandemic to justice”.

The White House joined in with the accusations. Donald Trump, in his tweets, called COVID-19 a “Chinese virus”.

And US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thwarted the signing of a joint communiqué by G7 foreign ministers in March, as the majority demanded that the term “Wuhan virus” be removed from the document.

Meanwhile, more and more reputable experts refute such accusations. The New York Times reported that US Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger asked intelligence agencies to study the possibility of a virus leak from a laboratory in Wuhan in January, but the CIA found nothing suspicious.

General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday: “There is plenty of evidence that coronavirus formed naturally”.
Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, explained to The Washington Post: “There is absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates artificial origin. <…> The narrative of biological weapons must be categorically excluded.”

And yet in the United States, they continue to insist on its own. Last week, the Texas and Nevada courts filed collective lawsuits against China, with more than 5,000 Americans claiming they suffered huge losses because the Chinese allowed coronavirus to spread around the world.

“Our claim concerns those physically affected by exposure to the virus. <…> It is also about commercial activities of China, trade in markets where wildlife meat is sold,” said the law company Berman Law Group, representing the interests of the plaintiffs.

The Americans are demanding $1.2 trillion in compensation. By “random” coincidence, this exactly corresponds to the amount of US bonds on the balance sheet of the People’s Bank of China.

So the court may well prohibit the government from paying for these securities “to ensure the interests of the plaintiffs”. And Washington officials will obediently implement this decision.

Suicide mission

The demands of compensation for the pandemic are contrary to both legal norms and common sense. This was pointed out by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday.

“When we hear the reasoning that China will have to pay everyone for the fact that this infection appeared and allegedly someone didn’t inform someone in time… You know, it passes all kinds of limits and all kinds of decency,” said the head of Russian diplomacy.

However, as Washington’s experience of sanctions against other countries shows, such little things concern the US least. After all, the commercial interests of American companies are once again hidden behind the talk of China’s responsibility.

The fact is that in China has already practically managed to cope with the epidemic, and factories and plants have quickly resumed work. But most Western companies are idle due to quarantine. So the markets are open to Chinese expansion – there will be no one to counter them in the coming months.

Washington is going to use the demands of enormous compensation as a leverage to prevent Beijing from taking advantage of the situation. Therefore, there is no doubt that American courts will grant all claims against the Chinese government.

However, the United States itself is at risk of being the main victims of such a development. Because of the prospect of an American default, Beijing has no choice but to urgently start selling off treasuries.

This could completely destroy the US public debt market – investors will stop buying new bond issues because of the excess supply. Consequently, the Treasury will have nothing to finance a record budget deficit, as well as multi-trillion-dollar anti-crisis support programs for the national economy.

If the Federal Reserve dares to cover these costs only at the expense of the printing press, the position of the dollar as the world reserve currency will be permanently undermined.

Maksim Rubchenko

https://www.stalkerzone.org/the-us-is-p ... -to-china/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 20, 2020 3:58 pm

Image

Coronavirus: Capitalist Chaos, Workers Resistance and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
April 20, 2020 orinocotribune capitalism destroys, communis is the alternative, coronavirus, COVID-19, dictatorship of the proletariat, Strike, US decline, workers
By Chris Fry – April 19, 2020

On April 14, as the death count in the U.S. from the terrible coronavirus pandemic raced past 25,000, the New York Times published an article by Scott Paul, head of the American Alliance for American Manufacturing, titled “Why Can’t America Make Enough Masks or Ventilators?” Of course, this question is on the minds of millions of people who are watching with growing disgust as states and hospitals around the country are scrambling for the ventilator devices, vital in a desperate bid to keep patients alive long enough for them to overcome the viral infection.

Watching nurses and other health care workers denied personal protection equipment (PPE) including N95 masks, face shields and gowns has sparked tremendous anger. “Essential” workers at nursing homes, grocery stores, food processing plants and shipping warehouses like Amazon, most of whom are low paid, are denied even minimal protection, which has also sparked nationwide outrage.



Paul points out the obvious:
“Our country is unable to meet an immediate need for critical medical supplies and personal protective equipment in the face of a crisis. The absence of adequate domestic production capacity for things like face shields and respirators, coupled with the frailty of on-demand global supply chains and our utter reliance on them — for everything from the ingredients in our medications to parts of breathing machines — has left us dangerously exposed during an international health emergency.”
While blaming “outsourcing” of manufacturing as a cause for this production quagmire, speaking for his section of the ruling class, Paul’s solution is to discard any relief for the workers and oppressed, and instead assist “domestic” corporations:
“Whenever Congress and the administration decide on next steps for our national well-being, they must move beyond bromides for the working class and put into place a sensible industrial policy, one that combines the power of American ingenuity with the capabilities of public investment.

“Such a policy should incentivize re-industrialization via the tax code. It should encourage it with its traditional power of the purse — which means expanding Buy America provisions that prioritize domestic manufacturers in federal contracting bids to virtually all spending.”
The ventilator shortage and the quest for profits

But is it really a question of “foreign” vs. “domestic” manufacturing of medical supplies?

An April 12th New York Times article titled “A Corporate Merger Cost America Ventilators” by Tim Wu describes how a small company bought out by a corporate giant has had deadly consequences for coronavirus patients today:
“On April 24, 2012, the Federal Trade Commission, the nation’s principal gatekeeper for health care mergers, published an innocuous-seeming notice granting a request for “early termination” of its review of a $108 million health care acquisition. Newport Medical Instruments, a small developer of cheap, portable ventilators, was being acquired by Covidien, a much larger American company headquartered in Ireland for tax purposes. Covidien makes, among other things, larger and more expensive ventilators.

“The government’s review was not extensive. One of the lawyers involved, a former F.T.C. staff member, notes that he successfully steered the merger through the F.T.C. “without second request” — without extensive review.

“We now know that approving that merger without conditions had severe costs. It would cripple what had been a prescient federal program, begun in 2007, to build an emergency stockpile of up to 40,000 portable ventilators with the eventual help of Newport Medical Instruments. But Covidien terminated the project, apparently in large part because it was insufficiently profitable.”
Wu goes on to describe how corporate buyouts and mergers have allowed drug companies to impose sky-high prices for needed drugs. And he describes the impact of the recent wave of hospital mergers:
“Perhaps the greatest calamity, in terms of harm done, has been the F.T.C.’s inability over the past two decades to stop hospital consolidation, despite its best efforts and growing evidence of negative effects. In theory a hospital merger might produce welcome efficiencies, but in practice too many hospital mergers tend to yield higher prices and lower quality of care (measured by morbidity), not to mention bed shortages. After a bad hospital merger, patients pay more and die more.”
Despite isolation and “social distancing,” workers fight back

Medical experts point out that overworked and stressed health care and other workers confronting this crisis often face their own immune system being degraded, increasing their own risk of contracting this disease, with even more serious consequences to their health, their lives. Beef and poultry workers, many of them Latinx, must work in extremely close quarters where the virus can easily spread. Nursing home and home health workers must take care of the most vulnerable elderly people, risking the lives of their clients, their families and their own lives, all under the threat of losing their jobs and livelihood.



Yet workers have found ways to struggle against well-sheltered hospital administrators and billionaire corporate owners like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Some have been suspended or fired, but their brave struggle has won huge support among the workers and oppressed.

Coronavirus: Capitalist Chaos, Workers Resistance and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Image
Call for action by Amazon workers in Romulus, Michigan, at a facility known as DTW1.

As more than 22 million workers who suddenly lost their jobs wait impatiently for their meager funds from the so-called “stimulus” package, which mostly goes to the banks and big business, many have been forced into crowded lines to apply on paper for unemployment compensation. Threatened by foreclosures and evictions, many renters, particularly in the oppressed communities, have already joined a massive “rent strike”. Prisoners caged in virus hellholes have been placing signs at windows begging for help.

On April 8, General Electric workers protested outside of GE factories in Schenectady, New York, Dallas, Salem, Virginia, and outside the GE aviation facility in Lynn, Massachusetts. The report said:
“The protesters called for a shift in production, allowing them to go from making turbines, aviation parts and other components to helping hospitals source vitally needed medical equipment. The switch would create and save jobs when GE plans to lay off or furlough a significant part of its U.S. workforce.

“‘Instead of laying workers off, GE should be stepping up to the plate with us to build the ventilators this country needs,” Carl Kennebrew, president of the Industrial Division of the Communications Workers of America (IUE-CWA ), which represents the workers, said in a statement. “In the plants that are up and running, GE also needs to keep workers safe on the job.’”
These demonstrations are notable in that the workers were actually challenging their capitalist bosses over the actual production process. They were calling for GE to shift production from the highly profitable aircraft parts, including military aircraft, to their medical equipment subsidiary to increase production of much needed ventilators.

Ventilators are items of distribution and consumption. Consciously or not, these workers displayed something that the capitalist class always tries to conceal; that in a time of crisis, in order to protect their share of commodities necessary for their survival, our class must seize control of the means of production. Their mad quest for profits makes the capitalist class unable to manage production to serve the needs of the workers and oppressed.

At this point, with the collapse of the Bernie Sanders electoral campaign and with the deepening crisis unfolding before our eyes that no one can predict how far it may go, it is critical for revolutionaries to understand our goals, so as to lead our class in the struggles ahead.

Critique of the Gotha Program

In 1875, just four years after the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels were asked to comment on a reformist agenda proposed for the newly formed United Workers’ Party of Germany. That agenda, called the Gotha Program, called for a more “democratic” capitalist government and “fair wages”, among other reforms for the working class.

Marx’s revolutionary response to his activist contacts became known as the “Critique of the Gotha Program.” Much of this short document is worthy of study by progressives and organizers today. Marx makes clear that however worthy are the demands by our class that we deserve increases in our living standard, that whoever controls means of production controls the distribution and consumption of all necessary commodities:
Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers [capitalists and landowners – cf] in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one.
As far as the reformist call for “fair wages, Marx counters:
Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is “fair”? And is it not, in fact, the only “fair” distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions, or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise out of economic ones?
Of course, it is worthwhile to struggle for every economic and democratic gain for the workers and oppressed. Certainly, the young activists, not put off at all by the “socialist” label, have been galvanized by the Sanders program of Medicare for All, college loan forgiveness, free education, and so on. Their enthusiasm for these demands seems undiminished by Sander’s electoral defeat. And all the demands made by our class to alleviate the suffering created by this terrible disease are more than justified.

Our task as revolutionaries is to explain to the activists and workers in this time of crisis which the capitalist class is unable to contain, that the true definition of socialism as an improved stage of society came from Karl Marx almost 150 years ago:
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Source URL: Fighting Words

https://orinocotribune.com/coronavirus- ... oletariat/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 21, 2020 1:05 pm

The "arms race" for the Covid-19 vaccine
Mission Truth

Apr 20 · 9 min read

Image
The WHO has been leading a global effort since March to analyze the efficacy of treatments and trials for the Covid-19 vaccine. Photo: Reference

The global race to find an effective vaccine against Covid-19 is in full fury as the multifactorial effects of the pandemic make the future of global society increasingly indeterminate.
To date, the only effective measure that authorities and experts have found against the global pandemic is social distancing, in addition to strict hygiene measures.
The spread of the disease is unstoppable because this is the mobility of the human population throughout the planet, in addition, the occupation patterns of the territory spread it because the majority live crowded in cities, exposed to the risk of air pollution and Access to public services is limited and highly commercialized.
Route and panorama of an urgent vaccine
After Chinese scientists published the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, on January 11, in mid-March the World Health Organization (WHO) was already leading a global effort to analyze the efficacy of treatments and trials of the Covid-19 vaccine.
Its CEO, Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus announced that “Multiple small trials with different methodologies may not give us the clear and solid evidence we need on what treatments help save lives.
Therefore, the WHO and its partners are organizing a study in many countries in which some of these unproven treatments will be compared with each other ”
The international study seeks to generate solid data and demonstrate which treatments are the most effective. Countries such as Argentina, Bahrain, Canada, France, Iran, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and Thailand participate in it. Gebreyesus said, “We have called this study the Solidarity Trial.
This trial provides simplified treatments to allow even overburdened hospitals to participate. ” Until then, the Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund had raised more than $ 43 million from more than 173,000 individuals and organizations, just days after its launch.
Although public information on the SARS-CoV-2 specific antigens used in vaccine development is limited, it is known that most of the candidates for which information is available aim to induce neutralizing antibodies against the spike or spike protein of the virus ( called protein S).
Experience in fields such as oncology allows for faster development and manufacturing speed, and some vaccine platforms could be better adapted to specific population subtypes (such as the elderly, children, pregnant women, etc.).
The journal Nature published a database of reported vaccine development programs through a licensed and updated WHO list, along with other projects identified from publicly available sources.
As of April 8, 2020, the global research and development (R&D) landscape of the Covid-19 vaccine included 115 candidate vaccines, of which 78 were confirmed to be active.

Image
Number of candidate vaccines against Covid-19 according to the technological platform. Photo: Nature Reviews

Of the 78 confirmed active projects, 73 are currently in exploratory stages.
The most advanced candidates have recently moved into clinical development, including tmRNA-1273 from Moderna (United States), Ad5-nCoV from CanSino Biologicals (China), INO-4800 from Inovio (United States), LV-SMENP-DC and a pathogen-specific APC from the Geno-Immune Medical Institute of Shenzhen, China.
Many other vaccine developers have stated plans to start human testing in 2020.

Lurking in Shock: Markets vs. Health

One of the most heated debates in the scientific and health environment is about the trade in medicines, including vaccines, the levels of violation of the right to life due to the commercialization and integral sovereignty threatened by transnational companies.
Because the Covid-19 vaccine would not be available to the public until the end of 2021, it becomes vital for many governments to ensure the production and availability of drugs to treat severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). .
However, as in other cases, there is the threat of some measures that intellectual property intervene in favor of the commercialization of the vaccine.

Image
Different trials for Covid-19 drugs move private corporations and their servile governments to find ways to maximize profits. Photo: RT

Some existing drugs, and applied against other diseases, have been successful in treating the disease and their production costs are essentially low, however there is a speculative process based on patents and monopolies by the pharmaceutical companies.
An article in the Journal of Virus Eradication , led by Dr. Andrew Hill of the University of Liverpool Department of Translational Medicine, explored the cost of mass-producing various drugs that have shown great promise in the global fight against the new coronavirus, finding that:
The two-week antimalarial treatments for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by Trump and produced by one of his companies, could be produced for just $ 0.30 and $ 1, but the former has a retail price of $ 93 in the United States.
A two-week treatment of Sofosbuvir / Daclatasvir sells in Pakistan for $ 6, the transnational Gilead charges for up to $ 18,610 in the United States.
The two-week treatment of Truvada, an HIV drug whose effectiveness against Covid-19 is being tested in 4,000 patients, costs $ 2, Gilead charges Americans about $ 2,000 per month, earning a gross profit of about 28 thousand percent.
These times of pandemic allow us to see in the first row how corporations use the public resources of the countries for their capitalist expansion.
The journalist Alan Macleod, of the Mintpress media , says that the most surprising thing of all is that Truvada was developed with public funds for 50 million dollars in R&D, however it is sold to US taxpayers almost 300 times more than the price that even developed countries like Australia pay for it.
Regarding patents, some governments are expected to ignore them and invest funds to analyze any treatment against the new coronavirus, although pharmaceutical companies maintain that strict patent laws prevent theft of intellectual property and that they are the only way in which the Research and innovation can continue, the reality is that they have done almost no research and development on the coronavirus and the drugs are only being taken and applied to the disease, it is a complete possibility if they succeed or fail.

Shaping global health governance

Hence, it is not uncommon for the links between imperialism, business elites, public health and health institutions to intensify in the midst of a global pandemic through various key mediating institutions such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Corporate globalization was intensified with the imposition of a regime of liberalization, deregulation and privatization making the governance of world health:
It systematically eliminated or compromised national ministries of health through "public-private partnerships" and similar schemes.
He touted "emerging infections" as inevitable and potentially catastrophic in order to soften resistance against imperialist health interventions.
It was part of the broader “security” speech that emerged in the wake of September 11, thereafter the global alarm on bioterrorism provided an opportunity to link health and national security.
It justifies imperial interventions in the health field in the same terms as “humanitarian” military interventions.

Image
The global alarm on bioterrorism provided an opportunity to link health and national security and justify imperial interventions. Photo: Daily Star

Elites in their labyrinth Cooperation or competition?
Vaccine-producing companies belong to the intertwined Big Pharma controlled directly or indirectly by a few businesses and a power elite, and they have increasingly intertwined through shared directors and common institutional investors.
In 2004, a team of Swiss system theorists , using a database of 37 million companies and investors worldwide, studied share ownership that links more than 43,000 transnational corporations.
They found that 1,318 core companies, accounting for 20 percent of global operating revenue, owned 60 percent of the world's revenue, and that the property network in turn belonged to 147 companies that controlled 40 percent of wealth. total network.
Indeed, less than 1 percent of companies were able to control 40 percent of the entire network, and most were financial institutions such as Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
This business elite is closely linked to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), America's elite foreign policy and international affairs expert who heads the Rockefeller Studies Program and brings together government officials, global business leaders and prominent members of the intelligence and foreign policy community to debate international issues and make recommendations to the presidential administration and the diplomatic community.
Sylvia Mathews Burwell is a member of the CFR, was secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during the presidency of Barack Obama and is a member of the BMGF, a foundation linked to magnate Bill Gates that will finance at least seven projects that strive to find the Covid-19 vaccine so as not to “waste time” in the search for a vaccine and thus, when the best candidate is found, have the infrastructures already in place to test and mass-manufacture it in about 18 months .
The largest development activity for the Covid-19 vaccine is found in North America, with 36 (46%) developers of confirmed active vaccine candidates compared to 14 (18%) in China, 14 (18%) in the rest of Asia and Australia, and 14 (18%) in Europe.

Image
COVID-19 Vaccine Developers Profile by Type and Geographic Location. For associations, the location is that of the lead developer. Photo: Nature Reviews

In the three months since the virus began its spread, China, Europe and the United States have set out to become the first to produce a vaccine, the contest has reached levels of arms race . Some acts:
Donald Trump has spoken in meetings with pharmaceutical executives about making sure a vaccine is produced on American soil, so that the United States can control its supplies.
German authorities said they believed Trump tried to lure a German company, CureVac, to do its research and production in the United States.
Trump's approach to CureVac prompted the European Commission to pledge another $ 85 million to the company, which already had the support of a European vaccine consortium.
The same day, a Chinese company offered $ 133.3 million for a stake and other consideration from another German firm, BioNTech.
In China, a thousand scientists work on a vaccine. Researchers affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences have developed what is considered to be the country's top successful candidate and are recruiting volunteers for clinical trials.
The main developers of active candidates for the Covid-19 vaccine are distributed in 19 countries that constitute more than three quarters of the world population, there is no public information on the development of vaccines in Africa or Latin America, although in these regions there are regulatory frameworks and vaccine manufacturing capacity.
Seth Berkley, GAVI Executive Director stated: "If countries say, 'Let's try to keep stocks so we can protect our populations,' then it can be challenging to get the vaccine to places where it can make a huge difference from the point of view of epidemiological view ”.
Of the confirmed active candidate vaccines, 56 (72%) are being developed by private / industrial, and the remaining 22 (28%) projects are led by academic, public sector and other non-profit organizations.
However, while there is cooperation at many levels, even between companies that are generally competing, the threat of a nationalistic approach persists that could allow the winner to favor his own population and have an advantage in dealing with the economic and geostrategic consequences of the crisis.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/la ... 0bd347ff78

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 23, 2020 2:11 pm

It Is Not 'Authoritarian' To Support Quarantine Measures - It Just Makes Sense
Yesterday James Corbett of The Corbett Report interviewed Kit Knightly of Off-Guardian about the corona crisis. At 18:30 minutes in Corbett finds it "disturbing" that some of the blogs who usually criticize governments, like Moon of Alabama, support the measures governments have taken to lower the speed of the novel coronavirus epidemic.

Corbett then highlights a discussion on Twitter between me and the Off-Guardian account.

It started with this:

vanessa beeley @VanessaBeeley - 5:33 UTC · Apr 9, 2020
#BillGates funded World Health Organisation advocate forced removal of family members fm homes if "tested" positive for #COVID19 even tho test is not proven reliable. So, govts hve corralled us in homes & will now unlawfully raid & extract citizens under poss. false pretext.

I retweeted that and remarked:

Moon of Alabama @MoonofA - 22:30 UTC · Apr 9, 2020
China did this in phase 2 of the Wuhan quarantine because it was the only way to protect the families from their infected members. Without that policy Wuhan would not have ended the epidemic.
Current test reliability is relativ high if test is immediate used when symptoms appear.
OffGuardian retweeted my tweet and launched the discussion:

OffGuardian @OffGuardian0 - 10:54 UTC · Apr 9, 2020
Surely your not actually advocating the forced removal of “infected” people from their homes against their will? #COVID19 #coronavirus
MoonofA: To separate infected from non-infected people is the ONLY way to stop such an epidemic.

OffGuardian: So let’s be totally clear. You believe the govts - the same ones who have lied us into wars, murdered innocents and destroyed the environment - should have the power to invade our homes and take away apparently healthy people whom they “SUSPECT” of being infected?

MoonofA: Our governments already have the right to do so under certain circumstances. An epidemic which threatens the health of all is one of them.

OffGuardian: That is not an answer. Do YOU believe these corrupt govts, which you have been opposing for so many years, should be able to enter people’s homes and take away people they claim to “suspect” of being infected?

MoonofA: I support quarantine measures during epidemics. We have had these for many centuries for good reasons. We should again use them.

OffGuardian: You support arrest and detention for people the govt claims to suspect MAY have a virus that - according to official estimates - is harmless or mild for 80-99% of those infected.
You do. MoA. Former champion of human rights and justice.
Have you lost your mind?

MoonofA: You are framing a measure that protects your and other families as "arrest" and "detention". It is neither of those.

OffGuardian: Oh ok. So, should the people ‘suspected’ of being infected be allowed to leave when they choose?

If your answer is ‘no’, then this IS arrest and detention and you are hiding behind blurry language.

As it made no sense to continue I stopped responding. Later Mark Sleboda jumped in to support my view:

Mark Sleboda @MarkSleboda1 - 5:02 UTC · Apr 9, 2020
Replying to @OffGuardian0 and @MoonofA
Leviathan - save me and mine from such fools.

Another discussion between OffGuardian and him unfolded from that. OffGuardian seemed to become a bit desperate when it then tweeted this nonsense:

OffGuardian @OffGuardian0 - 19:14 UTC · Apr 9, 2020
Replying to @MarkSleboda1 @ghigoberni and @MoonofA
So you would support indefinite detention for anyone who may be carrying flu virus then. It’s a lot more dangerous to healthy people and children than #covid19, as any epidemiologist will tell you.
I have not heard of any epidemiologist who has claimed that. But maybe I am reading the wrong ones. This graphic though from the British Office of National Statistics does not look like a flu outbreak:


Image
The same ONS data was used by the Financial Times to produce this probably better visual:


Image

The few high blue dots around December/January time frame show exceptionally bad flu seasons like the London flu of 1972. Similar charts from other countries show the same effect for current covid-19 outbreaks. Without control measures like the current lock-downs the red line would certainly go through the roof.

The covid-19 disease the novel coronavirus causes is not a "flu". We largely do have 'herd immunity' against the flu. But this is a new virus causing a new disease. Nearly nobody is yet immune against it. It works in ways we are still just beginning to understand and there is no established therapy.

If we let this epidemic run wild without any control measures the death toll will be exceptionally high. The death per infection rate in Germany is currently estimated to be 0.53% (via Christian Drosten). It may be higher in other countries. That looks like a small number but remember that nearly no one has yet acquired immunity. It would probably take a year for the epidemic to run through a whole country.

Great Britain, with a population of some 60 million, would be theoretically looking at 300.000 excess death within one year. But the health care system would completely break down and thereby vastly increase the total death toll as there would be no care for most of the critical covid-19 patients and no beds for the usual other cases. That may already happen as Britain is now estimated to already have 41,000 excess death from the current epidemic.

Current estimates say that 2 to 3% of the population have so far developed anti-bodies against the virus. They likely give some immunity but we do not know how long that will hold. Should this epidemic have weather dependent waves the first one will likely end during the summer. Model calculations show that only some 6-7% of the population would by then have acquired immunity.

A second wave will then come during the winter. It will be worse as it will start everywhere at the same time and will come on top of the yearly flu season. We will then likely again need some harsh control measure like temporary lock-downs and case quarantains.

Now back to the Off-Guardian and Corbett critique. My view on the epidemic was always based on science. You can follow how it developed through the list of posts attached to this one. As I watched how China defeated its outbreak I had hoped that other governments would take similar measures. With globally concerted action we could have completely erased this disease!

But one slips into a pandemic with the governments one has, not with the ones one wishes for.

Will our 'elites' use the crisis to further enrich themselves. Sure. Will they abuse some of the control measures? That is practically guaranteed. And it does not change a damned thing with regards to the pandemic.

It is now too late to defeat it by eradicating its source. Social distancing measures like lock-downs are needed to keep the epidemic under control and to not overload our health care systems. Should the next outbreak wave be worse than the current one we will need even harsher measures than we currently have. I will support those because I know that they will save lives.

If that makes me an 'authoritarian' in the view of some then let it be so.

I for one find it more useful to tell people to make and wear masks than to post 'expert opinions' (scroll down) from PR-company sites which disagree with the scientific mainstream while their estimates of the total death toll have already been exceeded.

---
Previous Moon of Alabama posts on the issue:

The Coronavirus - No Need To Panic - Jan 25 2020
Novel Coronavirus Defies Conspiracy Theories As Data Shows Its Coming Decline - Feb 1 2020
The Epidemic Recedes - Number Of New Coronavirus Cases In Decline - Feb 8 2020
Coronavirus - Statistical Change Causes Confusion - New Case Count Continues To Decline - Feb 13 2020
Coronavirus - The Decline Of New Cases Continues - Economic Ripples Begin To Emerge - Feb 21 2020
As Virus Spreads Over The Planet Governments Are Slow To React - Feb 27 2020
Coronavirus - Its Time To Press Your Government To React Faster - Feb 29 2020
Coronavirus - Bad Preparation And Propaganda Increase The Onsetting Panic - Mar 6 2020
Why Is The Coronavirus More Dangerous Than The Flu? - Mar 9 2020
Coronavirus - The Hidden Cases - Why We Must Shut Everything Down And Do It Now - Mar 11 2020
News-Nugget About The Coronavirus Pandemic - Mar 13 2020
The Pandemic Will Cause A Global Depression - We Need Demand Side Measures To Counter It - Mar 16 2020
Coronavirus - A Lockdown Is Not Enough - Mar 17 2020
False Claims About The Novel Coronavirus And How To Debunk Them - Mar 19 2020
Congress Grifters Profit From Crisis - Mar 20 2020
Coronavirus - On Western Government Failures And Possible Therapies - Mar 21 2020
Coronavirus - How To Lift Lockdowns And Why We Should All Wear Masks - Mar 23 2020
More Bits On The Corona Crisis - Mar 26 2020
U.S. Virus Cases Are Off The Scale - But Its People Can Build A Movement From This - Mar 31 2020
China Did Not Deceive Us - Counting Death During An Epidemic Is Really Difficult - Apr 1 2020
Why The U.S. Will Drown In Covid-19 Cases - Apr 2 2020
U.S. Will Cover-up Its Own Coronavirus Death Toll - Apr 6 2020
Debunking Some Ideas About The Virus - Apr 14 2020
The New Anti-China Campaign Is Built On Lies - Apr 18 2020
Posted by b on April 22, 2020 at 18:02 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/04/i ... .html#more

'Authoritarian!' Anaxarchos told me early on that he was an authoritarian and initially that bugged the shit out of me.Took a good while and and a lot of thinking for me to understand. Until we understand the crucial question of "Whose authority?" as a class issue and recall that the term is a liberal invention for liberal purpose we might sympathize with that favorite perjative of half-baked anarchism.

To be sure, sections of the booj are on either side of this as is obvious from all the wrangling, shifting positions, major league ass-covering. Ain't none of them doing anything for our benefit, what they do supposedly for us they do in the interest of not swaying from lampposts. And of course super-profits.

The divide between major & local capital here is now further complicated in the micro as a gaggle of SC mayors(particularly beach towns) push back against the governor's re-opening program. I expect they'll fold soon as Memorial Day Weekend approaches. Interesting to note that those towns are largely more up-scale venues whereas those opening, North Myrtle Beach & Garden City are more plebeian.

So what is to be done? Do what the socialists who have handled this have done is what. Emulate China. Our very bad luck that this is administered by our hideous bosses. Small choice I think & we must stay on their asses as best we can and use the criticism which we will have in super-abundance to bolster class politics. There is no doubt that the US government & economy are going to come out of this weaker in absolute and relative terms. 'Kick them when they are down' is my motto.

Imperialist's policy is scoring much better with this than they did with the partisan 'Russia-gate'. Bipartisan, baby! as both parties accuse the other of being in bed with China. "Preparing for the inevitable" while China quietly works to short circuit the same.

Things will only get weirder.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

solidgold
Posts: 68
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 7:36 pm

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by solidgold » Fri Apr 24, 2020 12:24 am

blindpig wrote:
Thu Apr 23, 2020 2:11 pm
'Authoritarian!' Anaxarchos told me early on that he was an authoritarian and initially that bugged the shit out of me.Took a good while and and a lot of thinking for me to understand. Until we understand the crucial question of "Whose authority?" as a class issue and recall that the term is a liberal invention for liberal purpose we might sympathize with that favorite perjative of half-baked anarchism.
I'm shocked to see how proud some people are acting over this. I guess I shouldn't be. :/

Materialism HAS to be our North Star through COVID-19. Whose authority under which conditions make what outcome. We aren't socialist; our lockdown looks much different. Regardless of the lives it saves in the vacuum of the virus, it is no symbolic gesture for human rights or socialism. The contradictions of bourgeois ideology--to save yourself you have to kill yourself. I'm sure people were itching for increased police presence around public housing!

But like you said, we don't have much choice. We should be taping the hair back to our heads every night, not patting ourselves on the back. People will die.

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 24, 2020 11:56 am

solidgold wrote:
Fri Apr 24, 2020 12:24 am
blindpig wrote:
Thu Apr 23, 2020 2:11 pm
'Authoritarian!' Anaxarchos told me early on that he was an authoritarian and initially that bugged the shit out of me.Took a good while and and a lot of thinking for me to understand. Until we understand the crucial question of "Whose authority?" as a class issue and recall that the term is a liberal invention for liberal purpose we might sympathize with that favorite perjative of half-baked anarchism.
I'm shocked to see how proud some people are acting over this. I guess I shouldn't be. :/

Materialism HAS to be our North Star through COVID-19. Whose authority under which conditions make what outcome. We aren't socialist; our lockdown looks much different. Regardless of the lives it saves in the vacuum of the virus, it is no symbolic gesture for human rights or socialism. The contradictions of bourgeois ideology--to save yourself you have to kill yourself. I'm sure people were itching for increased police presence around public housing!

But like you said, we don't have much choice. We should be taping the hair back to our heads every night, not patting ourselves on the back. People will die.
And there will be no 'Chinese solution' here, except where it can be used as an instrument of oppression. Like public housing.The difference, as Roland Boer repeatedly notes, is that the Chinese people can and do trust their government, for good reason. We do not, for good reason. Otherwise 'let freedom ring!' The stories of apartment doors being welded shut or organized 'noisy neighbors' snitching to authorities are already circulating. Because the methods of communist are unsuitable for a 'free people'. Because anything communist must be utterly discredited by any lie necessary. Because capitalist ideology trumps science. We are in for a rough ride, so is capitalism and bourgeois democracy, but we are not 'in this together'. The so-called 'income gap' (whadda bout wealth? Whadda bout class?) will loom ever more obvious and as it does be ignored by the media ever more studiously. And the equivalency of worker's interests with capital's will be hammered incessantly.Cause they are the 'job creators'...

All we got is ruthless criticism.

edited
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply