Pandemic Capitalism’s Cruel Absurdity
https://socialistaction.org/2020/05/24/pandemic-capitalisms-cruel-absurdity/
May 24, 2020
By MARK T. HARRIS
The United States leads the world in Covid-19 morbidity and mortality.
It’s also among the global front-runners for organized political idiocy,
as President Trump’s deadly incompetence in managing the crisis has left
many Americans in despair, their hopes for the future uncertain if not
on life support.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports 1,595,885 total cases and
96,002 deaths from Covid-19 as of May 23. While state case reports vary,
further waves of disease are likely unless vigilant public health
measures, including greatly expanded testing, contact tracing, and
quarantining, are in place.
For Trump and his right-wing political allies, Fox News media, and
anti-lockdown groups, such concerns are only minor irritants. They want
a reopened economy now, damn it! And if that means downplaying or
ignoring public health expertise over how to do so safely, then so be
it. Indeed, the pandemic has exposed Trump’s callous disregard for the
lives of ordinary people. But even more it has exposed the cruel
absurdity of competitive rivalries in an interconnected world. It has
exposed the irrationality and waste of class society, with its extremes
of wealth and poverty, concentrated elite political power, and social
policies driven by capitalist profits rather than human need.
Reopening Risks Downplayed
The estimates vary now on exactly how much testing is required to safely
reopen society. But in the past week only 9 of the nation’s 50 states
had sufficient testing in place to drive infection rates below the
safety benchmark needed for reopening, according to an analysis of
metrics used by the Harvard Global Health Institute. In fact, Harvard
researchers calculate a minimum of 900,000 daily tests are necessary to
safely ease social distancing measures without risking a surge in new
infections. This is almost three times current testing of approximately
300,000 to 400,000 daily tests done between May 12 and May 19, according
to the Covid Tracking Project.
Accordingly, public health experts, such as Anthony Fauci, MD, director
of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, are warning
moving too fast to reopen runs the risk of undoing progress to contain
the virus. Incredibly, Trump and his propaganda ministers at Fox News
have declared Dr. Fauci’s concerns “unacceptable.”
Trump argued this past week that he also now believes Covid-19 testing
is “overrated.” “If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few
cases,” explains the same man who earlier wondered if shining UV light
inside the body or ingesting disinfectants might eliminate the virus
from humans. Ironically, while now disparaging the value of testing,
Trump also boasts about how much testing the United States is doing,
more he claims than any other nation.
Actually, as of May 10, 2020, the United States ranked ninth in the
proportion of testing relative to population size among nations most
impacted by the pandemic. With 52,781 and 50,767 tests per one million
population, Spain and Portugal respectively have performed the most
COVID-19 tests, a rate about double that of the United States.
To note, shuttering the economy was first necessitated by lack of
adequate testing capacity, as public health experts have tried to
explain. In fact, epidemiologists estimate 90 percent of the deaths in
the United States from Covid-19 could have been prevented if social
distancing guidelines had been implemented by March 2, just two weeks
earlier than March 16 when they were.
Remember in late February when Trump declared Covid-19 cases would soon
be “close to zero”? The latest version of similar right-wing
disinformation is the Fox News hosts who now suggest the mounting death
toll is “inflated.” Actually, if anything mortality figures are more
likely underrepresented in official CDC reports, caution Dr. Fauci and
other public health experts.
Medical Experts: Remove the U.S. President
The leadership shown by Trump to manage the pandemic is a case study in
many things, but mostly just failure. The United States was
spectacularly unprepared for the pandemic threat. The White House was
warned in mid-January that immediate action was required to stop the
spread of Covid-19. But little was done for almost two months, beyond a
China travel ban on February 2 and a ban on most European travel some
six weeks later. This despite evidence travel restrictions for a highly
contagious virus such as Covid-19 would only have a “modest effect” in
delaying spread of the disease, unless combined with strict public
health interventions including social distancing practices.
When the pandemic emergency began, medical equipment and testing
capacity were also in desperately short supply. Trump claims no one
could have foreseen a pandemic of this scope; another lie. In fact, as
The Nation reports a 2017 Pentagon assessment anticipated a future
scarcity of ventilators, face masks, and hospitals in the event of a
novel virus pandemic.
The current leadership crisis in the United States is severe and
deepening. Trump is clearly a deluded incompetent, a man whose magical
thinking is not exactly leading us into the land of enchantment.
Charging the Trump administration with “an inconsistent and incoherent
response to the COVID-19 crisis,” treating CDC expertise as not much
more than someone else’s two cents, the prestigious British medical
journal The Lancet has taken the unprecedented step of calling for the
removal of the American president from office.
“The [Trump] Administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new
medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear,” wrote the
journal’s editors in a May 16 editorial. “But only a steadfast reliance
on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will
see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective
national public health agency.”
A Crisis Long in the Making
The social crisis we are entering is beyond the time for half-measures.
Unfortunately, the $3 trillion HEROES legislation passed recently by the
House of Representatives falls short of protecting the livelihoods and
needs of American working people, rejecting proposals for paycheck
guarantees or recurring stimulus payments to struggling workers.
“This legislation does not keep workers in their jobs and guarantee the
certainty of paychecks,” says Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), a leader of
the Congressional Progressive Caucus who voted against the legislation.
“More than 36 million people have filed for unemployment in only eight
weeks and a full 40% of households earning less than $40,000 lost a job
in March alone,” says Jayapal in a statement on her website. “Mass
unemployment is a choice and we cannot wait to let the rate of
unemployment rise to 40% or 50%, which it will do if we do not act
boldly. This is the highest level of unemployment we have seen since the
Great Depression and we cannot sit idly by and only offer half measures
or let it rise.”
You might logically assume that the wealthiest nation on earth would be
the best prepared for an infectious disease pandemic. But this would be
a wrong assumption. This also should not come as a surprise. The United
States has long established itself as the neoliberal superstar, the
modern nation with the most wealth inequality, threadbare social safety
net, and thoroughly corporatized political leaders from both major parties.
Obviously, Trump’s rush for a reopened economy is not motivated by
concerns for workers’ livelihoods, beyond perhaps some sketchy
calculation that an America open for business will translate into
electoral popularity come November. Actually, Trump’s encouragement of
the anti-lockdown protests is more likely to spike morbidity and
mortality rates in the coming months. Then again, Trump is counting on
the unwavering loyalty of his base of right wing supporters, a group at
apparent peace with their Dear Leader’s endless lies and whose demands
for “freedom” come increasingly colored in violent, fascist-tinged
sentiments.
Can former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden win the presidency now
with his apparently stealth campaign, counting on Trump to essentially
defeat himself in November? Maybe. And then? Will we get more sycophant
Wall Street politics, adapted to the new pandemic era, but still
offering basically the same Democratic “liberalism” whose failures first
set the stage for the rise of Trump and mainstream far-right politics?
If so, get ready for a further emboldening of the far right, whose
supporters include not only elite financial interests, but self-styled
armed militias whose protests are a likely sign of worse things to come.
Republican Party extremism is on a collision course with even the
pretense of democracy. It will take a different kind of transformative
politics, one built on mass mobilizations for a far-reaching program of
social and economic justice, to truly defeat the reactionary ghouls who
are taking this country to the brink of ruin.
The global pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of our common
humanity. It has brought a new urgency to the need for political
alternatives to status quo politics, a need for socialist politics and
organization and a vision of a future beyond capitalism. Under
conditions of a public health emergency, the venality at the core of the
capitalist way of life is now exposed for the acute threat to life it
actually is.
Mark Harris, former staff writer for Socialist Action newspaper, is a
Portland, Oregon-based writer and member of the Association of Health
Care Journalists (AHCJ). He can be reached at
markharris.media@xxxxxxxxx. This article was originally posted at
harrismedia.org.
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Steven Pinker
“It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer.
But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming
naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's
highest callings.
[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]”
― Steven Pinker