Time of
Plague and Meltdown: Mass Murder by Corporate
Duopoly
By Glen
Ford
March
28, 2020 "Information
Clearing House"
- The
shrinking of the public health sector is a
capitalist crime, abetted by the two corporate
parties.
“There is
now no possibility of avoiding many tens of
thousands of deaths due to a shortage of
equipment, beds and health care personnel.”
Tens of thousands of people, disproportionately
Black and brown, are marked for death by
coronavirus in the coming weeks and months
because the United States political system
allows only corporate parties to govern. By
ensuring that the Dictatorship of Capital is
immune to effective electoral challenge, the
duopoly system has made the people of the United
States less healthy than the rest of the
developed world, and far more vulnerable to
epidemics of all types. As dutiful servants of
Capital, the Democratic and Republican parties
have for more than 40 years facilitated a Race
to the Bottom (austerity) that has steadily
lowered working people’s living standards and
slashed social service supports, including the
number of hospital beds, which have declined by
more than
half a million
since 1975 despite a population increase of 114
million.
Barack Obama and his Democrat-controlled
Congress saved the oligarchy from
self-destruction in the Great Recession, and
then collaborated with the resurgent Republicans
in a “Grand
Bargain” to
ensure that social services, including local and
state public health systems, would never recover
lost revenue and personnel. The pruning and
hyper-privatization of medical care was overseen
mainly by Democrats in the big cities, and
largely by Republicans on the state level, with
both parties in general agreement that the
public health sector was less “efficient” and
“innovative” than for-profit medicine. The
public health sphere became even more dependent
on private suppliers, including overseas
sources. Inventories of ventilators, masks and
other equipment and gear were kept to a minimum,
in line with the private sector’s “just-in-time
”
profit-maximizing philosophy. But time ran out
when the coronavirus hit, and there is now no
possibility of avoiding many tens of thousands
of deaths due to a shortage of equipment, beds
and health care personnel.
“The
pruning and hyper-privatization of medical care
was overseen mainly by Democrats in the big
cities, and largely by Republicans on the state
level.”
The
shrinking of the public health sector is a
capitalist crime, abetted by the two corporate
parties.
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The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
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Not
content to lessen the life-chances of their own
citizens, the duopoly parties screamed for
sanctions that have crippled the health sectors
of Venezuela and Iran, killing tens of thousands
before anyone had heard of COVID-19. The United
States is a global vector of suffering and
death, through the policies of its corporate
party tag-team. When deadly diseases are set in
motion, the crime becomes mass murder-suicide.
Donald
Trump is singularly stupid, incompetent and
self-dealing, but these very qualities make him
incapable of effecting any fundamental change in
national systems, for good or ill.
Congress rebuffed his attempts to cut funding of
the Centers for Disease Control -- but that
matters little in the current crisis because there
is no national health system for the CDC to
bolster, direct and rally. U.S. healthcare
has been shrunken, privatized and made wholly
incapable of coping with mass contagion – which
never arrives “just in time.”
It was
too late long before Trump. And, if
Fast-Talking-Slow-Thinking Joe Biden succeeds
the Orange Menace next January, there will be no
prospect of constructing a true national health
care system. Biden says he’ll veto a Medicare
for All bill if it comes across his desk in the
Oval Office. But without single payer
healthcare, no national system is possible. In
effect, Biden is campaigning for president on a
platform of mass death. Biden’s biggest
supporters -- Black Americans -- will continue
to die in disproportionate numbers whichever of
the two corporate parties is in power because
the Race to the Bottom (Race to the Graveyard)
is ruling class policy, and both parties serve
the ruling class.
“Without
single payer healthcare, no national system is
possible.”
If, by some miracle, Bernie Sanders becomes the
Democratic nominee, and then president, his
legislative agenda will be opposed by the bulk
of his own party officials and officeholders.
The corporate party faithful have rallied around
Hapless Joe because he can be depended on to
defend the interests of the party’s rich funders
– to continue the Race to the Graveyard. To make
sure that Democrats understand who is boss, the
world’s 8th richest oligarch, Michael Bloomberg,
is purchasing the party outright (see “Bloomberg
Wants to Swallow the Democrats and Spit Out the
Sandernistas
”). Bloomberg this week transferred $18
million
of his campaign funds to the Democratic
National Committee – actually, money that he
previously transferred from his own accounts to
his self-funded presidential campaign. The DNC
will soon be answerable directly to a New York
billionaire whose mission is to make the
Democratic Party an even more hostile
environment for austerity-busting politicians
like Sanders and his young enthusiasts. Medicare
for All is an austerity trip-wire that shall not
be crossed, but without a single payer system
there can be no national health care system.
Nevertheless, those Americans that survive the
Great Epidemic and Meltdown of 2020 will demand
a New Health Care Deal. Having been frightened
out of their locked-down wits by the
crisis-induced realization that economic
precarity is the national working class
condition, many millions will also demand a new
social contract that provides for a modicum of
economic security. But these are concessions
that the Democratic Party, overseen by
Bloomberg-the-Enforcer, cannot champion.
Infectious disease and growing immiseration and
precarity are crises for the masses, but the
cure – an end to the Dictatorship of Capital –
represents an existential crisis for the ruling
class. The revolution will not be organized in
the Master’s houses – Democrat or Republican.
BAR
executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
.
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