Monday, May 18, 2020

Reopening the Economy is a Death Sentence for Workers

Every morning for the last two months, I’ve checked the news in my home state of Florida with growing concern.

First came the photos of unemployed people lining up to file for benefits in person, denied access to an overburdened system. Then came the news that only a tiny percentage of unemployment claims were paid out by late April.

Now, barber shops and nail salons are reopening, even as the state saw its deadliest week yet. Altogether, the news paints a horrifying picture of a government cruelly uninterested in protecting human life.

The overwhelming majority of Americans continue to support social distancing and stay at home orders. But right-wing forces across the country are demanding an end to life-saving lockdowns, cheered on by a White House well aware of how devastating the loss of life could be.

The government estimates a death count as high as 3,000 people a day. Despite those horrifying numbers, some states are encouraging employers to report workers who are afraid that returning to their jobs could amount to a death sentence, kicking them off unemployment.

As other countries have shown with far more grace, the alternative isn’t shutting down forever — it’s investing in testing and social safety nets.

Senegal, which has 50 ventilators for its population of 16 million, is building more through 3D printing, all while it trials a $1 testing kit. The world took note of South Korea’s quick and vigorous testing system. Countries across Europe have relied on existing social safety nets to prevent the mass layoffs we’ve seen here in the U.S.

Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo provided necessary perspective: “We know how to bring the economy back to life,” he said. “What we do not know is how to bring people back to life.”

By contrast, the Trump administration’s callousness has become more evident than ever.

Experts have been sidelined in favor of fumbling volunteers from private equity and venture capital firms, who botched the procurement of medical supplies. And when Trump finally invoked the Defense Production Act, it was to force meatpacking workers — who are mostly Latinx and Black — to work through unsafe conditions at the very plants that have emerged as outbreak hotspots.

Indeed, those demographics may help explain the government’s willingness to risk lives.

It seems like no coincidence that the far-right pushback became stronger as evidence mounted showing the virus disproportionately killing already marginalized people of color, especially black Americans. And it was hard to miss the Nazi slogan prominently displayed at a “re-open” protest in Illinois, or the Confederate flags featured as far north as Wisconsin.

Government disregard for vulnerable lives is hardly new. Who can forget the New Orleans residents stranded on their rooftops after Hurricane Katrina? Or the disabled New Yorkers left stranded for days after Hurricane Sandy?

Every level of the U.S. government has shown, time and again, that the default setting is to leave the vulnerable behind. But Americans themselves are challenging that approach.

Workers at General Electric protested to switch production to ventilators, a move that could save jobs and lives. Teachers have promised more strikes if schools open against medical advice.

Nurses, in addition to treating the sick, have faced “re-open” protesters head on. And they’ve stood outside the White House, reading the names of their colleagues killed by government inaction and demanding more protections.

Add these actions to the wave of strikes and sickouts from essential workers across the country, and a clear picture emerges: The wealthy may be fine with sacrificing the vulnerable. But workers understand the sanctity of human life, and will fight for it.

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Racism, Animal Rights and Eugene Debs

by JON HOCHSCHARTNER COUNTERPUNCH MAY 15, 2020

I was excited to read The Universal Kinship, a 1906 book by John Howard Moore, which argues the ethical implications of Darwinism is some form of animal liberation. Unfortunately, the text is marred by the pseudo-scientific racism that seems to have been popular at the time.

My interest primarily stemmed from Eugene Deb’s praise for the book. “It is impossible for me to express my appreciation of your masterly work,” the labor leader was quoted as saying in advertisements for the text. “It is simply great, and every socialist and student of sociology should read it. I have carried it in my grip over the past few thousand miles and its essence is in my heart.”

Way back when, I edited a blog called Species and Class, which sought to make connections between the animals’ and workers’ movements. I’d never come across anything to suggest Debs had progressive views about nonhumans. Sure, he recognized his connectedness with all living beings, in a famous statement to the court after his conviction for violating the Sedition Act. But I assumed that was a meaningless platitude.

I’m still not sure about Debs’ species politics. However, I can say The Universal Kinship is an animal-liberationist book. At times, Moore seems oddly positive about the transformations wrought by domestication. He rhapsodizes about the temperamental superiority of dogs over wolves, as an example. But the overall thrust of the text is clear.

For instance, Moore writes: “The creophagist and the hunter exemplify the same somnambulism, are the authors of the same kind of conduct, and belong literally in the same category of offenders, as the cannibal and the slave-driver. To take the life of an ox for his muscles, or to kill a sheep for his skin is murder, and those who do these things or cause them to be done are murderers.”

Moore argues humanity should treat animals according to the Golden Rule. He encourages readers to imagine how their perspective would change if there were a more dominant species on the planet than Homo sapiens. Moore clearly sees animal rights as a worthy complement to abolitionism, women’s suffrage and socialism.

“All beings are ends; no creatures are means,” he says. “The Life Process is the End — not man, nor any other animal temporarily privileged to weave a world’s philosophy. Nonhuman beings were not made for human beings any more than human beings were made for nonhuman beings.”

Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, there’s a passage filled with racist social Darwinism to match every progressive sentiment. Moore refers to Aryans as incomparable. He gives serious consideration to a biologist who believes that if black and white people were snails, they’d be classified as different species.

Moore frequently suggests Africans are evolutionarily closer to other primates than Europeans are. “The anthropoid races, in the shape of their heads and faces and in the general form and structure of their bodies, and even in their habits of life, resemble in a remarkable manner the lowest races of human beings,” he writes. “This resemblance is recognized by the negro races, who call the gorilla and chimpanzee ‘hairy men,’ and believe them to be descendants of outcast members of their own species.”

One must assume this pseudo-scientific racism was common at the time. After all, the text was endorsed by a number of notable progressives, besides Debs. In the same advertisements, authors Mark Twain and Jack London gave positive testimony about the book. Animal-rights pioneer Henry Salt hailed it as best anti-speciesist text he’d ever read.

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Covid-19, Big Ag and the Failing Food System

by RASHID NURI MAY 18, 2020 COUNTERPUNCH

Photograph Source: Cullen328 – CC BY-SA 3.0

Big Ag has separated humankind from the process of creating food that sustains existence. This separation has been done for material gain. Big Ag has interrupted the most natural relationship, a spiritual relationship, between humanity and the land. This human/land connection supersedes all religions. It is humankind’s association with land that feeds us and fortifies people to grow and expand civilization. It is this divine relationship that has been interrupted by the economic agenda of Big Ag. That agenda, like in most industry, is to monetize human need, with little or no concern for people’s wellbeing.

This COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the contradictions existing in our food system. We have a hyper-concentration in the distribution of food throughout the country. There is grand irony in hearing one of the leaders of Big Ag express dismay at the current state of affairs.

John Tyson is a third-generation scion and board chairman of the family business that bears his name. Tyson Foods, headquartered in Springdale Arkansas, is the world’s second largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork. Tyson exports the largest percentage of beef out of the United States. Their revenues exceed $40 billion annually.

“The food supply chain is breaking,” wrote board chairman John Tyson in a full-page advertisement published simultaneously in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “There will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed,” Tyson wrote.

President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order that invoked the Defense Production Act and commanded meat processing facilities to remain open. An analysis by Business Insider found at least 4,585 Tyson workers in 15 states have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and 18 have died. Trump’s order has prioritized meatpacker profits over the health and safety of workers, many of whom are immigrants, and created coronavirus hotspots.

The food system is broken! Where are the solutions? We need a comprehensive Small Farm and Urban Agriculture Homestead Act to support local food economies!! Some tentative steps have been taken. We have to go further.

Senator Cory Booker, joined by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Ro Khanna, has introduced a bill to phase out large-scale factory farming by 2040. The question is what will replace the current modalities of production? Access to land, labor, capital (both infrastructure and funding) and regulatory support has to shift from Big Ag to small farmers who live in the neighborhoods that they serve. There are billions of dollars already committed to the food system in the form of subsidies, education and research and other resources, that can fund a new food system that is more efficient, healthy and humane.

As it stands, the business of farming and ranching is increasingly concentrated, with few growers occupying much larger acreage. The number of farms in the U.S. peaked in 1935, at 6.8 million. By 2016, there were only 2.1 million farms, occupying the same number of acres. Large farms “eat up” smaller ones, by having greater access to land, equipment and markets. The small farmers that have weathered the onslaught of commercial farming are finding it difficult to survive. According to a 2016 USDA report, 59 to 78 percent of small farms, those with gross incomes up to $349,999, were operating in the red in 2015. On the other hand, farms with incomes of $1-5 million and above were more likely to bring in profits averaging 25%.

Building sustainable communities begins with a focus on infrastructure, equity and food self-sufficiency. Big Ag is highly scalable, but not replicable. They have the ability to become larger, but the possibility of their facilities and infrastructure being replicated are slim. However, the local food production provided by small farms and urban agriculture is highly replicable. Small farms and urban agriculture can address many of the issues faced by humanity and expand a very productive pre-industrial, regenerative local food economy.

Reopen the Economy; or Charge of the Right Brigade

by MARSHALL SAHLINS

COUNTERPUNCH MAY 18, 2020

Half a shop, half a bar,
Half a school onward.
Into the Virus of Death
Goad the Sick Hundreds.
“Forward the Right Brigade,
Charge on your cards,” he said.
Into the Virus of Death
Goad the sick hundreds.

“Forward the Right Brigade!”
Was there a MAGA dismayed?
Not that the shoppers knew
POTUS had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to buy and die.
Into the Virus of Death
Goad the sick hundreds.

Covid to the Right of them,
Covid to the Left of them,
Covid in front of them
Slaughtered and sundered.
Stormed at with goods to sell,
Boldly they shopped and well.
Into the Virus of Death
Rode the sick hundreds.

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Can We Simultaneously Oppose Bayer/Monsanto’s Biotechnology and Support Cuba’s Interferon Alpha 2B?

by DON FITZ COUNTERPUNCH MAY 15, 2020

GREEN REVOLUTION 2.0Genetically engineered crops are a form of food imperialism. This technology allows mega-corporations like Bayer/Monsanto to patent seeds, lure farmers into buying them with visions of high yields, and then destroy the ability of small farmers to survive.

Genetic engineering produces an artificial combination of plant traits which often results in foods with less nutritional value while introducing health problems to animals and humans who eat them. It increases costs of food production, pushing millions of farmers throughout the world into poverty and driving them off their land.

Agricultural corporations get control of enormous quantities of land in Africa, Latin America and Asia which they use to control the world’s food supply and reap super-profits from the cheap labor of those who work for them, sometimes people who once owned the same land. These crops can be developed in open-field testing which allows the novel pollen to contaminate wild relatives of the engineered crops.

Agro-industries which dominate this process have the resources to lobby two sections of governments. They tell one government agency that their plants do not need to pass safety tests because they are “substantively equivalent” to already existing plants. Yet, out of the other side of their mouths, corporate lawyers argue that, far from being equivalent to existing plants, their engineered ones are so novel as to deserve patents, patents which allow companies to sue farmers who save seeds for planting during the next season.

As a resident of St. Louis, a veritable plantation of Monsanto (now Bayer), I have participated in and organized dozens of demonstrations at the company’s world headquarters, as well as forums and conferences. It is necessary to compare the use of biotechnology by food corporations with that of Cuba to decide if they are the same or fundamentally different.

Medicine in Cuba

John Kirk’s Health Care without Borders: Understanding Cuban Medical Internationalism (2015) provides a wealth of information regarding Cuba’s early use of biotechnology in medicine. It is a poor country suffering effects of a blockade by the US which interferes with its access to materials, equipment, technologies, finance, and even exchange of information. This makes it remarkable that Cuba’s research institutes have produced so many important medications. Even a partial list is impressive. The use of Heberprot B to treat diabetes has reduced amputations by 80 percent. Cuba is the only country to create an effective vaccine against type-B bacterial meningitis, and it developed the first synthetic vaccine for Haemophilus influenza type B (Hib), which causes almost half of pediatric meningitis infections. It has also produced the vaccine Racotumomab against advanced lung cancer and has begun clinical tests for Itolizumab to fight severe psoriasis.

By far, the best known efforts of Cuban biotechnology followed an outbreak of dengue fever in 1981 when its researchers found that it could combat the disease with Interferon Alpha 2B. The same drug became vitally important decades later as a potential cure for COVID-19. Interferons are signaling proteins which can respond to infections by strengthening anti-viral defenses. In this way, they decrease complications which could cause death. Cuba’s interferons have also shown their usefulness and safety in treating viral diseases including Hepatitis B and C, shingles and HIV-AIDS.

A Tale of Two Technologies

There are marked differences between corporate biotechnology for food and Cuba’s medications for health. First, corporations produce food that fails to be healthier than non-engineered food which it replaces. Cuba’s biotechnology improves human health to such a degree that dozens of nations have requested Interferon Alpha 2B.

Second, corporate food production drives people off of their land while making a few investors very rich. No one loses their home due to Cuban medical advances.

Third, food imperialism fosters dependency but Cuba promotes medical independence. While corporate biotechnology drains money from poor counties by monopolizing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), Cuba strives to produce drugs as cheaply as possible.

Patents for its many medical innovations are held by the Cuban government. There is no impetus to increase profits by charging outrageously high prices for new drugs – these medications become available to Cubans at much lower cost than they would in a market-based health care system like that of the United States. This has a profound impact on Cuban medical internationalism. The country provides drugs, including vaccines, at a cost low enough to make humanitarian campaign goals abroad more achievable. Its use of synthetic vaccines for meningitis and pneumonia has resulted in the immunization of millions of Latin American children.

Cuba’s other phase of medical biotechnology is also unknown in the corporate world. This is the transfer of new technology to poor countries so that they can produce drugs themselves and do not have to rely on purchasing them from rich countries. Collaboration with Brazil has resulted in meningitis vaccines at a cost of 95¢ rather than $15 to $20 per dose. Cuba and Brazil worked together on several other biotechnology projects, including Interferon Alpha 2B, for hepatitis C, and recombinant human erythropoletin (rHuEPO), for anemia caused by chronic kidney problems.

In Perspective

The bigger picture is that technology of all types is not “value free” – it reflects social factors in its development and use. Nuclear plants require military forces for protection from attack, making them attractive in any society dominated by those who employ a high degree of violence to suppress dissent.

Market forces within capitalism select technologies that are profitable, even if they are destructive to human welfare. Of course, medicine such as antibiotics benefit humanity even if their original goal was profits for pharmaceutical giants.

At other times, products that damage society as a whole are pursued because they augment corporate profits by weakening labor unions. Planting and harvesting equipment have been used to undermine organizing efforts of agricultural workers. In the mid-1880s Chicago McCormick adopted new molding machines which could be run by unskilled workers. The company used them to replace skilled workers of the National Union of Iron Molders.

Expensive technologies can destroy small competitors so that large companies with more capital can better control the market. No case is clearer than the use of GMOs in agriculture. By use of market control (making non-GMO seeds unavailable), financial terrorism (such as lawsuits against resistant farmers), and the pesticide addiction treadmill, GMO giants such as Bayer/Monsanto have increased the cost of food production. This destroys the livelihood of small farmers across the globe while transforming the large farmers who remain into semi-vassals of these multinational lords of seeds and pesticides.

Though a century separated them and they affected different types of labor, actions by McCormick and Bayer/Monsanto had something in common. They both utilized novel technology which resulted in less desirable products but increased profits.

Because they were an invaluable weapon against the union, McCormick used molding machines that produced inferior castings and cost consumers more. GMOs in agriculture result in lower-quality food. Since two-thirds of GMOs are designed to create plants that can tolerate poisonous pesticides such as Roundup, pesticide residues increase with GMO usage.

GMOs are also used to increase the production of corn syrup which sweetens a growing quantity of processed foods, and thereby contributes to the obesity crisis. At the same time, food engineered to be uniform, survive transportation, and have a longer shelf life contains less nutritional value. The use of GMOs in corporate agriculture is one of the largest contributing factors to the phenomenon of people simultaneously being overweight and undernourished.

Cuba’s use of biotechnology to create medications is in sharp contrast to both McCormick and Bayer/Monsanto. Its drugs, especially Interferon Alfpha 2B, are used to help people overcome illnesses. They are created to share throughout the world rather drive people into worse poverty. Making a distinction between the biotechnology of Bayer/Monsanto and Cuba requires understanding the difference between bioimperialism and biosolidarity. Imperialism subdues. Biosolidarity empowers.

Why Capitalism Can’t Cure Global Pandemics

by PRABIR PURKAYASTHA COUNTERPUNCH MAY 15, 2020

We frequently hear that COVID-19 is the worst pandemic since the influenza of 1918. It is forgotten that another pandemic known as “the third plague” (because it was “the third major bubonic plague outbreak to affect European society”) killed millions from the 1890s to the 1950s in Asia’s southern, southeastern, and eastern regions, continuing well after the 1918 flu was over. It killed an estimated 10 million in India alone.

So why is this forgotten when we talk about pandemics today? The answer is the same reason behind the collective amnesia in wealthy nations on a whole host of diseases that still plague the world—diseases that Peter Hotez, a molecular biologist, wrote about in his book Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases. (The World Health Organization [WHO] gives them the neutral term “neglected tropical diseases.”)

The question is who has forgotten such diseases. Certainly not the 65 percent of people who are threatened by tuberculosis, malaria, dengue, yellow fever, and the other “forgotten” diseases Hotez lists.

It is the well-off countries who believed that infectious diseases did not concern them anymore. They were “forgotten” by the rich, as they believed they could keep such diseases outside their borders. The third plague was almost entirely restricted to the colonized world, leaving the colonialists in the comfortable belief that they had now conquered the infectious diseases that only affected dirty, flea-ridden, rat-infested parts of the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic proves that diseases can strike back, and we are always only one mutation away from a new infectious disease emerging.

One of the consequences of the belief that infectious disease is no longer a concern of the rich is the drying up of research funds needed for developing new medicines for such diseases. Annually, tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people and infects 10 million (according to the WHO’s 2019 Global Tuberculosis Report), with Indiaalone counting for nearly half a million deaths and about 2.7 million infected. Yet, it took four decades for new tuberculosis drugs to enter the market.

The last three new medicines (mefloquine, halofantrine and

artemisinin) for malaria, which annually infects more than 200 million, were developed 50 years ago. Two out of three (mefloquine and halofantrine) were developed by the U.S. Army for its soldiers fighting the U.S. colonial war against Vietnamese liberation forces.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Nobel Prize winner for chemistry in 2009) pointed out that the current model of developing medicine will not work for infectious diseases for two reasons. One is that drug companies do not see an incentive for developing a drug that cures patients in a few days. The other is that infectious diseases are far more prevalent in poorer countries, and the poor cannot pay the prices that multinational drug companies want. Whether it is medicines for infectious drugs or vaccines, both of which address public health issues, multinational companies and big pharma have very little interest. That is why infectious diseases have been forgotten—by rich countries, who think it is only a problem of the third world; and by big pharma, which does not see any profits from such drugs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the other contradiction in the capitalist world: ill health produces profits; a healthy population does not. Money is to be made from disease when people buy pills or have to go to hospitals.

Public health was important as long as infectious diseases were perceived to be threats. As they became “forgotten,” so did public health in rich countries. In the case of hospitals, what drove the system was private profits for private hospitals. The same capitalist criteria were introduced as “efficiency” for public hospitals. The capitalist principle of maximizing efficiency was maximizing bed occupancy, a twisted form of “just-in-time manufacturing” introduced by capitalism that reduces inventories and therefore costs. Reducing beds, equipment, and medical staff is, in capitalism’s terms, “rationalizing” production and increasing “efficiency.”

When the COVID-19 epidemic hit advanced capitalist countries, particularly in the flu season when there is already a peaking of patient loads, they ran into a huge shortage of intensive care beds, equipment, doctors and nurses. This is what has led to such high death rates as the hospitals simply collapsed. That is not to mention other problems caused by the collapse of global supply chains, such as the lack of personal protective equipment (PPEs) and medicines.

What has surprised most observers is the collapse of the health systems in the advanced capitalist countries. Forbes magazine in late January cited a Global Health Security (GHS) Index (a project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security) “ranking” of countries that are “best and worst prepared” to handle the epidemic. In these rankings, the two countries that were on top were the U.S. and the UK. The U.S. today has the highest number of infections and deaths in the world; the UK has registered the highest number of deaths in Europe already. Almost all the countries that the GHS Index had ranked as best prepared—the U.S. and the core EU countries—now have the worst numbers. These countries may have been prepared to handle normal health issues, and annual flu cases, but were completely unprepared for a novel infectious disease.

While East and Southeast Asia adopted masks, particularly with their brush with SARS (now renamed as SARS-CoV-1) in 2003 and the dangerous H5N1 version of avian flu, the advanced countries have no such experience. In the less affluent countries, there is still a collective memory of infectious diseases—plague, cholera, small pox, polio—and the public health measures that are needed during epidemics. There are even some surveillance and monitoring systems, however weak, that address such issues. For the people in the U.S., the threat of a new infectious disease is not even a part of their collective psyche. That is why, with an imminent lockdown, guns and ammunition were in as high a demand as medicines and food. The threat many Americans saw was clearly other people, and not the virus itself.

Amit Sengupta, one of the founding members of the global People’s Health Movement, wrote extensively about the contradiction between capitalists and the rest of the world, between their greed for profits (and profiteering) and people dying for lack of medicine. He wrote, “Unethical behavior of health care providers is directly linked with the fact that if care is linked to profit, more ill health means more profit!… Governments, not markets, can ensure that health systems address the needs of the poorest and the most marginalized.”

It is not an accident that COVID-19 deaths are concentrated in the advanced countries among immigrant communities, the poor, and the socially excluded. It is the African American and Hispanic populations in the U.S. who are seeing disproportionately larger numbers of deaths and infected. It is the immigrant areas in the EU and UK who are again seeing higher rates of infection and death. But diseases are also levelers; the poor and the excluded may suffer more, but COVID-19 will not spare the rich either. And this time, the rich countries who thought they had left their infectious past behind are beginning to understand that in a globalized world, they are also at risk from pandemics.

This is the question that Amit had posed in the last People’s Health Assembly in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2018. What happens when the hunger of capitalism enters the belly of the beast? When this hunger enters those countries that the GHS Index thought were best prepared to face the pandemic?

The novel virus—SARS-CoV-2—has brought out the older challenge of disease back to the list of existential challenges that humanity faces. We know that the race between microbes and us is a continual battle. As we evolve our defense, they also develop their offense. We know that we upset the global ecological balance—climate change—at our peril. What is not understood widely—except by those on the left—is that the biggest obstacle to charting a path for humanity that lets us address these challenges is capitalists and their greed.

Pandemics have not only spread death and destruction, but they have also changed societies in fundamental ways. No, the world will not look the same once the COVID-19 pandemic is over with herd immunity: either through vaccination or infections. But will it lead to society confronting capitalism’s greed against people’s lives? That is the challenge before all of us; this is how history will judge us.

This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.