Entering calendar year 3 of the pandemic, America’s death toll has reached over one million lives. As state and local demagogues assure people it’s ok to ignore the advice of health scientists, the federal government still has no national policy on masking or safe practices in schools. Two things are absolutely clear: first, that COVID-19 is much more deadly than the public was initially told. Second, that the government has failed to protect public health adequately, especially for the growing class becoming disposable because they are not needed in the hi-tech economy.
Our series Ray of Light Inside the Pandemic has described how the ruling class allowed millions of us to go unprotected from the virus itself. They are also failing to protect us from criminals who profit from this pandemic. Google has confirmed that each day it blocks about 18 million coronavirus-related “phishing” emails promoting fake COVID-19 tests, counterfeit n95 masks, fake or low-quality vaccines, and phony medications. Vox reports that the phony drugs being promoted online include “chloroquine, as well as more far-out fake treatments involving cow urine, colloidal silver, and even oregano.”
And yet, on January 19, the Federal Trade Commission’s website declared that the agency had sent “cease and desist demands to more than 400 companies and individuals.” That is like doing nothing about such rampant lawlessness. And our government contributes to this situation, because University College London’s program on the Outbreak of Infectious Disease has reported that the tiny trickle of vaccine donations from richer countries to poorer ones leaves many people desperate enough to try products which often prove useless and even dangerous.
The lack of accessible, affordable tests for COVID-19 has opened yet another illegitimate market. On January 13, WIFR TV reported that Oregon’s Better Business Bureau had received complaints that people paid the pop-up Center for COVID Control Testing for expedited test results but never got them. Meanwhile, the Illinois Attorney General’s office received over 150 complaints on “pop-up” testing sites statewide. It’s only because people fought back that the word of this got out. But once again, our national government is not alerting the people nor local health workers to the problem.
What has gotten the government’s attention is how this global epidemic affects financial markets. The Investopedia company reports that “the pandemic has speeded up trends” of speculative investing instead of investing in traditional industries, and that this “speculative froth” will cause some market disruptions and investor losses. But they also reminded investors that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell made a distinction between market “volatility” and “stability,” saying that whatever loss individual investors suffer from volatility is only the government’s concern when it constitutes a threat to market stability. Leading capitalists will always put speculation’s benefits to their class ahead of the harm it causes any struggling member.
Imagine if the government used its publicity tools and public service messaging to mobilize the American people to help identify and expose both the online scam artists and the corrupt speculators. It could do what Italian scientists Emiliano Brancaccio and Ugo Pagan have called on the world’s governments to do since the pandemic began:
“It is necessary to denounce the behavior of private agents driven by a profit motive who are causing slowdowns in research against the virus … these speculations hinder research and must be stopped immediately. Public authorities must remedy these ‘market failures’ by ensuring maximum collective sharing of the scientific knowledge necessary to tackle the ongoing pandemic” (The Scientist, March 23, 2020).
Our government’s failure to protect millions of America’s most dispossessed people from COVID-19 and the economic disruption caused by speculation proves that the ruling class will sacrifice millions of lives to benefit their wealth and power. Ultimately, those millions can only protect themselves by taking power out of the hands of such a criminal class, so they can create a new publicly owned economy that does provide for their needs.
May/June 2022. vol.32. Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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