As this issue of Rally! was published, people were using the 2022 midterm elections to raise awareness of issues that really were about life-or-death.
Covid killed over a million Americans because their government didn’t adequately protect public health. Others died from massive flooding in Puerto Rico and Florida, where housing speculation produced enormous wealth, but little government spending to protect communities from climate change. Others were killed by the conscious actions of pharmaceutical corporations, as a deadly opioid epidemic caused immense suffering across the country. Let’s look into this epidemic, as a way of seeing how the whole system causes so many of us to die.
More than 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2021 and more than 109,000 people died of a drug overdose in the 12-month period ending March 2022, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in September. More than 1 million Americans have died from drug overdoses since 2001.
Throughout the country, protests have demanded that federal and state government leaders expose how prescription drugs greatly increased addictions, and punish corporate leaders for lying about the risks in their marketing campaigns. Fed Up! used the 2022 election season to mobilize in Washington, D.C and directly give Congressmembers demands like “Addiction treatment must be universally available and easily accessible”. In September, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a documentary on protests which made museums cut ties with the billionaire opioid-dealing Sackler family, won the Venice International Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion.
Paralleling the rise in overdose deaths is an immense change in economic life. The application of electronics to production is creating an entirely new situation. On the one hand, a growing number of jobs are simply disappearing forever, taken over by automation.
On the other hand, we have seen the emergence of part time, contingent, temporary workers. They work at or below minimum wage. No insurance, no benefits are the new norm. Temps, part time and contract workers already constitute a third of the work force. The growth in the contingent workforce over the past few years has been staggering. In 2020, the number of contingent workers in the U.S. reached 51.5 million. And in 2021 alone, 32% of companies replaced full-time salaried workers with contingent workers.
These workers being pushed out of economic life do not add to that wealth and their lives are considered valueless to a U.S. ruling class is well known for its relentless pursuit of amassing greater wealth. This is the source of increasing overdose deaths, steep rise in homelessness and evictions, poverty and the degrading of education and health care.
But these workers also represent an entirely new class in the social fabric of America — they are the revolutionary force of the 21st century. In spite of the relentless attempts by the ruling class to sow division and discord, it is a class beginning to unite to resolve the problems created by social destruction of the lives and health of the vast majority of us.
November/December 2022 vol.32. Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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