Americans will die sooner than expected, because of a dangerous virus and a lethal social system. America’s average life expectancy fell in 2021, for the second year in a row, largely as an effect of COVID-19. We suffered a larger drop than the decline in other highly developed capitalist countries like England, France, and Germany. Many who died were not elderly, but in the prime of their lives, driving average U.S. life expectancy down to a 25-year low.
New technology has allowed capitalists to discard people that production once depended on. At first, they seemed to mainly be people of color, as the historically last ones hired became the first ones fired. But the pandemic is now exposing the class nature of this crisis. For example, over the full two years of the coronavirus pandemic, the life expectancy for Americans of color has fallen the most. But a new development in 2021 was that life expectancy for whites began to decline at a faster rate than the rates for others, bringing them closer to the death rates for people of color.
This reflects the growing equality of poverty and death that is underway for the new class of the dispossessed. In response, people in this class are fighting in every corner of the land. Rally, Comrades! has brought readers this class struggle represented in the fights of millions against killer cops in Minnesota and Oklahoma, and in struggles for safe water from Flint, Michigan to Colorado, etc. Today, fighting for survival inherently means a fight against fascism.
So, the government has been forced to deal with some of these issues. Yet, even when the government puts resources into fighting the pandemic, they do too little. Although the Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security urged the U.S. government to invest about $20 billion annually to combat pandemics, the Preparedness Plan drafted by the Biden administration in September called for spending only $65 billion over 10 years, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Meanwhile, military funding is draining funds for protecting the public’s health. The Director of the Center for Defense Information reports that “those polled in the United States identified infectious diseases as the greatest threat to the country.” Yet, in the first year of the pandemic, “As US defense expenditures rose in 2020 to $778 billion—that is, almost 40 percent of total military spending in the world—a third of small US businesses closed either temporarily or forever, and, by June 2021, over 600,000 people in the United States had died.”
“And it’s important to remember what happened when the Defense Department was given the lead in a pandemic-related effort: The department took $1 billion meant to accelerate purchases of N95 masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) and reallocated that money, using it to buy jet engine parts and body armor.” (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists September 7, 2021)
World military funding increases in 2020 were not the result of being surprised by COVID-19’s sudden emergence. In 2021, world military spending hit an all-time high of $2.1 trillion, with the United States, China, India, the United Kingdom and Russia paying 62 per cent of that amount. “Even amid the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, world military spending hit record levels,” reported Dr Diego Lopes da Silva of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute on April 25, 2022.
Our government pretends Russia’s invasion disrupted its COVID strategy, requiring funds to be shifted into military assistance to Ukraine. But the orgy of military spending increases began years before that war, part of the maneuvering for global dominance underway among ruling classes as technology really disrupts the world economy. If we don’t die of COVID, or brutal police, they are trying to have us die for them in the wars they are preparing. A tiny ruling class owns or controls the core of the economy, where the things we need are produced but then kept from us when we can’t pay for them. To stop the shortening of our life expectancy, humanity has to shorten the life span of that class and its system. So, fighting for everyone to have the necessities for a decent life inevitably has to develop towards fighting for a new world. The growing equality of poverty not only makes class unity finally possible, now it is absolutely necessary to our survival.
Published: May 7, 2022
This article published by Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction
