Fighting Covid Together

It is often said that “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members,” a quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Nothing has brought that measure to the forefront like the two years of the Coronavirus pandemic.

In an unusual circumstance, a catastrophe borne by all simultaneously tests every country’s healthcare system, every country’s ability to respond effectively to an unexpected challenge.

The Coronavirus punishes those countries that lack a commitment to preparedness, execution, and relief. It inflicts great pain on those societies that tolerate or encourage inequality. It ravages the populations that stress individualism or individual responsibility over collectivism and social responsibility. 

Universal, publicly funded, publicly guaranteed, and publicly administered health solutions fare far better than private, semi-private, or public-private schemes.

The bastion of private solutions, “efficiency,” and individual responsibility-- the US-- wins the failed-approach-with-the-most-deadly-consequences competition hands down, besting all countries in late, insufficient, and botched response. 

Conventional wisdom among the television gasbags was that the US catastrophe was the fault of the arrogant, ignorant President Trump. But now with another year of record-setting infections and deaths under the Biden Administration, that explanation falls away. The problem is systemic, though no one in the US political industry will acknowledge that it is inherent to the US healthcare model.

The facts are incontrovertible: On Thursday, December 30 Worldometer confirmed US infections totaled 572,029 for the day– a new record– and 1584 deaths on the same day. More infections occurred in the US than any other country for that day and for the duration of the pandemic to date (55,252,823). More deaths (846,189) have been reported in the US due to Covid than any other country. Happy New Year!

Far more deaths have happened from the Covid infection than combat deaths in all the wars fought by the US since 1775. This singular “achievement” has been accomplished in only two years. There are no cries of “USA, USA!”, as were in other cases of US pride.

Other countries that follow the US model showed similar “victories” in the Covid wars. Poland, a US ally engaging a similar employer-based, private insurance system, incurred 14,319 new cases and 710 deaths on December 30. Another country, Colombia, a US ally incorporating private insurance and individual responsibility in its healthcare system, has amassed 5,147,039 total cases and 129,901 deaths. 

Compare these numbers to countries that have a robust public health sector, with a focus on identification, isolation, contact tracing, and selective, but thorough lockdowns. Unlike the US and its allies who rely upon individual responsibility, some countries have robust public health systems and a deep-seated identification with and duty to others.

China (PRC), for example, despite being the most populous country in the world, had 4636 new cases on December 30 and no deaths. In total, PRC has far fewer total deaths from Covid than the US has in a week. Japan has fewer total deaths than the US has in a month. And Taiwan has far fewer total deaths than the US has in a day.

A poor country like Nicaragua, limited by US sanctions, has only 17,487 total cases and 212 deaths through December 30, 2021.

All share a reliance upon a public healthcare approach, renouncing a dependence solely on vaccines and individual choices. They all approach the terror of Covid as a social issue not to be solved by private, profit-driven solutions and a state leaving the key decisions to individuals and their own self-interest. Instead, they call on the people’s highest values-- cooperation.

Heroic Cuba has mounted a national campaign against Covid, despite the barbarous blockade and scarce resources, developing its own domestically developed vaccines and offering them to other countries.

While these approaches embody what might be called “socialist values,” they need not be limited to socialist-oriented countries, as Japan and Taiwan demonstrate. An effective war against Covid can be waged by countries that embrace a healthcare system that cleanses private profit from the task of protecting public health and ensuring equal, universal benefits. 

In other words, an effective approach to Covid can be reached as a reform under capitalism, but not without a radical shift in the political landscape away from the notion that the private sector has all of the answers. Only lacking is the political will.

Yet there are compelling reasons to go further than healthcare reform. The pharmaceutical industry has a stranglehold over the efforts to win the war against Covid. Pfizer and Moderna have made over $35 billion in vaccine sales for the first nine months of 2021 and are projected to sell more than $52 billion in 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal. The same article, documents the “high stakes legal battle [that] is taking shape over lucrative patent rights for Covid-19 vaccines, with drug companies pitted against each other and government and academic scientists over who invented what.”

As is typical with drug research, public institutions and scientists research, develop, often do everything short of manufacture and market new drugs, while big pharma acquires patents or licenses to sell. “Patents are especially valuable in the pharmaceutical industry because they can give a company the exclusive right to sell a drug or vaccine for many years, free from generic competition.” Academic and government scientists sell licenses for a pittance and pharmaceuticals exercise the monopoly price-gouging all too familiar to anyone utilizing the US healthcare system.

In the matter of the Covid vaccine development, the role of government scientists and the National Institute of Health is being disputed by the drug companies. One expert claims that with the dispute, “tens of billions of dollars are on the line.” In a separate case, “Moderna could be on the hook to pay more than $1 billion to the government for infringing the patent.”

At a time when people are asked to risk their lives, to sacrifice in the battle against Covid, big pharma is carving the vaccine’s destiny to fit its profit model, extracting the last dollars from the vaccine’s development process, denying its partner, the US government, even a token.

As reported by Common Dreams, a group of Texas researchers have pointed the way ahead by developing and offering an open-source alternative to the corporate vaccines. “We're not trying to make money,” Peter Hotez, who led the Texas Children's Hospital team, told The Washington Post. “We just want to see people get vaccinated.” Implicit in his statement is a ringing indictment of the big pharma approach.

With US politicians clearly unwilling to rein in or reform the rapacious, big-donor pharmaceutical industry, it is time the people insist that it be nationalized. Since it cannot be tamed, it must be euthanized. Public ownership!

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Tariff Follies

To its credit, the United Steelworkers union (USW) has lifted the living standards and working conditions of millions of workers. Birthed from the militant 1930s Steel Workers Organizing Committee and midwifed by hundreds of Communist and socialist organizers, the USW became a strong advocate of industrial unionism and one of the more progressive forces in US political life. 

But with the Cold War and the purging or repression of its most militant members, the USW abandoned the class-confrontation approach of its early years for a partnership with capital. In place of exercising the strength and power of a united membership, the union leadership chose a partnership approach, negotiating contracts based upon the notion that the worker and the boss had a common interest.

In the contest of the early Cold war, capital accepted some concessions to labor to guarantee US labor’s loyalty to US foreign policy objectives. In return for US labor leaders policing domestic radicalism in the workplace and for international collaboration in fighting Communism, the bosses tacitly agreed to accept wage and benefit growth commensurate with rising productivity. 

With the onset of the economic crisis in the 1970s and with the ruling class turning toward market fundamentalism, capital reneged on its part of the partnership, attacking labor with vengeance. The implicit partnership was dissolved by one side.

Unfortunately, the other side-- organized labor (in this case, the USW)-- clung to the partnership. Despite restructuring, downsizing, plant closures, and concession demands, the USW stood by the philosophy of cooperation, what their critics called “class collaboration.” 

Since we can remember, one expression of this affinity with corporate bosses has taken the form of seeking protection from foreign competitors. From inviting workers to sledgehammer Toyotas to advocating for steel tariffs, the USW leadership has maintained that what is good for steel corporations doing business in the USA is good for USW members. 

In recent years, the protectionist demand was at odds with the political mainstream, including the union’s putative ally, the Democratic Party. Since the rise of Thatcher/Carter/Reagan/Clintonism, unfettered free markets have been an ideological fixation of all the bourgeois parties and their policy makers, placing tariffs and other protectionist policies beyond the pale. 

But in 2016, the USW leadership found their savior. Donald Trump rudely arrived to occupy the White House. 

Moreover, he kept his promise in 2018 to impose restrictive tariffs on all the imported steel coming into the United States. Unfortunately for the USW and their bet on protectionism, the Trump tariffs failed to meet their expectations. As The Wall Street Journal reports: “With the expanded production, about 6,000 jobs were added to the U.S. steel industry’s workforce after tariffs started in 2018, according to the Census Bureau. By the end of 2019, though, those gains evaporated as steel demand and prices sank.” [my emphasis]

Authors Bob Tita and William Mauldin (Tariffs Didn’t Fuel Revival for American Steel, WSJ, 10-28-2020) add that: “Higher prices [initially] also made steel more expensive for manufacturers that buy it, leading to the loss of about 75,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs, according to a study released late last year by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.”

In addition, foreign steel makers secured punitive export tariffs in retaliation, further hurting domestic US manufacturing.

The lack of growth in demand for steel in the USA has forced domestic producers to seek exports of steel to markets outside the USA in search of profits, the same strategy practiced by the "foreign" competition. 

A major component of Trump's 2016 victorious campaign message which helped him secure votes in the Rust Belt was his promise of major investment to rebuild infrastructure and create jobs. It never got off the ground because it was based on the false notion that capitalists will invest in the public good. Things like fixing public schools, hospitals, water systems, pollution control, and building mass transit systems simply don't offer returns to investors even though they will provide for the public good, boost steel production, and create tens of thousands of steelworker jobs. 

 Instead, Trump, true to his real, big-business agenda, pushed a major tax cut that actually reduced the revenue available for any public investment. Rather than drain the swamp, Trump drained the public coffers and offered the syrup of "public private partnerships" that were supposed to entice capitalists to invest. They never did. 

Not to be outdone, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports that the Republican-controlled legislature of Pennsylvania has now taken this phony concept to its practical conclusion which will result in the proposed tolling of many bridges in Pennsylvania as a way of making the "partnership" work to increase state revenues. Rather than tax the wealth of billionaires and corporations to obtain necessary revenues to rebuild in the public interest, we instead have tax cuts for the rich and privatization of necessary networks and services. 

Understandably, the US-based steel industry sought to garner greater market share through the tariff program. However, the USW leadership failed to acknowledge one of the more basic laws of capitalism: with tariff-induced prices soaring and foreign competition locked out, domestic capitalist enterprises were incentivized to engage in an orgy of expansion and production. As a result of this classic overproduction-induced crisis, prices collapsed and the industry withdrew, with layoffs and closed facilities. Prices for hot-rolled coiled sheet steel increased by nearly half to $920 a ton after the tariffs were imposed, but are now below their pre-tariff level. 

The advocates of tariffs as a remedy for layoffs and stagnant or declining wages and benefits forget that capitalism runs on profits and not sharing the wealth. The Communist, socialist, and other militant trade unionists who founded the union understood this truth. They sought a union that would fight the corporations for a greater portion of those profits for the workers. 

Today’s leadership of the USW mistakenly believes that workers will benefit if “our'' corporations are favored over “theirs.” They fantasize a world where foreigners are rapacious cheaters and US producers are inspired by the greater good. “Theirs” are driven by ruthless competition, while “ours” are committed to fairness and partnership. Lurking beneath the rhetoric is a not-too-subtle national chauvinism.

Surely, the experience with the Trump tariffs reveals that the protectionist approach not only slanders foreigners, but fails to protect domestic production, jobs, and compensation. Domestic producers, like their foreign counterparts, are ruled by the laws of motion of the capitalist system. Bust follows boom, whether it applies to a protected national market or a global unfettered market. 

The union's reliance on this cooperative approach with the steel corporations defangs it for the necessary independent political action program that could unite the membership and the general public in a fight for jobs and investment in decaying infrastructure. All research shows that this is a real path forward to create steel demand and union jobs. It's plain to see and many studies document that America's infrastructure is in horrible shape. Tariffs have not increased domestic demand for steel. The only way to increase domestic steel production is through a massive reinvestment program that not only rebuilds the decaying American infrastructure in the public interest but creates steelworker jobs.

Rather than casting their fate with their privately owned corporate rivals for the wealth created by the workers, unions should fight those rivals for a greater share. If they want to guarantee jobs, security, and compensation, they should struggle to eliminate the private corporations altogether. A real fighting union would be for public ownership of the steel industry.

Greg Godels  zzsblogml@gmail.com

Ed Grystar egrystar@aol.com