Get comfortable, this is going to be a long one.
So along with the above, please provide a third citation to explain how Sanders stump speech on Medicare would have done literally anything to prevent a highly infectious virus that China was jailing doctors for talking about for two whole months before they were forced to admit it and lock down the Wuhan region? Or why his platform on insurance costs would have meant something different in the US, when we can literally just look across the pond and see the ****show that is the UK and Italy right now?
https://twitter.com/markmackinnon/status/1242798008170938369
Not only is the US on track to have the most cases by far and yesterday it did pass China as the country with most cases, but did so in less time than the UK or Italy or even China. You'll notice that all the countries that managed to get their outbreaks under control quickly have notes that basically amount to aggressive treatment, testing, and quarantine. While administrative incompetence didn't help in the US, Italy, or the UK, the US also does not have the infrastructure to handle this, Trump or no.
https://gizmodo.com/teen-who-died-of-covid-19-was-denied-treatment-because-1842520539
This is a seventeen-year-old that died from treatment denial, because he didn't have health insurance. The info that this virus kills only old people is misleading, because it's younger people that are prioritized over old people in overrun healthcare systems. Just because they die at a lesser rate than old people, doesn't mean that this isn't serious for young people either. It should merit some serious consideration that COVID-19 statistics are done in countries that guarantee healthcare to everyone. Those statistics are from people that were being treated.
What about people that can't afford
$30,000 for treatment?
https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/
Tens of millions are uninsured and they are mostly low income and working families. That means they depend on their paycheck to survive and aren't exactly going to be able to quarantine themselves.
https://www.usnews.com/news/economy...ent-could-hit-30-as-coronavirus-slams-economy
Remember Pete's "If you like your private plan, you can keep it"? 30% unemployment is beyond Great Depression levels and that's a lot of people going to lose their health insurance. Private plans are completely pointless if you lose the job they're tied to. Maybe having critical infrastructure be independent from private entities has some upsides.
So we essentially have a situation where poor people who are going need to keep working aren't going to be able to be tested or get treatment or quarantine themselves, like those other countries. Italy and the UK have made massive cuts to their healthcare and haven't had a very responsible administration or populace, much like the US. But they do guarantee healthcare to their citizens, while the US does not.
It bears repeating that the current statistics are based on countries that do guarantee healthcare to their citizens. The US is the outlier here and has lots of unique variables. Not to mention other situations that aren't strictly healthcare related, but will exacerbate the current crisis.
https://www.texasobserver.org/homeless-covid-19-texas/
With staggering levels of homelessness, over half a million, that's a large number of people that don't have adequate shelter to quarantine themselves, no healthcare, no ability to social distance, and no real easy way to track. That's just asking for rampant infection that isn't really going to be easy to contain. If you think Trump flubbing the test kits is bad, how about people that aren't even necessarily on the grid to be tracked and tested in the first place?
https://www.inquirer.com/education/nj-schools-laundry-students-dirty-clothes-20200219.html
There's an increasing issue in the US, where low income families are relying on schools to feed their kids and wash their clothes. Shutting down schools puts these families in a bad situation where they will have to provide the two meals they rely on schools to provide, as well as figure out how to work and take care of their kids at the same time.
There's many more similarly ****ed up situations like these America ignores in favor of pretending life is great, but in the interest of keeping this post as small as possible, I'll just leave with the fact that these are going to have far reaching consequences.
Meanwhile, the top 20% are in dire straights as well. Economic shutdown and a plummeting stock market have them begging for Government handouts. Not necessarily due to being poor, so much as they used their tax cuts to buyback stocks instead of having cash reserves to cushion themselves from a potential crisis like this one. The airlines for instance, had a similar problem during 9/11 and had to be bailed out by the Bush administration.
Greed over stability appears to be a common trend among corporations in this current system, and has led to Congress being forced to bail them out several times over the last twenty years. While poor people are finger wagged at to have at least nine months worth of cash savings, it seems like Capital is content with using the Federal Reserve as their backup option. This has led to a trend of the rich having their assets bailed out with no strings attached, such as the Wall Street crash of 2008 or the GM bailout and the current plan that just passed, that's going to give trillions more.
And because there's no strings attached, there's no incentive to discontinue eschewing stability for profit.
https://spectator.us/big-pharma-trade-association-trump-buy-american-order/
After the inflationary crisis of the 80s, a new system of globalization took hold and manufacturing was gutted in the US in order to take advantage of lax labor laws in other countries and destroy union power simultaneously. This has increased profit margins for corporations and China has become the source the US and other countries rely on for everything from cheap plastic toys to important medical supplies.
Which makes it highly ironic that it's ground zero for COVID-19. Not only does the virus not display symptoms for two weeks, but the high traffic going in and out of China pretty much insured worldwide infection before the PRC even knew what they had, coverup or no. But it also means the global supply chain is halted and thus critical medical supplies that are needed are in short supply for the rest of the world, as Chinese manufacturers are devastated and China prioritizes itself.
There's been some scrambling by the Trump administration to repurpose some plants, including invoking the Defense Production Act, but as the link suggests, there's some heavy opposition by corporations that benefit from this supply chain. But this crisis has shown how silly it was to rely on one country for all of our critical supplies and that maybe we shouldn't kill our own capacity for production to make a few more bucks for the already wealthy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/...us-congress.html?referringSource=articleShare
The current bill that bails everyone out has something for everyone, but has much more for wealthy corporations. 500 billion to be exact. Not only with little in the way of restrictions, but at the discretion of Steve Mnuchin no less. And while it may be another month for poor people to receive their stimulus, these corporations aren't going to have to worry too much.
But there's a more sinister plot in this bill, in that it is structured in a way that exacerbates the current economic inequality. While small businesses tank and die, these mega corporations will experience a much bigger stimulus and that will ultimately trend toward further consolidation and monopolization of the economy and industry. It'll be exactly like the bailout in 2008, but possibly even worse for the bottom 80%.
So not only are we bailing out irresponsible corporations that use their cash reserves to further enrich themselves with stock buybacks once again with public money that we are constantly told by Congress doesn't exist, but we are doing it in a way that further consolidates their power, while fussing over means testing and poor people potentially getting too much.
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/27/coronavirus-stimulus-package-spending/
In the midst of this entire corporate orgy and debacle there is one question that had been repeated ad nauseam in this primary and in 2016, that has been mysteriously absent.
How are we going to pay for it?
For all the bluster over Bernie's platform being "pie in the sky" and the deficit being too high and no money in the public coffers, once again, like in 2008, Congress managed to whip up trillions in short order to bail out the rich. And like the article describes, it was done without cutting other budgets, raising taxes, or otherwise being concerned with the deficit. And it also would have payed for a substantial portion of Bernie's platform to boot.
And as the article and the AOC quote within alludes to, it was never about the logistics or actually coming up with the money, but more the lack of political will and where the priorities of Congress lies. You absolutely can pay for Bernie's entire platform with the amount of money we're about to spend on the fallout of this crisis.
Because if you actually look at his platform and his campaign, not what MSNBC spews out about him, you'll notice he has every single thing covered, that this crisis is exposing. That's how this crisis is proving him right, from healthcare to homelessness. Had we addressed these issues previously, we wouldn't be seeing disaster on the scale we might be about to see.
Because as tempting as it may be to blame everything on Trump and China, the reality is that there was only so much they could do. Yes it would have helped had they taken it seriously and not tried to cover it up, but the virus itself is incredibly difficult to deal with, especially considering China didn't have the luxury of the forewarning the rest of us had. And unlike China, Trump is limited as to what he can do by how the American Government is structured.
Trump is hamstrung by our inadequate infrastructure as would Biden, Hillary, or any of the other candidates. He can't just magically invent everything we need on the spot and anything that is currently proposed is both heavily opposed by Capital and may be a too little too late thing. We needed this infrastructure to be in place and these problems to be fixed before the crisis hit, not during.
And that's why we need a complete system redesign. We let the systems of the 30s and 80s fail and redesigned new ones, but we've been continually bailing out the current one, because it makes Capital profits like nothing before it. And as we've seen over the last few decades, it's been making society deteriorate and has us on the verge of collapse. It's pretty clear that there is no invisible hand floating around making everything work, no consumers disciplining Capital, and no self-discipline or reform from the system itself.
Biden, Hillary, and the other candidates all had a hand in the creation of the current system and have been fighting to keep it this way. They're not going to be reforming it nor is Trump, Pence, or whatever other candidate the GOP ****s out. Congress on the whole has been completely bought by the corporations and has been writing laws at their behest that hinder attempts to reform the system. "Master Legislator" Nancy Pelosi created
pay-go which quite literally prevents Democrats from making any progress on anything. If they want to actually do something, they have to cut from something else, insuring they will always take one step back with each step forward.
And that's why it's so important to have a candidate with political courage and vision like Bernie, AOC, and other Progressive politicians. Even if we make it through this crisis, it's projected that COVID-19 will have a resurgence in the winter. If it's already bring us to our knees before it has yet to hit it's peak, what will happen when round 2 hits an already reeling economy and populace?
That's before getting to other disasters like climate change, that will make this one look paltry in comparison.
"Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” -Winston Churchill
I'm hoping for something along those lines, but I don't know how this is going to play out. If there's a trend in this primary, it's that you can take nothing for granted.
Buddhahobo what did you mean by “genocide denialism?”
