“They’re literally making us sick”: Pharmacy workers describe conditions that sparked US walkouts
Retail pharmacy workers conducted a nationwide walkout on Monday in the US, organized on social media, to protest worsening work conditions at large retail chains such as CVS, Walgreens and Walmart. As the hyper-infectious Omicron variant continues to spread throughout the country, this much overlooked section of the health care industry is making its own demands for better working conditions, including patient safety, and an overdue increase in wages.
One pharmacist who requested to remain anonymous told the WSWS, “We work 12 hour shifts without technicians, we have no breaks and no lunch break as the drive-thru has to be open. We have not had a raise in four years.” He emphasized the need for pharmacy technicians who “help take care of customers and type and count prescriptions, so if there is no tech, then the pharmacist has to try and do everything all while filling prescriptions accurately and giving COVID vaccinations.”
He said the job “gave me so much stress that I developed heart arrhythmia and had to be on meds. They’re literally making us sick.”
Even before the pandemic began, these workers already faced chronic understaffing and low pay, circumstances that were only made worse during the pandemic.
Bled Tanoe, the pharmacist who started the popular #pizzaisnotworking hashtag and Facebook group, spoke to the World Socialist Web Site on the conditions facing pharmacists. “There is no shortage of pharmacists,” she said, “but people are refusing to work in dangerous working conditions with high medical errors. There is a refusal to work in an environment that is detrimental to pharmacists and patients.”
Tanoe used to be a retail pharmacist at Walgreens, but she left her job after numerous years of stress and abuse in the opening months of the pandemic. She described the mental, physical and emotional stress on pharmacists who are leaving the profession in droves. “It is a very dangerous situation that people don’t realize. It’s not just putting medicine in bottles; someone has to check you don’t have an allergy, correct medication, the duration and everything are correct.” She described that there have been many instances where patients “get flu vaccine instead of COVID vaccine, or even the wrong vaccine entirely.”
Tanoe described the multiple responsibilities piled on pharmacists as similar to a pilot on a plane being “asked to serve drinks and take care of passengers while no one is running the plane.” Pharmacists have to “make sure medications are correct, in the right doses, make sure there are no issues with allergies, etc.”
The number of pharmacists nationwide who took part in the walkouts is not yet clear, but Tanoe noted that where pharmacy staff have not walked out, it was due to fear of retaliation by their employers, “not because they don’t want to.”
Such accounts are not uncommon. One worker on Twitter responded to a tweet by CVS Health’s CEO, Karen Lynch, about the massive profits the company made in its third quarter, “Karen I’ve been a worker at CVS for 6 straight years. You all can report HUGE earnings but WON’T pass those earnings on to us techs who work SOLO 40+ hours a week and develop medical problems because of being overworked without ‘enough hours’ to hire more people. Help US instead.”
In September, a pharmacist died of a heart attack on the floor of a CVS pharmacy after being told by a supervisor that she could not leave until another pharmacist arrived to relieve her two hours later. The hashtag #SheWaited has been used to bring attention to this senseless tragedy.
Such crippling conditions can contribute to pharmacists and pharmacy techs making dangerous errors while filling prescriptions. This led one pharmacist to write to the Texas Board of Pharmacy in April 2020: “I am a danger to the public working for CVS.” In December 2018, an 85-year-old Florida woman died after two weeks when she was accidentally given a strong chemotherapy drug instead of her usual medication.
Dr. Shane Jerominski, the southern California pharmacist who first issued the call for Monday's walkouts, spoke with the World Socialist Web Site. “I tried to organize this as a show of solidarity, because we are working in unsafe environments and something has to give.
“It’s hard to say how many walked out.” explained Jerominski, “In the Palm Springs market, there were five stores closed. They have about 23 locations. They’re all understaffed.
“A lot of technicians could get behind it. They felt that if they didn’t show up that day, they can still operate. If the pharmacist doesn’t show up, the pharmacy can’t operate. Many pharmacists felt they couldn’t do that to their patients.”
Highlighting the brutal conditions facing pharmacy technicians, Jerominski noted, “In the Palm Springs market, it’s a cyclical market. Some technicians would be guaranteed 40 hours a week and then get flexed out in the summer.”
Jerominski explained his personal motivation for fighting to organize pharmacy workers. In March of 2021, Jerominski and his wife, Marylin, began warning about the stresses that the coronavirus vaccination campaign would place on already overburdened pharmacists without additional support. “My wife and I were featured at NBC with Lester Holt. She’s working at one of the busiest Walgreens in the area and now we’re expected to vaccinate everybody. They started with one every 15 minutes, then three every 15 minutes, and they still had to fill all the regular prescriptions.
“We thought they were going to fire her for talking to the media. Corporate basically promised her the world, said she would get extra help, but never delivered. They are making it very difficult for her to try to get her to quit. They don’t want to fire her. The media asked us to let them know if they fired her.”
Jerominski’s outspoken fight for the rights of pharmacy workers may have already resulted in retaliation against his independent pharmacy in Brawley, California. “I wanted to participate, I wanted my entire store closed. I had every intention of not being open as well on Monday at my location. On Friday—we’re open Monday through Friday—I opened the pharmacy and the second patient was an inspector from the board of pharmacy who had received an anonymous complaint to inspect the pharmacy. Now I have to submit a lot of paperwork by December 24 to keep my license and I had to work through the strike.
“I’ve been a pharmacist for 15 years and I’ve never seen a Board of Pharmacy inspection until I started working for an independent. The first time was about four and a half years ago, about theree months after I started working here. That inspection first was due to issues with the prior pharmacist.”
Although it is unknown who filed this anonymous complaint, the timing is highly suspect. “Sitting on the California Board of Pharmacy are many middle-level managers of pharmacy chains,” noted Jerominski, “I think I made someone irritated.”
Jerominski remains determined to organize pharmacy workers for better conditions. “Pharmacists do have more power than they know. You can’t have the pharmacy open without them.”
Life expectancy in the US dropped by an astounding 1.8 years during the first year of the pandemic
During his live televised speech regarding Omicron’s dominance in the United States on Tuesday, President Joe Biden claimed that the country was in a far better position now than in March of 2020. This blatantly false assertion was exposed the next day when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that Americans’ life expectancy fell 1.8 years (from 78.8 to 77.0) in the course of 2020, 0.3 years more than their interim estimate of July 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic has been the cause of the most significant drop in life expectancy in the US since World War II, 75 years ago.
Last year more than 3.3 million people died in the United States, the highest such number at any point in the country’s history. By comparison, in 2019 and 2018, 2.85 and 2.84 million died, respectively. COVID-19 deaths were attributable for three-quarters of the overall life expectancy decline in 2020 and 11 percent of annual deaths.
By comparison, China’s life expectancy has climbed from 76.91 years in 2019 to 76.96 in 2020 and 77.13 in 2021. Their pursuit and strict adherence to a dynamic Zero COVID policy limited the death toll to 5,000 during the initial outbreak. Only three people have reportedly died of COVID-19 since April 2020, and as a consequence, it is likely that this year China, still a relatively poor country, will surpass the United States in life expectancy for its citizens.
As a trigger event in world history, the pandemic magnifies every social contradiction of capitalism in its advanced state of decay. For instance, during the pandemic, the two-decades-long opioid crisis saw deaths jump 30 percent from 2019 to 2021 with deaths attributed to accidental overdoses exceeding 100,000.
Still, as staggering as these statistics for 2020 are, 2021 has proven even more deadly. The US COVID-19 death toll by the last week of December 2020, according to the Economist, stood at 340,878 and excess deaths at 528,185. One year later, the magazine’s dashboard placed the COVID-19 reported deaths at 810,000 and excess deaths between 1.0–1.1 million. This suggests there will be an even more significant drop in life expectancy in the first year of Biden’s presidency than during the last year of Trump’s.
According to a report published yesterday by USA Today, “Nationwide, nearly one million more Americans have died in 2020 and 2021 than in normal, pre-pandemic years, but about 800,000 deaths have been officially attributed to COVID-19, according to the CDC data. A majority of those additional 195,000 deaths are unidentified COVID-19 cases. Public health experts have long suggested [this], pointing to the unusual increase in deaths from natural causes.”
Coronavirus has become the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer. More than 203,000 people between 18 and 65 have died during the pandemic, and it was the leading cause of death for people aged 45 to 54. One in 400 people of all ages have died from COVID-19, and among those 65 and older, one in 100.
Each week since August 12, 2021, more than 100,000 children have been infected with COVID-19. They have consistently accounted for nearly one-quarter of all infections. Since the onset of the pandemic, almost 7.4 million children have tested positive for COVID-19. More than 790 children under 18 have died from COVID-19, a level nearly twice the average flu mortality and in the top 10 leading causes of death for this age category. Severe multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) continues to climb. Almost 6,000 have developed this menacing illness, and 52 have died in the US.
Hospitalization rates among children, who are, for the most part, the largest constituent of the unvaccinated, have climbed higher than at any other time in the pandemic. Though children fare much better than adults, they remain at risk for chronic complications posed by Long COVID that can affect a small subset of children. These, by the sheer scale of infections due to Omicron, will pose significant challenges with uncertain long-term consequences.
Biden, and the press corps surrounding him, did not once touch on the impact the pandemic has had on children who have been orphaned and won’t be sharing holiday celebrations with their loved ones and caregivers. A daunting 120,000-plus children have lost a parent or grandparent who was a primary provider or financial support, and another 22,000 have lost a secondary caregiver.
“Are these children better off, Mr. President? Wouldn’t we have all been better off if in March 2020 we had eliminated COVID once and for all and prevented such a colossal loss of life?” These would have been appropriate follow-up questions. But no one asked them.
Indeed, in just three weeks, when the incidence of Omicron was far less than one percent of all sequenced strains, it now accounts for more than 73 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the country. By all accounts, the US trails the UK by around two weeks, which means events there have significant relevance to what the population can soon expect in the US.
In London, the epicenter of the Omicron wave in the UK, hospitalizations have tripled since a month ago. This means that state after state in the US can expect a potentially sudden and alarming rise in emergency room visits. Two years into the pandemic, with repeated assaults on their capacity to care for patients, health systems have been left destitute.
In a recent email by the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio to their medical and ancillary staff, where the state’s health care is facing calamity brought on by the surge of infections, they offer this sobering assessment:
This past month has been sobering for many of us in healthcare. Nearly two years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, we’re seeing some of the highest volumes of patients with the disease in hospitals throughout the Midwest. Here at Cleveland Clinic, we’re caring for more than 800 patients with COVID-19 at our Ohio hospitals. Of these, more than 200 are in the intensive care unit. The majority of these patients are unvaccinated. Our Ohio emergency departments are filled. We have people waiting to get into our hospitals. Neighboring hospitals in our communities are facing the same issues. We’ve had to postpone many non-urgent surgeries in Ohio as we try to leave enough space for patients with COVID-19. Our physicians, nurses, and caregivers are working around-the-clock to care for these sick patients. They are exhausted.
Despite the grim news on the decline in life expectancy, stocks traded higher on the President’s announcement that there would be little done in the way of impeding the surge of infections. Having recouped all their losses from Monday when Omicron’s dominance was announced, yesterday the Dow closed 261 points up at 35,753.
As comparisons between China and the US show, the drop in life expectancy is a purely political phenomenon attributable to the policies the ruling elites have employed that continue to place profits over lives, as evidenced by the financial aristocracy’s trillions amassed.
Victor Davis Hanson on Illegal Immigration | Highlights Ep.35
The Omicron surge: Scientific facts vs. Biden’s fictions
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported yesterday a staggering 288,579 new COVID-19 cases in the United States, the second highest daily case total ever, as the Omicron variant is spreading at an unprecedented rate throughout the country.
Amidst this catastrophic new phase of the pandemic, US President Joe Biden delivered a national address yesterday afternoon that combined lies, distortions, contradictions and no small amount of self-delusion. He did not advance a single concrete proposal that would meaningfully reduce the spread of the virus.
Biden’s entire speech was built around the narrative that the pandemic is a problem of the unvaccinated, attempting to transform the partial truth—that those who are unvaccinated are at the greatest risk—into an entirely false claim that those who are vaccinated are safe, and that no additional public health measures are required aside from encouraging more vaccination.
“If you are not fully vaccinated, you have good reason to be concerned,” Biden said. “You’re at a high risk of getting sick. And if you get sick, you’re likely to spread it to others, including friends and family. And the unvaccinated have a significantly higher risk of ending up in a hospital or even dying.”
But Biden said those who are vaccinated “have much, much less reason to worry. You have a high degree of protection against severe illness.” Biden added that COVID-19 cases in vaccinated people “are highly unlikely to lead to serious illness” and that vaccinated people are “protected from severe illness and death.”
Even if one were to accept this claim as true, the fact is that only 61 percent of the American population is “fully vaccinated,” currently defined as having two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or one dose of Johnson & Johnson. Those who are not fully vaccinated include a large majority of children (only 16.7 percent of children between the ages of 5 and 11 have even one dose of the vaccine) and those who are infants up to the age of five, for whom no vaccine is available.
Even this, however, understates the gravity of the situation. The ability of the Omicron variant to evade existing vaccines means that being “fully vaccinated” requires having a third, “booster” shot. Only 18 percent of the American population have had a booster. There is even discussion now that to be protected against the Omicron variant requires not a third, but a fourth shot, which Israel has now approved for people 60 years or older four months after their third shot.
Biden’s main message was to call on the American population to get vaccinated and to get their boosters. “People with booster shots are highly protected,” he said. “Join them, join us.”
Even if the entire unvaccinated population and unboosted population were to follow his advice today, however, it would take two weeks for the impact of the vaccines to take full effect. Meanwhile, the virus will infect, at the current rate, millions of people. It is the equivalent of telling people in a burning building to quietly finish their lunch and then go down to the local hardware store to buy a fire extinguisher.
Moreover, the entire presentation of the issue by Biden is based on a lie—that only the unvaccinated need to worry about the massive surge in new cases.
Biden accepted as inevitable that millions of people will be infected. “We’ll see some fully vaccinated people get COVID, potentially in large numbers. There will be positive cases in every office, even here in the White House, among the vaccinated—from Omicron.” However, those who are vaccinated, Biden claimed, are “highly unlikely” to get seriously ill.
But the virus targets society, not individuals. With new infections numbering in the millions, even a small percentage of serious illnesses and deaths can produce a catastrophe.
A recent analysis by ABC News of data from 34 states found 16,700 deaths from breakthrough infections between April and November of this year, with 20 percent of all deaths in those states being vaccinated people. If that figure is representative of the entire country, that means that 300 vaccinated people are dying every single day in the United States. And these deaths took place before the current surge of the Omicron variant, which is far more resistant to vaccines.
Biden’s speech was constructed to justify a position that there must be no change in policy, no matter how rapidly the virus spreads. He particularly stressed keeping schools open for in-person learning, which is necessary to allow parents to stay at work.
“We must also keep our K-12 schools open,” Biden said. “The science is clear and overwhelming. We know how to keep our kids safe from COVID-19 in school. … Children are as safe in school as they are any place.”
This is another lie. To the extent that data exists, including in the state of Michigan, it has shown that schools are a major source of broader community outbreaks. Every serious study on the subject has shown that closing schools massively reduces community transmission of COVID-19.
The reopening of schools in the fall, amidst the surge of the Delta variant, has driven a sharp rise in infections and deaths among children. Over 1,000 children have already died from the disease, half of whom succumbed in the last four months.
The spread of the Omicron variant in South Africa and the UK has led to a sharp rise of hospitalizations among children, particularly infants under the age of five, for whom there is no vaccine. Addressing himself to parents terrified that their young child could catch COVID-19, Biden merely said, “One thing you can and must do, get yourself fully vaccinated and boosted, as well as those around you.”
However, even vaccinated and boosted adults can contract the virus, as Biden himself acknowledged, meaning that they can transmit it to their infant children.
Biden also advised that the millions of Americans traveling and gathering in groups for the holiday season should make no changes in their plans. “I know some Americans are wondering if you can safely celebrate the holidays with your family and friends,” he said. “The answer is yes… If you are vaccinated, and particularly if you have a booster shot. You should be comfortable celebrating the holidays as you planned it.”
Again, vaccinated individuals can transmit the virus, which means that even if only “fully vaccinated” people travel and congregate over the holidays, the airplanes and the homes of potentially millions of people will become “super-spreaders” for Omicron. Biden’s encouragement for the population to gather over the holiday “is not only misinformation. It’s premeditated social murder,” commented epidemiologist Seth J. Prins.
Perhaps the biggest lie of all was Biden’s claim that the country is in a far better position today than in March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. In March 2020, there were less than 1,000 deaths from COVID-19. Today, there are more than 800,000. The daily death toll then stood at less than 100; today it is over 1,200.
As for Biden’s claim that there has been a significant improvement in the health care infrastructure, even at current levels, the surge of the Omicron variant has already overwhelmed testing and contact tracing capabilities in the United States, with rapid test kits in short supply and lines at testing facilities. The US medical system has been massively degraded by two years of the pandemic, with its medical staff burnt out and many afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Finally, Biden claimed that this entire situation was unforeseen and unforeseeable. “I don’t think anybody anticipated that this was going to be as rapidly spreading as it did.” The president must take the American people for fools. Scientists and epidemiologists, along with the World Socialist Web Site, have been warning for over a year that the continued transmission of the virus would lead to the evolution of new, more infectious strains.
All of these lies and falsifications were intended for one audience: Wall Street. Biden’s task was to ensure the corporate and financial elite that no measures would be taken that undermined profit and the endless accumulation of wealth by the ruling class. Wall Street responded to his remarks with enthusiasm, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising 560 points (1.6 percent) yesterday.
At this point, the most reliable indicator that anything serious was being done to save lives would be a sell-off on the markets. But this requires the intervention of the working class. Biden’s policy of “living with COVID-19,” repeated in its essentials in every major capitalist country, must be rejected.
The working class must fight for a policy of “Zero COVID,” that is, the elimination and eventual eradication of the virus. That such a strategy is viable is proven by the case of China, which has limited deaths in a country of 1.4 billion to less than 5,000 over the past two years. It has been rejected in the US and the major capitalist countries because the necessary public health measures to implement it—including the shutdown of nonessential production and the closure of schools, combined with mass testing, contact tracing and vaccination—go against the interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy.
This is why the fight for this strategy must be taken up by the working class, through the formation of rank-and-file committees to demand and enforce the necessary measures to save lives, and through the development of a revolutionary movement against the ruling elites and the entire capitalist system.
JOE BIDEN, SOCIOPATH. VACCINATE EVERYONE BUT OUR ILLEGALS
Victor Davis Hanson on Illegal Immigration | Highlights Ep.35
Paxton: Border Policies Show Biden Doesn’t ‘Really Care about COVID’
On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Evening Edit,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) argued that the lax coronavirus policies on the border by the Biden administration show that “they don’t really care about COVID.”
Paxton said, “It is shocking to me that this president really will stop American citizens from crossing the border, coming by flight or however they come, you cannot come into this country if you have COVID and you’re an American citizen, but if you’re illegal, we’re not going to check that and we’re going to send you secretly all over the country with COVID. That tells me that they do not care about COVID, and the fact that they’re willing to fire Americans for not taking a COVID vaccine, and at the same time, turn a blind eye, with no vaccinations, for those who are coming across illegally. Those two things don’t go together, and they tell you that there’s some reason they don’t really care about COVID.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
Victor Davis Hanson on Illegal Immigration | Highlights Ep.35
Joe Biden Warns People ‘Peddling Lies’ and ‘Misinformation’ About Coronavirus Vaccines: ‘Stop it. Stop it Now!’
President Joe Biden blamed alternative media sources on Tuesday for convincing Americans to refuse the coronavirus vaccines.
“The unvaccinated are responsible for their own choices, but those choices have been fueled by dangerous misinformation on cable tv and social media,” Biden said.
The president spoke about the spike in coronavirus cases as a result of the omicron variant of the virus, and repeatedly urged Americans to get vaccinated.
He criticized media figures and influencers for “peddling lies” to make money off of their audience, which he argued endangered their lives.
“It’s wrong. It’s immoral. I call on the purveyors of these lies and misinformation to stop it. Stop it now!” he said in his strongest condemnation of “misinformation” to date.
Prominent figures such as Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers and podcaster Joe Rogan have been targeted by critics for not getting vaccinated, sharing their reasons for making their decisions and detailing treatments for the virus after they were infected.
Other popularized figures who continue to pick through coronavirus and vaccine data continue raising questions on social media, usually getting banned from social media companies like Facebook and Twitter as a consequence.
Biden warned the unvaccinated population that they were hurting their country and their loved ones by refusing the shots.
“You may think you’re only putting yourself at risk, but it’s your choice, your choice is not just a choice about you, it affects other people, you’re putting other people at risk,” he said.
Census: U.S. Population Hits 331.9M, Driven Mostly by Legal Immigration
The United States population hit a record 331.9 million residents this year as net immigration to the U.S. exceeded the nation’s natural increase, the number of excess births over deaths, for the first time in American history.
U.S. Census Bureau data released on Tuesday reveals that the population has slowed to the lowest rate in American history, increasing 0.1 percent from July 2020 to July 2021, but still increased to the highest total in history — hitting 331,893,745 residents.
For comparison, the U.S. population in 1970 stood at 203 million residents.
Natural increase in the population, determined by the number of excess births over deaths from July 2020 to July 2021, contributed to about 38 percent of the 0.1 percent growth.
Meanwhile, net immigration to the U.S. contributed to about 62 percent of the population growth seen in the last year, the first time that immigration has exceeded natural increase for any given year.
By region, the South was the only region in the U.S. to see net domestic migration grow its population in the last year. With more than 127 million residents today, nearly 658,000 residents moved to the South from July 2020 to July 2021.
At the same time, the Northeast, with a population of 57.2 million residents, lost population mostly due to net domestic migration. Over the last year, nearly 400,000 residents moved out of the Northeast.
The West also lost residents from net domestic migration. Despite gaining population by about 36,000 residents, the region lost residents to other parts of the country to the sum of 145,000.
While immigration to the U.S., where more than 1.2 million green cards are awarded to foreign nationals every year, drove much of the slow population growth in the last year, the Census Bureau has projected that it will help drive the U.S. population to a record more than 400 million by the year 2060.
In the next 40 years, there will be 78 million people added to the U.S. population, with the majority deriving from illegal and legal immigration, the Census Bureau previously noted.
Such an unprecedented population total for the U.S. will translate to denser communities, an increase in vehicle traffic, strained public infrastructure, and more development across once rural areas.
The totals come as newly released Census Bureau data showed that the nation’s foreign-born population has hit a record 46.2 million with much of the increases occurring in California, Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Virginia.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Finance capital and the COVID-19 pandemic
Nothing like it has been seen in economic history. According to analysis by the Bank of America, reported by the Financial Times at the weekend, central banks have pumped $32 trillion into financial markets since the pandemic began.
This means that since the interventions, led by the Fed, started in response to the market meltdown of March 2020, central banks have been buying financial assets at the rate of $800 million per hour for 20 months.
The result has been a massive speculative boom that has resulted in a rise in stock market capitalization of $60 trillion.
The scale of this increase can be seen when compared to figures for gross domestic product (GDP) which measures growth in the real economy. The annual economic output of the US is around $22 trillion while global GDP is about $84 trillion. In other words, the growth in market capitalisation, which is most pronounced in the US, is equivalent to more than two and half times annual American output. It is roughly three quarters that of the entire world economy.
These comparisons serve to underscore the nature of the escalation of the stock market and its divorce from the underlying real economy.
Stocks, bonds and other financial assets do not embody real value. Vast profits can be made when they are traded but these profits do not signify that any real value has been expanded. By contrast, in the real economy, a company makes profit from the extraction of surplus value from the labour power of the workers it employs.
Shares and other financial assets are what Marx called fictitious capital, that is, they are titles to property and, in the final analysis, are a claim on the surplus value extracted by real capital in the economy.
The situation is, of course, more complicated than depicted here, but, whatever its complexities, this is its essential dynamic.
While fictitious capital can exist for a considerable period in a kind of heaven where money begets ever greater quantities of money, often through all kinds of arcane operations, it can never completely separate itself from its earthly foundations.
This heaven can be sustained by the provision of ever greater quantities of virtually free money from the central banks through the lowering of interest rates to near zero and the purchases of financial assets. Ultimately, however, it depends on the continuous extraction of surplus value from the living labour of the working class upon which it feeds as a gargantuan vampire.
And if that flow is threatened with an interruption—by a cessation of production or through the development of strike struggles for wages—it finds expression in the markets as financial confidence is shaken.
All financial operations are highly leveraged and therefore sensitive to even small movements in interest rates. So even a minor disturbance can have significant consequences.
The latest data on the rise of the financial markets, the result of debt-fuelled speculation financed by the Fed and other central banks, directs attention to the underlying driving force behind the refusal of capitalist governments in the US and around the world, whatever their political stripe, to implement meaningful public health safety measures.
They have insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that a “vaccine only” policy is sufficient. Whatever the level of death and disease, the population must “learn to live” with the virus.
As the data from China reveals and analysis by conscientious scientists demonstrates, rigorous protection measures, if implemented on a global scale, could eliminate COVID-19 and all its variants from the human population.
When the measures implemented in China are cited as concrete evidence that the pandemic can be stopped, the response is often that its figures are not to be trusted.
One can be sure if that were the case, however, it would have been immediately seized on by the capitalist media which has so heavily promoted the lie that COVID-19 emanated from the Wuhan virology lab. But no such reports analysing and questioning the Chinese data have appeared in any of the world’s media outlets.
Why then have meaningful public safety heath measures of protection—so often dubbed as “restrictions” on human “freedom”, not as what they really are, protections—not been carried out?
The necessary measures, including the cessation of non-essential production and economic activity, with compensation for those affected, mass vaccinations on a global scale, rigorous contact tracing combined with quarantining, as well as with other public safety measures, are well known. But they are not implemented because that would interrupt the flow of surplus value necessary to sustain the mountain of fictitious capital.
The claim is advanced that it is necessary to “learn to live” with COVID, that is, with disease and death, because the “economy” could not sustain the necessary measures.
To accept this claim, however, is to fall for an essential mystification widely promoted by bourgeois economists. This is the false identification of the economy—the productive activity of billions of workers worldwide which is the source of all real wealth—with the financial system. The financial system does not contribute an atom of real wealth. It is an institutionalised mechanism for siphoning wealth into the hands of the financial oligarchy and the pandemic billionaires.
In the 21st century, the vast productive forces created by the labour of billions of workers worldwide, combined with enormous advances in technology, mean that the economic resources exist for the full-scale implementation of public safety measures for the time necessary to eliminate the pandemic.
The resources available to society, if mobilised on a rational and planned basis in the interests of the population, rather than according to the dictates of profit, would be more than capable of dealing with the pandemic.
However, the stock markets and global financial system, bloated to an extent never seen before, cannot tolerate even the smallest interruption in the flow of the lifeblood—the surplus value extracted from the working class, on which it feeds.
This fact of economic life was demonstrated at the start of the pandemic. As the coronavirus hit, the walkouts and strikes by workers in the US, Italy and elsewhere, sent a wave of terror through the financial system.
Wall Street underwent a precipitous fall and, even more significantly, the $22 trillion US Treasury bond market—the basis of the global financial system—froze, such that at one point there were no buyers for US government debt.
Faced with a crisis that had the potential to go far beyond the meltdown of 2008, the Fed intervened, doubling its holdings of financial assets, virtually overnight, to more than $8 trillion. It stepped forward as the guarantor for all areas of the financial system at one point spending $1 million every second.
The intervention stabilised the markets but none of the underlying causes of the crisis have been resolved as numerous official reports on the March 2020 events make clear. Very definite conclusions, however, were drawn. The market meltdown led to adoption of the mantra “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” that is, no matter what the extent of the death nothing must be done that impacts on the financial system.
The emergence of the even more virulent Omicron variant has resulted in a new stage of the crisis. The claim that a “vaccine only” policy suffices has been refuted by events. The overriding fear in financial markets is the eruption of a movement in the working class fighting for measures to end the wave of death.
The issues confronting the global working class are emerging ever more clearly. For long decades, the ruling classes and their ideologists have maintained that the capitalist market, private property and the parasitic financial system that has arisen from it, is the only possible socio-economic order. The Marxist analysis of the inevitable breakdown of capitalism was mythology.
However, the lesson which must be grasped from the events of the past 20 months is that the complete inability and refusal of the present order to deal with the pandemic is the form in which the breakdown of capitalism is emerging.
The incompatibility of the capitalist socio-economic order with the advance of society and with life itself is being established not simply in theoretical form, but in living events themselves.
The Global Workers Inquest into the COVID-19 pandemic conducted by the WSWS is central to the development of the understanding in the working class of the political tasks, the fight for a socialist program, that now directly confront it as the ongoing breakdown of capitalism assumes the form of a continuous monstrous crime against humanity.
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