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Search Results for: Coronavirus COVID-19 Capitalism  – Page 4

US Capitalism Is In Total Meltdown

July 24, 2020 Sarah Jaffe , The Progressive. , , ,
In 2005, when the federal, state, and local governments spectacularly failed the residents of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, there was a sense of shock from both inside and outside of the country. The triumphalist narrative that “There Is No Alternative”—that neoliberal capitalism was the best and indeed the only way to do things—got its first cracks there, when we saw people stuck on rooftops and others sheltering without food and water in the convention center and Superdome.  Somehow reporters could get in, and private security firms like Blackwater patrolled the streets, but the government could not or would not deliver relief to the mostly Black and poor residents who had been unable to evacuate before the storm. 

Capitalism May Not Survive The 2020 Global Crisis

July 24, 2020 Richard D. Wolff, RT. , , ,
The current global crisis triggered by Covid-19 is the third capitalist crash in this century. And governments’ incapacity to consider non-capitalist solutions threatens to keep deepening this crisis into capitalism’s worst. The first was in early 2000. Because it was triggered by the absurdly high prices of dot-com stocks, it got named the “dotcom crisis.” In 2008, the trigger was widespread subprime mortgage default in the US and the crash was far more serious, one of the worst in capitalism’s history, second only to the crash of the 1930s. And now, in 2020, the trigger was a viral pandemic, and we have a far deeper crash than in 2008.

The Life-Saving COVID-19 Drugs You’ve Never Heard Of (And Why)

July 16, 2020 Lee Camp, Consortium News. , , ,
The American profit-based healthcare system impacts us in more ways than just our gargantuan bill at the excretion end of an emergency room visit. Right now, our lovable idiotic inhumane healthcare system is acting as a hurdle to the manufacture and procurement of the right drugs to treat Covid-19. One of the drugs currently trumpeted as our savior is remdesivir. Despite sounding like the name of a Hobbit in Middle Earth, some reports from the corporate media make it sound like the drug will thrust us face-first into a fresh world of happiness — water parks and restaurants and random no-holds-barred make-outs with strangers. A world where when someone sneezes, we don’t dive under our desk with an adult diaper strapped on our face as a makeshift mask.

COVID-19 Exposes The Weakness Of Capitalism

July 11, 2020 Richard D. Wolff,  Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. , , ,
A cornerstone of orthodox economics is the idea that capitalists' decisions about investing and producing are inherently "efficient." This means that capitalists select among all alternative courses of action those whose costs are minimal and whose benefits are maximal. Keeping costs to the lowest possible level while producing goods and services that yield the most possible revenue is what maximizes profit, the difference between costs and revenues. Capitalism, we are told, is the best system because it drives all those in charge of production (the owners and top executives of enterprises) to maximize profits and thus economic efficiency. Capitalists get profits, and the rest of us benefit from the efficiency of production within a capitalist system.

Pandemic Capitalism: Pervasive Inequality Is A Chosen Catastrophe

July 8, 2020 By Chris Oestereich, Open Democracy. , , ,
The current flavor of ‘no holds barred’ capitalism sits at this precipice. For years, it has extracted everything within its reach. It has exploited our natural resources and damaged our ecosystems. It has claimed our time and effort, and even our hopes and dreams. All these things have been treated as resources to be mined for a system that’s systematically designed to benefit the few. The main idea underpinning the current version of capitalism is blindingly simple: you only have to remember one thing - that your job is to maximize profits. And you only have to accept one lie - that in doing so, you benefit the collective. That might be tough to swallow, but there’s a good trick involved: buying in uncritically allows you to believe that your self-interest is benevolent. That so many people are willing to do so is captured by Upton Sinclair’s famous quip, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
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