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Healthcare workers

Why The Neoliberal Agenda Is A Failure At Fighting Coronavirus

The utter failure of private capitalism to prepare for the coronavirus should have surprised no one. Private capitalism, as business school graduates repeat, focuses on profit. The “profit incentive,” they learn, makes private capitalism the superior, “most efficient” economic system available. That is its “bottom line” and “chief goal.” The problem is that to produce adequate numbers of testing components, masks, gloves, ventilators, hospital beds, etc., and then to store, secure, monitor, maintain and demographically stockpile them were not and are not privately profitable businesses. A private capitalist producer of those goods would have to wait, perhaps a long time, for them to become marketable. The risk is great, the future price unknowable, and profitability hard to count on.

Health Care Workers Call On Labor Movement To Take Action

As health care workers, we condemn the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers as an act of racist violence. We condemn the murder of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police officers as an act of racist violence. We condemn the murder of Tony McDade by Tallahassee police officers as an act of racist violence. Their killings are just a handful of countless examples of police brutality responsible for the early deaths of many Black people in the United States. Black people are three times more likely than white people to die by police violence. As health care workers, we witness first-hand how widespread racist police brutality harms Black and brown people. We understand the anti-Black, racist origins of the institution of policing, initially created to patrol and entrap people who had escaped enslavement.

40 Million Health Workers Endorse Green Recovery

More than 40 million doctors and nurses are in, and they are prescribing a green recovery from the economic devastation caused by the new coronavirus. More than 350 health organizations representing some 40 million medical professionals, as well as more than 4,500 individual health workers from 90 countries, signed a letter to the G20 leaders Tuesday urging them to craft what they are promoting as a #HealthyRecovery by taking measures such as reforming fossil fuel subsidies and fighting pollution and deforestation. "A truly healthy recovery will not allow pollution to continue to cloud the air we breathe and the water we drink," the health professionals wrote. "It will not permit unabated climate change and deforestation, potentially unleashing new health threats upon vulnerable populations."

Frontline Healthcare Workers Are Becoming Socialists

As the current Covid-19 pandemic spread throughout the country, healthcare workers again witnessed how the for-profit healthcare system, along with the capitalist economic system, was unable to respond. Frontline workers, already putting their lives at risk, were being more exposed due to lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies that should never be in shortage, especially in a country that allows an individual with a net worth of over $100 billion to exist. Hospitals, already short-staffed due to years of “cost-saving” measures, were near collapse from the influx of patients. This helped to further expose the system and drive healthcare workers to action. As they say, “the boss is the best organizer.” Nurses and other healthcare workers began organizing actions calling attention to the lack of PPE and other supplies in their hospitals. These actions then led, in some cases, to larger critiques of the for-profit healthcare system and the economic system as a whole.

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Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

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Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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