Author: ajohnstone

Re-Imagining Society

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In 2009, Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization stated in, “All countries should immediately activate their pandemic preparedness plans and must remain on high alert for unusual outbreaks of influenza-like illness and severe pneumonia.”

In the richest country on the face of the earth, doctors and nurses have no guarantees about having enough two dollar masks or other personal protective equipment (PPE) when they care for patients. The inadequate supply of PPE has already killed patients and providers. It is shameful. Covid19 provide ample reasons for anger—towards the  healthcare corporations and the media purposefully oblivious to exploitation. As usual in times of crisis, those most affected are generally those with the least economic resources. Millions of employees worldwide have been left without work given the widespread cessation of all kinds of activities, except the essential ones. As a result, those workers who depend exclusively on their wages and savings are unable to meet their needs and those of their families. Some governments have promised financial aid to those most in need but that aid is insufficient or it will take time to arrive, making it less effective. What workers need right now is not good-will, but will-power.

We’re living in a different world now. Schools, workplaces, and restaurants are shut down, adding to that already desperate situation of workers living pay-check to pay-check. The COVID-19 pandemic exposes the huge cracks in capitalist society. The longer the coronavirus emergency goes on, however, the clearer it is that people require to start rethinking our whole society. Is a “return to normalcy” possible when we may never see normal again. It is time for a revolution in our politics, pushing the idea of a more sane, more humane type of system.  Squeezing a few concessions from the government is hardly revolutionary and no amount hyping it up as a revolution will make it one. We need to back radical change in the fundamentals of this economic system. The COVID-19 pandemic is leading to major changes in people’s behaviour. It will also bring a new way of thinking. The majority of people are acting with a great sense of responsibility and expressing a great amount of generosity, offer their assistance at the risk of their lives. The pandemic, economic collapse will define the future. What we need to do is to develop solidarity and reciprocity between people around the world, to cooperate and collaborate and to provide mutual aid. To create change, people must demand it. Technology allows us to educate and organise online. People are showing they can be innovative to get our message across to our brothers and sisters. COVID-19 has shown that essential workers are among the lowest-paid workers and that it is they who make our society function.  Understanding this gives a new understanding of the power of the people. We are all connected and share a common humanity. If we act in solidarity during this time of crisis we can create the future we want to see for ourselves. We are all in this together.

  POWER TO THE PEOPLE


Things have changed and can still change

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Imagine being told that all schools will be closed, all public gatherings will be cancelled. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will be put out of work, billions told not to leave their homes  and governments launching some of the largest bail-outs in history while landlords are stopped from collecting rent and banks letting mortgage payments to fall into arrears while the homeless are housed in hotels free of charge. Governments are helicoptering cash payments to households, writing out checks,  and some on the Right are even adopting the left-wing idea of the universal basic income. Would you have believed what you were hearing?



There is a pessimistic view is that the pandemic crisis inflames xenophobia and racist scape–goating.



Mike Davis, author of the 2005 book, “The Monster at Our Door. The Global Threat of Avian Flu” explains that “In a totally rational world, you might assume that an international pandemic would lead to greater internationalism. In a rational world, we would be ramping up production of basic essential supplies – test kits, masks, respirators – not only for our own use, but for poorer countries, too. Because it’s all one battle. But it’s not necessarily a rational world. So there could be a lot of demonisation and calls for isolation. Which will mean more deaths and more suffering worldwide.”

Some populist and demagogue politicians have blamed foreigners for COVIS-19 and have embarked upon unilateral nationalist policies rather than coordinated with neighbouring nations. In a 2008 report on the legal aspects of pandemic response, prompted by the increase in pandemic flu outbreaks, a team of historians and medical ethicists assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union suggested that  “People, rather than the disease, become the enemy.”



However there is another way of responding to a global pandemic.



Long before COVID-19, people died of diseases we knew how to prevent and treat. People lived precarious lives in societies awash with wealth. Experts told us about catastrophic threats on the horizon, such as climate change, and we did next to nothing to prepare for them. We are now aware of the extent of that can be accomplished (and quickly!) when we understand the urgency of the threat and risk. We have learned that the market cannot provide solutions to protect the public good. 



The task today is not to fight the pandemic in order to return to business as usual, because business as usual was already a disaster. The goal, instead, is to fight the virus – and in doing so transform business as usual into something more humane. 



“We’ve been trying for years to get people out of normal mode and into emergency mode,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, a former psychologist who now heads the advocacy group The Climate Mobilization. “What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can. And it’s been interesting to see that theory validated by the response to the coronavirus. Now the challenge is to keep emergency mode activated about climate, where the dangers are orders of magnitude greater. We can’t think we’re going to go ‘back to normal’, because things weren’t normal.” Salamon believes that one lesson of the coronavirus crisis is the power of shared emotion, which has helped make possible radical action to slow the pandemic. “I’m not talking about people giving each other medical expertise. I’m talking about people calling each other up and saying: ‘How are you doing? Are you scared? I’m scared. I want you to be OK, I want us to be OK.’ And that’s what we want for climate, too. We need to learn to be scared together, to agree on what we’re terrified about. It’s good that we’re entering emergency mode about the pandemic,” she said.



“The political outcome of the epidemic,” said Mike Davis, “will, like all political outcomes, be decided by struggle, by battles over interpretation, by pointing out what causes problems and what solves them. And we need to get that analysis out in the world any way we can.”



Rebecca Solnit, author of  “A Paradise Built in Hell”, a study of disaters, said she was taking heart from all the new ways people were finding to connect and help each other around the world, ranging from the neighbourhood delivery networks that had sprung up to bring groceries to people who couldn’t get out, to more symbolic interventions, such as kids playing music on an older neighbour’s porch.



 The Italian political scientist Alessandro Delfanti said he was finding hope from a post-outbreak wave of strikes roiling Amazon warehouses in the US and Europe, and also the steps that workers across different sectors of the Italian economy were taking to help each other secure equipment they needed to stay safe.



The world feels strange right now because –it is changing so fast and any one of us could fall ill at any time, or could already be carrying the virus and not know it. It feels strange because the past few weeks have exposed the fact that one of the biggest things which can change is ourselves.



 The pandemic reveals that people are not selfish and self-centred but possess the capacity to share and act in solidarity with one another, even in the midst of a disaster.



Adapted from here

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/how-will-the-world-emerge-from-the-coronavirus-crisis




Big Ag

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The US agriculture giant Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms.



Risks were downplayed even while they planned how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto’s new seeds just to avoid damage, according to documents unearthed.



The documents also reveal how Monsanto opposed some third-party product testing in order to curtail the generation of data that might have worried regulators.



The new crop system developed by Monsanto and BASF was designed to address the fact that millions of acres of US farmland have become overrun with weeds resistant to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weedkillers, best known as Roundup. The collaboration between the two companies was built around a different herbicide called dicamba.



In the Roundup system, farmers could spray glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup over the top of certain crops that Monsanto genetically engineered to survive being sprayed with the pesticide. This “glyphosate-tolerant” crop system has been popular with farmers around the world but has led to widespread weed resistance to glyphosate. The new system promoted by Monsanto and BASF similarly provides farmers with genetically engineered dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton that can be sprayed directly with dicamba. The weeds in the fields die but the crops do not. Dicamba has been in use since the 1960s but traditionally was used sparingly, and not on growing crops, because it has a track record of volatilizing – moving far from where it is sprayed – particularly in warm growing months. As it moves it can damage or kill the plants it drifts across. The companies announced in 2011 that they were collaborating in the development of the dicamba-tolerant cropping systems, granting each other reciprocal licenses, with BASF agreeing to supply formulated dicamba herbicide products to Monsanto. The companies said they would make new dicamba formulations that would stay where they were sprayed and would not volatilize as older versions of dicamba were believed to do. With good training, special nozzles, buffer zones and other “stewardship” practices, the companies assured regulators and farmers that the new system would bring “really good farmer-friendly formulations to the marketplace”.



But records show agricultural experts warned that the plan to develop a dicamba-tolerant system could have catastrophic consequences. The experts told Monsanto that farmers were likely to spray old volatile versions of dicamba on the new dicamba-tolerant crops and even new versions were still likely to be volatile enough to move away from the special cotton and soybean fields on to crops growing on other farms.

Importantly, under the system designed by Monsanto and BASF, only farmers buying Monsanto’s dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybean seeds would be protected from dicamba drift damage. Other cotton and soybean farmers and farmers growing everything from wheat to watermelons would be at risk from the drifting dicamba.
According to a report prepared for Monsanto in 2009 as part of industry consultation, such “off-target movement” was expected, along with “crop loss”, “lawsuits” and “negative press around pesticides”. Just as Monsanto has done in the Roundup litigation, Monsanto and BASF sought to keep most of the discovery documents they turned over in the dicamba litigation designated confidential. Several million acres of crops have now been reported damaged by dicamba, according to industry estimates. 
The documents show that both companies were excited about the profit potential in the new system. BASF projected its new dicamba herbicide would be a “$400m brand in two years”, with sales by May 2017 exceeding $131m and a gross profit of 45%. The companies saw part of the opportunity in selling to soybean and cotton farmers who didn’t need or want the special dicamba-tolerant crops but could be convinced to buy them as a means to protect their crops from dicamba drift, the documents show. That strategy was noted in multiple documents. In one BASF 2016 strategy update, the company noted “defensive planting” as a “potential market opportunity”. Monsanto also saw “new users” in farmers who suffered drift damage.





Coronavirus crisis. When, if ever, will a vaccine be widely available?

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There would seem to be good prospects for safe and effective vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] coronavirus.



First, numerous teams of scientists are working in parallel, applying diverse approaches to the problem. According to Dr. Stanley Plotkin, inventor of the rubella vaccine,[1] at least forty possible vaccines are already under development. Besides European and North American biotech companies, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese companies are now in the race. China alone is developing nine potential vaccines.



In addition, the Oslo-based Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is funding several research efforts by non-commercial organizations.[2] Non-commercial projects are of special value, because they are not bound by the commercial secrecy that impedes cooperation among scientists working for different companies.



The Boston-based company Moderna has already begun a first-phase clinical trial of an RNA vaccine – a new type – on human subjects.[3]



Second, the evidence so far indicates that the virus is slow to mutate. Genetic differences among the strains that have emerged in different countries are slight. This greatly simplifies the task. Any vaccines developed to protect against the virus in its current forms will probably remain potent for a considerable period.  



Third, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is new but not completely new. It bears some similarity to other coronaviruses and especially to the SARS coronavirus of 2002—2003 (this is why it is labeled as SARS No. 2) and also to the MERS coronavirus of 2012—2014. This family resemblance to viruses that have already been studied facilitates the search for a vaccine.[4]  



Squandered advantage



However, much of the advantage that this family resemblance could have given was squandered when research into SARS and MERS was discontinued after the corresponding epidemics ended. In particular, Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi and her team at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development developed early vaccines against SARS and MERS but in 2016 were unable to obtain funding to conduct clinical trials. Such trials that would have given a head start to current work on a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Researchers would already have some idea of how humans react to one class of possible vaccines against members of the SARS family of coronaviruses.[5]



Why then was ‘no one interested’ in funding trials of these vaccines? Presumably, funders saw little if any point in developing vaccines against viruses that had apparently disappeared and seemed unlikely to return. That attitude would have reflected not only a poor understanding of the science but also a narrowness of vision typical of a profit-driven society, in which decision makers see no palpable advantage in contributing to a broadly conceived research program. 



It is precisely such a program that we humans need in our present predicament. To quote another scientist[6]:   



We need coordinated research, worldwide, on virus illnesses, to be prepared for the next mutation. It will be impossible to cover all possible variants, but we would be much closer to a new mutation than we are now.



This makes good sense. A socialist world community would do it that way. But is such a high degree of global coordination feasible in a world of competing producers and rival nation-states?



Delay, delay



The time needed from the start of research on a new vaccine until it is marketed is commonly estimated as 12—18 months, although many commentators say that it could easily take two years and some give an upper limit of three years or even longer. Dr. Plotkin recalls that ‘it took at least five years before a vaccine [for rubella] was on the market’ and adds: ‘We cannot afford to have that kind of delay in an emergency like this one.’ He urges companies to ‘go into superaction’ immediately, with a view to having a vaccine available in the event of a second wave of the pandemic next winter – that is, within about 8 months. 



One major reason why the process takes so long is the number and duration of the clinical trials required to get a vaccine licensed by regulatory agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration. The official purpose of licensing is to ensure the safety and efficacy of drugs and vaccines. In practice, the FDA was long ago ‘captured’ by the companies it is supposed to regulate, with most of the scientists who sit on its advisory committees dependent on those companies.[7] FDA decisions therefore tend to reflect the interests of the companies that have the most political clout at the time.  



Monopolization and extortion



Another recommendation made by Dr. Plotkin is that the FDA should license not one but several vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, ‘because if we need millions of doses a single manufacturer will not be able to make enough for the world.’ This too makes good sense. Or at least it would if production were carried on to satisfy human needs. However, we live under a global system in which production is for profit. 



How then does a company that develops and produces vaccines act in order to maximize its profit? It seeks to monopolize the market for a vaccine against a specific disease by ensuring that its vaccine – and its vaccine alone! – is licensed. Then it applies for a patent on its vaccine – another significant cause of delay. Monopolization sets the scene for extortion. The company sells its vaccine at an exorbitant price that makes it unaffordable to most of those who need it.   



How many times this has happened in the past! A few years ago, for instance, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, one of the committees that advises the British National Health Service, recommended that a new vaccine against Meningitis B manufactured by Novartis NOT be made available to all children in the UK, even though this terrible disease afflicts 1,870 people per year. It was ‘highly unlikely to be cost effective’ – in other words, it was too expensive.[8] And this in a country that for over seven decades now has had what ‘progressive’ Americans politicians call ‘Medicare for All’! Vaccines against the scourge of viral hepatitis are likewise too expensive for large-scale use.[9] 



Indeed, there has already been an attempt to monopolize a future SARS-CoV-2 vaccine – one that does not yet even exist. In mid-March, the German press reported that the Trump Administration was trying to secure exclusive rights to any vaccine created by the German pharmaceutical company CureVac. Research and development would then be moved to the United States and the vaccine made available only in the United States.[10]



Notes



 [1] Interviewed here.



 [2] As of March 21, six projects. See http://cepi.net/news_cepi.





 [4] See the article by researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology in the March 16 online issue of Cell, Host and Microbe.



 [5] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-vaccine-cure-doctor-peter-hotez-covid-19-us-trump-congress-states-a9378001.html. For a detailed assessment and references to articles by members of the Bottazzi team, see comments by pharmaceutical engineer Christopher C. VanLang on the question-and-answer website quora.com.  



 [6] Physicist Cees J.M. Lanting on the question-and-answer website quora.com.



 [7] This includes scientists directly employed by companies, scientists working for them on contract, and the many university scientists who depend on corporate money to fund their research. In fact, there are so few genuinely independent scientists that the FDA would be unable to rely mainly on them even if its leading officials wished to do so. 



 [8] 10% of victims die, while many survivors become deaf or blind or have to have limbs amputated (The Independent, July 24, 2013; Daily Mail, August 24, 2013). 



 [9] Vaccines exist for types A and B of this disease. See here. For a discussion of the availability of vaccines in underdeveloped countries, see here.



 [10] The Washington Post, March 16. 


Stephen Shenfield

http://www.wspus.org/2020/03/coronavirus-crisis-when-if-ever-will-a-vaccine-be-widely-available/

COVID-19 and Climate Change

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Countries around the world are enforcing lockdowns with factories shut down, businesses closed, traffic off the roads, air travel reduced and the impact of these  measures on the environment is already noticeable.


In China, nitrogen dioxide emissions, produced by cars, factories and power plants, have fallen by more than 40 per cent over many of the country’s cities under lockdown. Coal consumption at power plants has fallen by 36 per cent and restrictions have led to a 25 per cent drop in energy use and carbon emissions.In northern Italy nitrogen dioxide emissions have fallen by an average of 10 per cent per week since mid-February.
Pollution levels in the UK have also fallen since  strict new measures to halt the spread of the virus were introduced.
Besides a drop in nitrogen dioxide, dirty particulate matter (PM2.5) emitted by vehicles has reduced significantly. “In London, for example, PM2.5 is noticeably lower than would be expected for this time of year at the roadside,” according to Alastair Lewis, professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of York.
Unfortunately, according to Ian Colbeck, professor of environmental science at the University of Essex the reduction in global emissions will most likely be temporary.
“Emissions tend to bounce back fairly quickly shortly after a crisis ends,” he said. “Expect to see short-term impacts on energy and emissions disappear as governments introduce stimulus packages to increase industrial output at the end of the pandemic. Following the global financial crash in 2008-09, carbon emissions increased by 5 per cent as a result of such stimulus.”
Dr Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), has warned that the pandemic could stall global efforts to transition towards clean energy.
“We should not allow today’s crisis to compromise our efforts to tackle the world’s inescapable challenge,” he said in a statement.
According to Professor Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College Londonthe transition to a low-carbon economy requires trillions of pounds of investment. If it is all spent on managing the coronavirus outbreak, “we will not have the financial muscle to invest in a low-carbon future”, he said.
However, like many other  environmental experts he hopes that the pandemic presents an unprecedented opportunity to curb global emissions, explaining that there is “ an amazing opportunity to shape the economy in a slightly different way”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-climate-change-pollution-emissions-china-a9427356.html

COVID-19 and the Dictators

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Boris Johnson’s coronavirus bill, which gives sweeping new powers to ministers, was passed last week with the proviso that MPs would vote every six months on whether it should be renewed. In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s more wide-ranging and draconian emergency measures have a lifespan of two months.

The situation is different in Hungary. The Hungarian parliament is expected to rubber-stamp the “protecting against the coronavirus” law, ushering in an indefinite period of what amounts to one-man rule in an EU member state.



The new law allows Victor Orbán to rule by decree, alone and unchallenged. The prime minister will be able to override all existing legislation. Elections will not take place. Information on government actions will be provided to the speaker of the Hungarian parliament and the leaders of parliamentary groups.

The spreading of “false” information that could lead to social unrest and prevent the “protection of the public” will become a crime punishable by a lengthy prison sentence. Some of Mr Orbán’s cheerleaders in the media have already suggested approvingly that this provision could lead to the arrest of critical journalists.

Orbán is not the only autocratic leader to have spotted the chance for a power grab. 



 Azerbaijan’s strongman, Ilham Aliyev, has stepped up the harassment of opposition groups. 



 Israel’s beleaguered PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, used an emergency decree to delay the start of his trial on corruption charges, marginalised parliament and moved to enact unprecedented surveillance measures. It now seems possible that a national unity government will be formed with Mr Netanyahu’s main political rival, Benny Gantz, the leader of the Blue and White party. 



 In Egypt, Guardian correspondent, Ruth Michaelson, had her press accreditation was revoked for publishing an article citing research by Canadian disease specialists estimating the actual number of Covid-19 cases in Egypt in early March was likely between 6,000 and 19,300 – at a time when Cairo’s official tally was only three cases. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in power since 2014, has been accused by rights groups of silencing independent and foreign media, and jailing dozens of reporters who published information deemed critical of his administration.



 Ominously, in the United States, Donald Trump has begun to consider himself a “wartime president”.

Housing the homeless

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After the unfunded request from the government last week, which also called for the closure of night shelters and street encampments, homelessness charities questioned whether fulfilling it would be feasible. But on Monday, charities were keen to stress that considerable progress had been made in a short space of time, with the national homelessness charity Crisis estimating that about 4,200 had been rehoused in England within a few weeks. Crisis estimates that there are thousands more people still in night shelters, lying next to each other on church hall floors or still living in hostels where they have to access shared space to cook or wash.



“It shows what you can do with money and organisation and an assertive approach from government,” Matthew Downie, director of policy at Crisis said. “There shouldn’t be too much self-congratulation about this. There are people still on the streets, and many people who won’t have eaten for days,” said Downie. “But we should recognise that it has taken a global pandemic to sort out an absolutely solvable problem; it is possible to get thousands of people off the streets and out of night shelters in the space of a week. The real test isn’t how quickly we get people off the streets, but how permanently we can keep them off afterwards,” Downie said.



 Officials are concerned about the risk of transmission between people living on the streets, congregating in day shelters, and also about those who live in shelters with communal sleeping, eating and washing areas.Birmingham city council had worked with a Holiday Inn in the centre of the city to accommodate more than 250 rough sleepers or residents of night shelters, he said, and hotel staff and charity workers were bringing people three meals a day to their rooms to allow them to isolate. Liverpool council has paid for more than 50 people to move into a newly built, unopened hotel.



Meanwhile, charities dealing primarily with people who have an uncertain immigration status said they were worried that not enough support was being offered. People who have a “no recourse to public funds” (NRPF) status – which is given to some asylum seekers, or people who have a limited immigration status – are not normally eligible for support from homelessness charities that rely on government funding. The question of how rehousing these people can be funded remains unresolved.



“It’s clear that NRPF conditions from the Home Office are prohibiting local authorities from supporting an extremely vulnerable groups of people,” a spokesperson for Naccom, a charity helping destitute migrants, said.



The Glass Door Homeless Charity said it had been contacted by many people who still needed urgent rehousing. “We have had one case of someone sleeping rough who has been told they must reconnect to their home country rather than being offered accommodation,” Neil Parkinson, a senior caseworker, said.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/thousands-of-rough-sleepers-still-unhoused-in-england-say-charities

Protect the already vulnerable

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Hundreds of thousands of disabled and chronically ill people face poverty after being left out of emergency measures to bolster the benefits system to help claimants cope with the coronavirus crisis, 100 disability charities have warned.



The Disability Benefits Consortium (DBC) said in an open letter that changes introduced last week to raise the weekly rate of universal credit by £20 would not apply to those on legacy benefits.
Ella Abraham, the DBC’s campaigns co-chair, said: “These are unprecedented and extremely worrying times for so many people, across all of our organisations we are seeing the detrimental impact this is having on disabled and unwell people’s physical and mental health.



Many claimants will not receive the increase, worth more than £1,000 a year, because they receive employment and support allowance (ESA), a disability unemployment benefit that pre-dates universal credit.
The DBC warns that disabled people claiming tax credits who lose their jobs over the next few months will be worse off because they will not qualify for income protections promised when universal credit was introduced.
Transitional protection is a temporary top-up payment added to universal credit to offset any benefit losses when claimants are transferred from tax credits – but it is not payable when claimants move because of a change of circumstances, such as job loss.
“Disabled people in work and parents of disabled children stand to lose far more than most people if they lose transitional protection – sometimes amounting to thousands of pounds a year. This will make it even more difficult for them to recover from the economic shock of the next few months,” the letter says.

The charities have called for measures to protect vulnerable claimants from sudden falls in income, including a definitive commitment from ministers not to apply benefit sanctions, and a repayment holiday on advance loans from the Department for Work and Pensions to see new claimants through the five-week wait for a first universal credit payment. It also calls on ministers to protect the incomes of disabled people whose benefits are automatically reduced or suspended when they start an appeal against a benefit decision. About 90,000 people are currently awaiting an appeal.



https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/30/benefit-changes-leave-disabled-people-facing-poverty-uk-charities-warn-coronavirus

The Peoples Wake-Up Call

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The COVID-19 pandemic focuses attention on the disastrous deficiencies of the profit system. For far too long, we have ignored the failures of a system that reduces ever more people to homelessness, refugee camps, permanent indebtedness, and servitude. It is an economic system which directly imperils our survival and well-being. It is system devoted to generating profits for the richest. It values things only for its market price. It promotes maximising personal financial returns as the highest moral obligation to society. It wantonly destroys the stability of its climate and the purity of its air, water, and soil. Military expenditures and preparations for wars represents wasted resources that would be better applied to addressing the deficiencies in our healthcare. 



 Rich people are far more likely to survive Coronavirus than poor people. Wealthy people the world over are more likely to have access to testing, treatment, good doctors, ventilators, etc. Poor people all over the planet are more likely to try to “tough it out” at home because they don’t have a doctor or can’t afford one. A humane society doesn’t trade some lives for others. It is, perhaps, possible within capitalism to put a dollar sign on every death as part of a cost-benefit analysis. But a humane society doesn’t frame addressing the public’s health and the health of the economy as a “trade-off.” There’s never an excuse to send people to work in dangerous conditions with no safety nets and benefits. It’s especially horrendous in the midst of coronavirus.

 

 The COVID-19 pandemic has been made worse and continues to be made worse by nationalism, ironic considering the virus doesn’t care about borders. This pandemic shows us it’s time to evolve past the idea of the nation-state. It has shown us not just the flaws in the capitalist system, but it has also demonstrated for all to see our shared humanity. We must join together. What if we decided there were no nations but instead the working people of the world were one. Coronavirus has made so clear that global issues can’t be easily categorized as just a health issue. It has encompass our economy and encompassed our entire social system and ways of life. Covid-19 has shined a spotlight on the ways that our society is not working, particularly not working for people in vulnerable groups.



Capitalism is a self-destructive system that no longer can support our long-term future. When the pandemic dissipates business as usual is simply not an option. Once the global turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic has eventually subsided (as it certainly will in due course), our biggest and most important challenge will be if we have learned from the experience to re-shape our future. It has awaken to the stark reality of the profound failure of our existing institutions. But it has also awaken to the truth of other possibilities and our interconnections with one another and with our planet. We must now learn to devote ourselves to the well-being of all in an interdependent world. The coronavirus pandemic has been a powerful reminder that a society committed to the common good is essential. Let us move forward to create a better world for all. Let us free our minds. World socialism is all about you and me, and our neighbours, and our friends and co-workers, and our shared humanity. The antidote to COVID-19 is to build a solidarity-based economy with one another. A real sharing economy could emerge at the other end of the coronavirus crisis.



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