April 16
GUEST: Mike Davis, Professor Emeritus at University of California at Riverside, a MacArthur Fellow, author of numerous books, and an editor of the New Left Review, talks about Coronavirus and capitalism.Mike Davis on Coronavirus: “In a Plague Year”
In a "just in time" manufacturing, companies make a little more money because inventory is kept very low. But in times of stress, the system falls apart much faster.
In America, our healthcare is mostly privatized. Even our public hospitals try to save money by following the practices of the private sector. So when the pandemic hit, instead of having reserves of masks, testing kits, and hospital beds, we had nothing. Very soon our supposedly richest country in the world had the highest death rate from Covid 19.
Pandemics don't generate a lot of corporate wealth, so few major drug makers were interested in researching vaccines or medications. In a pharmaceutical industry where profit is the only motivation, the US drifted into Covid 19, with an ignoramus as President, a Congress firmly controlled by corporate interests, and a public health system that has been starved for decades. We are proudly "number one" when it comes to ignoring the needs of our citizenry.
Mike Davis talks about these links that our neoliberal media chooses to ignore. Most of us have already guessed that this round of Congressional bailouts will go mostly to the very billionaires who have created this inhuman system. What we didn't quite realize is that our kleptocracy would produce these many bodies. Where to put them all when our refrigerated trucks are jammed to overflowing?
Has there been a time in our recent history when our form of government has seemed so obviously flawed? Like all criminal organizations, it is firmly entrenched. But we know what we must do, and that is to confront the Mammon we have let slip into power, where it has destroyed our American dream.
