Statement LIS: coronavirus, ensure health, no capitalist profits
lis-isl.org
We are going through a global crisis whose trigger has been the coronavirus. It became the trigger that triggered an economic crisis that was brewing like a perfect storm. Undressed the consequences of austerity policies, growing inequality, the disarticulation of health and public services. Governments give repressive responses without succeeding in stopping the pandemic and enabling extraordinary profits for capitalists.
The number of people infected with the Coronavirus already exceed 145 thousand in 139 countries and more than 5400 deaths. The World Health Organization classified the outbreak as a pandemic. The villages of the world face not only virus and disease, but to the real cause of the pandemic that is capitalism.
Covid-19 numbers are alarming. Although there is still no exact data, its mortality rate is around a 3% and goes up quickly for those over 60 years and so-called risk groups. It is twice as contagious as the flu, and it takes around five days to manifest symptoms. This contributes to the fact that the barriers and quarantines of millions have not been able to stop their expansion.. There are specialists who claim that it can potentially infect the 40% of the world population.
Adjustment and crisis of health systems
The pandemic revealed the collapse of the health systems exhausted by the capitalist logic of profit, the privatization and adjustment. Under these conditions they are not prepared to face the virus. Despite advancing treatments, of vaccines, antibiotics and retrovirals that reduced during the 20th century substantially the mortality of epidemics, the collapse of the capitalist system, the reduction of health budgets, poverty and environmental disaster -all aggravated by the lack of information and prevention-, make the recommendations of the World Health Organization are dead letter.
Three factors have worked synergistically to put the population in a state of defenselessness.
First, the drastic reduction of public social investment as part of the structural adjustment programs promoted for many years by capitalist governments, the European troika, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. Said social austerity policies, have degraded the infrastructure of services of health, workers and popular conquests that, like the social wage, the job stability, social welfare, etc. are adjustment variables of the ongoing capitalist crisis.
Secondly, promoting policies for the tariffing and privatization of health benefits. Recommended by the same organizations and endorsed in recent years by WHO itself.
In third place, the progressive cut to public investment in science, technology e investigation. Its priority is the defense of the financial interests of corporations pharmaceutical and industrial medical complex, at the cost of leaving millions of people without treatment for emerging diseases.
The failure of governments to stop the pandemic
The response of the world's governments gives testimony to its failure and the system's inability to safeguard the peoples health. From the Chinese bureaucracy that concealed information and deployed the strength of its repressive apparatus to try to minimize the crisis, down to Trump's unscientific denialism and his racist rhetoric that presents the virus as a foreign danger. Other governments cover up inaction transferring responsibility to the working people. All this, within decades of adjustment and privatization of health, lost valuable time to contain the viruses and mitigate their impact.
Facing the reality of the pandemic, now the governments reinforce repressive policies and capitalists' profits. Trump has transformed the pandemic into fertile ground for large companies capitalists privatizing the response. Put billions in your pockets of pharmaceutical corporations to develop tests and vaccines. Until has agreed with the gigantic supermarket companies, as Wall Mart, for rapid diagnostic centers to be mounted in their parking lots. further, have used Covid - 19 to inject 1,5 trillions of dollars in financial markets through the FED.
While capitalists do huge business with the help of governments, the peoples of the world are put under quarantine. Authoritarian measures that point more to containment grow repressive social crisis that preventive social distancing. Is it so more interested in containing the popular response to their austerity policies than to contain the virus. In the Spanish State the PSOE - Podemos government has decreed the "State of Alarm", granting him special powers including the mobilization of the army, the intervention of the autonomies and the cut of democratic freedoms. In France Macron prohibits concentrations of more than 100 people on the street and represses protests with public health like excuse, as you go ahead with pension reform. In New York already have used the National Guard to guarantee the quarantine of a specially affected population, and the Governor of the State has asked the federal government mobilizing the army. In Chile Piñera seeks to advance declare a state of emergency, taking advantage of the health crisis to evoke social control measures that seek to contain a mobilization process that does not has stopped at 5 months. We must face every measure that seeks to cut democratic freedoms to pass adjustment plans under the virus umbrella.
The economic crisis
The pandemic aggravates an economic situation that previously it was steadily advancing towards a general crisis. Even without the pandemic all the elements of a crisis had been brought together, and its outburst it was about time. The roots of it are in the own dynamics of the capitalist system in general, and in policies driven by the States after the crisis of 2008 in particular. This last, there was already evidenced the structural tendency to the fall of the profit rate and, consequently, the over accumulation of capital that led to the creation of a financial bubble that finally burst.
Since then, States devoted themselves to inject money into capitalists through massive bailouts, cuts tax, quantitative easing, reduction of interest rates central banks, etc. As it was expected, Nevertheless, the rich used this money to get richer, and given the modest prospects of profit in the productive activity, massively turned to speculation. This gave origin of a spectacular financial bubble whose burst coincided with the coronavirus spread.
The pandemic did sound the alarm that the markets have been waiting to start selling, generating a spectacular drop in stock markets around the world. The thousands of millions of dollars with which central banks have intervened and the announcements of interest rate reductions have failed to stop the crash so far.
The governments They use the coronavirus to justify this massive rescue of the capitalists. At the same time, the development of the pandemic fuels the crisis economic. The paralysis of productive sectors and complete industries such as tourism and the decrease in international trade, they hit the world economy both from the point of supply and demand. The bourgeois take advantage, Besides, to mount an offensive against workers firing or leaving without full pay and cutting wages and benefits. Temporary and precarious workers are the first to lose their jobs and income.
What to do?
It is necessary to promote the fight for a response from the working class and the peoples of the world. As immediate measures against the emergency, we need first of all a public health investment shock allocating specific budget lines under social control. We must ensure that all evidence, treatments and vaccines are completely free. For this, all the supplies and infrastructure to combat the pandemic must be declared of public utility subject to expropriation.. Guarantee the free distribution of prevention and treatment elements. Likewise, all the installed capacity of private health services, must be available to the public system. That licenses be guaranteed with the full payment of wages and the payment of the entire wages to quarantined workers and that dismissals are prohibited. Subsidies for informal workers, self-employed and unemployed. Prohibition of evictions, and immediate housing solutions for the homeless. End all persecution of migrants, no expulsion and full access to the health system. Immediate hiring, with full labor rights, of all the personnel necessary for the health system and backing down of all austerity measures. Private health profit must be eliminated with a single state health system under democratic control of workers and users. Not a dollar to Wall Street and speculators, nationalization of the banking and financial system. Non-payment and investigation of external debts. Down with all the flexible employment and retirement reforms. It is time to put the resources to guarantee the health of the peoples, not for the IMF and capitalist corporations.
16.03.2020
