Corporate greed keeps the pandemic alive

More than two years on, it is hard to imagine there could be someone who is not sick of the pandemic. Although we can point to multiple reasons for the inability to bring Covid-19 under control, a prominent factor is corporate greed.

The elevation of the private profit of a few over the welfare of the many is, sadly, the ordinary course of events in a capitalist world. This is brightly illustrated by the failure of the world’s governments to prioritize health care over money as exemplified by the ongoing failure to make vaccines available to the Global South.

Business as usual, yes, and it would be easy enough to lament the standards of the United States and its wildly expensive health care system being exported to the rest of the world. The U.S. does play a role here, but this time the U.S. is not the biggest villain. The European Union, with its obstinate refusal to waive any intellectual property rule because of fealty to Covid-19 vaccine makers, has been the biggest roadblock.

As new variations and mutations repeatedly spread, achieving a critical mass of vaccinated people is the only way the pandemic will be brought to an end. Covid-19 may never be fully eradicated but it can be reduced to a background nuisance as are many other illnesses. Hesitancy among many in the Global North to be vaccinated has played a not insignificant role, whether by right-wingers believing the nonsense peddled by the likes of Fox “News” or by people on the Left who, not without reason, are skeptical of Big Pharma.

^{Nurse graffiti COVID-19 in Málaga, Spain (photo by Daniel Capilla)}

Those in the latter category see nefarious motivations behind pharmaceutical companies’ promotion of Covid vaccines. But is this another instance of Big Pharma pushing unneeded or even dangerous drugs? Such things do happen; suspicion does have a basis. But let’s consider what Big Pharma wants, which is no different from any other corporation: To accumulate the biggest piles of money possible. Given the global health emergency that arose in the first months of 2020, the surest path to achieving that goal would be to become the first to develop a cure. The pandemic was that rare instance in which the interests of Big Pharma and the general population coincided, and the vaccine makers wouldn’t be, and indeed aren’t, at all shy about taking advantage of an emergency to rack up huge profits, even by their industry’s standards. And with the whole world watching, a vaccine had better work and not cause undue harm.

Thus, because of unique circumstances, creating a safe, effective product for a real problem was actually in a corporate interest. And the profits, thanks to these rare circumstances and government largesse, are gigantic, a topic to which we will return.

Intellectual property as a weapon

It should surprise no one that the vaccine makers are doing everything they can to keep windfall profits rolling in. That means clinging to intellectual property (IP) law, heavily skewed in their favor, to maintain a monopoly. Capitalist governments have rolled over for corporate interests for decades, making IP laws ever more rigid. National legislation has played a role, firmly augmented by so-called “free trade” agreements that are used as battering rams by the United States, the European Union and other advanced capitalist countries to force open less powerful countries’ economies and force the world’s governments, including themselves, to be subordinate to multinational capital. Seeking to undermine government health care systems, and especially the ability of governments to negotiate lower prices, is often a goal of “free trade” deals, most notably demonstrated in the efforts of the U.S. government to push draconian rules in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

These developments are anathema to the interests of working people everywhere. It is unconscionable, or should be, when IP rules are used to keep life-saving vaccines away from most of the world’s people. Struggles to make Covid-19 vaccines available to the Global South kicked off quickly, and there is no sign that this issue will anytime soon be resolved. This is not only against the interests of those for whom vaccines remain out of reach, but, given that the pandemic won’t end until a substantial percentage of the world’s peoples are inoculated and thus end the risk of still more dangerous variants arising, it is against the interests of those countries whose governments continue to elevate corporate profits over human life.

What the world needs is for manufacturers anywhere in the world to be granted the unrestricted right to manufacture the vaccines.

To achieve this necessity, what is needed is something called a “TRIPS waiver.” This will require some explanation, as once again a trip into the weeds of global trade policy becomes unavoidable.

^{Traffic in a British village is reduced from two lanes to one so there would be sufficient space for walkers to maintain two-meter distances from one another. (Photo by Martinvl)}

Under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, IP rights are strictly enforced. As the neoliberal variant of capitalism became dominant with the decline of Keynesianism in the 1970s, economic decision-making has been separated from politics, leaving multinational corporations free to move production to the places with the lowest wages and least regulation, constantly on the prowl for locations that can be even more exploited. With components obtained from around the world, assembled in low-wage, low-regulation havens and finished products exported, barriers to trade such as tariffs were necessary and, having won those, corporate executives and financiers next sought to eliminate the ability of governments to regulate them. Thus the era of “free trade” agreements arose, and one of the institutions that was created to enforce corporate supremacy was the WTO.

One of the legs of corporate domination is IP law. How that relates to the pandemic is this: A handful of multinational corporations, interested in the biggest possible profits for their executives and shareholders, can decide who will receive vaccines and at what price. That human life is at stake — more than 6 million have died from Covid-19 — does not make for an exception. As Alain Supiot, writing on international law in the November-December 2021 issue of New Left Review, noted:

“On the one hand, the Preamble to the [World Health Organization] Constitution states that ‘The extension to all peoples of the benefits of medical, psychological and related knowledge is essential to the attainment of health.’ But on the other, since the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994, this knowledge has become an object of private property, precisely opposed ‘to all peoples’ by virtue of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Until then, it was accepted in international law that the protection of public health interests took precedence over the interests of patent-holders. The TRIPS Agreement reversed this hierarchy and gave primacy to the protection of industrial property.”

Negotiations to enact a waiver are stonewalled

A waiver of TRIPS rules, then, is what is needed. In other words, a comprehensive waiver that, even if temporary for the duration of the emergency, sets aside Big Pharma’s IP rights and allows all manufacturers of vaccines, wherever they are, to produce Covid-19 vaccines. The governments of India and South Africa proposed, in October 2020, just such a waiver to allow the production of one or more of the Covid-19 vaccines. A year and a half later, the world is still waiting, with no resolution in sight.

Sarah Lazare and Paige Oamek, writing for In These Times, recently wrote an article demonstrating the “big lie” of Big Pharma talking points as the industry, in particular Pfizer, furiously resist any weakening of their IP fortresses. They wrote:

“The lie relates to an October 2020 proposal from India and South Africa that the World Trade Organization suspend enforcement of key patent rules so that cheaper, generic versions of Covid-19 treatments and vaccines can get to more people more quickly. (The proposal is referred to as a TRIPS waiver, a reference to the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.) The pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna, concerned with maximizing their present and future profits, emerged as virulent opponents of such a measure, which still has not passed more than a year later, even as just one out of 21 people in poor countries have been fully vaccinated. It is no anomaly that the industry would reject such a proposal — pharmaceutical companies had a big hand in shaping those WTO intellectual property rules in the first place, to protect pharmaceutical monopolies and their profits.”

Negotiations have centered on four-way talks among India, South Africa, the European Union and the United States. A report surfaced in March 2022 that an agreement had finally been reached, but that has been denied, most notably by the U.S. government. Text accompanying the reported agreement was widely and loudly condemned around the world as grossly insufficient, and possibly even adding additional barriers to global vaccine access. Weeks have gone by, and there is no word that any agreement has actually been reached. What the true state of the negotiations may be can not be stated with any certainty, but there is no indication that any deal is imminent. Or that any deal will resemble what is needed by the Global South.

^{A doctor in a hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic (photo by Pablo Jarrín)}

A surprise announcement by the Biden administration in May 2021, when President Joe Biden announced support for a TRIPS waiver, in a partial reversal of U.S. policy that has consistently elevated corporate profits above all other considerations, raised hopes. But the Biden administration pronouncement is less than meets the eye, and the European Union has remained obstinately opposed to any waiver. Providing a fresh demonstration of the anti-democratic nature of the EU, that the European Parliament has three times called for a waiver to be approved and many EU countries are in support have had no apparent effect on EU negotiators.

The U.S.-based watchdog group Global Trade Watch, in its analysis, says that accepting the EU proposal would be worse than having no deal:

“The European Union has been the primary obstacle to progress on the waiver. … The EU’s position had been to basically restate existing WTO flexibilities on patents that almost every WTO member already has, while requiring additional conditionalities. … Any proposal that follows the EU position is worse than no action at all, because it could further undermine current WTO rules that already allow governments to issue compulsory licenses. The need for far greater, not less, freedom to make and use medicines in a global health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic is precisely why more than 100 countries have supported the waiver as introduced by India and South Africa.”

The EU, however, is not the only obstacle. The U.S. negotiating position isn’t for a full waiver. The Global Trade Watch analysis states:

“The longstanding U.S. position to support a waiver for vaccines only, excluding the tests and therapeutics, is shameful, particularly as President Biden recently lauded testing and treatment as key tools in fighting the pandemic at this stage. The new proposal only covers vaccines, with tests and treatments to be considered six months after the proposal is agreed, if it is agreed. Given the already seventeen-month delay since the waiver was introduced, it is irresponsible to suggest further delay for tests and therapeutics. … The U.S. had also reportedly suggested limiting the geographic scope of the waiver, which would only further limit the ability to scale up manufacturing all over the world. This demand was apparently agreed, as the proposal now on offer would only apply to developing countries that contributed less than 10% of the world’s exports of COVID-19 vaccine doses in 2021.”

Public statements by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative have not been encouraging. The trade representative, Katherine Tai, “assured” the U.S. Congress that her office is not “working to give away American IP.” With the usual bipartisan commitment to corporate profits, congressional Republicans and Democrats oppose a meaningful waiver, echoing industry talking points to underline their disapproval. A bloc of Republican representatives is seeking to enforce this by introducing a bill that would grant Congress more oversight over negotiations.

Most of the world’s countries back India, South Africa

As many as 120 of the WTO’s 164 countries are said to be backing India and South Africa. Yet many of these countries would be excluded even from the limited and inadequate proposals put forth by the EU and U.S. As noted above, larger Global South countries would be excluded under the U.S. proposal to limit the countries eligible, while also limiting what would be available. Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, for example, calls on WTO members to “tackle the current barriers to accessing all COVID-19 medical tools, including treatments and diagnostics, and also addresses patents and non-patent barriers in an effective way.” Dimitri Eynikel, EU Policy Advisor for MSF’s Access Campaign, noting the “considerable limitations” of what is on the table, said:

“It is incredibly concerning that the leaked text currently only covers vaccines, but neither treatments nor diagnostics. Excluding treatments and diagnostics is a critical weakness, especially as access to COVID-19 treatments remains a significant problem in many low- and middle-income countries, particularly in Latin America, in part because of patent barriers and restrictive licensing deals controlled by pharmaceutical corporations. Excluding countries with significant manufacturing and supply capacity like Brazil is highly problematic as it arbitrarily blocks potential critical avenues to increase access to COVID-19 medical tools for low- and middle-income countries.”

The severe limitations the EU and U.S. are attempting to impose make it unlikely that a “deeply flawed text” can be set right, according to Professor Jane Kelsey of the University of Auckland. Noting that by the end of 2021, more boosters had been given in high-income countries than total doses in low-income ones, Dr. Kelsey wrote, “The leaked ‘solution’ agreed by the informal ‘quad’ (US, EU, India and South Africa) is insufficient, problematic and unworkable. There are too many limitations to make any significant difference and it is a far cry from the original proposal from India and South Africa that would have effectively addressed the barriers.”

Perhaps activists and medical professionals going on the offensive as part of a public-pressure effort is one way that a fair deal might be forced. Nurses from 28 countries filed a complaint in November 2021 with the United Nations alleging human rights violations by the EU and four countries for “the loss of countless lives” in the pandemic. The nurses, representing more than 2.5 million health care workers around the world, named Britain, Norway, Singapore and Switzerland in their filing — the four countries known to be standing with the EU. The nurses charge that “these countries have violated our rights and the rights of our patients — and caused the loss of countless lives” through “continued opposition to the TRIPS waiver … resulting in the violation of human rights of peoples across the world.” The complaint notes human rights obligations to which WTO member states are legally bound.

^{Nurses demand safe staffing (Photo via National Nurse magazine)}

The organizations behind the filing are mostly from the Global South, but among the 28 are ones from Canada (Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions and Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec), the United States (National Nurses United) and Australia (Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation)).

Deborah Burger, president of National Nurses United, which represents more than 175,000 members in the United States, was unsparing in her assessment. She said:

“The maldistribution of vaccines in the face of more than 5 million deaths, many of them preventable, is a devastating reminder of the deplorable disparity of wealth between the rich nations of the north and the global south. To refuse to act simply to protect the profits of giant pharmaceutical corporations is unconscionable, inhumane, and must be ended.”

Upon receipt of the complaint, Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Physical and Mental Health, said, “The nurses’ core demand is one I share.” She said:

“States have a collective responsibility to use all available means to facilitate faster access to vaccines, including by introducing a temporary waiver of relevant intellectual property rights under the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). Nurses and health care workers have been on the front line keeping us safe and have witnessed the most painful and heart-wrenching effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Their evident commitment to the right to physical and mental health provides them with moral authority.”

No executive or shareholder is any danger of starving

Let us now return to the profit margins of pharmaceutical companies and the massive windfall profits being racked up by Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers, which will provide some context to industry arguments. The business news agency Bloomberg reports that Pfizer’s vaccine generated $20 billion in pretax profit in 2021 while Moderna “is expected by analysts to earn $12.2 billion before taxes this year.” Pfizer’s vaccine may rack up $36 billion in revenue this year.

The pharmaceutical industry was already one of the most profitable. To provide some examples, health technology was found to be the most profitable of 19 broadly defined “major” industrial sectors in the U.S. for 2015 and 2016. A BBC report found that pharmaceuticals and banks tied for the highest average profit margin in 2013, with five pharmaceutical companies enjoying a profit margin of 20 percent or more — Pfizer among them. The most profitable pharmaceutical corporations spent far more on sales and marketing than they did on research and development. With little control exerted over pharmaceutical prices in the U.S., it is no wonder that U.S. health care costs are the world’s highest, greatly exceeding any other country.

Even by these rarified standards, the boost to profit margins from Covid-19 have been noteworthy. Pfizer reported almost $22 billion in net income for 2021, only $3 billion more than it reported for 2020 and 2019 combined. Moderna, which even self-described “capitalist tool” Forbes magazine says produced a vaccine “largely funded by taxpayer dollars,” reported $12.2 billion in profits for 2021. Moderna received a billion dollars in government subsidies for its vaccine, and has, overall, received $6 billion from the U.S. government to develop, test, manufacture and deliver its vaccine.

Johnson & Johnson reported net income of almost $21 billion for 2021, a healthy gain of 40 percent over the previous year, a much larger gain than the gain it reported in revenue. And AstraZeneca reported a 37 percent increase in its core earnings per share (a comparison apparently used to exclude special one-time costs from an acquisition).

So it appears that no executive or shareholder of these four pharmaceutical makers is in any danger of being out on the street.

What is the problem in sharing the technology that would finally put an end to the pandemic? The real reason is that the maximum possible amount of profit wouldn’t be accrued. No big corporation is going to admit that, so other excuses are offered.

Debunking Big Pharma’s favorite talking points

The director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had a revealing conversation with Pfizer’s chief executive officer. As reported by Bloomberg, Dr. Tedros, on a conference call with pharmaceutical executives, said, “Honestly, I’m not seeing the commitment I would expect from you.” The Pfizer chief executive, Albert Bourla, whined that Dr. Tedros was speaking “emotionally.” Consistent with that exchange, Johnson & Johnson’s chief scientific officer, Paul Stoffels, declared at an industry lobbying group gathering that there was no need for any waivers because the industry’s efforts are “sufficient.”

Letting the pharmaceutical industry have its way quite clearly hasn’t been “sufficient,” given the small numbers of vaccines available to the Global South well more than a year since vaccines became available and the inability to stop the pandemic given that lack of availability. The Bloomberg report admitted that “Vaccine inequality didn’t happen by itself. It was the result of decisions by corporate executives and government officials.”

^{Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto during the pandemic (photo by Sikander Iqbal)}

Big Pharma talking points have revolved around claims that restrictive patents are necessary to encourage research and development, without which supposedly nothing would be invented. (Yet Jonas Salk famously declined to pursue a patent on the polio vaccine.) A new line has emerged during the pandemic: That even if a full waiver were granted, the Global South is incapable of producing vaccines because of a lack of capability or capacity, and thus granting rights would do nothing to solve the pandemic. Government officials backing the pharmaceutical industry loudly echo these claims, among them former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, and members of the U.S. Congress who are recipients of Big Pharma donations.

The In These Times article “Big Pharma’s Big Lies About Vaccine Patents,” debunks these talking points:

“It’s clever messaging, because it has an air of expert knowledge, casting companies as patiently informing activists who are well-intentioned but don’t understand how vaccine production works. It also plays to pre-existing racist assumptions that the Global South does not have pharmaceutical sectors capable of producing quality goods, but must rely on its more sophisticated former colonizers. … We don’t have definitive proof that pharmaceutical executives sat in a room somewhere and said, ‘Let’s deceive the public about the world’s vaccine manufacturing capacity.’ But there have been enough activists, scientists, and heads of state pointing out holes in Big Pharma’s narrative to make it highly likely that the industry, at the very least, was aware of challenges to the veracity of its claims. And it was in its interest to ignore them. Remarkably, the industry has shown it would rather build its own facilities from scratch — like the BioNTech facilities in Rwanda and Senegal, which won’t even start construction until mid-2022 — than give Global South countries the ability to produce vaccines themselves.”

India, for example, ranks third in the world in producing pharmaceuticals, measured by volume, and generics already constitute 70 to 80 percent of the world pharmaceutical market. The Serum Institute of India is the world’s largest producer of vaccines by number of doses produced and sold.

It’s not only vaccines that are being held back

Beyond vaccines, what about pills that are being developed? Pfizer has developed a Covid-19 oral antiviral treatment and granted a royalty-free license for the pill to the United Nations-backed Medicines Patent Pool, but the license covers only about half the world’s population. The Associated Press reported, “The deal excludes some large countries that have suffered devastating coronavirus outbreaks. For example, while a Brazilian drug company could get a license to make the pill for export to other countries, the medicine could not be made generically for use in Brazil.”

The Medicines Patent Pool said on March 18 that 35 companies around the world will produce generic versions of the pill, which has received an emergency approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The countries where the generic producers are located include Bangladesh, Brazil, China, the Dominican Republic, Jordan, India, Israel, Mexico, Pakistan, Serbia, South Korea and Vietnam.

Nonetheless, health care activists note that the license is less than adequate. Yuanqiong Hu, senior legal policy advisor for Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign said:

“Pfizer’s license with the Medicines Patent Pool for its potential oral antiviral treatment offers supply to 95 countries by generic companies that take up the license, covering about 53% of the world’s population, but this again shows how voluntary licenses come up short and do not harness the full capacity available globally for sufficient and sustainable production and supply of lifesaving medical tools for all. Many upper middle-income countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, China, Malaysia and Thailand, where established generic production capacity exists, are excluded from the license territory. We are disheartened to see yet another restrictive voluntary license during this pandemic while cases continue to rise in many countries around the world. The world knows by now that access to COVID-19 medical tools needs to be guaranteed for everyone, everywhere, if we really want to control this pandemic.”

What is more important: Ending the pandemic or increasing corporate profits? Life or money? The world capitalist system is making its choice. Should that choice be allowed to stand?

The corporate origins of the anti-science “reopen” demonstrations

Many of the same extreme right operatives who created the “Tea Party” are behind the anti-science and anti-intellectual spectacles opposing measures designed to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. And with much the same agenda.

By now, that is not much of a secret, but it is nonetheless necessary to expose these roots, and to debunk the anti-science conspiracy theories they help spread. This is an astroturf operation underwritten by Betsy DeVos, her ultra-reactionary family and veteran operatives linked to them, with FreedomWorks, primary organizer of the early Tea Party protests, and the Club For Growth, a libertarian outfit dedicated to eliminating Social Security, lurking in the background.

Perhaps the most virulent outbreak was in Lansing, where armed militia members were given free reign to roam Michigan’s state capitol building, causing a legislative session to be called off. A truly dangerous precedent — will these characters be allowed to take over the capitol next time? And that these White protestors were left untouched, even allowed to hijack the functioning of government for a day, makes for a sharp contrast with the Black Lives Matter protestors being arrested and brutalized by police around the country.

A doctor in a hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic (photo by Pablo Jarrín0

To make another comparison, recall that similar armed White militia members were allowed to take over a federal sanctuary and desecrate Native American artifacts in rural Oregon in 2016. Can anybody imagine Black protestors taking over a government facility with an intention of sparking a rebellion lasting even a day without every police agency that could mobilize mowing them down in a fusillade of bullets and bombs, much less being allowed to spend weeks and allowed to come and go as they pleased?

Let’s examine the evidence. There is plenty of it, should we wish to look.

The wealthy extremists behind the astroturf campaign

Edwin Rios, writing in Mother Jones on April 17, 2020, provided this report on the Lansing demonstrations:

“The protest, known as ‘Operation Gridlock,’ featured a fair share of MAGA hats, Trump flags, at least one Confederate flag, chants of ‘Lock her up!’ in reference to [Governor Gretchen] Whitmer, and far-right groups from the Proud Boys to the Michigan Liberty Militia. They clogged up the streets outside the state Capitol and defied Whitmer’s ban on public gatherings. The whole charade was facilitated by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, a conservative political group that doubles as a front for Michigan Trump Republicans, and promoted by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a conservative group with ties to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a Michigan billionaire philanthropist power broker before she joined the Trump administration.”

A detailed Snopes report put together by Alex Kasprak and Bethania Palma found plenty of DeVos family money:

“[T]his anti-lockdown movement was originally pushed by a small circle of fervent activists who have been protesting almost constantly since well before the onset of the pandemic. Furthermore, they have benefited from a political action infrastructure originally created to support the DeVos-funded, anti-union ‘right-to-work’ movement. These methods have apparently created the perception of widespread discontent with public health measures largely supported by the American populace and are part of a campaign playbook self-evidently resulting in an increasingly radicalized base of Trump supporters as the 2020 general election approaches.”

The article reports that the DeVos family made $14 million in political contributions to the Michigan Republican Party and other Republican groups, and also donated substantial amounts of money to the Michigan Freedom Network. The Network is in turn tightly linked to the Michigan Conservative Coalition, a group that the Snopes report characterizes as “a collection of former Tea Party-aligned groups and pro-Trump organizations whose purpose is to recruit and train an ‘army of conservative activists,’ most notably the groups Michigan Trump Republicans, Women for Trump, and the Lakes Area Tea Party. The people who run the coalition have deep ties to the Michigan GOP and to Trump campaign surrogates,” with strong links with Michigan Republican officials.

Not mentioned in these articles but nonetheless relevant is that Betsy DeVos’ brother is Erik Prince, founder of the notorious Blackwater mercenary army.

“Reopening” the economy in the corporate interest

To round out this survey, CNN reporters located two more sources of support:

“One prominent voice supporting the protests is Stephen Moore, the founder of the Club for Growth and an unofficial economic adviser to President Trump. … Moore told CNN he has been working on this organization with FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group that gained prominence during the Tea Party era.”

The Club For Growth is an ultra-reactionary outfit with connections to the Koch Brothers dedicated to eliminating government-run social benefits. Club for Growth founder Stephen Moore is on record with this statement: “Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.” In other words, it’s work until you drop, if he gets his way.

FreedomWorks is a group of corporate lobbyists formerly run by Dick Armey (a hard-line Republican Party operative who once was majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives) that was the primary organizer of the early Tea Party protests. FreedomWorks’ predecessor organization was the Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was founded and funded by David and Charles Koch (although the surviving brother, Charles, does not currently back FreedomWorks). Sharing similar roots is Americans for Prosperity, a lavishly funded and tightly controlled pressure group founded by the Koch Brothers dedicated to promoting the family business interests and extremist political philosophies, and also heavily involved in organizing the Tea Party. Organizers of the Tea Party sought to deflect anger from corporate elites consumed by greed and arrogance who bend the country’s institutions to their benefit, and instead pin the blame on “the government,” on minorities, on immigrants and any other handy scapegoat. Sound familiar?

Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto during the pandemic (photo by Sikander Iqbal)

It will come as no surprise those readers who pay attention that the Trump administration has a hand in these events. For several weeks, the White House has been agitating to “reopen” the country regardless of health consequences — an unusually open reminder that working people are seen as nothing more than disposable peons in the eyes of Wall Street and corporate boardrooms.

The Associated Press, as cautious a news agency as exists in the U.S., has provided further details:

“Republican political operatives are recruiting ‘extremely pro-Trump’ doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, without waiting to meet safety benchmarks proposed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to slow the spread of the new coronavirus. The plan was discussed in a May 11 conference call with a senior staffer for the Trump reelection campaign organized by CNP Action, an affiliate of the GOP-aligned Council for National Policy. A leaked recording of the hourlong call was provided to The Associated Press by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive watchdog group.

CNP Action is part of the Save Our Country Coalition, an alliance of conservative think tanks and political committees formed in late April to end state lockdowns implemented in response to the pandemic. Other members of the coalition include the FreedomWorks Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council and Tea Party Patriots.”

As always, we should member that the “freedom” promoted by these representatives of big capital means freedom for capital, not people. “Freedom” is equated with individualism — but as a specific form of individualism that is shorn of responsibility. Imposing harsher working conditions is another aspect of this individualistic “freedom,” but freedom for who? “Freedom” for industrialists and financiers is freedom to rule over, control and exploit others; “justice” is the unfettered ability to enjoy this freedom, a justice reflected in legal structures. Working people are “free” to compete in a race to the bottom set up by capitalists.

To this, we can now add the “freedom” to spread a deadly virus without regard to the danger imposed on others.

Debunking that Covid-19 was created in a laboratory

The complement of exposing the funders and organizers of the movement to ignore measures to provide for public health during a pandemic — how dare Governor Whitmer and other state governors seek to keep people alive! — is exposing the disinformation spread by their followers.

Contrary to conspiracy theories peddling the idea that Covid-19 is an artificial creation, possibly intentionally created for political purposes, multiple teams of scientists have determined that Covid-19 is a virus that originated in nature, and can not have been created in a laboratory. It does not help that U.S. President Donald Trump and his almost as ignorant secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, have repeatedly implied such — in the minds of Trump followers, how could scientists who have spent a lifetime studying diseases and epidemics possibly know as much as the all-knowing, all-seeing Dear Leader?

Downtown Portland, Oregon, during the pandemic (photo by Mattsjc)

Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at the Scripps Research Institute who led a team of evolutionary biologists and virologists from several countries, said Covid-19 has components that differ from those of previously known viruses and therefore had to come from an unknown virus or viruses in nature. A human-created virus would need to work with already known viruses and engineer them to have desired properties, according to Andersen.

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Medicine, Andersen and his colleagues wrote, “Genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes Covid-19] is not derived from any previously used virus backbone” and conclude, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

A molecular epidemiologist in Switzerland, Emma Hodcroft, who is not connected to the study led by Andersen, agreed. Hodcroft, who is part of a team studying changes in coronaviruses to track how they spread, said, “We see absolutely no evidence that the virus has been engineered or purposely released.” Andersen said there were several clues that clinched the case that the virus is natural, including adaptations protecting it from an immune-system attack that doesn’t occur in viruses being worked on in laboratories.

This ongoing work has also debunked the erroneous idea that Covid-19 contains bits of HIV. There was one paper that made the HIV assertion that was not peer-reviewed and was quickly retracted after numerous scientists pointed out serious flaws in it. There are no fragments of the genetic code of HIV in the virus, European Scientist reports in an article that then debunks this conspiracy theory from other angles.

Debunking that deaths from Covid-19 are overstated

Researchers on the Our World In Data web site provide a good explanation for why Covid-19 deaths are likely under-reported, not over-reported. To summarize, the reasons that deaths are being under-reported include that many countries only report Covid-19 deaths that occur in hospitals, meaning that people who die from the disease at home may not be recorded; some countries only report deaths for which a Covid-19 test has confirmed that a patient was infected with the virus; and that the pandemic may result in increased deaths from other causes due to weakened health care systems, fewer people seeking treatment for other health risks and less available funding and treatment for other diseases.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the official death toll attributed to Covid-19 counts only laboratory-confirmed Covid-19-associated deaths, and 5,048 probable Covid-19-associated deaths. Not counted are deaths among infected persons who did not access diagnostic testing, tested falsely negative, or became infected after testing negative, died outside of a health care setting or for whom Covid-19 was not suspected by a health care provider as a cause of death. Official Covid-19 deaths also do not include deaths that are not directly associated with Covid-19 infection.

A study of New York City deaths from March 11 to May 2 by the CDC found there were 24,172 excess deaths. The official total of deaths associated with Covid-19, however, is 18,879 deaths. Therefore, the CDC study determined, there were 5,293 deaths that were not identified as either laboratory-confirmed or probable Covid-19-associated deaths. That is an undercounting of Covid-19 deaths as high as 22 percent.

The CDC report said, “Covid-19-associated mortality is higher in persons with underlying chronic health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes, and deaths in persons with these chronic health conditions might not be recognized as being directly attributable to Covid-19. In addition, social distancing practices, the demand on hospitals and health care providers, and public fear related to Covid-19 might lead to delays in seeking or obtaining lifesaving care.”

A separate study conducted by a team of scientists on the death rates in New York State, England, Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands and Italy found that the number of deaths attributed to Covid-19 through May 6 range from one-half to three-quarters of the total number of excess deaths. The scientists, led by Kieran Docherty of the University of Glasgow, concluded that the additional deaths “may represent unrecognized deaths due to Covid-19.”

Debunking that Covid-19 is no more fatal than the flu

The World Health Organization found that Covid-19 data to date suggests that 80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infections requiring oxygen and 5% are critical infections requiring ventilation. These fractions of severe and critical infections are higher than what is observed for influenza infection. A WHO report states:

“While the true mortality of COVID-19 will take some time to fully understand, the data we have so far indicate that the crude mortality ratio (the number of reported deaths divided by the reported cases) is between 3-4%, the infection mortality rate (the number of reported deaths divided by the number of infections) will be lower. For seasonal influenza, mortality is usually well below 0.1%. However, mortality is to a large extent determined by access to and quality of health care.”

The United States has by far the most number of cases and the most deaths from the virus, something caused in large part by the for-profit health care system of the U.S., which is designed to deliver corporate profits rather than health care, and thus produces among the worst results of any advanced capitalist country while costing by far the most. A country with a health care system with incentives so inhumane that early deaths are considered to be a “silver lining” for corporations.

Some of the claims that Covid-19 is no worse than the flu rest on a single discredited report. The discredited report, concerning two studies in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties that purported to claim that Covid-19 death rates are similar to seasonal flus, were quickly and widely debunked. An Ars Technica article said the two studies used flawed statistical models to put the number of people with the virus at 50 to 85 times higher than was actually the case at the time, thus drastically lowering the studies’ reported death rate. The methodologies used to recruit people to this study was also flawed, including using Facebook and e-mail to ask for participants and thus far from random. Finally, the antibody test used in the two studies has a low rate of accuracy.

Need more? The Federation of American Scientists notes that between 2010 and 2019, the flu killed between 12,000 and 61,000 United Statesians during each eight-month long season (October to May). In just over four months, or about half of a flu season, Covid-19 killed over 100,000 people (as of May 28), or 785 people each day, in the U.S. alone.

Finally, Northwell Health reports that each infected person spreads Covid-19 to an average of 2.2 other people. By comparison, those with the seasonal flu infect approximately 1.3. So, yes, it is more easily transmitted than the flu.

As a final thought, it has not escaped my attention that the right-wing anti-science protestors largely did not wear face masks while demonstrating, nor did they observe social distancing. By contrast, the Black Lives Matters protests that erupted after the police murder of George Floyd overwhelmingly wear face masks. (Nor did they carry weapons.) I’ve participated in three Black Lives Matters marches at the time of writing this article, and not only can I confirm that almost everyone wears masks, but there are always a couple of people handing out masks to people who need one. That’s the difference between people who think others should die so they can get a haircut and those with a strong social conscience.

If you incentivize pollution, you incentive death

The cost of pollution in human lives is often abstract due to the long-term nature of such deaths. The cost, however, is quite concrete: A new report estimates that 4.1 million people died as a result of ambient air pollution in 2016. And that’s a conservative estimate.

Globally, only five causes of death took a higher toll. (High blood pressure and smoking were the leading causes.)

That sobering report was issued this month by teams of researchers at the Health Effects Institute and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Their report, State of Global Air 2018, sought to analyze worldwide air pollution exposures and health impacts; data for 2016 is used because that is the most recent data available. The report states:

“Worldwide exposure to PM2.5 contributed to 4.1 million deaths from heart disease and stroke, lung cancer, chronic lung disease, and respiratory infections in 2016. PM2.5 was responsible for a substantially larger number of attributable deaths than other more well-known risk factors (such as alcohol use, physical inactivity, or high sodium intake) and for an equivalent number of attributable deaths as high cholesterol and high body mass index. Ozone, another important component of outdoor air pollution, whose levels are on the rise around the world, contributed to 234,000 [additional] deaths from chronic lung disease.”

“PM2.5” refers to particulate matter less than or equal to 2.5 micrometers in aerodynamic diameter. Because particle pollution can travel deep into the lungs and cause or aggravate heart and lung diseases, there are numerous health hazards associated with it, including reduced lung function, development of respiratory diseases in children, aggravation of existing lung diseases and premature death of people with lung diseases, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency overview that the Trump administration appears to not have gotten around to censoring. Sources include incomplete combustion, automobile emissions, dust and industrial activity.

Smog in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (photo by Hafiz Noor Shams)

This pollution is a global problem — the State of Global Air 2018 report notes that 95 percent of the world’s population lives in areas exceeding World Health Organization guidelines for healthy air, and almost 60% live in areas that do not meet even the WHO’s least-stringent air quality target. That widespread pollution adds up. The report states that “In 2016, long-term exposure to ambient PM2.5 contributed to 4.1 million deaths and to a loss of 106 million [disability-adjusted life-years], making PM 2.5 exposure responsible for 7.5% of all global deaths and 4.4% of all global DALYs.” (The term “DALY” refers to losses of healthy life and are calculated as the sum of the years of life lost from a premature death and the years lived with disability.)

Different countries have different source characteristics. In China, for example, industrial coal, transportation and residential biomass burning are the major sources of deaths attributable to air pollution, accounting for more than 400,000 deaths. In India, residential biomass burning is by far the single biggest culprit, responsible for an estimated 268,000 deaths. China has recently begun to slowly reverse an earlier rise in air-pollution deaths, but these remain on the increase in India. The report estimates that India could avoid up to 1.2 million deaths in 2050 through instituting more aggressive measures rather than simply keeping current practices in place.

Further costs of pollution

The actual global total of 4.1 million might actually be an under-estimate. The report says its calculation does not include causes of death and disability for which evidence for a causal relationship with exposure to ambient PM2.5 is growing, such as the development of asthma in children, low birth weight and pre-term birth, type 2 diabetes and neurological disorders.

By no means does the State of Global Air 2018 report exhaust the literature of the toll of pollution. A United Nations study, Towards a Pollution-Free Planet (an advanced copy of which was posted in December 2017), cites the World Health Organization estimate that 12.6 million people died from environmental causes in 2012, or almost one-quarter of the world’s deaths that year. The cost of pollution is enormous, not only in lives shortened but in economic costs. The UN study says:

“In 2013, the global welfare costs associated with air pollution were estimated at some $5.11 trillion. The welfare costs from mortality relating to outdoor air pollution were estimated at $3 trillion; for indoor air pollution the figure was $2 trillion. … With regard to human health, the welfare cost of mortality from unsafe water is considerable in many developing countries. In 2004, losses stemming from inadequate water and sanitation services in developing countries were estimated at $260 billion per year – the equivalent of 10 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) for some poor countries.”

Although deaths from pollution are much higher in developing countries, the total is significant in the advanced capitalist countries. Earlier studies, for example, estimated 200,000 premature deaths in the United States annually and 29,000 per year in Britain.

Alberta oil sands (photo by Eryn Rickard)

What is often missed in these sorts of reports is the externalization of costs. Industrial activity by large corporations is responsible for a significant amount of deadly pollution — but those corporate entities don’t bear the costs of that pollution. Rather, the costs are externalized onto society, leaving the profits to be grabbed by a handful of executives and speculators while the rest of the world must absorb the costs.

These economic costs are not insignificant. One corporate report, not intended for the public’s eyes, estimates that external costs total US$7.3 trillion per year, with greenhouse-gas emissions accounting for more than one-third of that total. The report, “Natural Capital at Risk–The Top 100 Externalities of Business,” finds that coal-fired power in East Asia and North America alone account for $770 billion per year in damage from the impacts of greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution. These social costs exceeded the value of these sectors’ production value. Those two were among the top three sources of damages, along with South American cattle ranching, estimated to cost $350 billion.

It’s awful for us but great for profits

Getting closer to assessing responsibility, a separate United Nations report found that the world’s 3,000 biggest corporations cause $2.2 trillion of environmental damage in 2008. That total represents one-third of those corporations’ profits. This report appears never to have been released, although The Guardian was able to report briefly on its contents in February 2010. The true environmental cost, however, might have been yet higher, The Guardian reported:

“The biggest single impact on the $2.2tn estimate, accounting for more than half of the total, was emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change. Other major ‘costs’ were local air pollution such as particulates, and the damage caused by the over-use and pollution of freshwater.”

All the more absurd then, that fossil fuels are subsidized to enormous extents — $5.6 trillion per year. That, unfortunately, is not a misprint. That total comes from calculating not only the huge direct government subsidies and tax breaks provided to fossil-fuel companies, but the cost of environmental damages borne by the public rather than the corporations themselves. The subsidized cost of air pollution and global warming combined account for two-thirds of the $5.6 trillion total, according to the researchers who prepared the working paper, “How Large Are Global Energy Subsidies?.”

Although some of these reports, by implication, hint at the corporate responsibility for these massive costs, none dare to address the system that encourages such waste, instead offering boilerplate advice that humanity pollute less. The State of Global Air 2018 report discussed above, for example, concludes with a recommendation that “decision-makers” should be engaged in “identifying and taking action to control the major sources that contribute to them” and see to it that less coal is burned. The United Nations report Towards a Pollution-Free Planet, also discussed above, suggests a “framework for action” that is “founded on strong science to ensure that burdens and negative effects are not simply shifted from one area to another.”

There is nothing wrong with such suggestions, but if the source of the problem is never mentioned, how is a solution to be found? The massive environmental problems the Earth faces are not some deus ex machina or a natural variable such as ocean tides. They have concrete sources, rooted in the global economic system. Capitalism requires constant growth for which all incentives are for planned obsolescence, more growth, more industry and more pollution. That pollution in turn is mostly the result of activity by large corporations that are unaccountable and thus able to foist the costs of their activities onto society.

Once again, it is impossible to have infinite growth on a finite planet. The current global rate of consumption is 1.7 Earths for the provision of resources and the absorption of waste. It is impossible to indefinitely consume more than can be replenished, nor can rational and sustainable consumption and resource-use patterns be maintained in a system in which prices, taxation and incentives are so badly out of alignment with the environment. Our future ability to prosper can only be based on a steady-state economy that provides for need rather that private wealth accumulation, an impossibility under a system based on relentless competition.

Pharmaceuticals can be a license to print money

It’s no secret that the United States suffers from by far the world’s highest costs for health care. As the most market-oriented health care system among advanced capitalist countries, this is no surprise. Health care in the U.S. is designed to deliver corporate profits, not health care.

On that score, the U.S. system is quite successful. Pharmaceutical companies are at the head of the class in this regard, frequently justifying the spiraling costs of medications by citing large research and development costs that include the costs for drugs that don’t make it to market. There are many drugs that fail to survive testing and become a cost that will never be compensated, that is true. But are these failures really so high to justify the extreme costs of successful drugs?

It would seem not. Firmer proof of that lack of justification has been published by the JAMA Internal Medicine journal, which found that revenue for cancer drugs far outstrips spending on research and development. The article, “Research and Development Spending to Bring a Single Cancer Drug to Market and Revenues After Approval,” prepared by Drs. Vinay Prasad and Sham Mailankody, found that revenue from 10 drugs (one by each of 10 companies) exceed those companies’ total research and development costs by more than seven times.

The increase in pharmaceutical prices (blue) versus the general increase in commodities prices (red).

The total revenue hauled in from these 10 drugs did vary considerably. Two of them earned more than US$20 billion after approval. Both of these high performers cost less than $500 million in research and development costs. The revenue from each of the 10, however, exceeded costs, with widely varied margins. Still profitable: The median revenue of these 10 drugs was $1.7 billion, more than double the median development cost of $648 million, the JAMA Internal Medicine authors report.

The authors write that the median cost to develop a cancer drug represents “a figure significantly lower than prior estimates,” adding that their analysis “provides a transparent estimate of R&D spending on cancer drugs and has implications for the current debate on drug pricing.”

To obtain these figures, the authors analyzed U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissions filings for pharmaceutical companies with no drugs on the U.S. market that received approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a cancer drug from January 1, 2006, through December 31, 2015. Cumulative R&D spending was estimated from initiation of drug development activity to date of approval. Earnings were tracked from the time of approval to March 2017.

The sky’s the limit for pharmaceutical prices

Another way of looking at this would be to examine the increases in the cost of pharmaceuticals against other products. Here again the numbers stand out. Using data gathered by the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve Bank, the consumer price index for pharmaceutical preparation manufacturing for the first quarter of 2017 was 747.8, with January 1, 1980, as the benchmark of 100. In other words, the price of pharmaceuticals is seven and half times higher than they were at the start of 1980. (See graph above.)

How does that compare with inflation or other products? Quite well — for pharmaceutical companies. That more than sevenfold increase in drug prices is an increase nearly two and half times greater than inflation for the period, and nearly four times that of all commodities.

So, yes, unconscionable price-gouging is the cause here. By the industry as a whole, not simply individuals like “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, who might be an outlier in his brazenness but not in his profit-generation plan.

Although not the entire picture, this snapshot of corporate extortion plays a significant role in why the cost of the United States not having a universal health care system is more than $1.4 trillion per year.

Among 19 broadly defined “major” industrial sectors in the U.S., health technology is again expected to be found the most profitable for 2016, with a profit margin of 21.6 percent. Higher even than finance at 17 percent. When narrowing to more specific, narrowly defined industry categories, generic pharmaceuticals sit at the top with an expected 30 percent profit margin for 2016. Major pharmaceuticals rank fourth at 25.5 percent on a list in which health products and finance claim nine of the top 10 spots.

The sky’s the limit for pharmaceutical profits

That’s a repeat of 2015, when health technology had the highest profit margin of 19 broadly defined industrial sectors, at 20.9 percent, topping even finance, the second highest. When a separate study broke down profit margins by more specific industry categories, health care-related industries comprised three of the six most profitable.

Nothing new there, either. A BBC report found that pharmaceuticals and banks tied for the highest average profit margin in 2013, with five pharmaceutical companies enjoying a profit margin of 20 percent or more — Pfizer, Hoffmann-La Roche, AbbVie, GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly. The world’s 10 largest pharmaceutical corporations racked up a composite US$90 billion in profits for 2013, according to the BBC analysis. As to their expenses, these 10 firms spent far more on sales and marketing than they did on research and development.

If those facts and figures aren’t enough, here’s another way of looking at excessive profits — a 2015 study found that, of the 10 corporations that have the highest revenue per employee among the world’s biggest corporations, three are health care companies. Two of the three, Amerisourcebergen and McKesson, both distribute pharmaceuticals, and the other, Express Scrips, administers prescription drug benefits for tens of millions of health-plan members. Each of these primarily operates in the United States, the only advanced-capitalist country without universal health coverage.

The extra layers represented by those three companies demonstrate that there are ample opportunities for corporate profiteering that contribute to extraordinarily high health care costs in the U.S., beyond drug manufacturing and insurance.

And because corporations have the ear of politicians and other government officials, it’s no surprise that one of the primary ongoing goals of the U.S. government for so-called “free trade” agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is to impose rules that would weaken the national health care systems of other countries. This was done in TPP negotiations at the direct behest of U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies, incensed that countries like New Zealand make thousands of medicines, medical devices and related products available at subsidized costs.

By far the most expensive system while delivering among the worst outcomes and leaving tens of millions uninsured, where tens of thousands die from lack of health care annually. That is the high cost of private profit in health care. Or, to put it more bluntly, allowing the “market” to decide health outcomes instead of health care professionals.

Life under capitalism: Early deaths a ‘silver lining’ for corporations

Participating in Monday evening’s demonstration at the Trump Tower in Manhattan, I couldn’t help thinking of the connections between a Bloomberg article proclaiming that people dying earlier contains a “silver lining” because corporations will save pension costs and the ongoing savagery of the Trump administration.

Not simply the naked symbiosis between the Trump administration and white supremacists, neo-Nazis and assorted far-right cranks — all too sadly on display in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend — but the alliance of corporate titans, Republican Party leaders and President Trump himself. The rush by even conservative congressional Republicans to condemn the tweeter-in-chief for his refusal to condemn his so-called “alt-right” allies for two days should not distract us from the Trump administration’s all-out assault on regulations, civil rights laws, health care and the environment. (Let’s please retire the useless term “alt-right” and call them what they are: white supremacists, fascists and fascist wannabes.)

The health care system of the United States is already by far the world’s most expensive while delivering among the worst results. So of course the solution to this, in Republican eyes, is to make it worse. That effort has, so far, failed, thanks to massive grassroots activism. But plenty else is being rammed through under the radar through executive decrees — which is why we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for Congress to impeach President Trump. He’s much too useful to Republicans and corporate executives. Should that change, of course, all bets are off, but short a Democratic tidal wave in 2018 Republican members of Congress turning on the president anytime soon isn’t likely.

On the march against Trump in New York City August 14 (photo by Mark Apollo/Hashtag Occupy Media)

So what does this have to do with an article published by Bloomberg? The headline on this particular article says it all: “Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions,” complete with a subhead declaring “lower pension costs” a “silver lining.” As not only a proud member of the corporate media, but one specializing in delivering news to financiers and industrialists, extolling a benefit to corporate bottom lines and ignoring the, ahem, human cost of said benefit is only to be expected. The article is not at all atypical of the business press, even if this one is a little more obvious than usual.

But, as a friend who is an activist with a Marxist party but who once ran a chemical industry consultancy by day (if only his clients knew his politics!) once taught me, the business section is where they hide the news. So the point here isn’t the attitude of Bloomberg toward working people (no more hostile and sometimes less so than your average business publication) but the attitude of corporate titans toward employees. The article states:

“In 2015, the American death rate—the age-adjusted share of Americans dying—rose slightly for the first time since 1999. And over the last two years, at least 12 large companies, from Verizon to General Motors, have said recent slips in mortality improvement have led them to reduce their estimates for how much they could owe retirees by upward of a combined $9.7 billion, according to a Bloomberg analysis of company filings.”

Austerity costs human lives

Gains in U.S. death rates had been improving until 2009, Bloomberg reports, citing a Society of Actuaries analysis, but those rates then flattened before reversing in 2015. This isn’t necessarily unique to the U.S. — the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the United Kingdom last month reported that U.S., Canadian and British seniors have ceased seeing longevity improvements, suggesting the impact of austerity since the 2008 economic collapse is a primary culprit. The Actuaries report said:

“The rising mortality rates among US working age demonstrates that the historical fall in mortality rates cannot be taken for granted. The pace of life expectancy gains of older ages has slowed down, with some age groups showing signs of increasing death rates. These signs should be taken as warnings that worsened health care, behaviour and environment can reverse decades of success in health and longevity. Actuaries need to have a better understanding of the drivers of longevity to consider how to incorporate recent experience into forecasts of future longevity.”

As welcome as a new quantification of the toll of austerity is, such a notion is far from new, nor is it simply the latest variant of capitalism, neoliberalism, that is at work here. The increased deprivation of capitalism caused a half-million U.S. deaths from 1999 to 2015. Specifically, nearly half a million excess deaths have occurred since 1999 among middle-aged White non-Hispanic United Statesians, according to a paper published in 2015 by two Princeton University researchers, Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

A shuttered hospital (photo by Jim Henderson)

From 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate for U.S. Whites aged 45 to 54 fell by 2 percent per year on average, matching the average rate of decline in five comparison countries (Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany). But although, from 1999, other industrial countries continued to see a decline in mortality rates for the middle-aged, the U.S. White non-Hispanic mortality rose by half a percent a year, an increase that is unique, Drs. Case and Deaton reported. African-American death rates have not similarly risen although remain considerably higher than those for Whites.

The authors do not speculate on the reason for White deaths to increase in contrast to the trend of minority groups, but we might reasonably conclude that People of Color have had deprivation and economic difficulty imposed on them in greater numbers and more intensely, and thus are experiencing less of a change in historic circumstances than are Whites. The economic downturn that the world has lived through since 2008 certainly hasn’t bypassed People of Color — far from it — but the decline has not spared Whites, a group not as hardened to lower living standards thanks to their privileges.

Privatization costs human lives

Privatization and intensified reliance on “the market” has already been demonstrated to worsen health outcomes. A 2009 study published by The Lancet concluded that the mass privatization in the former Soviet bloc resulted in one million deaths. Mass privatization caused the average number of deaths to increase by 13 percent from the 1992 onset of shock therapy. An Oxford University press release summarized these findings:

“David Stuckler, from Oxford’s Department of Sociology, said: ‘Our study helps explain the striking differences in mortality in the post-communist world. Countries which pursued rapid privatisation, or ‘shock therapy’, had much greater rises in deaths than countries which followed a more gradual path. Not only did rapid privatisation lead to mass unemployment but also wiped out the social safety nets, which were critical for helping people survive during this turbulent period.’ ”

During Soviet times, we were assured by Western commentators that high levels of alcoholism were a sign of despair in Russia, yet alcohol per-capita consumption rates in 2007 were three times that of 1990.

When a health care system is designed to deliver corporate profits rather than health care — and this is precisely what privatized health systems do — such are the results. Throwing more than 20 million people off the roles of health insurance, as all Republican Party plans would have done, could only have exacerbated poor health outcomes. But doing so is consistent with Republican plans to shred what remains of the U.S. social safety net, sure to lead to further early deaths. As the more reliable instruments of the will of corporate plutocrats (Democrats having to sometimes make concessions to their voting base), Republicans see Donald Trump in the White House as a gift.

The purported disapproval enunciated by the likes of Senator Jeff Flake are a sad joke — the Arizona Republican has reliably voted for all Trump appointees and legislation. What really “embarrasses” members of Congress are the president’s vulgarity and ham-fisted obviousness. He simply refuses to use code words that way that ordinary Republicans have learned to do. Stop being so obvious! But in reality President Trump is the logical product of 37 years of Republican pandering — half a century if we go back to Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy.”

We can certainly argue over what constitutes fascism, and whether President Trump is properly called a fascist or that he is simply a Republican who is more willing to show the fist behind capitalist rule albeit someone who carries the seeds for a potential fascist movement. The latter is more than scary enough. But as the casual talk of a “silver lining” for shortened life spans illustrates, human life is expendable in the pursuit of profits under capitalism. And as long as the Trump administration is useful to this pursuit, occasional protests from corporate executives will remain no more than hollow gestures.

The cost of not having single payer: $1.4 trillion per year

You could not devise a worse health care system than that of the United States if you tried. By far the most expensive, with among the worst results.

Perhaps saying “among” the worst results is being too kind. That is an accurate statement if we are simply measuring metrics such as mortality rates and other medical outcomes. But if we consider that tens of millions of United Statesians go without health insurance while none do in any advanced capitalist country (or most any other) — and that tens of thousands annually die because of that lack — then we must reasonably assess the U.S. health care system as the worst.

This is the high cost of private profit in health care. How much? The United States spends more than $1.4 trillion per year than it would otherwise if it had a single-payer system. Such is what happens when a service is left in the hands of the private sector, and allowed to be bent toward profit rather than human need.

To calculate that figure, I took the average per capita health care spending of the three largest EU countries — France, Germany and the United Kingdom — and the neighbor of the U.S., Canada, and compared that average to U.S. per capita spending. The composite average for Britain, Canada, France and Germany for the years 2011 to 2016 is $4,392 per capita per year, converted to U.S. dollars adjusted to create purchasing power parity as reported by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Per capital health care spending in the U.S. for 2011 to 2016 averaged $8,924 — more than twice as much! Taking that difference and multiplying by 317 million, the average U.S. population for the five-year period, and the total annual excess comes to $1.44 trillion.

That excess has been steadily increasing. Doing these same calculations for earlier periods found that for the period of 2001 to 2010, the annual average of excess spending was $1.15 trillion. The annual average for the period of 1990 to 2000 was $685 billion.

For 2016, the OECD reports that only nine of the 35 countries surveyed spent more than half of what the U.S. spent on health care, and the second highest spender, Switzerland, spent $2,000 less per capita than did the United States.

Can this astounding amount of spending be accounted for by more health care? Nope. The average length of a hospital stay in U.S. in 2014 was 5.5 days, seventh shortest of 35 countries surveyed by the OECD. The average hospital stay in each of the four core comparison countries (Britain, Canada, France and Germany) was longer — a composite average of 7.6 days.

Paying more for less

So it really comes down to inferior results. The U.S. does well in combating cancer, but poorly in almost every other category of health care measurement. And people in the U.S. pay dearly for the privilege of health care, if they are lucky enough to have access to it. The cost of health insurance continues to rise, and the amount a patient must pay out of pocket before insurance kicks in (the “deductible” in U.S. lingo) is also steadily rising as employers push more of the cost of health insurance on to their employees.

Phillip Longman, discussing this issue for Popular Resistance, wrote:

“Indeed, the inflating cost of health care is the overwhelming reason why most Americans haven’t received a raise in years, and why employers increasingly make use of contract workers rather than taking on new employees that would receive benefits. This year, the total annual cost of health care for a typical family of four covered by a typical employer-sponsored plan surpassed $25,000, according to the actuarial research firm Milliman. Such a family will typically pay more than $11,000 of this cost directly out of its own pockets, through payroll deductions, copayments, and deductibles. They will also pay much more indirectly in foregone wages and other forms of compensation, and quite possibly more yet in the form of unemployment, as employers seek to escape their share of the mounting cost of providing health care for their employees.”

And because health care is dependent on maintaining a full-time job, bosses have more leverage over their employees, who will lose their insurance should they quit their job. Women with lower-paying work or staying at home to raise a family are also put at greater risk as health insurance for themselves and children are tied to their husband’s job, making it more difficult to leave a bad marriage. This dynamic could also apply to any one person in a non-traditional family or within a gay or lesbian household.

Thus it comes as little surprise that the United States is one of two countries in the world that do not provide paid maternity leave for women workers. Hope to get it at work? Good luck with that — only 9 percent of companies offered fully paid maternity-leave benefits to workers in 2014, down from 16 percent in 2008. By contrast, at least two-thirds of countries have mandatory maternity pay for at least 14 weeks, according to an International Labour Organization report.

You might not have it so good, but that is the price to be paid for high profits. An analysis by Forbes magazine found that health technology had the highest profit margin of any of 19 broadly defined industrial sectors, at 20.9 percent, topping even finance, the second highest. Three of the biggest companies — Pfizer, Merck & Co. and Johnson & Johnson — had profit margins of 25 percent or higher. When a separate study broke down profit margins by smaller, more specific industry categories, health care-related industries were three of the six most profitable. Generic pharmaceuticals topped the list, with a margin of 30 percent. Major pharmaceuticals and biotechnology were also among the top six.

Keeping people sick as a business model

The piles of money vacuumed into pharmaceutical pockets do not sit entirely idle. Big Pharma lavishes vast sums on doctors, state Medicaid officials and regulators to promote their products. Studies have shown that doctors who have received payments from pharmaceutical companies are more likely to prescribe those companies’ medications. But pharmaceutical companies go far beyond wining and dining doctors, or paying them speaking fees. They organize “patient advocacy” groups that pretend to be grassroots organizations. An investigative health reporter, Martha Rosenberg, writes that these front groups fly in “patients” to hearings to ask for expensive drugs to be fast-tracked for approval.

Expensive drugs that have to be taken for years, or even a lifetime, create a business model that “actually wants people sick,” Ms. Rosenberg writes. She says:

“ ‘Mental illness’ is a category deliberately ‘grown’ by Pharma with aggressive and unethical million-dollar campaigns. These campaigns, often unbranded to look like a public service, convince people with real life challenges they are ‘depressed’ or ‘bipolar’ and that their children have ADHD. Despite the Pharma marketing, the New England Journal of Medicine recently reported that the rate of severe mental illness among children and adolescents has actually dropped dramatically in the past generation.”

All this adds up to a 2011 study in the journal Health Policy that ranked the U.S. last in preventing early deaths. Attributing this result to “the lack of universal coverage and high costs of care,” the Commonwealth Fund noted:

“The United States placed last among 16 high-income, industrialized nations when it comes to deaths that could potentially have been prevented by timely access to effective health care. … [O]ther nations lowered their preventable death rates an average of 31 percent between 1997–98 and 2006–07, while the U.S. rate declined by only 20 percent, from 120 to 96 per 100,000. At the end of the decade, the preventable mortality rate in the U.S. was almost twice that in France, which had the lowest rate—55 per 100,000.”

An OECD report found that life expectancy in the U.S. is two years less than the average of OECD countries, a gap that is growing. That statistic isn’t improving at either end of life, as U.S. infant mortality rates are considerably higher than in peer countries. A report prepared by the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation explicated this poor performance:

“The U.S. has been slower to improve its infant mortality rate than comparable countries, which we define as countries whose gross domestic products (GDP) and per capita GDP were above average in at least one of the past 10 years. While the infant mortality rate in the U.S. improved by about 13 percent from 2000-2013, the comparable country average improved about 26 percent, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

U.S. infant mortality rates appear to be about 42 percent higher than the comparable country average. Looking into specific measures of infant mortality, it also appears that the U.S. has about 66 percent more neonatal deaths (deaths which occur less than 28 days after birth) than the comparable country average. From 2000 to 2013, neonatal deaths decreased by 13 percent in the U.S. and by 23 percent in comparable OECD countries.”

What’s good for big business is good for big business

With such dismal results, why does such a furious campaign continue to insist on privatized health care? Ideology, of course. Ideology no different than that propagated to insist that government is always bad and private enterprise always better. But government doesn’t have to earn a profit; private enterprise expects to and will pack its bags if it doesn’t. Just as privatization invariably results in higher costs and often poorer quality than when the service was provided by a government agency as a public good, health care is provided far more efficiently when in public hands.

Noting that “high administrative costs and lower quality have also characterized for-profit HMOs” (health maintenance organizations funded by insurance premiums that supervise health care), a Journal of the Canadian Medical Association article provides the following figures for the percentage of revenue that is diverted to overhead:

• For-profit HMOs: 19 percent
• Non-profit plans: 13 percent
• U.S. Medicare program: 3 percent
• Canadian Medicare: 1 percent

Ideology drives the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress to have no problem with adding more than 20 million people to the ranks of the uninsured by attempting to reverse the weak-tea, incremental improvement of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. This is not different from Donald Trump’s chimeric $1 trillion infrastructure program, which is a scam that commits his administration to zero dollars while showering corporations with massive subsidies that would supposedly magically induce private infrastructure investment.

That extra $1.4 trillion paid for health care in the United States is the result of a system designed to deliver corporate profits rather than health care. It’s the “magic of the market” at work. It just isn’t magic for you. In a concise explanation on the Real-World Economics Review Blog, Peter Radford explains:

“Markets, you see, are wonderlands that always and inevitably lead to efficient outcomes. And it is no good any starry eyed liberal tinkering with those outcomes. They are magically correct. By correct we mean that they cannot be improved upon. Economists have this vice like attachment to certain core beliefs. One of those is that, if left unfettered, markets will zero in on an allocation of stuff that can never be improved, especially by meddlesome governments.

The way you get to this particular promised land is by letting the great forces of supply and demand batter away at individual preferences and budgets until all the trading and so on ends with no one able to make another trade without such a trade making someone else worse off. It sounds wonderful. Now to make this all work we have to believe in magic. We have to suspend our intelligence and imagine a world where everyone knows exactly what everyone else is doing, where no one cheats, where everyone is marvelously rational, where they don’t suddenly change their minds, where they can calculate at the speed of light, absorb vast amounts of data, and always — yes always — arrive at precisely that combination of stuff they wanted. Within the constraints of their budget of course.”

Sarcastic, yes, but that is a summation of what passes for economic orthodoxy nowadays. Markets always magically result in fair and just results for all, and any actions by government automatically damage this miraculous machine. And therefore health care should be left in the hands of corporations with as little regulation as possible. And therefore the U.S. is a country in which 22,000 people die and 700,000 go bankrupt per year as a result of inadequate, or no, health insurance in the United States. That’s one of the prices of capitalism.

The toll of pollution: How many lives vs. how much profit?

Frequently lost in the arguments over financial costs and benefits when it comes to pollution is the cost to human health. Not only illness and respiratory problems but premature death. To put it bluntly: How many human lives should we exchange for corporate profit?

Two new studies by the World Health Organization should force us to confront these issues head on. This is no small matter — the two WHO studies estimate that polluted environments cause 1.7 million children age five or younger to die per year.

Spent shale from a Shale oil extraction process (photo by U.S. Argonne National Laboratory)

Indoor and outdoor air pollution, second-hand smoke, unsafe water, lack of sanitation, and inadequate hygiene all contribute to these 1.7 million annual deaths, accounting for more than one-quarter of all deaths of children age five or younger globally. A summary notes:

“[W]hen infants and pre-schoolers are exposed to indoor and outdoor air pollution and second-hand smoke they have an increased risk of pneumonia in childhood, and a lifelong increased risk of chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma. Exposure to air pollution may also increase their lifelong risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer.”

One of the two reports, Don’t pollute my future! The impact of the environment on children’s health, notes that most of humanity lives in environmentally stressed areas:

“92% of the global population, including billions of children, live in areas with ambient air pollution levels that exceed WHO limits. Over three billion people are exposed to household air pollution from the use of solid fuels. Air pollution causes approximately 600,000 deaths in children under five years annually and increases the risk for respiratory infections, asthma, adverse neonatal conditions and congenital anomalies. Air pollution accounts for over 50% of the overall disease burden of pneumonia which is among the leading causes of global child mortality. Growing evidence suggests that air pollution adversely affects cognitive development in children and early exposures might induce development of chronic disease in adulthood.” [page 3]

These types of calculations on health and mortality are absent from debates on environmental regulations. And not only is the human toll missing from cost/benefit analyses, but this pollution is actually subsidized.

Trump administration’s assault on the environment

These World Health Organization reports were published in the same month that the Trump administration mounted a full-scale assault on the U.S. environment. Not only has the Trump administration proposed draconian cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and signaled its intention to rescind air-pollution rules for motor vehicles scheduled to come into force between 2022 and 2025, it has issued an executive order requiring a “review [of] existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources and appropriately suspend, revise, or rescind those that unduly burden the development of domestic energy resources.”

One of the targets of this order is the Clean Power Plan, which requires a 32 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants by 2030, compared to 2005 emission rates. The standard, implemented by the Obama administration, was already seen as inadequate. The increased danger raised by President Donald Trump’s order was succinctly summed up by this headline on a Weather Underground article written by Jeff Masters: “Trump’s Executive Order Threatens to Wreck Earth as a Livable Planet for Humans.”

Threats don’t get much graver than that, do they?

Given the gigantic size of the United States economy and the pollution thrown into the atmosphere, this is of serious concern to the entire world. The World Resources Institute estimates that the U.S. accounts for almost 15 percent of Earth’s current greenhouse-gas emissions, second only to China’s 20 percent. Russia and the U.S. emit more than twice the global average on a per capita basis, as does Canada, which, due to its heavy reliance on fossil fuel extraction, has the world’s largest per-person greenhouse-gas footprint.

When greenhouse-gas emissions are calculated on a cumulative basis, then the responsibility of the global North comes into sharper focus: The United States has accounted for 27 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted since 1850, and the countries of the European Union contributed another 25 percent.

Carbon dioxide is the biggest single contributor to global warming — which is why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had sought to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant — but methane is also a significant contributor. The EPA in 2016 issued an order requiring that owners and operators of oil and gas facilities provide data needed to help it determine how to best reduce methane and other harmful emissions. But the Trump administration has withdrawn the order to provide data.

Not everything can be reversed at the stroke a pen, however. The larger attack on the Clean Power Plan will likely take years to carry out, Dr. Masters wrote:

“The Clean Power Plan will be difficult to undo quickly. The plan was finalized by EPA in 2015, and is currently being reviewed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Under the new executive order, the Department of Justice will ask the court to suspend the case until the EPA can review and write a new version of the rule. (Before that happens, the court may still rule on the Plan as written, which will influence how the EPA can rewrite the rule.) Once the case is removed from the court, the EPA will have to legally withdraw the existing rule and propose a new rule to take its place, a process that could take years, as the new rule will have to be justified in court, and would likely be challenged in court by environmental groups.”

Hundreds of thousands of lives in the balance

Nonetheless, a fightback is essential. Lives are literally at stake, in large numbers, if regulations safeguarding air quality are reversed. The EPA estimates that 160,000 premature deaths were prevented in 2010 by the Clean Air Act, and estimates that 230,000 lives will be saved and 120,000 emergency-room visits saved in 2020 if the act is left intact. The EPA said the benefits of the act “exceeds costs by a factor of more than 30 to one.” This study, at least for the moment, hasn’t been expunged from the Internet by the Trump administration.

A separate study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) estimates that air pollution causes 200,000 early deaths each year in the United States alone. The two biggest contributors to that death toll, the MIT report found, are emissions from road transportation and power generation, which together account for just more than half the total. One of the study’s authors, MIT professor Steven Barrett, said a person who dies from an air pollution-related cause typically dies about a decade earlier than he or she otherwise might have.

The Canadian government estimates that a 10 percent reduction in particulate-matter and ozone levels would result in a net social welfare benefit for Canadians of more than $4 billion. A separate study estimates that the cost to Canadian health care from air pollution will total $250 billion by 2031 without significant reductions.

Grangemouth oil refinery at sunset (photo by Steve Garvie, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland)

This exercise can be repeated around the world. A 2015 World Health Organization study estimates that indoor and outdoor air pollution costs European economies as much as €1.2 trillion annually in deaths and diseases. This includes £54 billion and 29,000 deaths per year in Britain. For Australia, the cost from air pollution was estimated at $5.8 billion in 2010, a doubling in only five years.

Globally, air pollution could lead to nine million premature deaths and US$2.6 trillion in economic damage from the costs of sick days, medical bills and reduced agricultural output by 2060, according to an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development study.

Only a drastic reduction in emissions can reverse these costs in human health and the mounting dangers of global warming.

We’ll have to go well beyond current plans

Cap-and-trade schemes, promoted by North American liberals and European social democrats, simply don’t work. The European Union system, for example, issued so many free certificates that the price of pollution is a small fraction of the target price, and attempts by environmentalists to reduce the number of certifications are consistently rebuffed. Moreover, cap-and-trade plans often allow “offsets,” whereby companies can buy emission credits from outside the program to “offset” emissions above the allowable level, allowing polluters to substitute unverifiable reductions elsewhere for real reductions locally.

Nor are renewable energy sources, as vital as they are to any rational future, a substitute for reducing energy usage. Renewable energy is not necessarily clean nor without contributions to global warming. Wind power and biomass, for example, have their own problems. The primary source of bioenergy is wood, which portends an increase in logging, counter to winning a struggle against global warming. Denmark and Britain are among the biggest users of biomass but must import wood to sustain that. The turbines used to produce electricity from wind increasingly are built with the “rare earth” element neodymium, which requires a highly toxic process to produce. Production of rare earths are environmentally destructive; increasing their extraction means more pollution and toxic waste.

The argument here certainly isn’t that a switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy as quickly as practical isn’t necessary; of course such a switch needs to be made. But if reversing pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions is the goal, then renewables are at most a partial measure.

Haze from forest fires in St. Mary Valley, Glacier National Park in August 2015, during the hottest and driest summer in Pacific Northwest history. (photo by Pete Dolack)

The Paris Climate Summit ended with a surprise decision by the world’s governments to limit the rise of the global average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial revolution average instead of the previously intended limit of 2 degrees. The difficulty here, however, is that even if every national goal were met, the Earth’s temperature would rise 2.2 to 3.4 degrees by 2100 with more to come, and the Paris summit contains no mechanism to enforce these goals.

Adding to the difficulty of reducing fossil fuel usage sufficiently to meet the Paris summit’s goals (and which would also reduce the damage to human health) is the astounding total of subsidies for them. A 2015 study that attempted to quantify the size of these subsidies on a global basis estimated them at US$5.6 trillion! That includes not only direct government subsidies through tax breaks and other programs, but damage to the environment — these are not inconsequential as the costs of air pollution and global warming transferred to society account for nearly two-thirds of that total.

“Fracking” (hydraulic fracturing) of rock to blast out natural gas alone accounts for billions of dollars of damages through contaminated water, health problems from the chemicals used in the process, air pollution, methane that contributes to global warming, disruption to agriculture and damage to roads from trucks. That the cost of those is transferred to society is another mammoth subsidy to the energy industry.

Overshooting Earth’s carrying capacity

The most recent estimate of planetary consumption is that humanity is using the equivalent of 1.6 Earths per year. By 2030, at present rates of increase, we’ll be consuming two Earths — that is, twice the capacity of our planet to sustain.

Then there is the matter of global warming. Two scientific studies issued in 2015 suggest that so much carbon dioxide already has been thrown in the air that humanity may have already committed itself to a six-meter rise in sea level. A separate 2015 study, prepared by 18 scientists, found that the Earth is crossing several “planetary boundaries” that together will render the planet much less hospitable.

What is the price of making Earth uninhabitable? No amount of strip-mining the Moon or the asteroid belt will reverse mass die-offs on Earth.

Illusions that “green capitalism” will save us really must be abandoned. Beyond that capitalism requires constant growth (infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet) and discourages corporate responsibility because enterprises can offload their responsibilities onto society, every incentive is for more production. Adding to that, capitalist economics discounts the future so much that future life is seen as nearly worthless. Thus, in this type of accounting, there is no cost for future pollution.

Authors Richard York, Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster put this plainly in a thoughtful May 2009 article in Monthly Review. They wrote:

“Where [orthodox economists] primarily differ is not on their views of the science behind climate change but on their value assumptions about the propriety of shifting burdens to future generations. This lays bare the ideology embedded in orthodox neoclassical economics, a field which regularly presents itself as using objective, even naturalistic, methods for modeling the economy. However, past all of the equations and technical jargon, the dominant economic paradigm is built on a value system that prizes capital accumulation in the short-term, while de-valuing everything else in the present and everything altogether in the future.”

As for the present day, capitalist enterprises aren’t going to guarantee jobs to workers displaced from energy-extraction industries, and if those workers don’t have any viable alternatives, it can’t be expected they will do anything other than join their bosses in fighting for their industry. Thus any rational plan to drastically shrink fossil fuel extraction has to be able to provide alternative jobs. Nor do the costs in human lives discussed above factor into capitalist economic calculations.

The drastic changes that are necessary to reverse the human and environmental tolls of pollution will come with a hefty price tag. But the cost of continuing business as usual is much higher — a price our descendants will pay if we don’t move to an economic system that values life rather than only profits.