#profit system

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Climate change breeds disease — public health cuts help it spread – Struggle – La Lucha

The MV Hondius at the Port of Granadilla in the Canary Islands on May 10, during the international hantavirus outbreak linked to the ship. T

The Andes strain is the only known hantavirus that spreads between people. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued no quarantine order for exposed passengers or contacts. Agency incident manager David Fitter told reporters on May 14 that adherence to isolation “would be hard to guarantee” and confirmed that no state or federal quarantine orders had been drawn.

This is not administrative caution. It is class policy — the doctrine that individuals bear the risk so business, travel, trade and employers can keep moving. During a public health emergency, that means neighbors, coworkers, airport workers, health care workers and whole communities are exposed while the state avoids imposing controls that interfere with profit and commerce.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Why is U.S. capitalism so decayed?

Millions of people in Texas lost their heat, lights and water two months ago during a winter storm. The state’s profit-hungry utilities didn’t want to spend money winterizing natural gas pumps and other equipment.

By Stephen Millies

President Biden and Vice President Harris have proposed a $2.25 trillion “American Jobs Program” to fix some of these infrastructure problems. That sounds like a lot of money, but the funds will be spent over eight or even ten years. 

That’s about $280 billion a year, or a little more than a third of the Pentagon’s official budget.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Capitalism stands in the way of reversing climate crisis

By Scott Scheffer

A lot of today’s climatologists may at this point feel like Superman’s father and Krypton’s leading scientist, Jor-El, who, in the comic book world, tried to warn the Council of Elders that planetary doom was nigh unless they acted.

No serious scientists believe that we will share the fate of Krypton — the comic book planet exploded — but mitigating and reversing the crisis will have to be done independently of capitalist corporations and their government. Unless that is done, global warming will bring more widespread death and destruction. The poorest countries and populations will bear the brunt of it.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Karl Marx: Capitalism produces unemployment

In Capital, Karl Marx wrote about the laws of capitalism and the ruthless capitalist competition for greater profits.

By Gary Wilson

Technology itself does not lead to unemployment. Instead, as Marx indicates, it is the use of technology under capitalism, implemented in an anarchic and unplanned way for the sole purpose of increasing profit, that leads to mass unemployment and places pressure on those still working to accept lower wages, as competition for the remaining jobs increases.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

The boom isn’t happening: Jobs report shows unemployment worsening

No matter how you look at it, the Labor Department’s April jobs report is miserable — unless you’re on Wall Street.

 By Gary Wilson

There were only 266,000 new jobs available in April across the whole United States, the government reported May 7, not the million or so that capitalist cheerleaders had forecast. The Labor Department’s official unemployment rate is now 6.1%. The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity says the true rate in March was 24.7%.

Joblessness remains rampant. The Labor Department says that the number of people working is still down 8.2 million from what it was before the pandemic in February 2020. Right now more than 16 million workers are collecting jobless aid — a number that’s far higher than the roughly 2 million a year ago, before the pandemic.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

The West is practicing vaccine apartheid at a global level

For rich countries, the billions of dollars of vaccine market for Big Pharma far outweigh the benefits of saving millions of lives.

By Prabir Purkayastha

How much of the vaccines manufactured in the rich countries have gone to the rest of the world? The brutal answer is that the rich countries have kept their supplies almost entirely to themselves. Moderna’s vaccine production has mostly been used to inoculate the population in the United States besides supplying it to some countries in Europe and to Canada. Pfizer has supplied its vaccines to the United States from its U.S. facilities, and to Europe and the UK from its European plants. It has also supplied vaccines to Israel and the Gulf monarchies and (begrudgingly) parts of Latin America, but that makes up a small fraction of its total production.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Americans’ Medical Debts Are Bigger Than Was Known, Totaling $140 Billion

A new study finds that health care has become the country’s largest source of debt in collections. Those debts are largest where Medicaid wasn’t expanded.

Americans owe nearly twice as much medical debt as was previously known, and the amount owed has become increasingly concentrated in states that do not participate in the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion program.

New research published Tuesday in JAMA finds that collection agencies held $140 billion in unpaid medical bills last year. An earlier study, examining debts in 2016, estimated that Americans held $81 billion in medical debt.

This new paper took a more complete look at which patients have outstanding medical debts, including individuals who do not have credit cards or bank accounts. Using 10 percent of all credit reports from the credit rating agency TransUnion, the paper finds that about 18 percent of Americans hold medical debt that is in collections.

The researchers found that, between 2009 and 2020, unpaid medical bills became the largest source of debt that Americans owe collections agencies. Overall debt, both from medical bills and other sources, declined during that period as the economy recovered from the Great Recession.