4. The destruction of health systems and of the ecosystem. The commodification of the world (Completed)
The outbreak of a violent pandemic, like Covid-19, has seemed to suddenly fall from the sky, like an umpteenth plague of Egypt. The U.S. economy seemed to be thriving, and unemployment was at a low ebb. Virtually everyone (except the homeless or the countless precarious workers) was going from home to work every day, hoping that everything would go well in the best possible of all capitalist worlds.
Contents:
a) New pandemics taking advantage of a capitalist health system adrift (page 2)
b) The agriculture of death: Toxic nutrition, health scourges of “obese capital” (page 3)
c) Commodification, the permanent war of capital against nature (page 4)
Newly added sections: b) and c)
Last updated: December 16, 2020.
Today nearly half of the world’s population is “confined” – including in deprived areas where the “cure” will be worse than the disease (there are 500 million new ultra-poor expected!). This unprecedented event in human history is a surprise only for the big shots of denial (the Captain-Americas of the Trump and Bolsonaro type, but there are so many others). It is certainly not [a surprise] for all the national security agencies represented in the European Commission, and first and foremost for the CIA. In 2009, both of them predicted on the horizon of 2025 a programmed disaster: “a pandemic with devastating effects” for the former; an apocalyptic pandemic for the latter, which seems to be betting on the appearance of a plague of a new kind (“a gift from Heaven” in Trumpian language) to reduce the supernumerary population (for US capital) of the “Third World”, developed or not:
“In the worst case scenario, tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans on U.S. soil would fall ill and deaths would number in the tens of millions. Outside the United States, the degradation of basic infrastructure and global economic losses would have the following effects: about one-third of the world’s population would fall ill and hundreds of millions would die.”(1)
Notes:
1 Le monde en 2025, Commission européenne, Bruxelles, 2009; Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, Nov. 2008, US Government Printing, Nov. 2008, p. 75.
An internationalist Articles Selection & Review 