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The Pandemic Reveals The Real Disease Of Our Societies
This morning I saw this map on the Washington Post homepage.
Reported cases per 100,000 residents by county since last week
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I immediately remembered that I had earlier seen a map with a similar pattern.
It was in my April 2 Moon of Alabama post. Here is the section as posted three months ago:
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Charles M. Blow @CharlesMBlow – 11:51 UTC · Apr 2, 2020
My god, I see a disaster brewing
#COVID19Pandemic #RacialTimeBomb
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It is quite obvious from the maps that areas where more people of color live are hit much harder by Covid-19 than other areas.
A British study published in Nature which used health care data of 17 million people pseudonymously linked to some 11,000 Covid-19 deaths found that people of color in Britain are much more likely to die of Covid-19:
Compared with people with white ethnicity, Black and South Asian people were at higher risk even after adjustment for other factors (HR 1.48, 1.30–1.69 and 1.44, 1.32–1.58, respectively).
A 'Hazard Ratio' (HR) of 1.48 means that these people were 48% more likely to die of the disease than the average person.
A similar observation has been made in U.S. meat processing plants:
More than 16,200 U.S. meat plant workers had tested positive for Covid-19 by the end of May and 86 had died, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report Tuesday. [..] Of the cases that disclosed race and ethnicity, 87% involved minority workers — with employees identified as Hispanic accounting for 56% of infections despite making up less than a third of the overall workforce.
There is no biological difference between various ethnicities with regards to Covid-19. There is no scientific theory that attributes this to any other causes than social issues – i.e. low income, bad housing and lack of access to care.
This is an issue of class, not of identity. Black and Hispanic people happen to be in the lowest one. Unfortunately neither the British nor the CDC study have parameters that cover income or other social indicators. I am sure that they would otherwise show that deprived white people have the same chance to die of Covid-19 as deprived non-white people living in similar circumstances.
Yes, there is a racial wage gap in the United States. But the real gap is between productivity growth and wage growth. Throughout the last decades neither black nor white workers have seen substantial wage raises. This is a class issue.
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This gap between increased productivity and wage gain at the bottom did not exist until the late 1970s when neo-liberal ideologues under Reagan and Thatcher introduced economic policies that favored the top 1%:
From 1979 to 2018, net productivity rose 69.6 percent, while the hourly pay of typical workers essentially stagnated—increasing only 11.6 percent over 39 years (after adjusting for inflation). This means that although Americans are working more productively than ever, the fruits of their labors have primarily accrued to those at the top and to corporate profits, especially in recent years.
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Identity policies around ethnicity, gender or sexual preference are instrumental in hiding the real disease of our societies. Class differences have become extreme. The rich have become much richer while those at the bottom have gained nothing.
The pandemic exposes the deadly consequences of these policies.
Sidenote:
It is likely that Trump started his campaign to urgently end the lockdown after he noticed that the outbreak in New York mostly hit the black underclass. Those weren't his people. But that thinking is wrong. An epidemic, once let off to run its cause, will not differentiate. The poor will be hit first. But the virus will not stop with them. One wonders how long it will take him to get that.
VK @ 6 and others:
One of the earliest neoliberal economic / political experiments, if not the first of such experiments, was Chile under General August Pinochet (1973 – 1990).
During this period, and especially during the 1970s, Chile restructured its economy according to neoliberal principles (privatising state-owned industries and corporations, privatising social security, banning trade unions, removing tariff protections on local industries, deregulating the financial industry) under the advice of the so-called “Chicago Boys”: Chilean economists who had attended the University of Chicago and studied neoliberal economics under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger.
The so-called Chicago Boys were part of a training program organised by the US State Department in the 1950s in the form of scholarships at a university (or universities?) run by the Roman Catholic Church in Santiago de Chile, later supplemented by postgraduate training at a university in the US (University of Chicago, Harvard University or Massachusetts Institute of Technology). A documentary “Chicago Boys” made by journalist Carola Fuentes and director Rafael Valdeavellano details the history of this training program which was funded by the Ford Foundation amd the Rockefeller Foundation.
“…The movie, which opened in Chile in November and was directed by Fuentes along with filmmaker Rafael Valdeavellano, explains how Chile ended up implementing the most extreme version of Friedman’s doctrines, while arguing that Chile’s audacious economic experiment was in many ways a field test for the ideas later put into practice by sympathetic leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
“A lot of things, such as the privatization of the pension system, for example, were discussed in the United States a long time after being implemented in Chile,” Fuentes said. “But I’ve lived in the U.S., and there’re big differences. [Americans] also have a lot of inequality and abusive practices of businessman, but it’s not as extreme as in Chile.”
The film recounts how in 1956 the University of Chicago and Santiago’s Universidad Católica—with the help of Ford Foundation—signed an exchange agreement to send young economics students to the United States to learn more about “monetarism,” the theory that governments should refrain from regulating the market, whenever possible, with the exception of managing the money supply. The idea, radical in the United States for years following the New Deal, was developed by Friedman in the 1940s and under his leadership of Chicago’s economics department became the intellectual center of free-market economics in America. “This exchange was part of the State Department’s investment plan to expand their influence in Latin America, in a moment when they were concerned about the growth of Soviet ideas in the region. It is clear evidence of America’s foreign-policy influence in Chile,” Fuentes [said].
Around 25 Chilean students came to Chicago between 1956 and 1961. Some of them bought video cameras, an unimaginable purchase in Chile in those years, and recorded their time in Chicago, footage that is used in the film. They filmed their parties, their study sessions, and their walks around the campus. They recorded their everyday lives as normal students, long before they became the economic leaders of Chile’s military government.
Back in Chile, the Chicago Boys hoped to implement some of what they had learned in America. So they started to build an economic program, which they presented to the presidential candidate Jorge Alessandri, who lost to the Socialist Salvador Allende in 1970.
During Allende’s rule, the Chicago Boys continued working on their economic project, which was finally named el ladrillo—the brick, because it was so big. Chicago alum Sergio de Castro authored their final recommendation, which they delivered to Navy Admiral José Toribio Merino.
Merino would be part of the junta that overthrew Allende in a CIA-backed coup in 1973, installing Gen. Augusto Pinochet as the new head of state. De Castro became the economic minister and later the treasury minister. The other Chicago Boys also joined the military government, occupying Cabinet positions during the 17 years of dictatorship.
Their program centered on reductions to fiscal spending to solve high inflation and economic difficulties. They opened the economy to foreign imports, privatized dozens of state companies, and removed most government controls on private economic activity. At the same time, as it was opening up the Chilean economy, the regime was clamping down on political opposition. In Pinochet’s nearly 20 years in power, thousands of people were killed or “disappeared.”
But while it came under heavy human rights criticism, Chile was the first country to apply Friedman’s economic principles, and, years later, the famous economist called this process, lead by his disciples, “the Miracle of Chile.” Friedman himself visited Chile and met with Pinochet in 1975, where he praised the economic measures taken by the Chicago Boys and Pinochet’s government. The connection with the dictator has been one of the most controversial aspects of Friedman’s legacy in the United States.
To Carola Fuentes, Chile was the first (and most radical) experiment in what we call now neoliberalism: “We helped to shape the economy of other countries. You can’t imagine Margaret Thatcher’s reforms, in the United Kingdom, and Ronald Reagan’s, in the United States, without Chile.” She adds that the Chicago Boys remain proud of how they changed Chile, even as high-profile corruption cases have caused many Chileans to lose faith in a largely self-regulated market: “They can’t understand why Chileans are not thankful for what they did.”…
Among other things, the Chicago Boys’ experiment indirectly led to the downfall of Augusto Pinochet’s government: the deregulation of the financial sector made it unstable and resulted in a financial sector meltdown in 1982. Any faith that Chileans had in the Pinochet government’s ability to “manage” the country’s economy evaporated after the 1982 financial crisis. The government had to walk back its liberalisation project after that and Chile endured lame-duck governance with police-state repression for nearly another decade.
Posted by: Jen | Jul 9 2020 23:46 utc | 50
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