Posted on 04/03/2020 8:54:15 PM PDT by Fester Chugabrew
OVID-19 has taken the world by storm. Hundreds of thousands are infected (possibly many times more than the confirmed cases), the list of dead is growing exponentially longer, and capitalist economies have come to a standstill, with a global recession now virtually inevitable.
The pandemic had been predicted long before its appearance, but actions to prepare for such a crisis were barred by the cruel imperatives of an economic order in which “there’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe,” Noam Chomsky points out in this exclusive interview for Truthout. Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics at MIT and laureate professor at the University of Arizona, author of more than 120 books and thousands of articles and essays. In the interview that follows, he discusses how neoliberal capitalism itself is behind the U.S.’s failed response to the pandemic
Yes, he is bad as a linguistic researcher.
Read Tom Wolfe’s “Kingdom of Speech.” Just a bully, using PC techniques to force ideological assumptions onto a phenomena that Neuroscience is now just finally getting a handle on 30 years later. But, Chomsky was completely wrong, nope.. no inherent grammer structures in the brain, it is an emergent capability.
NY’s “free college” program was more akin to indentured servitude than “free” anything; recipients had to remain in NY for as many years after graduation as they took the “free” college. I say “servitude” because if you want to live in NY state for four or five years as a young person, you can bet your @ss you’ll be working - even if the state has chased all the good jobs/employers away. You’ll work four or five years in a McJob before your emancipation, and that is the very goal of the program - to prevent the ongoing flight of young AMERICAN people from NY.
I assume that ventilators are a high cost item. I know nothing about them, but I would guess that a certain amount of maintenance is required of said ventilators and that certifications as to the ventilators correct functioning must also be done.
All of this costs money. So how many extra ventilators can a city, county, or state afford? Should they plan for 10% above average need? 20%? 30%? Should they plan and purchase for the 100 year pandemic?
What budget line item or items get cancelled so extra ventilators, many of which will never be used, can be purchased? And don’t tell me it’s the federal governments job to provide for this. Wrong, this is handled at the state, county, and city level.
California had a ton of extra ventilators that were purchased during the time of Governor Arnold. It seems inventory control was not a high priority as most of them are missing.
Source follows:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3831485/posts
Great response. Just want to focus on these words: “But the people who run New York don’t think like that . . . .”
Who of us is able and willing to think and act ahead on stuff like this? I totally understand in hindsight, but I do not think either party would have welcomed such an expenditure in advance of this plague. Preparedness, even though quintessential to an informed people, does not sell among the many of either party.
Stop all immigration until we have enough ventilators.
I read last night that 33% survive. If those are my odds I'd jump on it.
The entire invention and development of the Medical Ventilator, from the early Drinker & Shaw models sold by Emerson, thru those from Siemens, Puritan Bennet, Hamilton, and others to the latest NIV capable ventilators was a product of Freemarket Capitalism. Socialist societies Steal these technologies and put their label on them. Just like the so called ‘original’ thoughts of Chomsky.
Related threads:
The Real Reason For Hospital Shortages In The United States
Democrat NYC nurses: Andrew Cuomo led ‘drive to close down hospital beds
Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News: Federal stockpile of N95 masks was depleted under Obama and never restocked
California Had 2,400 Mobile Ventilators, Democrats Got Rid of Them
It’s Not The Federal Government’s Fault New York Doesn’t Have More Ventilators, It’s Andrew Cuomo’s
The next problem after New York gets the 30,000 ventilators Cuomo wants: Finding enough skilled workers to operate them all
Most people who have Covid-19 and get on a ventilator die, so arguing over them is a little pointless. It is also pointless to have ventilators if there are not people who could operate them.
My mother was a nurse all her life and recently told me a story. When she was a acting head nurse early on in her career, the management of the hospital she was working was going to get ventilators. My mom pointed out that there was no one trained to use them, and that she would quit if her staff was made to use ventilators they did not know how to use. If de Blasio and Cuomo want tens of thousands of ventilators, they need several thousand people trained to run them.
In this case, neoliberal capitalism has nothing to do with government policies that restrict the number of hospital beds, or equipment purchased by state legislatures. That's government, not greedy corporations. The government in New York and California are run by Democrats.
Going over the interview:
"Nor the fact that the U.S. has the worst record in responding to the crisis."
This is a lie. Trump mentioned he was already talking to China during the SOTU on Feb 4, when Pelosi was preparing to tear up the SOTU on camera. The fact is, China was and is lying about how bad it was, and health experts did not realize how bad it was going to get because of this. The U.S. has been leading, while due to politics, the news media and Democrats are trying to blame the President because it is a election year.
"But scientific understanding is not enough. There has to be someone to pick up the ball and run with it. That option was barred by the pathology of the contemporary socioeconomic order. Market signals were clear: There’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe. The government could have stepped in, but that’s barred by reigning doctrine: “Government is the problem,”"
Barak Obama was President during Swine Flue, and MERs, and had Senate and House majorities at times during his Presidency. He did not act on this. The SARS outbreaks under Bush were contained in a few months. So the systems Chomsky says neoliberal capitalism tried to destroy were already in place and working in those cases.
No one expected a country where a epidemic started to try to cover it up and give a disease a one to two month head start. The decisions of the Chinese government have nothing to do with domestic U.S. political and business policies.
"The depth of the pathology is revealed clearly by one of the most dramatic — and murderous — failures: the lack of ventilators..."
Once again, Chomsky is selective about doing his homework before he makes his pronouncements, so he can make any accusation and conclusion he wants.
Medtronic responds to NY Times story about failed ventilator contract
"By 2014, there were no ventilators delivered to the government, and the government canceled the contract after Covidien expressed its desire to be free from it, according to the Times report.
"Medtronic claims that the article lacked important information regarding Newport’s contract with the government.
"Medtronic’s statement outlined that after Covidien became aware of Newport’s contract with the government, it learned that the company’s work on the ventilator design had “significant gaps” between the promises made to the government and what the company was capable of delivering, on both the cost of production and product performance fronts. That, according to Medtronic, made Covidien question Newport’s ability to complete the project as agreed.
"Covidien was unable to address the gaps it saw and recognized that it could not deliver the product close to the target cost required by the contract. On top of that, the ventilator did not win FDA approval for use in neonatal populations, which was required in the contract, according to Medtronic’s statement.
The contract failed because Covidien could not deliver what it promised and wanted out, not because the government stopped funding a successful project. That is different than "pathological" refusing to prepare because it costs too much. Also, Since Obama was President in 2014, he did not seek to find a solution to this either. Now compare this to Trump getting GE, Ford and GM to make ventilators.
Back to Chomsky. "The current administration had ample warning about a likely pandemic. In fact, a high-level simulation was run as recently as last October."
That sounds nice, except it is misleading. Running a simulation and having warning of a specific event are not the same thing. For a linguist, Chomsky's arguments confuse connotative and denotative meanings frequently, in addtion to being really selective with facts.
The rest of the article is based on the assumption that corporate america and Reaganomics are to blame, without, and in spite of actual evidence.
This is my longest post on FR, so I'll stop now.
Everything we have is the result of free market capitalism. The government produces nothing.
I reminded my wife just this evening that government intervention in the markets is always destructive. The free market solves every problem and government intervention simply serves to protect the establishment, the established and the entrenched interests.
Or as Reagan said: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it. That is government. The agencies are totally captured by industry or ideology and simply does not serve the people.
Neoliberal Capitalism is Chomsky’s beef. Do you know the difference between it and Free Market Capitalism? I do not.
Ha! Good one, but I’d like to shy away from innuendo and ad hominem, as much as I relish both.
Was it? It always helps a faulty argument to build it upon a faulty premise.
The fact is, long ago, a pandemic had been predicted.
Yes, somewhere, sometime, someone once predicted, "Yuh know, I bet that someday in the future, there will be a pandemic. Oh, Barman! Another round!"
Yet another pandemic.
About as helpful as saying, "We might not have enough ventilators, but you probably will be safe, as long as you..."
Belongs in the category of "weasel words."
Regards,
Your longest post - so far.
I'll be monitoring you!
Seriously: Excellent critique!
Regards,
Thoroughly misrepresenting the matters at hand for political purposes. You don't even need "ample warning" I will wager everything I own that a black swan type event will occur in the future. It is absolutely, positively guaranteed. We don't know when or what type, but it absolutely will occur. But there is no 'profit' in trying to prepare for it. Politicians and bureaucrats and even most major corporations are plagued with short term thinking, feel goodism, and sychophancy.
And when the black swan does occur, there will have been some "warning" written by some well meaning functionary deep inside the alphabet swamp, and totally ignored by his or her superiors because, as Chomsky himself informs us, there is no profit in paying heed to dire warnings that don't provide immediate "profit" to the people who stand to be rewarded for more short term and simple minded endeavors.
There was a warning that terrorists would attack the WTC. Heck, they attacked it in 1993. Someone wrote a paper suggesting planes could be used to attack vital infrastructure. Someone wrote a book about the risk of a pandemic. These volumes fill up libraries inside the swamp and are always ignored.
As if socialism wouldn’t have far worse shortages.
SMDH
Of the number of folks going on vents for CCP-19, only 10 to 20% survive.
Your post is excellent. I hope to assimilate futher and soon. I could tell from the get go you put a great deal of thought into it, and for that reason I cannot help but thank you.
NOTE: This post exceeds my average length by about 7.459 words.
It’s not an ad hominem if it’s accurate.
I have disliked Chomsky for a long time. Once you recognize the pattern to how he makes intellectually dishonest arguments, finding the truth behind what he says becomes easier.
I didn't know the whole story about the Covidien ventilators until now. Since Chomsky made it a key point, I knew there had to be more to it than what he said. So I took five minutes to search on google to find the other side of the story. The side of the story Chomsky could not be bothered to look up himself.
Chomsky says things like that which sound intellectual and educated, but when you parse it out and ask what is he saying and what it means, what he argues is based on what did not happen or does not exist. The actually history of SARs, MERs, and Swine Flu puts to lie his claims about "pathological neoliberal capitalist resistance to fighting pandemics". If those events did not happen, then the motivations for those actions Chomsky attacks for the last half of the article, can not exist. He also pays no attention to China's handling of the disease, placing all blame on the President and corporate america. So who is more pathological, free market capitalists for what they did not do, or Chomsky for his dishonesty?
The internet makes his style of deception much harder than when he was covering for Pol Pot's Killing Fields in the 1970s.
proof that IQ and reason are not related
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