Yes, leftists tend to be unreasonable in many respects, but out of respect for my neighbor, I need the excercise and would like some seriously-minded Freeper help.
Please read the article before responding, and then answer my neighbor who says this about it: "I happen to agree with him. What he is saying aligns with my thoughts closely."
My response thus far: "Chomsky is a brilliant man in many respects. Why would he twist this malady to fit his world view? I guess he feels a need to justify himself."
Thank you. God bless you each and all, according to His mercies in Christ Jesus.
Lol. The governments he admires killed millions on purpose.
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
Stop all immigration until we have enough ventilators.
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.
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.
proof that IQ and reason are not related
IMO, Chomsky is correct about the cause being what he cal neoliberal capitalism.
What is his big error, is to think the government is the remedy.
It decidedly is not.
The partial remedy is a classical financial system of a reasonbly regulated free market with emphasis on small corporate entities with the consumer a stakeholder, not just capital and management.
And more.
So would an unused surplus of ventilators expose a fascist communist economy. Chomsky is an idiot sniping from the vantage point of 20/20 hindsight. If a communist government could see this coming and prepare, then what happened in China?
Neoliberalism is the enemy of mankind.
The sooner it is destroyed, the better.