No act of God

"When the world comes crashing down, it suits the ruling class to allow the public to believe that the primary cause of the collapse was something organic and intractable — God, the weather, natural  uctuations in the market, the unique savagery of a virus, the incomprehensible perversity of a foreign culture. Displacing responsibility onto abstractions allows the powerful to evade criticism for creating and maintaining such an unstable state of a airs.

A virus can make a person sick enough to need a ventilator — but it can’t create a shortage of ventilators That’s not the result of nature but of medical device companies promising to build them — even signing government contracts and taking public money — then failing to deliver, with zero consequences, leaving executives richer and the public in peril.

 The coronavirus didn’t cause our understaffed and under-resourced hospitals — “lean production” in hospital management did that. It didn’t cause an unemployment rate that rivals the Great Depression — the United States’ unwillingness to protect workers’ jobs did that. The coronavirus didn’t cause millions of newly unemployed people to lose their private health insurance during a public health crisis — the United States’ stubborn refusal to implement a single-payer system did that. "

READ ARTICLE BY MEAGAN DAY

ILLUSTRATION BY BEN O'NEILL