The COVID-19 pandemic has really exposed some of the serious weaknesses and failures of the US in a manner that we have never seen before.
It shows how, for the past thirty or so years, emphases have consistently been placed on the wrong things in that country,especially the celebration of virtual prosperity – for example as it exists in Silicon Valley and Wall Street – at the expense of a focus on what really matters the most to a country with real people. You consistently hear that America is the most prosperous country in the world, yet the number of homeless people is higher than in any other country.
We have already known before now that most Americans have less than four hundred dollars in their savings accounts. In the past few days, in cities across the US, you could see cars lined up in dual lanes for miles, waiting for free food. It is very shameful indeed.
Before COVID-19, no one would have thought that the US wouldn’t be able to provide basic hospital amenities like masks and respirators to patients. Who would have expected that nurses would have to use garbage bags to improvise for their gowns? Oxygen supplies have dried up in many hospitals treating coronavirus patients.
Thus, patients with impaired lung functions, who although may not need ventilators but require supplemental oxygen, are out of luck. Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) are in short supply everywhere and there are even guidelines for rationing care. Who would have expected that the State of New York would be begging China to donate ventilators?
This kind of apparently shameless act is what you expect from third world countries. Such as the recent arrival of a Chinese medical team in Nigeria, who were flown in to train Nigerians on managing COVID-19 patients.(In Nigeria only 10 COVID-19 deaths have been reported, whereas it is generally believed by many that hundreds of thousands of people might have died of the disease in China.)
The State of New York is looking to China for ventilators because that is where they are manufactured – as the US has invariably chosen to specialize in the white-collar matters of Intellectual Property (IP) ownership and Silicon Valley technology, which for the most part don’t help anybody under the present life-or-death situation. In my humble opinion, as an aside, it does not seem that capitalism is working very well right now.
The Republicans in America always ask for small government. However, the stimulus package –in trillions of US dollars – just passed by them, shows a stack contradiction to what they preach. In fact, a popular TV figure in the US recently alludes to the fact that when the economy “goes south” in the US, wealthy people there suddenly espouse socialist values, asking for handouts from the government to bail out their businesses!
Where do Silicon Valley and Wall Street come in? Well, these are the darlings of the US economy, that are consistently rated much more than their intrinsic worth. Just take a company like Facebook. A software package that does not require more than a student with an associate degree to develop is capitalized at $ 440 billion.
Can you imagine what $440 billion can do for Midwest America in terms of factory jobs, or for metropolitan America in terms of general infrastructure which are crumbling down? Or in terms of hospital supplies? Of course, there is nothing wrong with developing smartphones. We need them up to a point, but they are not life or death supplies. We also need computers – they help us do our work more quickly and more efficiently. The Internet technology, especially email, is also quite useful. The problem though is that their importance is overrated in relations to what humans really need. In 2008, the financial crisis wiped out 19.2 trillion (Silicon Valley and Wall Street) dollars in US alone and destroyed 34 million white-collar jobs globally. This is money that shouldn’t have been in Wall Street in the first place but one that should have been spent on industries in the Midwest of the USA. Jack Ma, the founder and CEO of Alibaba group alludes to these American problems in a recent interview with the CNBC network. He alludes to America’s “great” strategy to outsource manufacturing jobs to China and Mexico, and service jobs to India. That was because America decided it wanted to control Intellectual Property (IP) and technology, while outsourcing lowpaying(manufacturing) jobs to China and Mexico, at the expense of the blue-collar workers in the US Midwest. Because of this strategy, China has now dominated the world of manufacturing. Moreover,the expectation by America that China would just build for the US, without concerning itself with the actual knowhow and the IP issues has turned out to be a big rude awakening to America. New York State is going to China to beg for ventilators, because that is where ventilators are manufactured. America is more concerned about the stock in trade ventilators! The value of a ventilator could skyrocket in a day if an influential person in the US makes a speech about the equipment, creating vapor wealth on ventilators on Wall Street, even when there are no physical ventilators in America to save the lives of dying Americans.
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