Providing public goods

public services provided by the markets typically fail

Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatized and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there.

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There is a way out of this trap: by decommodifying essential goods and services, we can eliminate artificial scarcity and ensure public abundance, de-link human well-being from growth, and reduce growthist pressures.

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By universal services here I mean not only healthcare and education, but also housing, transit, nutritious food, energy, water, and communications.  In other words, a decommodification of the core social sector — the means of everyday survival.  And I mean attractive, high-quality, democratically managed, properly universal services, not the purposefully shitty last-resort systems we see in the US and other neoliberal countries.  

What does this look like?  

How do we get there?

COVID SEIR indicates chaos

a thread

More on the influence of the Powell memo

From the perspective of socialist organizers

This article tells the story of how the right wing of the capitalist class came to drive a new set of reactionary Supreme Court rulings, government policies, and ideological battles against democracy and the basic democratic rights our class won and that the right wing soon started rolling back. A key figure in this anti-democratic turn was Lewis F. Powell Jr., a tobacco company executive turned Supreme Court Justice. In the transition between the two roles, he wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.”

In hindsight, the private memorandum Lewis F. Powell Jr. sent to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on August 23, 1971—known as the “Powell Memo”—in many ways represents the inaugural moment in this counteroffensive. Titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the Memo clearly expressed the sharpness of the class struggle at that time and encapsulated the capitalist class’ fear that they were losing the battles of ideas and the world. It undoubtedly laid the groundwork for some key components of U.S. imperialism’s new offensive against the global revolutionary upsurge that characterized the immediate post-World War II environment, an offensive that is still with us today.

Understanding the background, context, and content of the Memo helps us get a sense of the right-wing counteroffensive against domestic people’s movements. Powell eventually entered the Supreme Court and helped usher in a wave of reactionary rulings against the people and for corporate profits. Thus, while the exact impacts of the Memo are hard to ascertain, they eventually made their way into the law books, attacking affirmative action and establishing a theory of corporate speech and “personhood.”

Communicating what “vaccine effectiveness” essentially means

vaccine effectiveness

what was never communicated to the public was that these mRNA vaccines are experimental in every way that matters.  A necessary experiment under the circumstances, but an experiment nevertheless, on a very large population.  This does not mean, however, that the molecular, cellular, and technical details of the production of the vaccines are experimental.  These are standard in every molecular biology research laboratory.

Relative risk reduction is not well intuited.  

Ways to check ventilation

Joey Fox has six

Since we all have to do all of our own homework now

“End” of the COVID emergency

Great roundup from Bloomberg 

The US has started unwinding its Covid-19 crisis measures that have expanded access to health care for millions of people since the beginning of the outbreak in the country in 2020. President Joe Biden is imminently expected to sign a bill passed by Congress that will conclude the country’s national emergency. The White House on May 11 plans to enda separate, more consequential public health emergency and disband its Covid response team. A policy that increased health coverage for low-income people has already been discontinued. So has the federal government’s purchase of Covid vaccines and treatments. While some rules around telehealth will remain relaxed, others are being tightened up again. Undoing Covid emergency rules also has implications for US immigration policy.

The Johns Hopkins COVID data team gave up in despair 

Database of COVID studies

Lots of papers, with some tags

Not heavily curated nor annotated but great for research 

Wonder if Consensus consumes these?

Consensus

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