How The Left Is Trying To Blame Capitalism For COVID-19 Deaths

Authored by Bradley Thomas via The Mises Institute,

Not hesitating to exploit a health pandemic to advance their ideological agenda, Jacobin magazine on March 26 published an article attempting to proactively blame “millions” of coronavirus deaths on “capitalism.”

Titled “How Capitalism Kills during a Pandemic,” the article advances tired slogans about free markets placing “profits above people,” buttressed by faulty and at times self-contradictory arguments that prove unpersuasive.

To set the most alarmist tone possible, author Nick French begins by warning the reader that the coronavirus “will likely kill millions of people in the United States alone.”

This prediction cherry-picks the most ominous of such projections, irresponsibly relying on the report from London's Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, who own authors admitted includes projections that are “worst-case,” combined with the incredibly unrealistic caveat that “there are no interventions or changes in people's behavior.” The report further admitted that "Epidemic timings are approximate given the limitations of surveillance data in both countries," in essence cautioning that such predictions will be moot once more sufficient data becomes available. (The Jacobin article was published before a leading author of the report altered his predictions based upon the dramatic responses imposed in countries around the world.)

With the reader sufficiently shocked by the worst-case projection of victims based on partial data and unrealistic assumptions, French quickly assigns the villain:

 “Many of these fatalities could have been avoided if we had a social order that placed the needs of people over profit,” he declares.

Helping to shape the readers’ cartoonish image of evil capitalism, the article informs us: 

“capitalists prioritize profits over the welfare of their workers and of humanity as a whole,” and adds, “They will pollute the environment with deadly toxins and planet-destroying greenhouse gases before spending money on safe production processes.”

Mass death is but an unconsidered side effect in the heartless system of capitalism. Such is the framing that French establishes.

This leads into his specific critiques:

“First, pharmaceutical companies could have started to develop a vaccine for the virus years ago. The novel coronavirus that is now ravaging the world is actually one of a family of coronaviruses (including SARS and MERS) with which we have long been familiar,” French notes.

“It would have been possible to begin research on vaccines and cures for coronaviruses in general, giving us a head start on treatments for the current outbreak. But pharmaceutical companies did not pursue this research, because the prospect of a cure was not sufficiently profitable.”

Two elephants in the room go unaddressed in this argument.

• First, if a vaccine for the virus would save millions of lives in the US alone, potentially tens of millions of lives worldwide, why would that product not be profitable? Does the author honestly think that a product that could literally save one’s life would not be in high demand?
• Secondly, why does the blame for failing to develop a vaccine fall squarely on private pharmaceutical companies? What about all the other developed nations that have some form of single-payer or universal healthcare system that the Jacobin crowd thinks will save us all? Why didn’t any of them develop a vaccine?

Next, the article addresses concerns about the consequences of the economic shutdown being imposed on the American economy. “Losing a job could result in losing your health-care coverage or being unable to pay your student loans,” French writes. This concern is entirely justifiable.

But somehow French doesn’t see the irony in lamenting the close tie between one’s job and health insurance coverage - a result of government policy making insurance coverage tax exempt - as somehow the fault of “capitalism.” Without government interference, far more health insurance coverage would be owned by individuals, not supplied by employers.

Moreover, the student loan debt crisis is largely a government phenomenon as well. Decades of government subsidies and low-interest loans have helped drive up college tuition, and the federal government owns more than 90 percent of all student loan debt.

French blames “capitalism” for putting individuals in precarious situations that are highly exacerbated by the pandemic crisis, but the roots are to be found in government intervention.

Next, he blames greedy capitalist owners for forcing workers to go to work and risk their health because doing otherwise would “hurt bosses’ bottom line.”

In the following paragraph, however, French is forced to concede that the only specific example he cites, Starbucks, despite staying open for a while, “has since shifted to only providing drive-through service because of employee pressure.”

In a competitive market, employers must treat employees reasonably well, or else they will be bid away by more hospitable workplaces.

French then points out the shortages of personal protective equipment such as face masks at hospitals across the country, insisting that this too “is the product of a system that puts profit over people.”

Not so fast. Cumbersome FDA approval processes have been instrumental in slowing the production of much-needed face masks. Moreover, it’s profit-driven private companies such as 3M that are ramping up production of face masks right now in order to bail out the unprepared public health system.

Undaunted, French insists, “If we adequately invested in public hospitals or used state resources to rapidly produce necessary medical equipment, the unfolding pandemic would not hit our health-care system nearly as hard.”

What amount of “investment” would be adequate goes unmentioned. Also unmentioned are the certificate of need (CON) laws still in place in thirty-five states, which require healthcare facilities to get permission from a government commission to expand or otherwise invest in additional medical equipment. These commissions are often stacked with representatives from existing hospitals, who have an incentive to restrict new supply and thus limit competition. Imagine if potential rival retail stores needed to get permission from a committee full of Walmart and Target executives in order to open a new location.

CON laws are one of countless government interventions limiting the supply of medical care in the US. In this the American Medical Association also plays a vital role. As reported by the American Conservative, the AMA “artificially limits the number of doctors, which drives up salaries for doctors and reduces the availability of care.”

For more than a hundred years, the AMA has successfully lobbied governments to enact laws that restrict the number of new doctors in the country. AMA activities have included dramatically decreasing the number of medical schools across the country and turning the process of becoming a doctor into a monumental feat that “requires navigating a maze of accrediting, licensing, and examining bodies.”

The only system putting “profits over people” is that of government interference into the healthcare industry.

French next tries to convince readers that countries with single-payer systems are well equipped to handle the outbreak, unlike the allegedly free market US system.

But on this attempt he also can’t avoid self-contradiction or a downright obfuscation of facts:

 “Despite the fact that Italy’s health capacity has been overstressed by the particularly brutal explosion of coronavirus there,” he writes, “its universal single-payer health-care system is ensuring that every person, no matter their job or income level, can receive the best treatment possible.”

Well, not every person.

As Politico reported as early as March 3, weeks before French published his article, “anesthesiologists and doctors are being called on to make increasingly tough calls on who gets access to beds and respirators when there are not enough to go around.”

Instead of every person receiving treatment, as French would have you believe is happening, doctors in Italy are forced into “prioritizing younger, otherwise healthy patients over older patients or those with pre-existing conditions.”

French also insists that “Single-payer systems have allowed Denmark and South Korea to quickly institute coronavirus testing on a large scale, which has been essential to their success in slowing the virus’s spread.”

In the case of South Korea, however, it was a previous decision by the government to get the public sector out of the way and allow private sector companies to come to the rescue in cases of emergency that was responsible.

Learning from the 2015 MERS outbreak, reports ProPublica, “Korean officials enacted a key reform, allowing the government to give near-instantaneous approval to testing systems in an emergency.”

The result? “Within weeks of the current outbreak in Wuhan, China, four Korean companies had manufactured tests from a World Health Organization recipe and, as a result, the country quickly had a system that could assess 10,000 people a day.”

In these unprecedented times, many are scared, mourning, and otherwise looking for a villain to blame. Jacobin wants to convince readers that somehow for-profit capitalism is to blame for an underwhelming preparedness. Their argument, however, amounts to little more than sloganeering and half-truths. If anything, it’s the wealth created by capitalist systems that will save lives during this pandemic.

China Prepares To Close "Oil Deal Of A Lifetime" In Iraq

Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,

Over the past week or so, China has eased quarantine measures in Wuhan – the city in which the global coronavirus pandemic began – with the entire lockdown scheduled to end on 8 April. With China’s President Xi Jinpiang having visited the city just a few days ago, the industrial economy across China as a whole is back working and operating at levels even above the pre-coronavirus rates, although the service sector remains more cautious.

For the oil industry, this means that China is back and busy taking up where it left off in terms of exploring and developing new field opportunities.

This is at a time when the U.S. is just beginning to see the full onset of coronavirus mayhem.

There has been no clearer sign of this move by China than last week’s awarding of a US$203.5 million engineering contract for Iraq’s supergiant oil field, Majnoon, to the little known China Petroleum Engineering & Construction Corp (CPECC). 

With the U.S.’ focus increasingly on fire-fighting the coronavirus outbreak at home, Beijing has good reason to believe that it has largely a clear run at target country Iraq, provided that it does not stick it too much in the U.S.’ craw. This specifically means continuing to develop oil and gas field opportunities in geopolitically ultra-sensitive areas, such as Iraq, on the basis of rolling contracts for specific work undertaken by companies that are not top of the U.S.’ radar, like CPECC.

This method is also being used by Russia, and the focus of it right now is Iraq and Iran, two countries that are right in the centre of the Middle East and vital to both China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ multi-generational dominance strategy and to Russia’s ongoing attempt to sequestrate the entire Middle East.

Majnoon is a key focus in Iraq because it has so much oil that its very name in Arabic means ‘insane’, to signify the insane amount of oil that has always been present there. Before the U.S. noticed that China was stealthily acting hand in glove with Russia to provide the money where the muscle had been put in place, the ever-fractious senior Iraqi politicians had offered China a stunningly lucrative deal for the development of the Majnoon field. Specifically, the terms of the deal were that China would obtain a 25-year contract but one that would officially start two years after the signing date. This would allow China to recoup more profits on average per year and less upfront investment.

Also enormously beneficial for Beijing was that the methodology for working out per barrel payments to it would be the higher – the Chinese would choose - of either the mean average of the 18 month spot price for crude oil produced, or the past six months. Additionally, China would receive a discount of at least 10 per cent for at least five years on the value of the oil it recovered.

And oil there is aplenty. Located around 60 kilometres to the north east of the main southern export terminal of Basra, the Majnoon supergiant oil field is one of the largest oil fields in the world, with an estimated 38 billion barrels of oil in place. Due to the legacy of both the Iran-Iraq War and the U.S. incursions, from when the licence on the field was awarded on 11 December 2009 by the Iraq government to Shell Iraq Petroleum Development (SIPD) – in conjunction with its Malaysian partner, Petronas, and Iraq’s Missan Oil Company – it took nearly 18 months simply to clear 28 square kilometres of land of explosives, prior to constructing and opening the first well. Production was then formally restarted on 20 September 2013 and, within a very short timeframe, the consortium had already managed to boost output to the 175,000 barrels per day (bpd) first commercial production target (also the threshold for cost-recovery payments for Shell). 

By the end of the first quarter of 2014, the field was churning out an average of 210,000 bpd, according to figures from Shell and Baghdad. Indeed, the first shipment of crude oil to Shell Trading occurred on 8 April that year and, despite the floods that hit the fields in early 2019, the longer-term original production target figures designed for the Shell-led consortium still stand: the first production target of 175,000 bpd (already reached and surpassed), and the plateau production for the site of 1.8 mbpd. 

The International Energy Agency projected output of 550,000-950,000 bpd production by 2020, and 700,000-1 million bpd at some point in the 2030s, although due to the flooding and recent political upheavals – plus the effects of the coronavirus – the timing has slipped. Even with these caveats, though, China’s part of the deal – which also remains in place – is to shore up the site from future potential flooding and to increase output to at least 500,000 bpd by the end of May 2021. 

The details of the early 2019 flooding damage might make worrying reading for some developers. The rain that caused the initial flooding had only fallen on both sides of the Iraq/Iran border for just 35 minutes in total, which then caused the Hiwiza marshes to overflow into farmland in the nearby Al-Qurna district, cutting through the safety berms and the rising level of water caused the Jahaf dam to collapse. By 15 March, the water level rose sufficiently to force itself through a second safety berm to the edges of the Majnoon oil field. 

The details do not worry the Chinese, though, for two key reasons.

• One is that China has extensive knowledge of dealing with floods across its own country, both natural and man-created (via the damming that has occurred for decades), so it has the expertise and engineering capabilities to effectively deal with such eventualities.
• The other is that, in line with its aforementioned encroachment into Iran, China can work on both sides of the border, as the Majnoon reservoir in the Iraqi side extends across the Iran border into the massive field known as Azadegan. This, in turn, is split into the North Azadegan and South Azadegan oil field developments.

For years, structural damage has been done to the area by the erosion of subsoil across over one million hectares of forest and brush land by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a result of building programmes. This has been worsened by the redirection of many of the natural water flows through the building of dams and again by Iran’s irrigation systems that have been sending clean and waste water into Iraq for decades.

A 2011 study by the University of Basra warned that the infrastructure was not able to handle Iranian inflows, with the danger zone concentrated in an area where the Majnoon oil pipelines feed the gas-oil separation station. However, as a senior source who works closely with Iran’s Petroleum Ministry told OilPrice.com last week: “The IRGC invited China into Iran and Iraq and the IRGC is entirely at China’s service.”  

This strategy of gradual encroachment is a Chinese classic, of course, currently being employed very notably where possible across the Asia-Pacific region as well as the Middle East. The modus operandi is:

offer lots of money to cash-strapped countries (which most emerging economies are) that are tied in to future project developments, then leverage this into the building out of on-the-ground infrastructural projects (that have employment and revenue benefits for the host countries as well), and then turn the screw by inveigling the host countries to give China extremely preferential terms on something it wants (in the Middle East it is oil and gas and land transit routes, and in Asia Pacific it is other natural resources and international port usage).

Although in the Middle East, China is still partly trying to cover its intentions by using non-headline companies on ‘contractor-only’ specific work projects – just like CPECC – it does not take much digging to find the real interest. 

Not only is CPECC a subsidiary of Chinese oil behemoth, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), but also it was the very same company that was recently awarded exactly the same type of contract (US$121 million for ‘engineering work’ that time) for Iraq’s supergiant West Qurna-1 oilfield, also located very close to Iraq’s principal oil hub of Basra.

“At some point the U.S. is going to wake up and find out that it has lost the entire Middle East, including Iraq and Saudi,” concluded the Iran source. 

The US Military Is Preparing For "Worst-Case Contagion Scenarios" (But It's A Secret)

Authored by Eric Felten via RealClearInvestigations.com,

The U.S. military is “preparing for worst-case scenarios with respect to the potential spread” of the COVID-19 virus, U.S. Air Force Gen. Tod D. Wolters told reporters Friday.

But just what those scenarios are is a military secret. At a time when the president and his advisers hold daily press conferences where worst-case scenarios for civilians are frankly and alarmingly discussed, the Pentagon is moving to tighten what information it shares about COVID-19’s impact on the military.

The Department of Defense has been providing running totals of military-related COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and mortality, with separate figures for service members, their families, and civilian contractors. For example, as of Monday, the Pentagon reported 1,087 cases, of which 569 involved troops. These figures were higher by two-thirds than they had been Friday. But the demands of epidemiological accuracy are beginning to clash with the imperatives of operational secrecy.

“I’m not going to get into a habit where we start providing numbers across all the commands and we come to a point six, seven weeks from now where we have some concerns in some locations and reveal information that could put people at risk,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told Reuters.

No one wants to give bad actors the idea that American troop strength is weakened on any particular front.

If not necessarily weakening forces, the virus is already causing complications. The commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe, Christopher Cavoli, has spent most of March in self-isolation after coming into contact with someone infected with COVID-19.

Lt.. Gen. Cavoli is just one of many officers who have taken to the internet to communicate with their troops via video. But missing from the videos is the officer one would most expect to see in that part of the world, the chief medical officer for the European theater. Brig. Gen. Ronald Stephens was relieved of command Monday. He had been suspended Feb. 12. For what, the Army isn’t saying – it’s a different sort of military secret -- but the timing is less than optimal. Regional Health Command-Europe is being headed on an acting basis by Stephens’ former chief of staff, Col. Andre Pippen.

Wolters, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, was relatively forthcoming when he said that “to sustain the current readiness posture,” he might have to “go outside the forces I currently command.” But if it happens, don’t expect it to be announced: Department of Defense spokesperson Alyssa Farah put out a statement last week saying, “If at some point in the future, a commander believes that the coronavirus could affect the readiness of our strategic deterrent or strategic response forces we would understandably protect that information.”

A senior defense official told Military Times on Monday that though the Pentagon would be reporting general figures, it would be “tamping down” on the release of “unit, region and installation” details.

Dealing with disease is key to military readiness. Wars in which the majority of fatalities are due to battlefield slaughter are something of a 20th century invention. The Civil War displayed a staggering carelessness with men’s lives, whether Pickett’s suicidal charge or just about any campaign waged by U.S. Grant. And yet for all the carnage, of over 600,000 fatalities, some two out of three died from diseases, including dysentery, typhoid, malaria and tuberculosis.

In Britain’s Thirty Years’ War, “deaths from disease far outstripped deaths from weapon in this as in every European conflict prior to the twentieth century,” writes historian William H. McNeill in the book “Plagues and Peoples.” The Continental Army was ravaged with smallpox until George Washington forced reluctant troops to be vaccinated. “Disease has destroyed Ten Men for Us,” John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, “where the Sword of the Enemy has killed one.”

The U.S. military doesn’t face anything like that with COVID-19 so far. But it is a reminder of the importance of keeping soldiers healthy to keeping them ready as a fighting force.

Some fronts have already been affected, if only marginally, as coalition forces have been drawn down. In the last week, hundreds of troops from the Netherlands, France, Spain and Portugal have left Iraq and Afghanistan, redeployed to their home countries to bolster civilian responses to the disease. U.S. and British training with Iraqi forces has been suspended and some U.K. soldiers have returned to Great Britain for emergency assignments.

The U.S. military has a deeper bench, of course, and can afford to assign the Army Corps of Engineers to outfit temporary emergency hospitals and the Navy to sail hospital ships to home-front hot spots. But that could eventually lead to drawdowns significant enough that the Pentagon wouldn’t want it known.

Still, a more detailed picture is painted by the information given to troops than that given the public. The Army’s acting regional health commander for Europe, Col. Pippen, held a virtual town hall with other medical officers to answer questions about COVID-19 and the Army’s response. Soldiers and their spouses emailed in. The answers they were given suggest the Army’s health system is stressed, even at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest military hospital in Europe.

“Every time I call the Landstuhl appointment line, I get a busy signal,” was one exasperated complaint.

Col. Randall Freeman, deputy commander for health readiness at Landstuhl, didn’t have much to offer:

“Our network is very heavily burdened right now, with a much higher volume of calls than we normally have,” he said.

“I encourage patients to keep trying. Sometimes it takes three, four, or five tries to get through.”

Freeman and the other Army health officials said the hospital was going to be focused on urgent care, and all other services would have to be online.

Soldiers can normally expect that their medical information and that of their families will be handled according to HIPAA principles. But not in the age of COVID-19. A soldier’s wife who had been tested for the virus emailed the town hall to ask what had happened to her privacy. The results of her test had been given first to her husband’s commanding officer, then to her husband, and only only after that to her. “In a public health emergency,” Freeman responded, “the command has to know certain things that affect the ability of the unit to carry out its mission.”

Some of the steps normally taken to clear troops as ready are being pushed off. For example, soldiers have to pass an annual dental exam to be considered deployable. But such routine care is no longer available. “We have stopped offering readiness exam appointments,” Col. Manuel Pozo-Alonso, the Army’s dental regional commander for Europe, said in the virtual town hall. Dental personnel are being seconded to COVID-19 duties. He admitted that because of even that minor consequence of switching to a COVID-19 footing, “There will be a little detriment to our readiness over time.”