The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) news site ran a lead story headlined "Ebola-Infected Americans Released from Hospital, Thanks to Experimental Drug U.S. Government Helps Develop".
The story reads "The National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Defense's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), have provided support for the development of ZMapp, the experimental drug used to treat the two Americans who had contracted Ebola while helping patients infected with the disease in Liberia."
The story highlights a particular contradiction in the US capitalist system, whose proponents like to speak about ingenuity and independence while they bash the function of government: that nothing was built by these tycoons alone. In fact, they could not have built anything alone.
Most of our major corporations have benefited from essentially a government handover of patents and technologies.
From pharmaceuticals to the high-tech industry, private corporations have been the recipients of highly subsidized ventures paid for by tax dollars. Any losses are borne by the consumer, by empty city coffers, schools and public universities with less funding, public transportation subsidies decreased so bus and transit fares continue to increase.
The gains are passed on to for-profit corporations to maximize on our backs.
Microsoft, Hewlitt-Packard, Dell, Apple, and all of the expanding Silicon Valley could not have happened without the huge transfers of government [including military] research from the public to the private sector.
The worst of the victims must lately include 1400 African deaths from the Ebola virus who were denied access to a treatment publicly paid for.
But Africa and the global South have long been denied access to the treatments of curable diseases because for-profit corporations do not find it profitable to produce the treatments, the recipient country will not pay the demanded price of the treatment, or, in the case of Cuba and other US "enemies," it is simply barred from purchasing the life-saving treatment or technology.
The victims don't stop there: the people of the US who witness the transfer of billions of dollars from their pockets for the enrichment of a few. The beneficiaries grow richer; their incomes continue to inflate out of proportion to the common workers, if the common workers can find work at all.
The technology drive seeks to maximize profit and minimize costs, and this includes labor costs. This is why the maqueoladoras on the US-Mexican border, the move to South Asia, the coups in Haiti and Honduras against leftist, pro-public, democratically elected presidents.
The technology drive means fewer jobs, and what jobs there are will be lower-waged ones.
Publicly funding our own extermination is not only class warfare but it is also a microcosm of how the West has Won for the last few centuries. The real wealth is not in London, Paris, or New York, it is in the lands of the global South - first made colonies or private fiefdoms, later guarded by Western-installed military juntas and eternal presidents - who secure the transfer of the foreign wealth to the global North in order to benefit the empire.
Once in the empire, we have seen it will always benefit a select few.
There is no reform under the sun that will right this crime, no picket line, no tweeting campaign. As things have gotten only worse they will continue to do so.
The unique path to right this crime is a revolution. If we cannot begin there, we will not begin anywhere.
The whole system must be dismantled by any and all available means.
