Thread by @Andre__Damon

How American capitalism profits on death
Please share this thread! #Omicron
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On Monday, as the US hit one million #covid19 cases, three times higher than previous waves, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up by 400 points, a new record. 1/🧵
wsws.org/en/articles/20…

Throughout 2021, as 478,000 Americans died, the Dow Jones logged 70 closing records in its third straight year of annual double-digit increases. “There were actually more new all-time highs than in the entire '70s and 2000s combined, those two decades.”

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Omicron fears led to a Wall Street selloff in early December, which ended when Biden went on TV to declare that his administration is “making sure that COVID-19 no longer closes businesses or schools.” Since then, Dow is up 2k points, daily cases hit 1 million
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Out of the total 6.7 trillion federal response to the pandemic in 2020, only one tenth took the form of assistance to households, with the vast majority going either to direct handouts to corporations or into the financial markets. Below: Fed balance sheet

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As a result, American billionaires became $2.1 trillion wealthier. As the economists Raphaële Chappe and Mark Blyth wrote in Foreign Affairs, The United States has severed “any remaining ties between financial markets and the real economy.”
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foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-…

In 2020, US life expectancy at birth fell by 1.8 years, from 78.8 years to 77.0. In 2020 alone, the COVID-19 pandemic has eliminated the entire increase in US life expectancy since 2003, that is, all the progress made over the course of a fifth of a century.

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COVID-19 has led to a massive death toll for older sections of the population. Seventy-five percent of those who have died have been those above the retirement age of 65, and 93 percent have been over the age of 50. 7/🧵

Economic, military and political strategists have worried for decades that the balance between the working-age population, which generates surplus value, and the retired, which do not, would shift, cutting into profits. 8/🧵

The CSIS think tank wrote in 2013, “The US does not face any foreign threat as serious as its failure to come to grips with… the rise in the cost of federal entitlement spending," driven by "major health care programs."

9/🧵csis.org/analysis/budge…

"Russia and China will soon face choices between buying guns for their militaries and buying canes for their ballooning elderly populations.” Implying the US can secure its place in the global order by prioritizing “buying guns” over “buying canes.” 10/🧵foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite…

The effort to popularize the reduction of life expectancy was exemplified by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s 2014 essay, entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75,” arguing that “society… will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly.” 11/🧵theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

Wall Street sees the benefit of COVID-19 becoming endemic, perpetually circulating within the population, culling the elderly and lowering the total costs of providing medical care to the elderly as well as the chronically ill of all ages. 12/🧵 #Omicron

The capitalist social and economic order has proven to be the greatest threat to the safety and well-being of the public. Its abolition, and the shutdown of Wall Street, are vital questions of public health. #Omicron

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