COVID proves corporate healthcare is immoral. Nicolle Wallace, Matthew Dowd, Pundits: GOP to pay
People are dying because corporations must put profits over humanity. Nicolle Wallace, Matthew Dowd, and other pundits have an interesting perspective on the GOP. Will they pay?
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See why our COVID disaster’s caused by our greedy, immoral economic system & bought politicians.
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Nicolle Wallace skewers TX GOP & Greg Abbott ‘Pro disease & Death Indifferent’ ‘anti-science.’
Worthwhile Reads
Matthew Dowd: This is how Democrats beat a sagging Texas Governor Greg Abbott & failed Republicans
Republican & Democratic Pundits think Texas anti-woman law will hurt Republicans in Election 2022
See why our COVID disaster’s caused by our greedy, immoral economic system & bought politicians.
The COVID pandemic provides all the proof America needs that healthcare does not belong under the control of for-profit corporations.
We are in a global pandemic. We have various vaccines on the market. Most at some point got their genesis from public funds, our taxpayer dollars in some form.
The vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, which are likely to be the first to win FDA approval, in particular rely heavily on two fundamental discoveries that emerged from federally funded research: the viral protein designed by Graham and his colleagues, and the concept of RNA modification, first developed by Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó at the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, Moderna’s founders in 2010 named the company after this concept: “Modified” + “RNA” = Moderna, according to co-founder Robert Langer.
“This is the people’s vaccine,” said corporate critic Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program. “Federal scientists helped invent it and taxpayers are funding its development. … It should belong to humanity.”
Moderna, through spokesperson Ray Jordan, acknowledged its partnership with NIH throughout the COVID-19 development process and earlier.
Pandemics can destroy communities, societies, and countries in the aggregate. But corporations that manufacture the medicines and tools necessary to combat the pandemic have a vested interest in continuing but managing the pandemic for maximizing their profits.
It is not difficult to infer that that is exactly what is happening. As people worldwide are dying and spreading different COVID variants for the lack of vaccines, western countries debate whether to suspend vaccine patents. In other words, they are accumulating massive profits with delays.
Negotiations between WTO member nations on the language of a waiver are ongoing and could take months. European nations have already voiced their opposition to a waiver. Germany argues that capacity and quality assurance, not intellectual property rights, are causing production restraints, while French President Emmanuel Macron has said that increasing export and production of the vaccines and their ingredients would be the best way to boost global vaccination rates. Given that the WTO is a consensus-driven body, it is difficult to predict what the actual text of any waiver would look like, although, given European opposition, it is likely to be less far-reaching than the original proposal by India and South Africa. For now, we’ll have to wait and see.
Ironically, when one examines the intellect behind the advanced technologies of the western countries, it is clear it has always been a result of people from all over the world. As such, a give-back to the world is the only moral thing to do.
Chris Hayes illustrated an immediately visible act by private corporations. It shows the complete lack of morality. It would make the unfettered capitalist economist Milton Freidman proud.
The conceptual foundations of the current version of American capitalism are found in Milton Friedman’s well-titled 1970 New York Times Magazine article “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase its Profits.”
Friedman meant this provocative thesis quite literally. In his view, which has since become the dominant perspective in American law and finance, corporate shareholders should be understood to own the company and its executives should be seen as their hired help. The shareholders, as individuals, can obviously have a variety of goals they favor in life. But their common goal is to maximize the value of their shares.
Therefore, for executives to set aside shareholder profits in pursuit of some other goal like environmental protection, racial justice, community stability, or simple common decency would be a form of theft. If reformulating your product to be more addictive or less healthy increases sales, then it’s not only permissible but actually required to do so. If closing a profitable plant and outsourcing the work to a low-wage country could make your company even more profitable, then it’s the right thing to do.
COVID rapid tests could save thousands of lives in the U.S because they will allow the infected to quarantine. It turns out the test can cost about 80 cents to manufacture. The United Kingdom and many other countries give it out for free. Others sell it from $1 to $3.
In the U.S., that price is between $20 and $25. Huge profits on our backs after the previous administration and its cohort criminally handled the pandemic.
I guess the corporations are doing what Milton Friedman preaches. If they don't charge whatever the market will bear, it is theft of the shareholder's gain.
It is obscene that a pandemic, your cancer cure, your diabetes treatment, or any other medical problem is dependent on maximizing the income of the few who are actual shareholders. But that is our economic system.
Remember, Trump and other bought politicians are responsible directly for the deaths of hundreds of thousands from this pandemic. Most importantly, our economic system is implicitly murderous. It forces the protagonist in this system to maximize profits at all cost, humanity, be damned.
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Nicolle Wallace skewers TX GOP & Greg Abbott ‘Pro disease & Death Indifferent’ ‘anti-science.’
Nicolle Wallace did not hold back in her honest description of what the Republican Party has become by enumerating its evil deeds.
Former Republican operative and MSNBC Host of Deadline White House Nicolle Wallace continues to castigate her former party appropriately. Like most of us, she is taken aback by the gall of Texas Republican politicians. Ultimately she pointed out some facts that should be at the tip of every Democrat's tongue.
Wallace first enumerates the draconian laws the Texas GOP passed or are about to pass.
"Let's examine today's Republican priorities with Texas leading the way," Nicolle Wallace said. "Those new Texas policies include the most restrictive abortion law in the country outlawing abortions after six weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest and where fellow citizens can receive a ten thousand dollar bounty for turning in anyone who performs or aids and abets an abortion. There's the law allowing any Texan, and we mean any Texan above the age of 21, to carry a handgun in public without training and without a license. Texas also enacted a law that limits school discussions on our country's history regarding race and racism. There's a new law requiring professional sports teams to play the national anthem at home games. And about that restrictive voting measure which now bans 24-hour and drive-through voting, empowers partisan poll watchers, and restricts voting by mail. It will soon become law while carving out space as the nation's most anti-choice governor."
Nicolle went all to point out the inconvenient truth about GOP's false claim to the pro-life moniker.
"Texas's Greg Abbott cannot lay claim to being pro-life," Wallace said. "No, not by a long shot. The Texas Governor's reckless disregard for the health of his citizens is decidedly pro-disease and death-indifferent for those living in Texas, including that state's children, while asking for help in his state's overflowing ICUs. Abbott (and most Republicans) is stridently opposed to life-saving measures like vaccine and mass mandates, and that's even as the virus surges in Texas schools turning Texas children into the latest victims of Abbott's anti-science worldview, all of this adding up to a state whose governing policies don't match the will of its people."
She said what had to be said. And coming from a former Republican will engage a tiny slice.
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Matthew Dowd: This is how Democrats beat a sagging Texas Governor Greg Abbott & failed Republicans
Former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd and new Texan is working hard to elect Democrats. He gives a recipe to defeat Greg Abbott.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is in political trouble, according to current polls.
Gov. Greg Abbott had the lowest approval rating since February 2016 and his highest disapproval numbers during his tenure as governor, The Texas Politics Project’s August polling found.
The poll queried 1,200 registered voters in Texas, finding that 50 percent disapproved of Abbott’s job performance and 41 percent approved. Nine percent didn’t know or did not have an opinion, the lowest such number of Abbott’s time in office. The margin of error was 2.83 percent, and the poll was conducted from Aug. 20 through Monday, Aug. 30.
Matthew Dowd points out that the governor is vulnerable.
"He is exceedingly, in my view, vulnerable," Dowd said. "But he has to be vulnerable to the right candidate with the right message and a good campaign. And this is where I have a tendency sometimes to get frustrated with Democrats who I'm advocating for who need to win every office they possibly can, especially here in Texas because it's the only way to save our population and save our republic is to do that."
Matthew Dowd then got into an important deficiency Democrats have got to work itself out of sooner rather than later.
"The problem is Democrats often seed the messaging ground to Republicans," Dowd said. "And what Democrats have a tendency to do is talk policy points, and process and Republicans talk values. And in a debate like that, voters ultimately vote based on values. They want to have policies they're concerned about, those things. But they want to know that you share the same values. Democrats have to start talking about all these issues, choice, COVID, all of these issues in a broad value context."
Dowd then made an important point that Democrats need to lean into as they tell the truth about the GOP.
"They should not cede the ground of pro-life," Dowd said. Republicans are not pro-life. They won't do anything about gun deaths. They won't do anything about COVID. They won't do anything about healthcare. They won't even expand Medicaid here where 90 of the costs would be borne by the federal government. ... Democrats have to get much much much much better, even Progressives, on this having a values-based argument about what the Republicans are doing are disconnected from American values and disconnected from the values us and a majority of us in Texas believe in."
He hit the nail on the head. We have a lot of work to do, but it is very doable.
Republican & Democratic Pundits think Texas anti-woman law will hurt Republicans in Election 2022
Ali Velshi had Republican Mark McKinnon and Democrat Cornell Belcher, political analysts who agreed that Texas' anti-woman bill would cost Republicans.
These two pundits, Republican Mark McKinnon and Democrat Cornell Belcher hit the nail on the head as they spoke to Ali Velshi on Texas' new draconian abortion law. Democrats must politicize what Texas Republicans have done to the nth degree. It is a winning issue because it is a decision that cuts across party lines. Polls indicate that the majority of Americans support women's right to control their own bodies.
Abortion has long been a contentious issue in the United States, and it is one that sharply divides Americans along partisan, ideological and religious lines.
Today, a 59% majority of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 39% think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. These views are relatively unchanged in the past few years. The latest Pew Research Center survey, conducted April 5 to 11, finds deep disagreement between – and within – the parties over abortion. In fact, the partisan divide on abortion is far wider than it was two decades ago.
In the latest survey, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are 45 percentage points more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to say abortion should be legal in all or most cases (80% vs. 35%). This gap is little changed over the last few years, but the current divide is wider than it was in the past. For instance, as recently as 2016, there was a 33-point gap between the shares of Democrats (72%) and Republicans (39%) who supported legal abortion in all or most cases.
It's clear. Enough Republicans along with Democrats and Independents will turn on the GOP if Democrats create the right narrative.
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