Possible Ebola Vaccine Withheld as Unprofitable

I AM WORKING on a detailed and somewhat intricate report that documents class warfare in and around Tacoma, Washington, where I am living the final years of my life. (It has nothing to do with the headlined Ebola story, which is immediately below.)  I had intended my piece, on which I started working last Friday, to be ready for posting Sunday evening. But at about 3 p.m. Sunday, while researching some government documents, I made a startling discovery that substantially broadens my focus and also demands comment from certain local officials. (Once again, writing for OAN comes ever closer to being a full-time job.) I can't say for sure when the report will be finished, but my hope is to publish it next Sunday, 2 November.

******

Meanwhile here is some outside agitation via other websites:

Reader Supported News republished a New York Times report that researchers developed a promising Ebola vaccine nearly a decade ago, but the prescription drug lords would not test it because it was not profitable enough.  Hence “Ebola Vaccine, Ready for Test, Sat on the Shelf”; hence too my contribution to the RSN comment thread:

Once again we see the innately murderous moral imbecility of capitalism.

Under its Ayn Rand coda of infinite greed as maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth – if we can't be exploited for profit, we're abandoned and left to die.

That explains not just the Ebola epidemic, but outsourcing, downsizing and the malicious re-impoverishment of elderly, disabled and minority peoples here in the imperial homeland.

And many times we're not merely abandoned. If the Ruling Class thinks we might be dangerous, we're gunned down, as in Ferguson.

Wake up, people; all these (deliberate) atrocities are the quintessence of capitalism in action. And as capitalism fulfills its tyrannical potential by maturing into unabashed fascism, its murderousness will only intensify...

******

Most appropriately given the above vaccine report and other comparable events, Thom Hartmann raised the question “Who Should an Economy Serve?”  I responded via the comment thread:

As we have learned from their methodical destruction of the New Deal, it is suicidal to allow any vestige of capitalism – or any capitalists – to survive. This harsh truth will be increasingly obvious in the apocalyptic world of ever-worsening shortages that is now our unavoidable doom.  Because of what capitalism is – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue (and thus the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth)  – it will always arise and in its quest for unlimited profits seek to destroy not just the common good but the environment itself. Capitalism – especially in its logical extensions as fascism and Nazism – is therefore the darkest most deadly evil ever spawned by our species.

 

The question, then, is what to replace it with. The purpose of government is to enable us to do collectively that which we cannot do individually. Anarchy, though emotionally attractive to the ignorant, is therefore doomed. It is destined, as in Somalia or Libya, to be self-destroyed by the same might-makes-right penchant for evil that produced capitalism, fascism and Nazism.  Any form of socialism – at least in the United States – is likewise doomed. This is because the conditioning of the entire USian population in the selfish, indeed self-obsessed principles of Ayn Rand individualism has created a population utterly incapable of collective thinking.  As a result, the politicians and bureaucrats universally operate from the everything-for-me-and-fuck-you values of the Ruling Class.  USian officials – men and women whom under socialism would presumably represent the people's interest – are thus as viciously self-serving as any megacorporation's chief executive.  We have literally been reduced to a nation of moral imbeciles – which means, because relentless selfishness now invariably trumps all other considerations – we have been rendered utterly incapable of any genuine sort of self-government. 

  

No doubt a strict Marxian educational program could, at least in the younger generations, reverse the inculcated selfishness that fuels capitalism and capitalist governance. Of all the forms of socialism, only Marxism offers the requisite ideological and intellectual discipline. But who would be the educators? Are there any USians who have not been irremediably tainted by capitalist greed? A very few, to be sure. But they are so few they will never be able to acquire the requisite power -- especially in a nation of people so morally depraved they willingly choose slavery rather than give up the modern "conveniences" that are destroying our planet and dooming our species to extinction.

 

I will of course continue working on behalf the cause of socialism because, even in old age,  that is who and what I am. But I will never again inflict heartache on myself by allowing myself to be seduced by the self-indulgence of hope. 

******

Plus I heartily recommend you read this Consortium News critique of how The New York Times functions as the de facto propaganda agency http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/25/treating-putin-like-a-lunatic/ for the U.S. Ruling Class and its puppet government in Washington D.C. A world-class newsman, Robert Parry's most telling paragraph is also his lead: “When reading the New York Times on many foreign policy issues, it doesn’t take a savant to figure out what the newspaper’s bias is. Anything, for instance, relating to Russian President Vladimir Putin drips of contempt and hostility.”

We owe Parry a huge debt of gratitude. Without him, without other men and women like him, the Fourth Reich's privatized version of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Truth would have long ago reduced us all to abject ignorance.

LB/19-26 October 2014

 

-30-