We have two examples of economic systems and of individual scientific workers and business people doing what they do that offer a instructive illustrations of why the US is so screwed up, and why it doesn’t have to be that way.
The first is the extraordinary new (if unfortunately named) James Webb telescope heading rapidly towards its parking orbit at the Lagrange point 1.2 where its telescope, reportedly 100 times more powerful than the already extraordinary orbiting Hubble telescope, will be able to show images of early galaxies formed only a short time after the Big Bang.
That telescope, which has had to go through nearly 400 automated or remotely controlled steps — in order — to open up from its fetal position crammed inside the oversized faring of a European-built Ariane rocket — was designed and built by scientists and engineers working on salary and launched on a rocket designed and built by a multi-European government agency. That is to say, nobody involved was a capitalist. Okay, the prime contractor for the satellite telescope is Northrop Grumman but that company is a Pentagon arms contractor, and as such, is actually as much a state-capitalist enterprise as any state enterprise in China or Russia. Payments are all sole sources by the government — in this case NASA — and pricing is what the government says it will be.
The whole process has gone flawlessly, aside from the usual delays in such mega projects, right before our eyes, even though nobody except the top execs of Northrop Grumman and some major shareholder/investors is getting rich from any of it. If all continues to go well, we will soon be seeing the results: incredible discoveries about the beginning of time itself and the universe’s creation, as well as, eventually, actual images of planets orbiting stars in our portion of the Milky Way, with the added ability to “see” what kinds of atmospheres they have, and perhaps if we’re lucky, any evidence of trace gases that would suggest life on some of them.
Now let’s look at the process of combatting the ongoing Covid pandemic. Both the US and the British government relied on private companies to produce vaccines as well as testing kits in a hurry. Four companies — Pfizer, Astra-Zeneca, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — delivered on the vaccines, though in Astra-Zeneca’s case, they tried to hide poor results in the rushed testing phase of their vaccine, not reporting on significant negative reactions some vaccine test recipients were experiencing. The other companies’ vaccines worked to varying extents (this author received the Moderna vaccine twice and a third time as a booster without a problem and has so far avoided getting Covid). But the rollout of these capitalist products has been a failure at ending the pandemic because they have all refused to release their patents to allow cheap generic vaccines to be mass produced by factories in countries like India and Brazil that have the facilities to do so and protect the bulk of humanity, preferring to reap the profits offered by selling their wares to the US government for distribution to just those countries willing to pay for the doses. (This after the critical research that enabled these companies to develop their vaccines so rapidly was done under billions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded research.)
The result of this greed is that most of the world (about 90% of the global population) is still unvaccinated, and is thus a massive breeding ground for ever more new variants of the original Covid 19 Sars-2 strain, which then come back to our shores able to dodge the new vaccines and reinfect us all.
While the corporate media in the US love to talk about the amazing success of US industry in quickly developing successful Covid vaccines, they never to mention that Cuba, one of the world’s few socialist countries, and one which has out of necessity developed a world-class bio-tech industry, all government-owned, has on its own, and in the face of a strangling US embargo on scientific equipment and supplies, developed not one but five different Covid vaccines. These Cuban vaccines, including a nasally delivered option, all tested in Cuba and Iran, have proven as good as US vaccines, and have been used to give Cuba one of the most vaccinated populations in the world, second only to the United Arab Emirates. 90% of Cubans have received one dose of vaccine and 83% have recieved two doses.
But Cuba is being prevented from making vastly more vaccine to provide to hard-hit and struggling Latin American countries. This is because the US has barred provision to the island nation of needed syringes and of the necessary adjuvants that extend shelf-life and improve the function of the anti-Covid sera — part of an appalling six-decade embargo of the country since its successful Communist revolution. Fortunately the World Health Organization is close to approving some of them, which would probably free up some resources to overcome this US blockade.
It’s probably fair to ask at this point: If US scientists and engineers can produce a huge complex technological marvel like the Webb telescope all while working on a tightly budgeted government project and on salary, why can’t ultra-capitalist super billionaire Elon Musk or the lucratively compensated execs at General Motors produce an electric car that doesn’t self-immolate like the Tesla parked in the driveway of a suburban home in my town of Maple Glen (that fire was so hot it destroyed the whole house along with the vehicle) or the Volts now being discontinued by GM because of their flawed and self-exploding battery systems?
Our so-called political “leaders” in Congress and the White House, whether Republican or Democrat, keep spouting their blather about the supposed wonders of America’s “free-enterprise” system, the need to allow wealthy people to earn a profit for their “creative risk taking,” and the need to reduce “onerous” regulations on their operations all, supposedly, for the alleged long-term good of society. Meanwhile, most American-made products are pure crap or if they work reasonable well, like Apple’s computers, are actually made outside the US in countries like China, by companies that are essentially state-owned with a patina of private shareholders.
Maybe what it will take for brainwashed US citizens to wake up to the fact that we’re all being lied to about the marvels of capitalism and the “essential” need for minimal regulation on employers and low-to-zero taxes on corporations and the rich, will be for the “socialist” Webb telescope to discover an advanced socialist-type society thriving on some distant planet around a nearby star — a place where they aren’t destroying their planetary home by promoting the fantasy of endless growth, don’t have obscenely wealthy plutocrats owning more than half the assets of the planet, and where everyone gets along without countries, tribes, national borders, racial animosities, wars and mass killing.
Maybe we Earthlings, on discovering such a wondrous place, would be inspired then to try and achieve the same state of harmony, peace and respect for our environment here on Earth. Nah! Sad experience suggests it is more likely our leaders would immediately set themselves the task of figuring out a way to build an invasion force to conquer and enslave those wimpy do-gooder alien beings and steal their planet’s resources.
Meanwhile, until we find such an distant society of alien socialists, enjoy the coming discoveries and wonders of the government-designed-and-built product of salaried US and European scientists and engineers, the Webb Telescope, and be sure to tell your bought-and-paid local Congressional delegation that you want the government to release the patents on all the taxpayer-funded private patents on Covid vaccines, and to stop blocking needed supplies to Cuba for mass production of their cheap and effective vaccines. In fact, tell them to end the generations-long embargo on Cuba altogether while you’re at it.
It should be noted here that the author, DAVE LINDORFF, a journalist who has written for decades as an independent journalist, usually for a pittance, is not and never has been driven by thoughts of getting rich. Rather, he is a reporter because he derives a sense of purpose from what he does, and to at least occasionally make a positive difference through his efforts. It is his belief that this is true for many of the world’s human beings.