For the price of one F-35, our government can buy around 6,000 ventilators. Now more than ever, Workers Need Healthcare, Not Warfare. The healthcare system in the U.S. is one that people are frightened to use. It is unconscionable that our government continues to pour money into weapons and war instead of funding life-saving PPE, healthcare coverage, medical research, building of hospitals, and the training of medical workers during the most alarming moment in modern time.
If one thing’s clear from the COVID19 pandemic, the working class is the essential class. As frontline heroes like nurses, grocery store clerks, postal carriers, sanitation workers, farmworkers and many others put their lives on the line to ensure America keeps running, corporations like Boeing are negotiating massive bailouts and our government is spending resources attacking other countries.
Boeing, a corporation that used its last bailout on stock buybacks, cut corners in production (costing worker lives in the process) to chase even higher stock prices, and gave a $23 million severance to a fired CEO in 2018, wants a massive coronavirus relief. At the same time, our government is weaponizing the virus by continuing to impose sanctions designed to brutalize working families in other countries that refuse to submit to Trump.
COVID19 is not only exposing our for-profit government’s failure to protect its own workers, but also its contempt of the international working class. We need powerful working class organizations that can fight back over the long haul. Only an economy based on international worker solidarity can prioritize the working class, keep us safe and effectively contain COVID19. Here are three ways you can join this struggle: