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Monday, February 22, 2021

The Mars rover and the Texas catastrophe: Scientific possibility vs capitalist reality

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/20/pers-f20.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

Bryan Dyne
a day ago

The successful landing of the Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars is a scientific and technological achievement of the highest order. Eight years of meticulous planning—involving thousands of people spanning multiple countries across three continents—were spent to gently place the 1,025-kilogram astrobiological explorer on the surface of another world.

Perseverance is the latest in a series of orbiters, landers and rovers that have studied a planet that has long fascinated humans. As all the past missions have shown, the Martian surface is a dry, cold, arid place. Yet for all its current hostility to known life, it can feel very familiar. It has dunes, storms, ice caps, mountains, dried-up streams, rivers and lake beds. There are even quite spectacular sunsets, the shades of blue seen on Mars contrasting beautifully with the reds and yellows seen on Earth.

Perseverance imaged by its rocket pack while being lowered to the surface of Mars, about two meters above touch down. Plumes on the side of the rover can also be seen, dust kicked up by the rockets. This is the first ever image from a landing as it was happening, and many more are expected to be released in the coming weeks, along with audio of the entire entry, descent and landing sequence. Credit: NASA/JPL/Mars 2020

After a 203-day journey, the seven advanced instruments on board the rover have already begun to transmit data and images back home. While the first photos taken by Perseverance are primarily used as part of the process to ensure the rover is functioning as it should, one image of its front left wheel reveals porous rocks. On Earth, such formations are caused either by volcanoes, which means they will provide insight into Mars’ geological history, or through sediment deposits in rivers and oceans, which means the rocks might have been formed by ancient water that was once on the red planet.

A great deal was also learned through just the landing itself. NASA proved for the second time (the first being the Curiosity landing) that it is possible to land a rover by gently lowering the vehicle to the Martian landscape via skycrane, an enormously complex and risky maneuver, but one which is necessary to bring so many cameras, analyzers and other tools to study the alien world. The upgraded navigational cameras and software used to guide the rover to its landing site were able to autonomously steer clear of boulders, slopes and cliffs that dot Jezero Crater, while placing Perseverance very close to many of these scientifically interesting features.

Further investigations are already being planned. The full suite of instruments will be brought online in the coming days. A helicopter to be flown on another planet will be flown in late April or early May, another first for planetary exploration. It will provide clues to the many questions researchers back on Earth have about Mars, above all, wondering whether or not the planet once harbored life.

The HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took a photo of the landing while the parachute was deployed. The orbiter was also at the same time relaying telemetry from the rover to Earth, because direct signals at the very end of the landing sequence were blocked by Mars. The small circle is the final landing site of Perseverance. Credit: NASA/JPL/Mars 2020

The Perseverance landing is a powerful demonstration of human cognition, science and reason. It is a powerful rebuke to the incessant contemporary glorification of irrationalism and a mighty vindication of the materialist understanding of the world. There are, in fact, objective laws of nature that humans can comprehend and act upon.

The significance of the achievement stands in stark contrast to the social disaster in the US and throughout the world. Two days before the rover touched down, an 11-year-old boy froze to death in Texas during a snowstorm that has collapsed the heating and electrical infrastructure of virtually the entire state.

Dozens more have died on the street or in their homes, while millions lack food, power or running water. Hospitals are being forced to shut down because their utilities are not functioning. Thousands are forced to seek shelter in the few places that do have power, such as community centers and gymnasiums, which in turn threatens to further spread the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. People are being forced to choose between death by frostbite or contagion.

And the pandemic still rages on in Texas, the US as a whole and internationally. Every day, more than 11,000 men, women and children succumb to the virus, including more than 2,000 just in the US. The death toll since January 2020 stands at a half million in the United States and more than 2.4 million worldwide.

The population has an instinctive understanding of this contradiction. In response to a chauvinistic tweet from US President Joe Biden about Perseverance, which claimed that “with the power of science and American ingenuity, nothing is beyond the realm of possibility,” many responded along the lines of: “Not even ending an epidemic? Not even an end to concentration camps? Not even a solution to a climate catastrophe? Not even providing aid to those whose lives are destroyed by freezing winter?”

More broadly, workers know that the methods employed to land a one-ton vehicle on Mars and make other scientific and technical advances should be used to solve social and economic problems, to provide sufficient jobs, education, shelter and food for all humanity. Society absolutely has the capacity to guard against global pandemics, environmental recklessness and nuclear-armed militarism, all of which threaten the life of every human on earth.

The first color image from the Martian surface by Perseverance reveals a now familiar red landscape, with Perseverance casting a shadow onto the ground and some of Jezero Crater’s many rocky outcroppings in the distance. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Mars 2020

If the care that went into making and landing Perseverance had been put into preventing the pandemic, the coronavirus would be remembered as a tragic outbreak largely contained in China that killed thousands, not the largest global public health crisis in a century, which has killed millions.

But the collaboration towards a common goal, driven by the pursuit of knowledge and the general betterment of humanity, stems from the working class and the more thoughtful layers of the intelligentsia, embodied in all those who worked on the Mars rover. Such humane thinking is totally alien to the world’s ruling elite, which flaunts its backwardness, vulgarity, ignorance and parasitism.

The rich instead squander trillions of dollars, yuan, yen, rubles and euros to enrich themselves and wage war around the globe. The $2.7 billion it has so far cost to build, launch and operate Perseverance is less than what was “earned” every week last year by Elon Musk—who moved to Texas to take advantage of its deregulation—and a quarter of the price of just one of the latest generation of aircraft carriers ordered by the Pentagon.

Driven inexorably by its internal contradictions, capitalism is leading mankind toward fascism and war. These same contradictions, however, also produce the basis for the overthrow of capitalism: the international working class.

Such objective processes must be brought into the consciousness of workers, and the growing opposition of millions of workers and youth around the world must be transformed into a political movement that has as its aim the establishment of an internationally coordinated, rationally directed system of economic planning based on equality and the satisfaction of human need: socialism.

BIDEN’S FIRST MONTH MARKED BY BROKEN PROMISES

By Alan Macleod, Mintpress News.

February 20, 2021

https://popularresistance.org/bidens-first-month-marked-by-broken-promises/

Biden Kicked Off His Campaign By Telling Wealthy Donors That “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change” Under His Presidency.

After one month in office, it appears as if that is one campaign promise he is likely to keep.

One month into his presidential career and Joe Biden has already left a trail of broken promises on progressive legislation. Yesterday, it was reported that the president held a closed-door meeting with a group of mayors and governors. At the first sign of pushback from Republicans in the room, he immediately dropped his support for the $15 minimum wage on the basis that he needed bipartisan support to pass it. Given that Democrats control the House, Senate, and the White House, this position seems surprising. “I really want this in there but it just doesn’t look like we can do it because of reconciliation,” the 78-year-old Delawarean said, according to those present. “Right now, we have to prepare for this not making it,” he added. As Politico noted, there was no further negotiation on the minimum wage after that; the topic was simply dropped.
Trump-Lite At Home And Abroad

The president’s professed desire to end the war in Yemen has also been liberally watered down. In his statement, Biden stressed that support for Saudi “defensive” operations would continue and that only “relevant” arms sales would be stopped. This was essentially a return to the Obama-era position on Yemen.

Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin spoke with the Saudi defense minister and assured him of the United States’ continued commitment to their partnership. Austin went on to publicly condemn alleged Houthi attacks in Saudi Arabia, reiterating that the U.S. would help Riyadh defend its borders. Consequently, the worry is that the Saudi onslaught will merely be reframed as a defensive campaign, and business will continue as usual. On Iran, the president has declared that Trump-era sanctions will not be lifted, something that Iran considers a prerequisite for any negotiations on a new nuclear deal.

Student debt is a major problem in all 50 states. Between 2008 and 2015, total loan debt doubled, with many Americans now retiring without having paid off their debts. Biden is defying many powerful Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, in categorically rejecting a proposed debt forgiveness program of up to $50,000 per person. “I’m prepared to write off a $10,000 debt, but not 50,” Biden told a CNN town hall on Tuesday, insisting that he does not have the authority to do so, something strongly contested by many experts. This will no doubt disappoint 44.7 million student loan borrowers, who owe an average of around $32,000 each.

Worse still, on Wednesday White House officials walked back even the $10,000 figure, suggesting that the president would not do this through executive action but instead go into negotiations with Republicans with this as his first offer.

If there was one area many were confident Biden would be radically different from Trump it was immigration. However, the administration issued new guidelines for ICE yesterday that make clear that the president has jettisoned his previous commitments to halting deportations. The news was met with dismay from the American Civil Liberties Union, which stated that it represented “a disappointing step backward from the Biden administration’s earlier commitments to fully break from the harmful deportation policies of both the Trump and Obama presidencies.” Earlier this month, ICE deported 72 people, including 20 children as young as six months old, to protest-wracked Haiti.
Picking A Few Easy Battles

All of this comes on the heels of the stimulus check debacle, where Biden and other top Democrats promised that $2,000 checks would be sent out “immediately” upon a Democratic victory. Yet $2,000 turned into a means-tested $1,400 check, which is still yet to be agreed upon, with payments not expected until mid-March at the earliest.

The former vice-president has followed through on a number of promises to rein in the worst of the Trump administration, including rejoining the World Health Organization and rescinding bans on Muslims and on transgender military service. However, those measures will likely not be enough for most Americans. Biden began his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in June 2019 at a Manhattan hotel, telling wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” under his presidency. After one month in office, it appears as if that is one campaign promise he is likely to keep.

BIDEN’S HEALTH PLAN SHIFTS EVEN MORE PUBLIC DOLLARS INTO PRIVATE HANDS

By Margaret Flowers, Truthout.

February 20, 2021

https://popularresistance.org/bidens-health-plan-shifts-even-more-public-dollars-into-private-hands/

As the American Rescue Plan (ARP) winds its way through Congress, some progressives are hailing its health provisions as the greatest expansion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 10 years, while conservatives are claiming that it is a slippery slope to a national Medicare for All system. Democrats have decided to forego seeking Republican support for President Biden’s $1.9 trillion promise of relief to those suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic and recession by using the budget reconciliation process. This has Republicans worried the legislation will be used to advance the progressive agenda to expand government health care programs.

However, at the end of the day, while the bill may be used to strengthen some provisions in the ACA, it will not move the United States’s health care system any closer to the popular national improved Medicare for All system that we need. It is more likely to enrich private health insurers and delay broader health care reform.

To understand why, it is important to note that the ACA, passed in 2010, was crafted to prevent national improved Medicare for All, not to create a path toward it. Following the financial crash of 2008, nearly 50 million people in the United States did not have health insurance, primarily because the premiums were unaffordable. Something had to be done, and public support for a single-payer health care system, which would replace private health insurance with a universal Medicare-like system, was growing.

The medical-industrial complex — consisting of the private health insurance, pharmaceutical, hospital, and other related corporations — viewed single-payer as a threat to the industry’s bottom line and worked overtime to stop it. Health industry corporations and trade groups donated heavily to campaigns for federal office in 2008 and invested billions in lobbyists to shape the ACA in their favor. The Center for Public Integrity reports that a total of $3.47 billion was spent to double the number of health care lobbyists in Washington, D.C., in 2009. There were eight lobbyists per member of Congress. Millions were also spent on public relations campaigns to portray Medicare for All negatively and to convince people that what they really wanted was a choice of health insurance.

Progressive organizations also played a role in preventing national Medicare for All. Tens of millions of dollars were donated to establish a front group called Healthcare for America Now (HCAN), which was intentionally given a name similar to the national grassroots Medicare for All group, Healthcare Now. HCAN convinced advocates for universal health care that a single-payer system was not achievable, and that a more practical demand would be a public health insurance plan called a “public option.” It worked, and progressives became the loudest defenders of a bill that former Cigna executive Wendell Potter renamed the “Private Insurance Profit Protection and Enhancement Act” — even though it didn’t include a public option.
The ACA Made For-Profit Health Care More Powerful

While more people in the United States gained health insurance because of the ACA, the biggest winners were private health insurance, pharmaceutical companies and large hospital corporations. Private health insurers insisted throughout the reform process that people be mandated to purchase their plans, which is what the ACA did. The only way for the government to achieve that was to provide subsidies to cover health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs. For this, private insurers receive hundreds of billions of public dollars each year.

Despite this high spending, the private health insurance expansion only covered about one-third of the newly insured, around 7 million people. The vast majority of those who gained coverage did so through the Medicaid expansion, but even this enriched private insurance corporations. Since the passage of the ACA, the proportion of people in public health insurances, both Medicaid and Medicare, that are run by private health insurers has soared so that the major health insurers now receive most of their revenue from the government.

Pharmaceutical corporations also benefited. The increased number of people with health insurance expanded their market. At the same time, no controls were implemented to limit the prices of drugs. The rise in pharmaceutical profits as a result of the ACA far outstripped those of the health insurance and hospital industries.

And the ACA unleashed a wave of mergers and acquisitions throughout the medical-industrial complex. Hospitals consolidated into large chains and bought up physician practices and health facilities. These mergers were an intended outcome of the ACA under the belief that consolidation would lead to greater efficiency and lower prices. Instead, the mergers drove up health care costs as these institutions now wield greater bargaining power. The ACA ultimately made the for-profit parts of the U.S. health care system more powerful, and these are the industries we must take on to solve the health care crisis.
Time To Stop Throwing Money At A Failed System

Prior to the pandemic, the number of people in the United States without health insurance was about 30 million. That number has been rising steadily since 2017, especially for people aged 18 to 64. Millions more people lost their health insurance in 2020 due to the recession and pandemic, either because they lost their jobs or because they could no longer afford the health insurance premiums. The current number of people who are uninsured is unknown, but a recent poll found that nearly 30 percent of people in the United States lost their health insurance in 2020 and less than half of them regained it.

Health care is a top issue again, as it was in 2008, and support for national improved Medicare for All has grown as more people are witnessing the profound flaws of a health care system that prioritizes profits over health. So, what can we expect from the ARP?

When it comes to health care, we can expect more of the same. The Biden proposal, if Congress adopts it, would increase tax credits for purchasing private health insurance, expand the subsidies for out-of-pocket costs to people with higher incomes, subsidize the cost of COBRA (a program that allows people to maintain their employer insurance when they lose their job), provide more money to the health insurance exchanges, and provide incentives for states to expand Medicaid. This is throwing more money at a failed system that changes nothing fundamentally.

The Biden plan matches the requests of the medical-industrial complex. In this press release, a coalition of private health insurers and their lobby group, hospital corporations, physician organizations and the Chamber of Commerce laid out their priorities. Each of their priorities would funnel more public dollars to them either directly or indirectly while the impact on people’s ability to receive health care will fall far short of what is needed.

Once again, the private industries are being bailed out and the people are being sold out. Even though Biden campaigned on a public option, it is not in the plan. The Commonwealth Fund finds that the ARP leaves out people who live in states where they don’t qualify for Medicaid and don’t earn enough to purchase health insurance through the exchanges. A cynic might believe the Biden administration is less concerned about that population since the states that rejected the Medicaid expansion are majority-Republican states.

Most people who purchase private health insurance plans on the health insurance exchange will continue to face significant barriers to receiving health care. The plans have restricted networks that limit where people can go for care and have out-of-pocket costs of thousands of dollars before coverage begins. Subsidizing the cost of premiums doesn’t change the fact that many people don’t have the cash on hand to cover the copay or deductible required before they can get care.

None of these changes move the health care system closer to a national improved Medicare for All, and in fact, the ARP may make it more challenging to achieve it. The most obvious reason is that the ARP shifts even more public dollars into private hands. Another concern is that the ARP may result in cuts to Medicare. Politico reports that the “pay-as-you-go” rules required under the budget reconciliation process will result in reductions in spending in other programs. Restoring that funding requires passing legislation dependent on Republican support, which is not guaranteed to happen.

Medicare has been under attack over the past few decades, which is why advocates for single-payer health care promote improving it to expand benefits, get rid of out-of-pocket costs and do away with the need for supplemental insurance. Further deterioration of Medicare will make it less popular and provide ammunition for opponents to scare people away from Medicare for All.

Finally, the measures taken to shore up the ACA will be used as justification for not implementing broader changes to the health care system. The ARP will be hailed as the “greatest expansion of health care since the passage of the ACA.” The public will be told that the priority will be to make the ACA work, not replace the whole system with Medicare for All. This is what happened in 2010. And, as Robert Blendon states in Politico, emphasis will be put on what the ARP does to address the crisis of the pandemic through expansions of testing and vaccination, which will push the persisting overall health care crisis out of the discussion.

We cannot solve the health care crisis by tweaking the current complicated for-profit health care system. Throwing more money at it will cover more people, but it won’t cover everyone, and it won’t guarantee that people will get the health care they need even with insurance. Health care is a public good, not a commodity. It can’t be treated as both at the same time. They contradict each other.

While single-payer advocates are often told that we need to achieve Medicare for All through incremental steps, the reality is the smallest measure that can be taken to create a health care system that treats health as a public good is a national improved Medicare for All — a system that is universal, comprehensive in benefits, publicly financed and administered, and that removes profits. This will generate the savings in health care spending needed to cover everyone and build out the health care infrastructure so that everyone everywhere in the country has what they need to live a healthy life.

President Biden has already declared his opposition to Medicare for All. As it has been for every great achievement for social change in the United States, we must build a movement that moves Medicare for All from being impossible to being inevitable.