We're going to talk today about a very basic issue, life and death in America. We are going to talk about health and safety in America. This is going to be a rather informal lecture. It's not the absolute last statement about the subject, but it is going to try to be a prophetic voice about key problems and key solutions relating to health and safety in America.
SICKNESS IN A SICK SOCIETY
Currently America is in the middle of the greatest health crisis in its history, the coronavirus. But it's very important to understand that America was infected by a whole series of other viruses before this occurred. Indeed America was and is a very sick society and the American people are very sick in many ways, a lot of them because of failures in leadership at the top.
IN AMERICA, LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE ARE UNDER-INSURED
AND CANNOT AFFORD A $400 EMERGENCY
In the first place, America is the only modern state that doesn't see healthcare as a right. As a result, millions upon millions of Americans do not have health insurance and even larger numbers are underinsured. It doesn't do a whole lot for a working person to have an Obamacare policy with a $7000 deductible since a very high percentage of working people in this country can't afford a $400 emergency expense. Just do the math on that. 400 versus 7000. No, it doesn't work. So that's an inherent virus. That's an inherent sickness from day one.
MASS EPA CUTS IN 1980
LEAD TO MORE ENVIRONMENTAL AND CHEMICAL HEALTH THREATS
Now it just gets worse from there. Since 1980, with the arrival of Reagan, there have been massive budget cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, very important to understand that these have been bipartisan. Carol Browner, Clinton's incompetent EPA administrator, is probably one of the worst administrators prior to Trump, of the EPA. Barack Obama put through some of the worst budget cuts in the history of the EPA. The end result has been a form of unilateral disarmament by the US government in the face of chemical and environmental threats that are just as deadly as all the so-called terrorists America spends $700 billion supposedly protecting itself against.
FALSE IDEAS OF SAFETY VERSUS REAL IDEAS OF SAFETY
When the virus struck in America, and we have been studying this since 1995, it was very obvious from 1995 on that America was vulnerable to this sort of virus, but politically America could not get its act together. So we had a $1 trillion F 35 jet fighter program that doesn't work. We had $15 billion aircraft carriers that don't work we had spent $6 trillion invading other people's countries and killing their civilians for wars that failed and again.
THE BIPARTISAN PUSH FOR IMPERIALISM
It's very important to understand that this is been very bipartisan. Bush started a lunatic campaign of imperialism after 911 with the unprovoked attack on Iraq, which we all know turned into a total catastrophe. But you gotta look at Obama. He bombed more foreign countries than any president since World War II. You got to look at some mentally deranged psychopath like his UN ambassador, Samantha Power, was constantly howling her head off about more war, more killing and putting forth all sorts of self-righteous lies and garbage, and just basically lunatic garbage to justify all the mass murder that she was defending.
NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE IS NATIONAL SECURITY
So this is a virus, these sick ideas are viruses, these are our illnesses, these are social illnesses at the top. Now getting back to health, you have the basic problem that you don't have national health insurance and the only solution to that is to give everybody national health insurance. We favor Medicare for all, but if somebody else can think up a way to do it without Medicare for all, we will support that. Do whatever it takes. Whatever it takes because thousands upon thousands of people are getting killed by the status quo. Yes this is a military situation. Now as a result of the total mismanagement of the coronavirus situation, the death toll is about to crack 100,000 That's right. So in another words, America will have lost more people due to healthcare incompetence than it lost in Vietnam. In fact, almost twice as many people will have been killed in a mere matter of months than were killed in the entire Vietnam War. And this number is sure to grow. And again, this is not an accident.
THE COMPLETE MISMANAGEMENT OF THE PANDEMIC
Trump put in charge of the CDC a right wing religious extremist rather than a qualified scientist and so on and so forth. In terms of other people who were put in office, they were completely unfit to handle the issue of the nation's health. So, again these are very logical results. There was no plan on hand, no supply of surgical masks, no supply of protection equipment, total incompetence in developing a test and so on and so on and so forth. These are very logical results.
THE BASICS ON PROTECTING ONE'S HEALTH
Now we are not doctors and we don't pretend if you are ill to know exactly what should be done for you. But we can go over a number of basic points and we're not getting into all the details about what to do about the virus and so on so forth.
Our focus is on another basic issue, which is health itself. A basic issue is getting enough sleep, getting enough exercise, getting enough fresh air.
THE TOXICITY OF INDOOR AIR
Now the latter point is a particularly horrifying reality. Indoor air is much more heavily polluted than outdoor air for a variety of reasons that are discussed on our website, particularly the lack of regulation of chemicals, which is near-total in this country, and the success of various chemical companies to get ridiculous levels of so-called flame retardant put in furniture via very clever lobbying campaigns. That is a further source of poison indoors. Now the indoor air situation has been somewhat improved as a result of the huge series of lawsuits against the carpet industry and a liberalization after 2000 of the mandate for chemicals in furniture, but it is still very bad and because the EPA budget has been so emasculated we really don't know what's going on.
The people of America are lab rats. That's right. You out there, you're a lab rat for corporate America. You're a lab rat for the ruling elite.
Thanks to environmental laws in the 70s and so on, outdoor air is significantly cleaner than it was in the 1970s. Lead has been taken out of gasoline. There's been a comprehensive campaign that has reduced outdoor air pollution, though the chemical aspects of this, we do not know, but outdoor air is much cleaner than indoor air in general. Though in certain areas, that's not the case.
So one thing to do is to buy yourself an electric fan. If you don't have one, to get more outdoor air into your home.
Unfortunately, the directives on how to supposedly survive the coronavirus have been a study in incompetence from day one on both the part of the World Health Organization and the CDC. The CDC originally told everybody not to wear a mask they said it was ridiculous. Some people are trying to make Mr. Fauci into some kind of god. Mr. Fauci is been all over the place. First he said don't wear masks. Now he says where masks. So on and so forth. So you really can't rely on these people. We are in favor of people wearing masks. We're not going to go against that. And we're not going to get into that debate.
What we are going to say is staying indoors, without getting fresh air, is potentially just as dangerous as the virus. Yes, for your health.
And you need to get exercise. That's important. It's also important to get enough sleep. If you are indoors. If you are eating Domino's pizza. Whatever is your regular meal via take-out with high cholesterol high-fat. If you're not getting exercise this is a threat to your health too.
SEALED GLASS COFFINS
So we are living a basically unhealthy society and you need to look at the top of society, the plutocratic leaders, the money lords. You look at billionaire's row in New York, these super luxury apartments, you can spend $60 million or more for one of these apartments. And guess what? You can't open the windows. You're buying yourself a sealed glass box, which is totally crazy when you think about it. Which is totally crazy, but that shows you the kind of people who are in charge.
That's also true for the office buildings, where the money lords preside over the economy, these are favored in San Francisco where Richter, the guy who invented the Richter Scale, said that no high-rises should be built. And there are very serious questions about whether all these high-rises could survive an earthquake, but that's where the big high-tech money lords have built all their high-tech, high-rise buildings, which are sealed glass boxes. If you look at a lot of the office buildings for the big high-tech corporations, these are sealed glass boxes. In other words, the only air that these places get comes from centralized air-conditioning systems. Think of how crazy that is. If it's 70° outside, and the sun is shining, if you had a normal building, you open the windows, an obvious point. If you're in one of these sealed glass buildings, you have to run the air conditioning all day long because there's something known as the sun. Yeah think about that. What if I the sun heats up the building and all this is a centralized system where you can get no fresh air. Obviously this is not part of an overall unhealthy situation.
MORE BASIC HEALTH ADVICE
So getting back to what you can do, get more exercise, get more fresh air, that's important, don't eat a lot of high-fat, high cholesterol foods. Again, we are not doctors, we cannot tell you what exactly your diet should be. There are websites that can give you some insight on that. We are not but going to pretend to be medical experts about your situation. We are going to claim and claim correctly that there are basic issues of health that are not being addressed in the middle of this crisis.
THE CRISIS OF THE CORONAVIRUS IS A CRISIS OF THE SYSTEM
This crisis is a crisis of the system. It's not a crisis of the Coronavirus. The Coronavirus is only so powerful because the system is so screwed up. In a sane society, this whole situation would've been dealt with and would've been dealt with successfully and would've been stopped. This crisis has been botched up at every single level of the government and at the level of the WHO. The virus is a virus of the system.
Now, things are likely to get quite a bit worse before they get better, because the economic aspect of this whole situation is going to kick in and a lot of businesses aren't going to be able to survive what's coming. We've already had a series of major bankruptcies. A lot more are going to come and we haven't even begun to discuss the mental health aspects of this, which are horrendous, and this is a society where a large number of the people are already self-medicating vis-à-vis alcohol happy pills and so on and so forth.
IT IS TIME TO DEMAND HEALTHCARE
We would urge people, and we don't pretend to be mental health experts, but the point is your life is in danger and you need to mobilize politically to demand healthcare. It's a matter of life and death. You need to mobilize politically to demand safe working spaces and the industrial sweatshop of the world has been replaced by the high-tech digital sweatshop where people are locked inside buildings where they can't open the windows and are breathing poisonous air. So one sweatshop has been replaced with another sweatshop. That's right. So you need to demand that it's not going to be given to you. That's why we see growing social unrest coming as people object to being injured and killed. We will discuss this whole situation further, but we felt it a moral imperative to do this lecture. Stay tuned for more. That's all we have to say for today.