Warning Something Big Is About To Happen In America The MARTIAL LAW Is Coming – 100% Chance It Will Happen ( RED LIST & BLUE LIST )
August 4, 2022
The Coronavirus War Economy Will Change the World
When societies shift their economies to a war footing, it doesn’t just help them survive a crisis—it alters them forever.
Our campaign against the disease most clearly recalls wartime emergencies in the urgent need to expand production and care. As COVID-19 cases overwhelm intensive care units around the world, we need more test kits, hospital beds, ventilator machines, masks, and protective clothing—lots of them, fast. Expanded emergency care capacity is encountering supply bottlenecks, for instance of the chemical reagents used in testing, and the looming shortage of trained medical personnel. The U.S. government’s invocation last week of the Defense Production Act (DPA), a Cold War law allowing it to prioritize and allocate resources to help expand private industries in strategic sectors, is a step on this road to constructing a larger medical mass-production base.
But as historian Tim Barker points out, the DPA is not the only model for such resource mobilization, or even the most effective one. There are models less reliant on the private sector than the DPA; one important peacetime predecessor is the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration. This sort of public scheme would be able to put to work the large numbers of workers who are facing unemployment in the coming weeks and months. Besides having positive economic side effects, such public employment expands state capacity and removes the need to rely on improvised exploitative labor practices, such as New York State’s use of prison labor to mass-produce hand sanitizer.
War-economic production is often conceived of as a national enterprise. But most war economies in the 20th century were deeply international in their supply lines. The medical mobilization against COVID-19 will have to be similarly global. There are currently about 173,000 ventilators in the United States. In the short term, the increase in American needs alone will probably exceed the entire global annual production of 40,000 to 50,000 machines. Given the complex nature and high sanitary requirements of ventilator assembly, even the DPA will only allow a small conversion of manufacturing plants for medical machine production. The shortage cannot be solved within national borders. East Asia, where the virus is under relative control, is where ventilators can be produced on a serious scale. Just as Lend-Lease and the Berlin airlift provided U.S.-produced war material for the rest of the world in the 1940s, so the realities of the global manufacturing base in 2020 suggest that mass airlifts of ventilators and machine parts from China will be needed to support adequate Western emergency care.
Beyond the immediate treatment of those infected with coronavirus, however, Western governments have almost universally shut down rather than ramped up production. As one financial analyst pointed out, “lockdown economics” is in many ways the exact opposite of the wartime economics of total mobilization. During both world wars, economic mobilization enrolled unprecedentedly large groups of male and female workers in mass production. The coronavirus’s disruption of supply chains and the social distancing measures of today, however, are currently putting millions of employees in the manufacturing and service sectors out of work.
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