Part II. Wars for SARS?
 
The capitalists who control the US Government are fighting this Global
War of Conquest for their own economic survival, not to benefit the SARS
virus.  But the effect is very much the same as if they were fighting
their wars for SARS.   The destruction of public health services and the
other policies set in motion by the capitalists have created the
conditions that not only allow deadly plagues like SARS to develop, they
make these plagues inevitable.
 
SARS is the third new fatal epidemic disease to emerge in the last
twenty years, and it is the most dangerous.  Unlike AIDS, SARS spreads
rapidly like the common cold that it is apparently related to. Even with
all the efforts to quarantine it, SARS cases have been on average
doubling every two weeks since the first infection in November. At this
rate, it could spread to the majority of humanity in ten months.  Since
it seems to have already escaped into the general population in China,
and possibly in Canada, it could spread even faster now unless means are
found to combat it.
 
Also unlike Ebola, SARS does not sicken its victims so rapidly that they
become incapable of moving about and spreading it.  It has a 10-day
incubation period until symptoms appear.
 
SARS does not kill everyone but its death rate is huge and it kills
quickly--in about two weeks after symptoms appear.  While newspaper
reports have quoted a 4% or 5% death rate -- dividing the dead by
reported cases-- matters are even worse. Since the virus is spreading so
quickly, many reported cases involved people who have not had SARS long
enough to die from it. IResearchers have now found that the death rate is about 2-=25%, even with the best treatment. With
the limited treatment available if a mass epidemic overwhelms available
hospitals, the death rate will probably be twice that. If such a disease
sweeps the world, it will be a catastrophe comparable to the Black Death
of the fourteenth century--hundreds of millions could die.  Even if SARS
is contained, there is good reason to believe that there will be more
such epidemics in the near future.
 
Capitalist looting creates the conditions for these epidemics in several
ways.  First, IMF-designed policies mandate high taxation of poor
peasants in order to drive them off the farms, creating a supply of
ultra-cheap labor in the exporting factories. In Africa, and now again
in China, these huge forced migrations allow animal-borne diseases from
the farms, which would have been isolated and burn themselves out in
small villages, to find vast numbers of  potential hosts in crowded
slums.
 
Second, the 16-hour work days, and squalid living conditions of the new
workers create enormous stress that weakens workers' immune defenses.
This large, often sick, population--in China involving 100 million urban
migrant workers-- is an ideal breeding ground for infectious diseases.
The great increase in the virus population in turn greatly increases the
rate of new mutations, and thus the generation of new epidemics.
 
Third, capitalist policies have gutted public health serves that could
catch and rapidly isolate new diseases before they can spread. Henk
Bekedam, a representative of the World Health Organization says that  in
China "the public health   system has collapsed over the past 10 to 20
years because the central government has not invested in health."
Concentrating investment in export industries, China gutted its rural
clinics.  It now has no way to stop the spread of SARS throughout its
hinterland and back into its cities. Premier Wen Jiabao, admitted that
the system was so inadequate an epidemic could spread “before we know
it” and “the  consequences could be too dreadful to contemplate”. Given
the interconnectedness of world trade there is no way that an
uncontrolled epidemic in Chain, home to one fifth of humanity, would not
spread to every other country on earth.
 
Not only does capitalist destruction of working conditions and public
health make new epidemics unavoidable, capitalist gutting of education
means that as the years pass, fewer and fewer doctors will even exist in
the future to fight new epidemics.
 
Finally, the mechanisms of repression and control that governments
around the world are using to defeat opposition to the looting cripple
the free and open discourse that can nip epidemics in the bud.  In
China, fear of expressing dissent has become fear of reporting any form
of bad news.  The secrecy that Chinese official enveloped around the
SARS epidemic allowed it to spread initially.  The secrecy, the
suppression of dissent, the attack on civil rights, on the right to
speak out, now occurring in the United States is a first step toward the
same form of pervasive fear of dissent that could cripple efforts to
fight disease in the future. Civil rights are not a luxury--in today's
world, they are essential to survival.
 
SARS is the result--the inevitable result-- of three decades of
capitalist looting. Its origination is not "natural phenomenon", but a product of
capitalism. Those who have designed and enforced the policies of
"capitalist globalization"--the leaders of the world's corporations and
the leaders of the governments that serve them, especially the
government of the United States-- are directly responsible for the death
of every SARS victim.
 
The War of Conquest in the Middle East greatly worsens all the
conditions needed for the spread of epidemics.  With hospitals essential
wiped out, there is no way available to isolate and treat SARS vicimts
if the disease reaches Iraq--or even worse, Afghanistan.  While the
conquerors retreat into their protective gear, Iraqis will be
decimated--spreading the disease to neighboring countries.
 
If SARS is stopped before a global pandemic ensues, the destruction of
Iraqi public health and education will mean that with each passing year
it will be more vulnerable to future epidemics, and may well become a
breeding ground for such epidemics itself.  And that picture will be
multiplied around the globe as the War of Conquest destroys other
nations. The result will be an accelerating cycles of destruction of
culture, essential  services and living standards, leading to waves of
epidemics, with no end but, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg " as in
ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery."
 
Today,  the process that took six centuries to reduce Rome from
invincible military power to ruins, amidst plagues that eventually
destroyed 90% of its population, will be shortened to a few decades at
most, as the sacking of Iraq was compressed to a few days.