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Imperium EU

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
288 Seiten
Englisch
treditionerschienen am02.09.2021
Since the end of World War II, the European Union has been a joint creation of the victorious USA and Western European corporations, banks and newly founded Christian, then also conservative, liberal and increasingly also social democratic parties. The institutional consolidation since the preliminary stages in the 1950s was characterized by the military and economic dual character: first by NATO and the Marshall Plan, later by the parallel 'eastward expansion' of NATO and membership in the EU. The ever-expanding capital bureaucracy in the founding states of Luxembourg and Belgium (Commission, Parliament, judiciary, agencies, NATO headquarters) promotes private capitalist interests through privatization, subsidies, directives, court rulings, international treaties. Labor rights are deeply below the standard of Universal Human Rights and the International Labor Organization ILO. In particular, collective labor rights such as for unions and employee representation are not promoted. Thus, not only the EU member states, but also associated and candidate states have become a vast resource for low-wage labor for Western subcontracting services (automotive, pharmaceutical, retail, digital services) and growing, often illegal, migrant labor (truck drivers, construction workers, doctors, nurses, home care, prostitution, seasonal agricultural labor). What is covered up in the leading media: In all 28 EU states (also England before Brexit) and associated states many spontaneous as well as organized defensive struggles are taking place: For the first time in this book they are presented with examples from 12 states.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextSince the end of World War II, the European Union has been a joint creation of the victorious USA and Western European corporations, banks and newly founded Christian, then also conservative, liberal and increasingly also social democratic parties. The institutional consolidation since the preliminary stages in the 1950s was characterized by the military and economic dual character: first by NATO and the Marshall Plan, later by the parallel 'eastward expansion' of NATO and membership in the EU. The ever-expanding capital bureaucracy in the founding states of Luxembourg and Belgium (Commission, Parliament, judiciary, agencies, NATO headquarters) promotes private capitalist interests through privatization, subsidies, directives, court rulings, international treaties. Labor rights are deeply below the standard of Universal Human Rights and the International Labor Organization ILO. In particular, collective labor rights such as for unions and employee representation are not promoted. Thus, not only the EU member states, but also associated and candidate states have become a vast resource for low-wage labor for Western subcontracting services (automotive, pharmaceutical, retail, digital services) and growing, often illegal, migrant labor (truck drivers, construction workers, doctors, nurses, home care, prostitution, seasonal agricultural labor). What is covered up in the leading media: In all 28 EU states (also England before Brexit) and associated states many spontaneous as well as organized defensive struggles are taking place: For the first time in this book they are presented with examples from 12 states.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783347372696
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2021
Erscheinungsdatum02.09.2021
Seiten288 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse5604 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.12571389
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



Introduction

Corona pandemic in the EU

Pre-diseased systems: Health, economy, government

How fragile, in some places, and at the same time (seemingly) steadfast the US-led West is, can be seen in the Covid-19 pandemic. This also applies to the EU, with differences in the Member States. The dependent employees, and among them again the weakest, the low-wage workers, the mini-jobbers, the temporary workers, the single mothers, the small self-employed and the pseudo self-employed, the migrant workers and refugees - they were and are hit the hardest - health-wise and economically. By contrast, the plummeting people's parties with their emergency regime were able to take refuge in their ability to take action, initially. And BlackRock, Amazon & Co, with the complicity of the EU and national governments, are becoming even more powerful than before.

Pre-diseased health systems

EU health policy focuses on protecting and improving health, giving equal access to modern and efficient healthcare for all Europeans, and coordinating any serious health threats involving more than one EU country. Thus proclaims the EU.1 That sounds good, doesn't it?

However, via the internal market, the EU promotes the access of private investors. In Germany, groups such as Asklepios, Rhön-Kliniken, Helios/Fresenius, Sana, Ameos and the rehab group Median have not only formed large hospital chains, but also sell numerous medical services throughout Europe via subsidiaries. The largest hospital in Europe, Berlin's Charité, may be a public corporation, but it is radically privatized.2

Health became a commodity on the capitalist market. Nursing positions were cut, the number of treatments increased. Local care, treatment of common ailments - unimportant. There were no reserves when Covid-19 arrived. Not even the cheapest test kits, protective masks and protective clothing were available, not even for hospital staff.

The scarce, overworked nursing staff are poorly paid. Other employees in the health care system are paid even less: As many positions as possible are outsourced to precarious jobs at subcontractors, for patient transport - also within the clinics - for cleaning, kitchen, laundry, warehousing, processing of medical records, sanitation, janitorial services, as Charité has done with the help of McKinsey.3 Superficial cleaning under time pressure, even now with corona - hygiene especially in hospitals? Not so important.

Then, up to half of the beds in the hospitals are empty - as a pool for corona patients, who did not exist in this quantity. Short-time work was prescribed. This is the logically absurd consequence of shortage: demand increases, but the shortage is exacerbated. To that end, 1.6 million planned treatments and surgeries were interrupted or canceled in Germany for the seven weeks between the start of the pandemic measures on March 13 and May 4, 2020 alone.4 According to estimates by the ten external corona experts at the Federal Ministry of the Interior, as many as 2.5 million treatments were canceled for the period mentioned.5 How many people died and will subsequently die earlier because of this than if they had been treated?

How many there really are in total to date remains unexplained - that does not interest the Minister of Health and the responsible health authority and the state and private mainstream media, nor the oh so caring Chancellor. They remained fixated on corona with half-empty hospitals and GP surgeries and on expensive, unused intensive care beds for corona patients. There were also fewer screenings, fewer admissions to emergency departments, fewer doctor visits, for fear of infection. Alongside the corona hype, people were dying, unrecognized and uncounted.6

EU adopts flat rate per case from the USA

One element of the profit orientation is the flat rate per case, Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG). It was developed at the elite private US university Yale and introduced into the US healthcare system in 1983.

This does not reward remedial activity, but rather the most short-term and technology-intensive treatment of individual ailments. Every bed must be emptied quickly for the next operation. This was part of the neoliberal program of US President Ronald Reagan. This former Hollywood actor was ex-press spokesman of General Electric - the leading US manufacturer of medical equipment - and promised to cut costs. But the US health care system became the most expensive and antisocial in the world. It excludes a large, the poorer part of the dependent workforce and the unemployed, African Americans and Native Americans from medical treatments.

The EU funded the EuroDRG project. Smaller US-affine states, such as Ireland and the Netherlands, were the first to adopt the system. In Germany, the CDU/CSU/FDP government under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, during this time also advised by McKinsey in the Treuhandanstalt for the privatization of GDR companies, pushed through the Health Structure Act in 1993. This replaced the cost-covering principle with performance-based remuneration . In the meantime, flat rates per case now apply throughout the EU.7

Many sick people never make it to hospital

In 2004, the SPD/Green government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder added further measures to the flat-rate payments as part of Agenda 2010; Tony Blair with New Labour had shown the way in Great Britain. These include the relief of employers from social security contributions, also for health insurance, and the multiple burden on dependent employees through co-payments for medicines, screenings, treatments and hospital stays.

The upshot, even in normal times: many ailments remain undetected and untreated. The ardent corona crusaders are not fundamentally interested in the health of dependent employees, pensioners, unemployed. You are poor - you do not need all the teeth in your mouth, you can die earlier.

Privatized, bought science

Moreover, the EU is lulled into a sense of security by the top scientific authority on health, the Johns Hopkins University (JHU). The health institutes of this private US elite university are funded by the private foundations of multi-billionaires such as Michael Bloomberg, Stavros Niarchos and William Gates. It has far more funding than the World Health Organization (WHO) and the EU.8

This university produces the Global Health Security Index. It evaluates the health systems of all 193 UN states. The systems in the USA and Great Britain are ranked first and second: They are considered best prepared against pandemics! And the healthcare systems in EU countries such as France, Italy, Spain and Germany, in the upper rankings, are considered to be well prepared for all epidemics and pandemics!9

This is one of the reasons why not only the US government under President Trump, but also the EU and the governments of the EU states lulled themselves into a sense of security. The German Minister of Health, Jens Spahn, also claimed as late as the end of February 2020: No danger! They took the countermeasures firstly unprepared, secondly too late, thirdly incorrectly.10

After the 2007 financial crisis: Even more untreated illnesses

The health care systems in Italy, Spain and Greece have been below normal EU standards for a decade. On top of this, after the financial crisis, came the measures of the European Commission (COM), the IMF and the ECB (Troika): they demanded drastic cuts to save the indebted domestic banks: Not in the military budget, however, but in the social and infrastructure sectors. In the health sector alone, the Troika demanded 63 cuts from these states between 2011 and 2018: Lay off doctors and nurses, sell hospitals!11

The cuts in (contractual) wages, unemployment benefits and pensions demanded in addition by the Troika also mean that more and more medical treatments can no longer be afforded by dependent employees, the unemployed and pensioners.

EU: Eastern Europeans do not have to be healthy

In Eastern EU-influenced regions such as Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, the two-tier system was expanded even more brutally than in the West: The nouveau riche turn to private clinics for care. At the same time, the public health care systems fall into disrepair and remain underfunded. Monthly salaries for doctors and nurses here range from EUR 400 to 1,200 - with a cost of living similar to that in the rich EU states. Younger people emigrate, older staff in particular hold out, overstretched.

The recurring strikes by doctors and nurses in Poland and Croatia, for instance, are ignored by EU bodies. Meanwhile, the German health minister had younger employees poached from there to the hospitals of the richest EU state, for example from Kosovo. Eastern Europeans don't need to be healthy. European solidarity?

Collective self-blinding of virologists and epidemiologists

Virologists and epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University, the Robert Koch Institute and the Charité are probably not subjectively corrupt. They do not have to be handed envelopes with wads of money under the table. They have risen in the privatized health and research system, have state-related, systemically important functions. They are showered with praise, well paid, their institutions are financed by the state and at the same time receive private donations.

Mutual endorsement over decades, as with the mainstream economists. This is how the collective self-blinding of the ruling elite, its accomplices and its support staff comes about, in the scientific establishment...

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