Masked Marauding 0
Farhad Manjoo investigates why an item so simple as a medical face mask is suddenly unobtainable, and the answer is all about the next quarterly report. It’s what Harry Shearer’s guest on Le Show, Matt Stoller, referred to as the “financialization” of business.
Here’s a bit; follow the link for the rest.
I am sorry to say that digging into the mask shortage does little to assuage one’s sense of outrage. The answer to why we’re running out of protective gear involves a very American set of capitalist pathologies — the rise and inevitable lure of low-cost overseas manufacturing, and a strategic failure, at the national level and in the health care industry, to consider seriously the cascading vulnerabilities that flowed from the incentives to reduce costs.
