This dream will come true only if, and when the Masses awake and throw
off the spell cast upon them by the everlasting propaganda spun by the
Wicked Witch of the Rich.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/26/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
COVID-19: Our Leaders Are Terrified. Not of the Virus — of Us
March 24, 2020
Governments will try to conceal for a little longer the fact that capitalism
is entirely incapable of solving the very crises it
has created, writes Jonathan Cook.
By JonathanCook
Jonathan-Cook.net
You can almost smell the fear-laden sweat oozing from the pores of
television broadcasts and social media posts as it finally dawns on our
political and media establishments what the coronavirus actually means. And
I am not talking about the threat posed to our health.
A worldview that has crowded out all other thinking for nearly two
generations is coming crashing down. It has no answers to our current
predicament. There is a kind of tragic karma to the fact that so many major
countries — meaning major economies — are today run by the very men least
equipped ideologically, emotionally and spiritually to deal with the virus.
That is being starkly exposed everywhere in the West, but the U.K. is a
particularly revealing case study.
Dragging Their Heels
It emerged at the weekend that Dominic Cummings, the ideological powerhouse
behind Britain’s buffoonish Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was pivotal in
delaying the U.K. government’s response to the coronavirus — effectively
driving Britain on to the Italian (bad) path of contagion rather than the
South Korean (good) one.
According to media reports at the weekend, Cummings initially stalled
government action, arguing of the coming plague that “if that means some
pensioners die, too bad.” That approach explains the dragging of heels for
many days, and then days more of dither that is only now coming to a
resolution.
Jack Duncan🌹
@JackDunc1
This was 2 weeks ago. 1000s had already died all around the world, the WHO
was already begging government's to enforce distancing & to "test test
test." This gross negligence by the Johnson's gov should never be forgotten
nor forgiven. #UKlockdown
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Cummings, of course, denies ever making the statement, calling the claim
“defamatory.” But let’s dispense with the formalities. Does anybody really –
really – believe that that wasn’t the first thought of Cummings and half the
cabinet when confronted with an imminent contagion they understood was about
to unravel a social and economic theory they have dedicated their entire
political careers to turning into a mass cult? An economic theory from which
— by happy coincidence — they derive their political power and class
privilege.
And sure enough, these hardcore monetarists are already quietly becoming
pretend socialists to weather the very first weeks of the crisis. And there
are many months more to run.
Austerity Thrown Out
As I predicted in my last post, the U.K. government last week threw out the
austerity policies that have been the benchmark of Conservative Party
orthodoxy for more than a decade and announced a splurge of spending to save
businesses with no business as well as members of the public no longer in a
position to earn a living.
Since the 2008 financial crash, the Tories have cut social and welfare
spending to the bone, creating a massive underclass in Britain, and have
left local authorities penniless and incapable of covering the shortfall.
For the past decade, the Conservative government excused its brutalist
approach with the mantra that there was no “magic money tree” to help in
times of trouble.
The free market, they argued, was the only fiscally responsible path. And in
its infinite wisdom, the market had decided that the 1 percent — the
millionaires and billionaires who had tanked the economy in that 2008 crash
— would get even filthier rich than they were already. Meanwhile, the rest
of us would see the siphoning off of our wages and prospects so that the 1
percent could horde yet more wealth on offshore islands where we and the
government could never get our hands on it.
“Neoliberalism” became a mystifying term used to reimagine unsustainable
late-stage, corporate capitalism not only as a rational and just system but
as the only system that did not involve gulags or bread queues.
Not only did British politicians (including most of the Labour parliamentary
party) subscribe to it, but so did the entire corporate media, even if the
“liberal” Guardian would very occasionally and very ineffectually wring its
hands about whether it was time to make this turbo-charged capitalism a
little more caring.
Only deluded, dangerous Jeremy Corbyn “cultists” thought different.
Self-Serving Fairytale
But suddenly, it seems, the Tories have found that magic money tree after
all. It was there all along and apparently has plenty of low-hanging fruit
the rest of us may be allowed to partake from.
One doesn’t need to be a genius like Dominic Cummings to see how politically
terrifying this moment is for the Establishment. The story they have been
telling us for 40 years or more about harsh economic realities is about to
be exposed as a self-serving fairytale. We have been lied to – and soon we
are going to grasp that very clearly.
That is why this week the Tory politician Zac Goldsmith, a billionaire’s son
who was recently elevated to the House of Lords, described as a “twat”
anyone who had the temerity to become a “backseat critic” of Boris Johnson.
And it is why the feted “political journalist” Isabel Oakeshott – formerly
of The Sunday Times and a regular on BBC Question Time – took to twitter to
applaud Mike Hancock and Johnson for their self-sacrifice and dedication to
public service in dealing with the virus:
Jonathan Cook
@Jonathan_K_Cook
Spare a thought today for high-paid corporate journalists like this one who
are now being forced to work overtime to find creative ways to make the
government look good – and cover up their failure to hold the Tories to
account for years of austerity that ravaged health services
https://twitter.com/IsabelOakeshott/status/1242003234094493697 …
Isabel Oakeshott
✔
@IsabelOakeshott
Spare a thought this morning for health secretary @MattHancock who has such
enormous responsibility right now and is working crazy hours trying to help
the nation beat this. The hourly judgements he and @BorisJohnson have to
make are so difficult
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Be ready. Over the coming weeks, more and more journalists are going to
sound like North Korea’s press corps, with paeans to “the dear leader” and
demands that we trust that he knows best what must be done in our hour of
need.
Saved by the Bail-Outs
Wall Street, March 2012. (Michael Fleshman)
The political and media class’s current desperation has a substantive cause
— and one that should worry us as much as the virus itself.
Twelve years ago, capitalism teetered on the brink of the abyss, its
structural flaws exposed for anyone who cared to look. The 2008 crash almost
broke the global financial system. It was saved by us, the public. The
government delved deep into our pockets and transferred our money to the
banks. Or rather the bankers.
We saved the bankers — and the politicians — from their economic
incompetence through bail-outs that were again mystified by being named
“quantitative easing.”
But we weren’t the ones rewarded. We did not own the banks or get a
meaningful stake in them. We did not even get oversight in return for our
huge public investment. Once we had saved them, the bankers went right back
to enriching themselves and their friends in precisely the same manner that
stalled the economy in 2008.
The bail-outs did not fix capitalism, they simply delayed for a while longer
its inevitable collapse.
“The story they have been telling us for 40 years or more about harsh
economic realities is about to be exposed as a self-serving fairytale.”
Capitalism is still structurally flawed. Its dependence on ever-expanding
consumption cannot answer the environmental crises necessarily entailed by
such consumption. And economies that are being artificially “grown,” at the
same time as resources deplete, ultimately create inflated bubbles of
nothingness — bubbles that will soon burst again.
Survival Mode
Indeed, the virus is illustrative of one of those structural flaws — an
early warning of the wider environmental emergency, and a reminder that
capitalism, by intertwining economic greed with environmental greed, has
ensured the two spheres collapse in tandem.
Pandemics like this one are the outcome of our destruction of natural
habitats — to grow cattle for burgers, to plant palm trees for cakes and
biscuits, to log forests for flat-pack furniture. Animals are being driven
into ever closer proximity, forcing diseases to cross the species barrier.
And then in a world of low-cost flights, disease finds an easy and rapid
transit to every corner of the planet.
The truth is that in a time of collapse, like this decade-long one,
capitalism has only “magic money trees” left. The first one, in the late
2000s, was reserved for the banks and the large corporations – the wealth
elite that now run our governments as plutocracies.
The second “magic money tree,” needed to deal with what will become the even
more disastrous economic toll wrought by the virus, has had to be widened to
include us. But make no mistake. The circle of beneficence has been expanded
not because capitalism suddenly cares about the homeless and those reliant
on food banks. Capitalism is an amoral economic system driven by the
accumulation of profit for the owners of capital. And that’s not you or me.
No, capitalism is now in survival mode. That is why Western governments
will, for a time, try to “bail out” sections of their publics too, giving
back to them some of the communal wealth that has been extracted over many
decades. These governments will try to conceal for a little longer the fact
that capitalism is entirely incapable of solving the very crises it has
created. They will try to buy our continuing deference to a system that has
destroyed our planet and our children’s future.
It won’t work indefinitely, as Dominic Cummings knows only too well. Which
is why the Johnson government, as well as the Trump administration and their
cut-outs in Brazil, Hungary, Israel, India and elsewhere, are in the process
of drafting draconian emergency legislation that will have a longer term
goal than the immediate one of preventing contagion.
Western governments will conclude that it is time to shore up capitalism’s
immune system against their own publics. The risk is that, given the chance,
they will begin treating us, not the virus, as the real plague.
