Wealth and power inequality, seem to be increasing all the time. Inequality in wealth equals inequality of power. Due to the power inequalities, wealthy people continue to get tax breaks in times of crisis, they get legislation which suits them, they get special privileges and subsidies. So the inequality of wealth keeps growing without limit, when we all need to pull together. This is one of the aims of neoliberalism. The other is to protect corporations from democracy. We can summarise this by saying, neoliberalism supports the proposition, that only big business and big profit is good. Nothing else counts.
It appears that through right wing parties and media ownership, the wealth elites are setting up oligarchies through out the world, and carrying out disinformation campaigns, to support their power and distract people from the real causes of inequality and crises in living.
Inequalities of wealth, in capitalism, also equal inequalities of pollution. The wealthy are responsible for most of the world’s pollution through their earning, ownerships and lifestyles. They get to freeload pollution and ecological destruction onto poorer areas. They drive ecological breakdown and its side-effect of climate change. Wealthy companies continue to manage to get taxpayer subsidies for new fossil fuel fields, destroying agricultural areas, while dispossessing and poisoning local people. In Australia, they get all this and most pay more or less no tax.
It is likely that eco-system tipping points have started, such as release of methane from beneath permafrost, rapid temperature rises at the poles, and bleaching death of major coral reefs. Should the tipping points become established, then there is no going back. Systems out of equilibriium and heading for new equilibrium, or chaotic states, are hard, if not impossible, to return to normal.
Inequalities of wealth also distribute inequalities of resilience and capacity to avoid, or deal with floods, bushfires, droughts, pandemics and pollution. Poorer people suffer more substantially and for longer from ecological disasters, and appear to get less governmental help.
Inequalities of wealth and power, also mean that potential solutions to problems are corrupted. Corporations do Renewable Energy installations, ignore the needs of locals, and do not even power local communities. They fence off, perhaps destroy and privatise lands, and create inequalities when they pay royalties and rents to some, but not to others. This prevents any social transformation, lowers hope, and lowers the legitimacy of Renewables.
The Covid pandemic is not over. Where I live, in NSW, Australia, there have been 1485 deaths from Covid this year (March), according to my arithmetic. This is more deaths than for the whole of Australia last year. However, there is no longer any interest in reporting the trends – hence my arithmetic. There is no interest in reducing the deaths through simple public health measures, even less interest in preventing long Covid amongst working people, and there seem to be no fear about what could happen with new variants which defeat vaccines. In Australia we are no longer requiring people to have Covid tests to enter the country, so the new variants will spread. The trend seems to be that most wealthy people can work from home, and avoid some dangers, while poorer people (including hospital doctors) take the risks. Furthermore pandemics will not end with Covid. The possibility is high that worse pandemics will be transferred around the world by aeroplane, as we destroy more forests, and viruses which normally affect small mammals cross species and escape into the wider world.
Its as if we have decided that if we cannot suicide through ecological destruction and climate change, we should suicide through avoidable public health failures, and ignoring what is happening.
Warfare is another present danger which could escalate. Putin is threatening nuclear war. this means all other nuclear systems will now be on stand by, and ready to go. I suspect Putin is the kind of person that should he feel he is losing or under threat will be happy to take others with him.
Climate change plus the disruption of gas and oil supplies caused by the war, while possibly helping energy transition (although giving others excuses to boost fossil fuel production) has already put food prices up. Ukraine is one of the world’s great sources of food, and it will take years to put back together, and climate change and biofuel production seems to be affecting food anyway. Increasing food prices will render poorer people even less resilient and capable of surviving eco-destruction.
All of these interactions generate an existential crisis for most people. This is a crisis of meaning and meaning making. People’s worlds are falling apart, yet they have no idea what is going wrong, or what to do about it. They do their best and still fall behind. They work endlessly to survive and get completely exhausted This makes them more vulnerable to misinformation and distraction and unable to resist their losses, so the situation is likely to get worse.
There seem to be few working negative feedback loops which could encourage stability, or a return to equilibrium – and those which might exist are being destroyed.
In these days of ecological destruction, climate change and Pandemic, the concept returns….
From Engels Condition of the Working Class in England
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of workers in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
I have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly commits what the working-men’s organs, with perfect correctness, characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. I have further to prove that society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it knows the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but murder
It is worth joining this up to the ideas of Stochastic Terrorism, and Information mess as tools used by the Dominant classes to wage war on everyone else.
Perhaps it happens because in neoliberalism (or in old fashioned capitalist liberalism) the only important thing is the corporate economy, which must be protected at all costs. Without that economy the dominant groups think there is nothing. Natural systems, and people, don’t exist apart from the economy, and as tools for the economy, under the economy. If those systems, or people, get in the way of the economy, or the way of corporate profit, then they have to be sacrificed to the economy to placate that economy. Then everything will work out fine.
Another aim of neoliberalism is to turn business people into heroes and everyone else into disposable and anonymous numbers. 29 unnamed people died today of Covid in NSW, to support the corporate economy and to maintain the fiction that all is well; and it is pretty good for the billionaires.
The ideal model of the worker, is the soldier who will do as they are told until they die for the greater good. They like the soldier are forced to go into danger, the threat not being firing squad, but hunger and homelessness for them and their children. The greater good is the corporate economy and those who run it, which is surely greater than any atomistic, unnamed worker…. The people who die under neoliberalism have only themselves to blame: they are old, they have pre-existing conditions, they are sick, they are not keeping quarantined, they don’t understand medical information, they don’t trust the government, they are idiots, they are not wealthy, they have no savings, and so on. All ways of distancing the rest of us from the murdered, and helping to stop us recognising that we could be next.
However, we should now know, that if the CEOs and high level executives don’t turn up for work, everything is ok. But if the garbage collectors, the street sweepers, the truck drivers, the people who put stock on shelves, the people who harvest and pick the food, the nurses, the ambulance drivers, the teachers don’t turn up, then there is panic. These are the essential workers, and these are the ones the system kills.
This is a flow on from the Djokovic saga: You can make your own mind up.
First quote
Fordham: The Novak Djokovic case has raised another issue. He was kept in a Melbourne hotel that also holds asylum seekers that have been denied visas. There are refugees in that same hotel who have been detained for more than nine years, and taxpayers fork out millions of dollars to keep them in limbo. How is that acceptable?
Prime Minister: Well, the specific cases, Ben, I mean, it’s not clear that to my information that someone in that case is actually a refugee. They may have sought asylum and been found not to be a refugee and have chosen not to return. And that’s that’s a very, that happens in this country, people aren’t found to be refugees and they won’t return. And they don’t have a visa to enter Australia, then obviously they can’t enter Australia.
JOURNALIST: …On Monday, you said that those held in the Park Hotel in Melbourne were not refugees. Most of them are. 25 of them are. Do you apologise for that mistake? Or if you, if you’re now aware that that is not the case, is it appropriate that some of those people have been held in detention for more than eight years?
PRIME MINISTER:…. I didn’t make the statement that every single person was who was in that place was not a refugee. I said that was, to my understanding, the case with some people who were there. There are a number of people who were at that facility who have not been found to be owed protection.
JOURNALIST: [Inaudible] I’m asking about the 25 people …
PRIME MINISTER: They are all in various stages, various stages of the pathway to where they will ultimately be located. Now, as I can tell you, as it was confirmed to me this morning that those who are there, with some obvious exceptions, who have who arrived more recently, are people who came to Australia, illegally entered Australia by boat…. The suggestion that I said they were all not found to be refugees is not true. That’s not what I said. It was a question in a radio interview. I answered to the best of my knowledge at that time. And in quite a number of cases, that was indeed the case. There are people who who are in detention, who are not owed protection under the, under the Refugee Convention and our rules. Others, but I can tell you the ones that are, they arrived in Australia illegally by boat.
For quite a while, it has been the convention of the coalition to declare that you cannot be a refugee if you come to Australia by boat. No matter if you cannot afford air travel, no matter that you cannot wait for diplomatic clearance because your country is trying to kill you, not matter that if you return to your country you will die, spend the rest of your life as a political prisoner etc. etc… Coming by boat = bad.
Some obvious remarks on the Djokovic scandal. I doubt there is anything new here.
Background: Government in Crisis
The right wing Australian federal government has recently been obviously stuffing up on issues related to Covid. Covid is exploding, hospitals are being overwhelmed, people are dying, etc. We won’t know how bad it will get for a while longer – by January 18 2022 about 256 people in NSW had died with or of Covid in 2022 – that seems to be over a third of those who died the whole of last year. The Government did not have enough vaccines, or Rapid Antigen tests, even though they demanded that people have them. Reports suggest the vaccination of kids before school returns is ‘stressful,’ to say the least, without the vaccines. Presumably the Federal government had all summer to prepare if they wanted schools to go ahead. The economy which was doing well, until the “Let it Rip” approach to Covid was implemented, is now tanking. Supply chain systems are breaking down for lack of healthy workers. Small businesses are taking it really hard.
While the federal government is not responsible for what State governments do, until it suits them, in December 2021, while omicron was emerging (omicron was first reported to WHO on 24 November), the Prime Minister Scot Morrison was gung-ho about the economy opening up and governments getting out of people’s lives. This lead was followed by Perrottet, the current Premier of NSW, who repealed constraints pretty quickly.
For all her faults I simply cannot imagine Berejiklian (the former Premier of NSW), going along with the Federal Government saying “Oh goody here is a new Covid variant we know nothing about other than it spreads really quickly, lets remove most of our public health measures before we learn more about it, and risk spreading it through all of Australia.” Perrottet just placated the Coalition and went ahead.
Even if they had delayed by a month or so to let it rip, to find out more about what was going to happen with Omicron without ripping, the decision would have been better informed.
These are not the only major problems the Federal government was facing at this moment, and it was declining in the polls with a federal election nearing.
A distraction is needed! One that will take up lots of air time…. What can be manufactured?
The Looming Australian Tennis Open attracts lots of eyes and minds
Originally the government (the Prime Minister himself) said it was up to the State government in Victoria to decide if Novak Djokovic could come in. Djokovic filled in forms and everything looked ok. According to Djokovic the Department of Home Affairs approved him directly (I cannot find evidence one way or the other). It turned out later he, or someone else, filled in the forms incorrectly and therefore lied to get a visa. He also was out and about in Europe, in public maskless, supposedly a day after after a positive Covid test – not an indicator of trustworthy behaviour. So there is plenty of reason to deny him a visa, or revoke the visa.
Legally it was never the Victorian government’s say so that counted – it is the Federal Government’s responsibility to issue and confirm the visa. So the PM was either wrong, deliberately misleading, hedging his bets, or at that time he did not think he needed a distraction beyond the tennis itself.
If the PM had a resolution about the visas and what was acceptable, he should have made it clear and visible before all this happened, rather than saying it was up to Victoria, when it never was. What stopped the Federal Government from saying beforehand publicly it was not possible for unvaccinated people to enter Australia to play tennis? Why let other unvaccinated tennis players through before Djokovic? Why wait until he was here? Perhaps, initially, they weren’t seeking a distraction. However, it looks completely capricious. Just as it does to release the decision Friday evening, when it would normally have been too late to arrange anything over the weekend, if it wasn’t for ‘extremely kind’ judges.
It is not as if it was unknown that the World Number One had refused to be vaccinated, so the Government could have prepared. But they had not, which could imply that they suddenly needed something which they thought might do them some good.
The distraction
The argument is that it is not implausible that they may have decided to distract people from their Chaos and change the news focus, by being Strong on Australian Borders which seems popular with voters, and their one sure public policy for near 20 years…. So to be strong, they seized upon the moment, and revoked Djokovic’s visa, and put him in immigration detention. A judge ruled the Feds had not followed procedural fairness, which was pretty blatantly correct – Djokovic was not allowed to speak to his lawyers before the visa was revoked, he was pressured by Border force to give up his rights, he did not have the reasons explained to him, etc.
The lying was then discovered, and the government had to decide whether alienating the sports mad Australian people was going to undo the protecting borders shtick.
Bizarre Reasons for a second removal of Visa
Then after a week or so, on Friday evening, the Minister for immigration, who basically has arbitrary power to decide who gets a visa, cancelled the visa again saying the visa was cancelled the second time because Djokovic’s presence: “creates a risk of strengthening the anti-vaccination sentiment of a minority of the Australian community”.
This is bizarre for a number of reasons:
1) The Federal government is not particularly anti-anti-vaxers. It has largely accepted demonstrations as an expression of free speech. It has members who spread what seems to be anti-vax information, who participate in demonstrations and who do not get reprimanded by the government, and they have done their best not to make vaccination compulsory. They were also trying to open the economy up, before ‘safe levels of vaccination’ were reached. Whether this is bad or good is up to you, but given this background, why worry about Djokovic so openly and so late?
2) The argument also has little legal force, when the lying on the visa forms would have done for the purpose of revoking a visa. Why not just deport him because of the failure to vaccinate, the false forms, or the deceits and stupidities he had practiced. These are all straight forward evidence of breaking the visa rules?
3) If you truly want to silence something, you do not go shouting it from the rooftops. Every anti-vaxer in the world has now been told to seize on Djokovic for their cause. This technique also leaves the government open to having to prove that he would be a political problem for them – which is not illegal in any case, and is he only a political problem for them because of the minister’s statement?
I quote Djokovic’s lawyers:
One could see a situation in which it was plain to anyone with common sense that cancelling the visa would cause overwhelming public discord and risks of transmission through very large public gatherings.
If the Minister’s argument is accepted by the courts it reinforces the arbitrary powers of that immigration minister. People can now be deported on the basis of how the Government thinks other people may respond to them if the government takes them to court. Yep this is bizarre. Either this is complete incompetence or a real double handed game. It is difficult to tell.
The final verdict
The case went back to a full bench of the Federal Court over the weekend – which is not normal I believe, and I’ve read lawyers wondering about this as well. I’m ignorant, but when was the last time a federal court sat on a Sunday? If not for a while, what does that say about priorities in Australia? Everything has been sped up so a decision can be reached in time for the tournament.
We now know Djokovic lost unanimously. The minister assumed that Djokovic “entered Australia consistently” with Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation documents, although the minister noted there was a dispute about this in the earlier court proceedings.
“For present purposes, I will assume that Mr Djokovic’s position is correct rather than seeking to get to the bottom of this here,” Hawke wrote.
Basically he argued the decision would have been the same regardless of the travel declaration and vaccination issues which were were the real rule based grounds for deportation, which they are claiming to have asserted – or at least the PM is.
The court also appears to have asserted that the Minister does not really have to give reasons or conduct investigations into breaches of visas. So the banning was purely on the grounds that people might have protested against the government as a result of Djokovic being here. And the court agreed that the minister was within his rights.
Now while it might be debatable if this is a good thing or not, people are usually banned for political effects before they get here, or after they start agitating, and this supposed effect would have to have been known in advance, and the visa could have already been refused if they were not seeking a distraction
We now know, the minister can deport anyone and apparently does not have to give any evidence for that decision other than their ‘common sense’.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems that once such discretionary powers are granted no laws govern them. Especially when courts rule the minister does not need coherent reasons, fairness or evidence. This probably should worry you.
There have been people waiting in the ‘confinement hotel’ Djokovic was briefly in, for 8 years or more, to have their refugee status decided, and its now clear to everyone the minister could arbitrarily release them if he chose. But they are not wealthy or famous, so they will continue to languish in jail for attempting to entry the country and claim refuge from persecution, rather than play in a tennis match or two.
Incidentally the PM seems to have misrepresented the position that most people held in the ‘hotel’ were refugees, by saying they were not. Amnesty International tweeted:
We’ve written to PM @ScottMorrisonMP asking to correct the public record on the false statement he made regarding refugees in the #ParkHotel on @BenFordham‘s program on @2GB873. Most of the people being held are refugees and are languishing in limbo due to his govt’s policies
There does not appear to be any record of the Minister’s arguments currently on the minister’s web site, but but the official document is now on the court website.
People have known, at a public political level about climate since the late 1980s and we basically have done nothing except increase the rate of producing greenhouse gases. Even now with year after year of temperature records, wild weather all over the world, major ice melts, and the UN calling for no new fossil fuel fields, the US, UK and Australian governments (among others) are promoting new coal and gas mines. The Australian government is enmeshed in fantasy.
Over fishing does not appear to have slowed in general etc etc.
One ongoing issue is the question of whether it is possible for Capitalism and developmentalism not to be destructive of the ecology?
We have to accept that these ideologies have been present during this period of ecological destruction. This may not be complete causation, for example capitalism and developmentalism have developed the way they have, precisely because they were able to freely destroy ecologies and pollute. If pollution and ecological damage had been factored into the system as costs, then they may not have developed the way they have….
However, it does possibly suggest that it is improbable that people will solve problems of pollution and ecological destruction within systems that have flourished by ignoring these problems.
Covid-19
The first year of Covid in the US, was pretty much a disaster. Apart, perhaps, from a roughly two week period in which people were cheering Tucker Carlson for persuading the president it was serious, which now seems to have been forgotten, the year was a mess. We know from the Bob Woodward interviews that the President knew Covid was serious in February 2020, but decided the American people needed to be cheered up and so he pretended the disease would vanish without much problem. Rather than face the problem, he engaged in positive thinking.
The President attacked quarantine and lock downs, he encouraged armed occupation of state buildings. According to some he thought the big cities would suffer worst and that they voted Democrat and so hindered their actions – does not appear to have helped (but part of the problem is the normalized abuse, which makes truth finding difficult). Simple things like using the pandemic plans, telling people the situation was dangerous, or coordinating PPE purchases would have helped. Sure he did help remove obstacles for vaccine production, although the vaccines were first developed overseas. He also seemed to have been caught in political bind about encouraging people to take the vaccine, and got his own shots in private.
The delta variant seems worse than the original form, and is spreading. The vaccines slow infection rather than stop it.
But with America now averaging about 113,000 cases a day, an increase of nearly 24% from the previous week, and hospitalizations up 31% from the week before, Republicans stand accused of causing the deaths of their own voters as the highly contagious Delta variant scythes through red states where vaccination rates are low….
In the past week Florida and Texas, states whose leaders take pride in riling the Biden administration, have accounted for nearly 40% of new hospitalizations across the country
In the UK, as far as I can see, the government has given up. The disease is rampant in India, Indonesia and South East Asia. People I know who live in those regions tell me that they hear of deaths of people they know almost every day.
Where I live the government is encouraging people from infected areas to go to the regions to buy real estate, and has contradictory rules, that make it hard for people to figure out what they should do, and was so overconfident that they blew their first serious challenge. Indeed it was so overconfident it seems to have had no plans for a problem. We have just heard from the Australian Medical Association that hospitals are not keeping up [2], and we have a long way to go before it gets really bad.
On top of that we seem to be ignoring long covid – well I have not seen any official stats – and pretending Covid is a form of flu rather than a new disease. While I’m ignorant it seems to be worth testing the hyporthesis, that in some cases Covid does long-term, or even permanent, damage to the body which produces long Covid.
In other words, the world as a whole, seemed to want to take the easy option, or even sabotage action, although it is true that some people did not. However, running around panic struck is not facing problems.
I’m not a medical doctor. So this is not medical advice. Some of it may only be relevant to Australia. I can’t discuss laws all around the world.
1) Deaths by flu are virtually non-existent, what is going on?
Covid and flu seem to have the same vectors of transmission. Attempts to shut down or slow Covid will shut down and slow flu. If flu has more or less disappeared as a serious illness over the last couple of years it shows that flu is less contagious than Covid.
2) Flu deaths are being counted as Covid deaths
In a bad flu year in the US you get about 60-90 thousand deaths. This is about a tenth of the Covid deaths, so even if people were counting all flu deaths as Covid deaths it probably would not make that much difference to the figures.
3) Covid is just flu. Its not that bad.
Covid is not like flu. Covid causes blood clots, liver failure, heart failure, stroke etc. It may stop cell differentiation, so that cell replication fails, and the cells do not function. This is one reason why Covid is relatively easy to misdiagnose; it can look like other serious diseases.
4) Ivermectin is a inexpensive and safe drug for Covid which is being censored and undermined by the establishment.
5) There is no promotion of inexpensive and safe methods of natural immune boosting.
It will be great when Western Medicine researches natural immune boosting techniques, but they don’t. This is not a specific conspiracy about Covid. And how would we test whether the techniques worked against Covid anyway? This is a classic medical ethics problem. If the techniques don’t work we might kill people, or make people off guard and complacent and help spread the disease.
6) People get vaccinated after having Covid, that just shows the Vaccination is suspicious.
Vaccination, as far as I know, is not compulsory, so there is no need to accept the vaccine if its offered. However, beliefs and actions may have consequences. Accepting the consequences of your beliefs may be inconvenient for you, as always. It is up to you.
Furthermore, I understand, it is still unclear how much immunity a person develops to future infections from having Covid. If the experience was deeply unpleasant a person might want to take a vaccine for an immune boost. Some people might take the vaccine to try and help recover from ‘long covid’. Up to them.
7) Dr. Bossche, or someone or other, has a theory that a mass vaccination campaign during a pandemic may create more dangerous variants that are immune to the vaccine together with a vaccine degraded natural immune system. Why is this not discussed?
Clearly it is being discussed by some. Is Dr. Bossche a researcher into Vaccines with any experience of treating Covid in humans?
One possible reason there is little discussion amongst medicos is because he has little real experience and has not made a good case. We still do not know enough about Covid and what kind of immune response is necessary to defeat it.
There is always a case for letting lots of people die until those who survive are generally good at handling the disease. This is effectively the Trump, Boris Johnson method and was I think Sweden’s. It has not worked that well, yet. Its up to you what kind of death rate you accept, but be careful to specify it before you start the experiment, oh and win people over to the possibility of their death and that death rate…
The reality is that there will always be doctors and scientists who disagree with the mainstream. This does not necessarily mean they are correct. Just as youtube videos may not be better sources for ‘facts’ than sane mainstream news.
8) There is no investigation of the virus source
The virus source does not tell us much about how the virus behaves in humans, and is usually irrelevant. Anyway plenty of people seem interested in tracing it to shift blame to somewhere else.
9) Covid is an engineered virus
I’m not anywhere near well informed enough to tell, but the Chinese are not the only people doing bio-warfare.
If it was a Chinese bioweapon, then the release was clearly accidental (no one should be stupid enough to deliberately release a bioweapon in their own country), and we need to overcome the virus, not think blame will help. Incidentally, the Chinese and others have blamed the virus on a release by the US military (in China) which is equally plausible (and an act of war), but does not help us solve the problem either.
In either case it might be a good idea to make sure we stop and prosecute biowarfare research, or make the facilities absolutely idiot proof – which is probably impossible.
10) Masks are not effective. Why do I have to wear one?
If you want to go out and mix with people then yes in some places you have to wear a mask. In other places, say out in a park, you may not have to. You are free to stay at home or in your car and not wear a mask. Using masks is an attempt to stop you spreading Covid, or an attempt to lower your chance of catching Covid and taking up medical time space and equipment, from those who need it.
With Freedom comes responsibility.
I have also heard people argue that the virus is so small it will get through mask, and also argue that Oxygen cannot get through the masks, which is odd given Oxygen is much smaller than the virus. Viruses can also come in water droplets which don’t pass through the mask. Which is why you should keep masks clean.
Masks are not 100% effective. They reduce infection and spread rates, not stop it. They are better than nothing, and not terribly inconvenient.
11) The vaccine contains microchips which program your brain, etc….
This implies a massive set of scientific and technological breakthroughs, which it would be hard to conceal. They could be able to do this, but it is still a massive breakthrough. Known useful chips are not small enough to pass through needles, and we don’t know how to control the human brain by electronics. We can do a much better job through propaganda and repetition. It is really much easier to convince people that mind controlling microchips are going to be injected into them, than it is to actually do it.
12) Covid just benefits Pharmaceutical companies
Yes some pharmaceutical companies will make vast profits out of this. That is the way capitalism works. If you object to this, then object to capitalism, its profiteering and its supposed free markets.
It was Trump who started the hurry to get a vaccine and indemnified pharmaceutical companies against damage, in order to get the testing done quickly. So he is partly to blame for any problems that arise through that quicker than usual testing of a new vaccine.
13) How do we prevent something like this happening again?
The best way of preventing the recurrence of a global pandemic apart from a working and compulsory quarantine for all overseas travellers, is to shut down global travel, especially quick global travel. Which would be a useful step in terms of reducing emissions and disturbing the upper atmosphere as well.
Firstly, neoliberalism, its politics and economics are non-empirical – they are matters of faith and ‘logic’ from faulty premises. Their position seems impossible to falsify under any circumstances, and (in complex systems) what counts as facts can be made a matter of selection and interpretation, so they can always say ‘their facts’ support them.
Secondly, a totally free market society has never existed, and probably cannot exist, therefore neoliberal advocacy for a ‘free market’ cannot be said to have anything to do with Covid, or any other project. The fact that neoliberals only ever engineer corporately controlled markets, as opposed to free markets, makes them theoretically pure.
Thirdly, if anything goes wrong in a capitalist society, Neoliberals hold it is always the fault of government, and never the fault of capitalists, corporations, or wealthy people. If such people overtly do do anything wrong or stupid, then that is because of the government (even if it was they who bought the government’s actions). As capitalism requires regulations to function and protect property distribution, there will always be government involvement of some type in the economy and daily life which can be blamed for failure.
Fourthly, there is no explicit connection between neoliberalism and Covid. Trump, who can be held responsible for denying Covid was a problem and denying help to badly affected states, was not officially a neoliberal (he even restricted trade), other than in being a corporate supremacist who helped transfer massive amounts of taxpayers’ money to the wealthy – but his followers refuse to believe that. Likewise with Boris Johnson, and Narendra Modi. We can say that governments were influenced by neoliberal ideas and thought everyone should get back to work before the problem was solved. But again this was the fault of governments, not apparently of neoliberals.
Fifthly, because of the information confusion and the pro-corporate right’s promulgation of neoliberal propaganda, Neoliberals can if they wish embrace the confusion and say Covid was just a “summer flu” or the “common cold”, and not really that bad. They can also state that any attempt to control people or slow down transmission was faulty, badly designed or an imposition on liberty, which (of course) they officially monopolise. As many people did not die from Covid, and the death figures may confuse people (there are allegations that they are faked, presumably all over the world), then they are likely to succeed – particularly given the supposed ‘common sense’ of the neoliberal backing of the corporate economy above people, and people’s dislike of being told what to do.
Sixthly, If they can convince people that Covid was the fault of governments (which it was to an extent, when governments acted in a confused or negligent manner), that the economy was seriously hurt (because the economy is the only thing that matters), that poor people were freeloading (because poor people are evil or lazy, or poor voluntarily), that private enterprise could have solved the problem quicker (because it was supposedly in their interests to solve it), and that what action was taken was tyrannous and oppressive and so on…. then it is possible we will be even worse in our preparation for the next pandemic, and less able to respond.
And that will not be the fault of neoliberals either, because it never is…….
To assume that Covid was fakery produced by government conspiracy, or that scientists were paid to fake data, you might have to make a lot of assumptions.
You would have to assume: a) that Donald Trump had approved the payments to scientists in the USA and b) that his government was exaggerating the dangers of Covid, rather than playing them down and telling people it would pass. This seems somewhat contradictory.
You would have to assume that Russia, the UK, France, Australia, Iran, Brazil, China and India (amongst others) also conspired together to lie about Covid, even when their governments were pretending there was not much of a problem. This also seems improbable, especially given they rarely can agree to do anything together.
That does not mean there could have been no conspiracies.
It seems more likely that some governments conspired to pretend that covid was not a big deal to keep the economy going, and keep the people docile at work, and were annoyed when scientists would not all go along with this.
It may also be the case that some governments, through intermediaries, publicised fake information about covid in the hope that people in other countries would take their advice and do nothing, or people would refuse to accept the quarantines, and those other countries would be ravaged by the disease and destroyed.
Did some governments try to shut down dissent? Well they certainly used the virus to shut down climate protests, school strikes, and some BLM events… So possibly they did. But I don’t see any really huge differences in the US, UK etc…. produced by Covid. Of course I could be wrong.
The virus appears to be unlike the flu or the common cold, although it is often alleged by politicians that it is similar. It has different effects on the body, can affect livers, hearts, brains etc…. For some people it continues for months. It seems to have killed as many people in the US in a year, than about 10 years worth of flu.
Of course the death figures could be all faked, but again it seems improbable, especially given that many governments wanted everyone to get back to work and suppressed figures, and its easy to under-find deaths from Covid, because Covid can have consequences for a business (such as a retirement home), or the Covid death looks like stroke, or heart attack or lung embolism etc….
If the Vaccine is a mind control device, as some people allege, then we have heaps of secret tech knocking around that most scientists seem unable to understand, or explain. If the tech was that advanced you probably would not need to pretend there was a deadly virus to spread it. You could just put it in people’s food, or in normal vaccines or normal medicines – that way it would be much easier to hide.
One thing you might notice, if “you did the research”, was the amount of taxpayers’ money going to help the wealthy, in terms of subsidies and tax breaks, or used to shore up companies dying from other causes, but that is pretty normal nowadays, and is rarely commented upon.
I’d suggest that there may already be a conspiracy to turn the US into a dictatorship, or a form of corporate plutocracy. Republicans seem to have been running this conspiracy since the 1980s, and have won over much of the supposed opposition. This conspiracy is generally known as ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘free market economics,’ and seems designed to benefit established corporations and wealth, at the expense of everyone else.
I’d be much more concerned about that conspiracy than about a Covid conspiracy, but somehow that idea gets far less publicity than the fake news around Covid.
Oh and those neoliberal free market supporters, just seem to be the ones promoting the idea that covid is fake and being used to increase government tyranny. Wonder if that is a distraction, from what they are doing?
First of all: if Gas is a viable industry that serves Australian people and makes a profit, why does it need government assistance? It is an established industry, not path-breaking, nor needing initial support to take off. It is pretty clearly not the future, as it is likely to be superseded if we really do gain emissions targets. Given this, it looks like a taxpayer subsidy, or kickback to people on the National COVID‑19 Commission Advisory Board, who could have the appearance of primarily aiming their recommendations at private benefit.
Second: again as I understand it, the pipelines that are being suggested are massively expensive. If the companies are viable why are they not paying the money? If the companies are not viable, why are we paying for it?
Third: why is money not being spent on electricity infrastructure, where the problems of lack of infrastructure is clear, and the problems of generating commercial builds are also quite clear? Improving electricity infrastructure would benefit a range of industries and, if well designed, provide the energy to help set up industries in Australian Country Towns. This could generate a national resurgence of jobs. Electricity infrastructure benefits everyone, not just a particular set of companies, and helps us to a better future.
Fourth: recent research has shown, that gas drilling sites and gas pipes leak, particularly old pipes in the city. The pipes are hard to monitor and hard to repair (again especially in cities). This leakage does not make gas a low emissions fuel. The methane leakage generates more climate change than carbon dioxide leakage in the short term. Gas companies have little incentive to repair leaking pipes if the leakage is not so bad that it impacts profit, or is likely to cause a major explosion.
Fifth: given the known problems with greenhouse gas emissions, why are taxpayers funding a source of energy that will help endanger the country? Gas emissions will help increase droughts, poison water and destroy the farming sector.
Sixth: in many places there are issues with gas contaminating bore water – particularly on the Eastern side of Australia. Much of Australia depends on bore water. While it may be possible that gas companies can absolutely guarantee that no bore water will be affected for 20-30 years (the difficulties of tracing pollution makes it impossible to be sure), they cannot guarantee safety over hundreds of years. Concrete rots, steel and welding decays, natural phenomena add stress over time. If we want to preserve our farming industry we have to think in terms of thousands of years, especially given the likelihood of increasing severity of droughts.
Seventh: if the EU, China, or the US installs Carbon tariffs which seems likely, as there is no reason they should protect foreigners who, from their point of view, freeload on carbon emissions, then taxpayers are helping to undermine Australia’s export industries.
The whole project of a gas lead recovery, seems to be a way to trap Australia into greenhouse gas emitting fuels, and to endanger our future prosperity. It should be abandoned.
2) Most people who get coronovirus will not have symptoms but they will spread the disease, increasing the infection rate by stealth – other people will not engage in protective behaviour around supposedly healthy people, and supposedly healthy people will be less likely to protect others from their unknown sickness.
3) Minor quarantine/hygene efforts can slow the apparent infection rate down, while the disease keeps spreading secretly. Then the bang hits.
4) Coronavirus looks like flu, heart attack, stroke, lung embolism, lung failure, liver failure and so on.
5) Coronavirus looks like other diseases, because it often damages the organs it lodges in – it appears to stop cells from doing what the cells are supposed to do.
6) Therefore it is really easy to mistake Covid-19 for something else.
7) If you are not looking for it, then deaths will often just be recorded as something normal, and the disease will keep spreading.
8) It would be normal to undercount the fatalities from Covid-19 for a long time, until someone wonders why so many different illnesses are off the charts. Then people might start looking for a common cause. They might not see it until too late.
9) Some people, getting organ or muscle damage, get what is now known as ‘long coronavirus’ – the disease effects last for months after they are supposedly healed. They consume medical and social resources long after they have supposedly recovered, which lowers resources for other people. We as yet do not know the average length of long coronavirus.
10) There is dispute about how long immunity lasts, however, it does seem pretty likely that some people who healed have got it again, thus becoming new sources of vulnerability.
11) This possible lack of long term immunity, may undermine vaccination efforts.
12) Anyone who now tells you Covid-19 is flu, or like a flu, is misinformed or lying. They may even be part of the war team – assuming it exists. After all the war team would want to downplay the severity of the disease, and persuade others it was not dangerous, so as to maintain its spread.
13) The death rate is quite high; not so high that its immediately noticeable, and so again deaths will appear minor until they start accelerating by the normal processes of exponential contagion. Deaths seem to have started to accelerate badly in the US since October.
14) Some of the acceleration has occurred because the President and his supporters have consistently played down the danger, and played at being positive (engaging in hype) – because that’s how business works. At the moment, the President is preoccupied with casting doubt on the election result (as he promised he would, if he didn’t win), the disease has even less organisation acting against it, at a time in which many US citizens have family celebrations and effectively will spread the disease. His most recent comment, which shows his focus:
The Democrats had this election rigged from the beginning. They used the pandemic, sometimes referred to as the China virus; where it originated; as an excuse to mail out tens of millions of ballots, which ultimately led to a big part of the fraud.
Obviously he does not read any decent news and I guess that is possible in the US, but given it is ‘clobbering’ Europe, which it is, then the virus is not fake news itself. It is not a hoax, or something which should be ignored…. None of this helps people survive.
15) Further, many states want to keep the labour and the profits going, and neoliberalism is about sacrificing people for profit, so if people die for the economy that is ok.
16) We could suggest that the more unequal and authoritarian the State, the more likely it will fail to deal with the problem, as the elites think they can escape – until they realise otherwise.
Other remarks
The disease seems to have been around in Europe since at least November last year (2019). There is a suggestion it was in Italy as early as September 2019, but this is not confirmed.
The first time it was identified as a new disease was in China in December 2019. The first case confirmed in Australia was announced on 25 January 2020. The first US cases confirmed on 21st January.
Let us be clear without the Chinese efforts to identify the disease, and let people know (however slowly, although a month or so for a new disease is not slow), the world would be in a much worse situation than it is. The disease could have spread with little check. There would likely be no relatively safe spots anywhere.
Real explanations?
So given it is the kind of disease we may not have noticed until the deaths were so high that societies could not function, is Covid-19 engineered?
The US informally accuses China. China accuses the US, as do Iran and Russia.
There are problems with this hypothesis. Firstly, any sensible person should have realised that with the amount of global air traffic we had pre-covid, that any camouflaged disease would be worldwide in a month at the most, and coming back into their own country very quickly. So they would need vaccines before launching it – and even then that might not be enough. They might of course think God, or destiny, was on their side and therefore be committing unintentional suicide.
Any sensible regime would not engineer bioweapons in the first place. And particularly would not engineer something potentially uncontainable like Covid-19.
Having said that, there are a few non-sensible regimes in the World. Trump’s US for example. But there are other places which you can probably guess for yourselves. Some of which claim remarkably low infection rates. I don’t think China is likely to have done a deliberate release, because why tell everyone else?
The other possibility is that the disease escaped before protection was ready. This could have happened anywhere, but again we are assuming people would have generated a bio-weapon which could wipe themselves out. I don’t see any sensible State doing that either.
The final and most plausible possibility, is that viral evolution now functions amidst human protective regimes, and that diseases will evolve to spread despite those regimes – or even through those regimes.
Global interconnection acts to spread (and incubate) diseases very quickly after they have hit people who travel.
Given the contemporary ecology of human prevention, it was probably only a matter of time before something like Covid-19 developed to look like intelligent design, through the processes of interaction, random mutation, survival and replication.
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