There is no magic money tree – the ‘rescue packages’ aim to rescue a rotten system, and won’t work. Everything that central banks have done since 2008 has been designed to postpone the inevitable day of reckoning. But now that day has come.
As the global pandemic marches on, governments scramble to mitigate it and cobble together economic aid packages. Mass climate protests and the Wet'suwet'en solidarity blockades, just a few weeks ago, seem like a distant memory.
Governments and bosses claim to be at war with coronavirus. In reality, it is a war against our social class that they are waging. A war against us for their profits!
Everything feels new, unbelievable, overwhelming. At the same time, it feels as if we’ve walked into an old recurring dream. In a way, we have. We’ve seen it before, on TV and in blockbusters. We knew roughly what it would be like, and somehow this makes the encounter not less strange, but more so.
In the 1980s, US hospitals began to transform from institutions providing comprehensive care, no matter how long it took, to healthcare factories intent on shuffling patients in and out as quickly as possible. While this was meant to save money, shortages of basic equipment during the coronavirus outbreak have revealed the high price of these cost-cutting measures.
In the face of the COVID-19 tsunami, our lives are changing in ways that were inconceivable just a few short weeks ago. Not since the 2008-09 economic collapse has the world collectively shared an experience of this kind: a single, rapidly-mutating, global crisis, structuring the rhythm of our daily lives within a complex calculus of risk and competing probabilities.
