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The MoA Week In Review – (NOT Ukraine) OT 2022-89
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Wokism:
Brexit:
U.S. – Saudi Relations:
Use as open (NOT Ukraine) thread …
The “Canadian Truckers” protest seems to have begun as an attempt to put pressure on Ottawa to reverse its, moderate and minimalist, attempts to control the pandemic.
The ‘truckers’ had a Swedish ‘let ‘er rip’ philosophy which put the interests of capitalists above those of society as a whole and the vulnerable in particular.
They were joined, intellectually, by those who made the peculiar argument that there was no pandemic and that the measures being taken (usually with great reluctance and much foot dragging) by governments to impose quarantines, identify sources of infection, treat the sick and, by advising the use of masks and social distancing, to stop the spread of an unusually virulent cause of illness and often death, all these measures were, it was argued, part of a coordinated campaign by unidentified powers, to control the population in order to exploit it.
There is nothing mysterious about the motives of those who were behind the “it’s a shamdemic” ideology. Its appeal was that it underlined the “herd immunity” argument and protected capitalism from the real threat that epidemic disease and inferior public health measures always pose to the system because they scream out for socialist solutions.
An optimist, I was greatly surprised that Trump’s appalling response to Covid did not lead to a massive public movement in favour of Medicare for All. I had no doubt that, at the very minimum the shocking and callous way in which tens of thousands were abandoned to die, as it were in the streets, because they were uninsured and because the Health Care system , geared to profit making, was incapable of dealing with a pandemic, would lead to the selection of a Democratic Party candidate calling for a major reform of the Healthcare system, probably on Canadian lines.
I was wrong. The calls from the left for socialist solutions were drowned out by the cacophony of those demanding that the capitalist show, especially in its retail sector, should go on and the lunacy of those who, hinting at the likelihood of lizards, the illuminati or perhaps the celebrants of a Saturday sabbath, if not the auld alliance between the City of London and the Comintern, insisted that there was no pandemic, that people were dying for all sorts of reasons other than the virus (a bad flu season…co-morbidity etc ) and that the aim was to take freedom away from the working man.
Such as the trucker.
What was missing was any explanation of why, suddenly, the capitalist class which has ruled the roost with increasing arrogance over a half century in which, by every metric imaginable, the living standards of the great majority of the population have declined and the wealth of the wealthiest class has enormously increased, in which taxation has become increasingly regressive, in which the power of the state in the form of police force, the military and the lockstep authoritarianism of the judiciary, has progressively grown. In which, in short, the ruling class could not have done more to enhance its interests at the expense of the masses.
And yet the “shamdemicists ” insisted, that sitting at the table with its winnings piled up around it and the workers, shivering and shirtless, unemployed and deeply indebted, disorganised, unrepresented politically and brainwashed into blaming themselves at the other end, losers. The Powers That Be, The Establishment elected, for no discernible reasons, in the moment of triumph to kick the card table over and call for radical change.
That is ‘radical change’ to the precise social arrangements that they had assembled, protected, developed and from which they had so enormously profited. The ruling class had smashed the Trade Union movement, largely by de-industrialising the metropolitan regions of the Empire and exporting industrial work to jurisdictions where governments did not tolerate strikes, demands for better conditions and shorter hours, pay rates sufficient to live from and those social services which comprise the Welfare State.
And now we are told, being in total control, owning all the media and all the scenery in the Overton Window, they decide to risk it all by demanding complete change. And not just change but change which would be bound to lead to developments against their interests.
All of which is perfectly encapsulated in the “Truckers” complaint that the Capitalists’ dream regime in Ottawa is in fact bent on communism or socialism. And that Trudeau a dyed in the wool neo-liberal with a deep belief in the dynamism and inevitability of a profit driven economy controlling an unequal society, is as Scorpion hints an offspring of Fidel Castro.
My optimism was born of the conviction that such stuff could not be made up. But it could be and it was. And, midwifed by millions from the Koch Bros and their friends, it lives among us yet, an ugly, improbable monster nourished by the blood of the poor.
Posted by: bevin | Jun 19 2022 22:39 utc | 55
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