IT IS TIME
A German media psychologist recommends in Der Spiegel that ‘it is time to understand more and to be afraid less’. Well, I think in the current pandemic situation, the more you understand what is going on, the more frightened you should get. On 19 February, a soccer match in Bergamo between an Italian and Spanish club attracted over 40,000 fans, causing the viral bomb to explode in northern Italy. On 11 March, Atlético Madrid played Liverpool. The IOC postponed the Olympic Games (now an elitist spectacle managed by sporting brands) in Tokyo just the other day. In New Zealand and Australia, they kept going with professional rugby and soccer until a few days ago. Corporate sport with its mega business empires was, and still is, willing to sacrifice the lives of many to make another easy buck. Obviously it is not only sports empires that are to blame for the pandemic outbreak but the whole corporate sector. The industrial empires with their mega factories in China did not want to see a slow-down in production in Wuhan, nor did a subservient Chinese Government want to curb the phenomenal economic growth in GDP – until it was too late. While China and other Asian manufacturing countries then threw everything they had at the epidemic, the capitalist West (mainly the UK, EU and US) looked on with simulated shock and horror, in the mistaken belief that this was a regional outbreak, like Ebola or SARS before – until it was too late. Even so, the belated responses are to save the economies, not the people. A Texan governor even declared that the elderly are willing to die to save the economy. Religious and fascist nutcases trot out the (God given) survival of the fittest scenarios.
Trillions of dollars are thrown at the business empires to keep them afloat, the terrible theory being that if they sink, everyone will sink with them. The daily propaganda warns of a deep recession, making millions of workers unemployed but keeping the corporations afloat – for what? Wartime metaphors are employed to prepare the populace for a wartime economy: the labour force will be requisitioned to build the weapons that will defeat the pandemic. Frontline medical personnel are already praised like wartime heroes, sacrificing their lives for the country’s economy. Big Pharma is frantic with finding the cure: another perverted Der Spiegel article asked researchers if they would become millionaires if they discovered the magic bullet that will defeat the evil virus. If there were an equally perverse conspiracy theory to be promoted, it would be to suggest that big Pharma let the virus loose in the first place, like the mad fire fighters who light fires to become heroes. Amidst all of this confusion it is not surprising that actual misunderstandings proliferate, like the one published about a Mexican state governor, Miguel Barbosa:
Officials say three-quarters of Mexico’s 475 confirmed cases are related to international travel, including several people who reportedly caught the virus on skiing trips to Italy or the US.
“Most of them are wealthy people,” Barbosa said. “If you are rich you are at risk. If you are poor you are not. The poor, we’re immune.”
If only! It may well be the case that the jet-set rich spread the virus across the globe but it will be the poor, as usual, who will suffer most. It may also be the case that the rich will swing into action once they realize that they will die too, as happened in NZ’s history when European induced diseases decimated the indigenous Maori without much concern, until it transpired that such diseases made their way back to the well-to-do European populations. Preventative action was taken and the ‘Maori race’ was saved from extinction, not as a humanitarian gesture but due to the self-serving interests of the upper-class settlers, for once ordering the government of the day to divert taxation funds towards public health.
In the current corporate state par excellence, the USA, the situation is still at the point of vast taxation funds being spent on ‘supporting business’ rather than public health, subscribing to bizarre economic theories, as described in a Guardian article, entitled ‘The economy v our lives? It's a false choice – and a deeply stupid one’ by Siva Vaidhyanathan. President Trump and his cronies just want the workers to ‘get back to work’, describing the lock-down cure worse than the disease. That the rich get preferential treatment when it comes to Corona virus testing, is no surprise. Trump is testing negative while Prince Charles (the UK as the mirror image of the USA) is testing positive. In NZ, you – as a commoner - are only tested if you fulfill the criteria that indicate a strong possibility you already have the virus, and it takes two to three days to get the results. Given that people with the virus can be asymptomatic, one would have thought that testing should be a fast and large-scale exercise, as indeed is done in more enlightened countries like China, South Korea and Taiwan. Here in the West, in private hospitals, patients with private health insurance receive preferential therapies, with no shortage of ventilators and other equipment considered necessary but in very short supply in the public health sector.
Again, here in NZ, frontline staff in public hospitals receive daily instructions as to when and WHEN NOT to wear personal protective equipment (PPE), with great emphasis on the latter. While the PM, Jacinda Adern, tries her best to scare everyone to death with her metaphor that we should all act as IF we had the virus, the frontline ED staff are told by management that PPEs are only to be worn if there is a confirmed or probable case of COVID-19 in the hospital, and even then only in the area where such patients are held in isolation. Currently, rumours are being circulated whereby PPEs are ‘stolen’ from public hospitals, so as to encourage hospital managers to ‘securely’ lock away such equipment, making it very difficult for frontline staff to request even basic equipment like face masks and hand sanitizers. Mental Health nurses are excluded from such procedures altogether, even though it is clear that mental health (MH) clients are often the most vulnerable, unable to be triaged for physical symptoms by asking them silly questions such as ‘have you been overseas recently, or in casual contact with someone who has or is suspected of having COVID-19’ when they have no concept about either. Obviously MH staff in such situations should wear PPE because there is no way to establish – other than testing – whether or not a client has the virus.
Daily media updates from Government and Health officials are couched in Orwellian newspeak, accentuating the positive, denying the negative, saying as much as ‘the good news is that we know that cases will increase before they will decrease’. Welcome to the Brave New World, as predicted long time ago by Aldous Huxley. Daily news conferences held by the NZ Director General of Health, together with inane questions from corporate journalists, are all designed to minimize an escalating situation, asking people to follow the rules of social distancing but still denying frontline staff to wear PPEs. Millions of PPEs are, apparently held in ‘secure’ storage facilities, presumably to be issued when ‘necessary’, as defined by medical bureaucrats and self-serving medical consultants in high places.
In the US as in NZ (and the like), workers are being ‘laid off’ or ‘furloughed’ without compensation even though income protection is supposed to be available. In NZ, Burger King is being accused of sacking workers without explanation, making excuses like management are still trying to ‘sort out’ the Government wage subsidy package. A Government Finance Minister blithely said that cases of ‘double-dipping’ (i.e. business owners getting the wage subsidy but not passing it on to their workers) would be investigated (and no doubt will be given a warning with the proverbial slap of a wet parking ticket). Banks are praised for offering struggling home owners ‘mortgage holidays’ when the fine print says that such mortgage repayments are deferred, i.e. adding to the length of the term with the effect of increased interest rates. In the US, at the time of writing, over 3 million workers have already filed for unemployment benefits, a degrading bureaucratic process reminiscent of the American soup kitchens during the Great Depression.
In the end, this sorry saga will have cost the corporate sectors few of their vast profits, cushioned by taxpayer handouts (and some may even profit from the misery) but it will cost the workers everything, if not their lives. There is speculation, that when the pandemic ends, a new way of life has to be found, a much more just and equitable global society to be established, a socialist transformation no less. Let us hope, that this time, it is the time.
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