CAPITALISM: And how it can only be this way. Until it can’t.

Fans of capitalism in its latest neoliberal iteration – and they are all over the place in Europe and the USA, at least among elites and the middle classes – tend to shut their eyes tightly against its latest horrors and the very real fact that the planet’s majority are not enjoying capitalism’s spoils, nor can they ever do so, although they may be unaware that capitalism is a zero sum game. The fans point with great determination at socialism’s failings, pinpointing the worst horrors of communism, many imagined, mostly dredged up from a decades-old past carefully not compared with other decades-old pasts.

Capitalism’s historical horrors are also, well, horrific. A thousand years ago, life expectancy, once childhood was overcome, was around 60 or even 70, especially if one had survived past 30 years of age. Studies of the skeletal remains of affluent people from over 2000 years ago paint the same picture. Childhood and war brought very grave dangers and, without them, healthy life expectancy was not dissimilar to our own. However, at the height of the industrial revolution, life expectancy for the poor in England’s major industrial cities was shockingly low, around 15-17 years in the 1840s.

In the 1960s, Russian life expectancy was above 64 for men, and 73 for women, similar to that of France. Current life expectancy in Cuba is over 78 years (80 for women; 76 for men). For China it is 79 years.

 

The point is that capitalism’s successes are extremely variable. The US, our capitalist hegemon has an overall life expectancy just below that of Cuba, a small and poor country that has suffered crippling sanctions imposed by its mighty rival, the US, for the best part of a century. Geographical differences are reproduced between the 1% richest and the 1% poorest in the USA, where a massive 15-year difference in life expectancy exists. Healthy life expectancy in the US is a mere 64 years.

Why can capitalism not be improved?

Because it is extractive. It extracts resources from poorer or weaker nations and does not pay the real price for them. France’s current economic woes and political unrest are in large part due to 14 African nations joining together and refusing to allow their former colonial powers to continue to steal resources without paying for them and without paying for the environmental damage. These countries are also attempting to put an end to the French imposed currency – the CFA franc - that keeps Paris in control and, from the start, has ensured that wealth is automatically transferred to France. The CFA franc was pegged to the French franc, and is now pegged to the euro. France demands that those 14 African countries maintain 50% of their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury.

Another factor is uranium mining. This is incredibly damaging both to the environment and to those who mine it, and Niger is no longer handing it over virtually for free. Thus, France’s historically low nuclear energy prices are a thing of the past and consumers have suffered significant increases. The future cost of decommissioning the nuclear plants and the extremely long storage problems associated with the spent fuel are also unresolved.

The “Green Revolution” is based on filthy lithium mining, unrecyclable wind turbine blades (often full of asbestos) and solar panels, rare earths, unresolved technology and has nothing to do with improving the environment and everything to do with the creation of a new boom. It has hit a snag, however, in that hydrogen cells need iridium which is extremely rare (although Russia has a lot of it), lithium deposits are in places like Afghanistan, Bolivia and Australia (and the latter needs the Chinese to process it), and everything else needs rare earths which are also, well, rare and mostly to be found not in the EU nor the USA, but in African and China, and need costly (both economically and environmentally) and complicated processing. The current wars promoted by our elites as being all about democracy and human rights – killing thousands of innocent civilians as collateral damage – have cut off the tap to the cheap Russian gas that our industries and computing rely on. The problem is that, while we had all the money, they (the “others” in the world) had all the resources (and all the time).

Capitalism’s second inbuilt feature is that it is debt-based. Its extraordinary ability to out-produce other systems is because it relies on money taken from future output. Compound interest means constant and exponential growth and rising populations among which to spread the ever-increasing debt, faster and faster, until the entire Ponzi scheme collapses, as it inevitably will in the cyclical systemic crises faced every few years. Meanwhile, more GDP, more destruction, more construction, more, more, more. Until our modern-time day of reckoning, the Great Reset, in which almost everything we own will be stolen from us. Remember “You will own nothing and be happy”? The first part looks set to be on the way really soon; the second part, never. As a cautionary tale, when the USSR collapsed, life expectancy there fell 10 years over a decade and rampant corruption, crime and murders soared. Our own economic collapse promises to be imminent and no less terrifying.

National debt is nothing but debt that others will have to pay, mostly future generations, but also precisely those who received almost nothing from the billions borrowed. This inbuilt feature leads to political corruption and excruciatingly bad uses of the incoming money today, which is generally not used to build infrastructure, nor useful technologies but for vanity projects and to line the pockets of our elites.

Capitalism also builds up personal debt. The 80s smashing of union power and the opening up of work to foreign competition, and low wages, together with significant immigration and preference for technology over workers, meant that downward pressure was put on salaries and, for consumerism to continue to rise – in order for the products to be sold -, personal debt was actively encouraged.

However, the most damning feature of capitalism is that everything, absolutely everything has a price put on it. The only value is monetary. Surrogacy, unnecessary surgeries, trans mutilations, dubious psychiatry, opiate crises (yes, in Europe as well), sex “workers”, Only Fans, AI pornography, illegals picking fruit without labour protections, unnecessary caesareans and induced births in private clinics, the purchase of babies, “assisted” dying (in other words the assisted murder of the economically useless), the theatre of democracy with the only choice between Team Blue and Team Red, both funded by the same corporations, two-tier justice…; you name it, it’s all for sale. People on disability pensions due to mental illness have tripled over the last 35 years. Why? For the combined reason that our society is alienating, hard to do well in for the 99%, ruthlessly competitive and, to top it, mental health is seen as an individual problem, requiring psychopharmaceutic remedies that are highly profitable for Big Pharma and of almost no use for solving the problem even were it an individual, rather than a social one.

In the chilling documentary The Alabama Solution you can see how the logic of capitalism results in excessive sentences, overcrowded prisons, scarcity of guards, poor personnel selection, lack of rehabilitation, shocking mistreatment of prisoners…, all of it making perfect business sense. Modern-day slavery. In Alabama the mostly white and filthy-rich elites distract the white and black uneducated poor with cheap pageants and other spectacles.

Capitalism's successes rely heavily on unpaid and underpaid labour, that of the illegal immigrant fleeing from countries whose economies have been devastated by the very countries the immigrants go to, “volunteer” firefighters and other workers from among the incarcerated, unpaid overtime… Indeed, fire protection units are being defunded just at the same time as climate change narratives should logically dictate that they should be a priority. Immigrant labour works for peanuts, without proper legal protection, accrues no sick leave nor pension rights, especially if the immigrant is then deported; and, more importantly, it exerts downward pressure on all salaries being competed for. The immigrant who does not return to his or her original country will inevitably further weaken social and ideological cohesion in Western countries. Historically, such weakening has always resulted in rapid civilizational decline. 

Additionally, capitalism traditionally relies on women’s unpaid labour, in the home, bringing up the next generation, and as carers and as workers in many of the badly paid professions (which are ironically many of the utterly vital professions).

But the very worst feature of capitalism is the lack of empathy it engenders in its populations. It belittles all moral value. From the 1980s film Wall Street, Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” has so permeated our consciousness that we cannot see how grotesque it is. A social system without moral values is not worth saving. Morality requires courage, itself an intrinsic value, in juxtaposition to our societies’ fetishist competitiveness, hustle, greed and grift. War, famine and pestilence stalk us in the West as we chug down our cocktails on the deck of the Titanic, and we are currently not worth saving.

¿Qué pasa con la desobediencia civil?

Mire a tu alrededor. ¿Se están acumulando los cadáveres por todas partes? Ah, Ud. responde, es importante aplanar la tasa de infección por coronavirus para no sobrecargar nuestros servicios públicos sanitarios, los únicos que le tratarán gratis por el coronavirus. (El mismo sistema de salud que se destrozó y se privatizó sin tregua durante décadas). ¡¡¡Hay que "aplanar la curva"!!! Por lo tanto, tenemos que aislarnos.

Tengo dos cosas que decirle:

1. Sería bueno asegurarnos en el futuro de que nuestro servicios públicos no estén funcionando a plena capacidad, o más, en tiempos normales, de modo de que los nuevos brotes de algún virus no creen el armageddon.
2. La implacable propaganda que se arroja desde cada pantalla de televisión y periódico es precisamente lo que ha hecho que las personas sobrecarguen el sistema de salud con unos síntomas que mejor se tratan permaneciendo en la cama, no propagando los gérmenes.

El bombardeo mediático ha sido más parecido a la caída de las Torres Gemelas que cualquier otra cosa. Donde quiera que mire, los medios de comunicación están gritando "¡Virus!" y "Pandemia!", señalándolo con enormes letras rojas, en imágenes estridentes y repetitivas. Recuerde que la baja tasa de mortalidad de Corea del Sur por el virus se debe a que las autoridades allí identificaron con gran eficacia a quienes tenían el virus en primer lugar. La tasa de mortalidad de la OMS del 3% es, en sus propias palabras, "ingenua y engañosa", porque depende del número de casos reportados del virus, que es un pequeño reflejo del número real de casos. No se registra la gran cantidad de casos leves; las personas que mejoran solas o con un par de paracetamol no están allí. La cifra total de casos de la OMS es solo de aquellos que se enfermaron gravemente por el virus y terminaron en el hospital, desproporcionadamente los ancianos y los enfermos, y su tasa de mortalidad es más alta. Las personas en países sin un sistema nacional de salud generalmente solo van al hospital cuando están muy enfermas, especialmente aquellos que son pobres y desfavorecidos.

Tenga en cuenta que los menores de 30 años en Corea del Sur tienen una tasa de mortalidad del 0%. Y con 66 muertes de 7.869, la tasa de mortalidad es solo del 0,84% entre los casos de infección detectados, con un nivel más alto entre los hombres debido al tabaquismo. En Inglaterra y Gales, según el British Medical Journal (una de las revistas médicas más prestigiosas del mundo), el número total de muertes NO aumenta, el número de muertes respiratorias NO aumenta, el total de muertes NO ha aumentado y las muertes respiratorias NO han aumentado. Entonces, dado que la tasa de mortalidad por coronavirus es más o menos similar a la de los otros coronavirus que padecemos cada año durante la "temporada de gripe" en alcance y objetivo, la histeria mostrada por los medios, el gobierno y la población hace mucho más daño que la enfermedad misma. En España, vi en la televisión nacional a un reportero que mostraba una "terraza" con gente tomando cerveza (¡ay, ya no más!), que los llamaba irresponsables y mencionaba con gran contundencia que estaban en un espacio abierto cerca de otras personas y "comían aceitunas usando la mano". La OMS tardó mucho en llamarlo "pandemia", mientras que los medios masivos lo hicieron desde el primer día implacablemente. ¿Sin embargo, es la crisis realmente una pandemia? En realidad no existe ningún definición cuantificada de "pandemia", que es sencillamente una epidemia que se ha extendido a varios países. ¿Llamarías el refriado común "pandemia"? La Fundación Bill y Melinda Gates es ahora el segundo mayor donante de la OMS, después del gobierno de los Estados Unidos (piénselo). También ha financiado una vacuna que dice que podrá estar lista en abril. No hay conflicto de intereses allí entonces. Llámeme cínica, pero apuesto a que Bill y Melinda no se vacunarán. Las medidas drásticas y burguesas que se toman, confinar a la gente en sus hogar, prohibir las visitas a amigos, cerrar todos los espacios públicos, etc., son extremadamente perjudiciales para las personas vulnerables: las personas mayores que pasan días sin ver a nadie y ven contenido incesantemente aterrador en la televisión, los niños que dependen de las comidas escolares, las personas que viven con familiares con enfermedades mentales o violentos, etc. Sin mencionar a las personas sin hogar. El cierre de escuelas y guarderías significa que muchos trabajadores sanitarios se quedarán en casa para cuidar a sus propios hijos o familiares dependientes. Ya Ud. no puede salir, ni siquiera a un parque, aunque nadie nunca haya contraído un virus al caminar por el parque. Sus hijos deben permanecer en el interior en un futuro previsible. Se le permite tomar el metro o autobús abarrotados para ir al trabajo, o hacer teletrabajo codo con codo con otros trabajadores, y usar auriculares que otros han usado minutos antes. Ud. no puede ir de compras a menos que vaya solo al supermercado, pero puede comprar golosinas y tabaco. Está previsto que los drones y personal militar harán cumplir la ley. Mientras tanto, 30,000 soldados estadounidenses están llegando a Europa en su mayor operación militar de los últimos 25 años, sin medidas sanitarias y con absoluta libertad de movimiento en su tiempo de ocio. (La postura agresiva de los EE.UU. ha puesto a Rusia en alerta máxima). Ahora que el desorden obsesivo de lavarse las manos repetidamente se ha vuelto prescriptivo, una orden incluso, ahora que nuestras propias manos se han vuelto intocables, ahora que ya no debemos contactar físicamente con otras personas, excluyendo el ridículo saludo de codo, ¿no hay nada que no esté prohibido o obligatorio en este nuevo régimen totalitario? En tan poco tiempo, hemos sucumbido al lavado de cerebro y a la mentalidad de rebaño que dicta que es irresponsable, o incluso un abandono del deber cívico, encontrarse con otras personas, hablar cara a cara y tocar a otros seres humanos, todo esto cosas ahora potencialmente sancionables con severidad. ¿Dónde está el derecho a la libre circulación en nuestro planeta común, a la asociación pública o privada con otros, y a la manifestación pública contra la corrupción y el poder que se ha extralimitado? ¿Quién defenderá a los perseguidos o los discriminados? El verdadero desinterés y el sacrificio se han convertido de la noche a la mañana en comportamiento peligroso, subversivo y desconsiderado que debe detenerse a toda costa. En cambio, estamos obligados a mostrar un patriotismo de manada aplaudiendo desde nuestros balcones en solidaridad con los trabajadores de la salud, aplaudiendo junto a todos aquellos que votaron una y otra vez por los partidos políticos que destruyeron los servicios públicos sanitarios. No existe suficiente nivel de amenaza para la salud -y el coronavirus actual está muy lejos de ser una amenaza importante para la salud pública-, para justificar que las élites dicten quién puede reunirse dentro o fuera de su hogar, o dónde pueden ir. Los ricos, como están las cosas, no han restringido sus movimientos, sino que se han marchado, empleados domésticos y todo, para disfrutar durante las próximas semanas en el lujo de sus segundas residencias y en compañía de sus amigos gángsters. Tampoco se arriesgan a perder el sustento. Mientras tanto, los bancos centrales acaban de inyectar otra auténtica fortuna a los bolsillos de los muy ricos. Tenga en cuenta que no han decidido perdonar la deuda estudiantil o la deuda hipotecaria de quienes pierdan sus empleos. Por ejemplo, el Banco Central Europeo ha inyectado unos 120 mil millones de euros ($135,28 mil millones), todo lo cual desapareció en minutos. El monto de la Reserva Federal de EE.UU. fue de $1.5 trillones. Ud. podría tirar un dólar por segundo durante casi 50,000 años (piénselo). Este dinero, en esencia recién impreso, será pagado por usted y por mí en servicios públicos reducidos, la pérdida de valor de nuestros escasos ahorros, la pérdida de nuestros trabajos o una mayor reducción de nuestros derechos laborales restantes. De hecho, las cantidades son mucho más altas. Han estado inyectando dinero subrepticiamente durante meses, parcheando un sistema económico en ruinas que ahora ha encontrado el chivo expiatorio perfecto. Al mismo tiempo, hemos perdido el derecho ganado con tanto esfuerzo -murieron muchos por ello- de manifestarnos contra la desaparición de nuestros derechos más básicos de movimiento y asociación. Agregue a eso el derecho fundamental a la integridad corporal, que pronto será tirado por la ventana cuando se nos vacune a la fuerza, bajo pena de arresto o peor (y posteriormente vacunación) por no querer aceptarlo. Al igual que 11S, que también tuvo un antes y un después en lo que respecta a los derechos civiles, estamos sucumbiendo sorprendentemente fácilmente al bombardeo pasivo-agresivo que estamos recibiendo. De hecho, los dos mensajes son incompatibles, pero no deje que eso le desanime. El mensaje: "No se preocupe, mantenga la calma, siga trabajando y luego enciérrese en el interior de su casa"; seguido del otro: "¡Pandemia! ¡Virus! ¡Ud. va morir!" No caiga en la trampa.

What's Happened to Civil Disobedience?

Look around you. Are dead bodies stacking up everywhere you look? Ah, you answer, it's important to spread out the coronavirus infection rate so as not to overload our national health service, the only one that will treat you free for the coronavirus. (The same health service relentlessly run down and privatised for decades.) We have to "flatten the curve"!!! So we have to self-isolate.

I have two things to say to you:

1. It would be good to make sure in the future that our national health service is not running at full capacity or more in normal times, so that new minor viruses do not create armageddon.
2. The relentless propaganda being spewed from every TV screen and newspaper is precisely what has made people overload the health system with symptoms best treated by a stay in bed and not spreading your germs around.

The media blitz has been more akin to that of the Twin Towers coming down than anything else. Wherever you look, mass media is screaming "Virus!" and "Pandemic!" at you with huge red letters, in loud repetitive images.

Remember that South Korea's low death rate for the virus is due to having identified with great efficiency those who had the virus in the first place. The WHO's death rate of 3% is in its own words "naïve and misleading", because it depends on the number of reported cases of the virus, which is a tiny reflection of the real number of cases. The very large number of mild cases are not reported, those people who get better on their own or with a couple of paracetamol are not in there. The WHO's figure of total cases is only of those who were made seriously ill by the virus and ended up in hospital, disproportionately the elderly and infirm, and their death rate is higher. People in countries without a national health system typically only go to hospital when they are very ill, especially those who are poor and disadvantaged.

Note that the under 30s in S Korea have a 0% death rate. And with 66 deaths out of 7,869, the death rate is only 0.84% among detected cases of infection, with a higher level among males due to smoking.

In England and Wales, according to the BMJ, the total number of deaths is NOT rising, the number of respiratory deaths are NOT on the rise, total deaths have NOT increased and respiratory deaths have NOT increased.

So, given that the coronavirus death rate is more or less similar to the other coronaviruses we get every year during the "flu season" in scope and target, the hysteria shown by media, government and population does far more harm than the illness itself. In Spain I saw on national TV a reporter showing a "terraza" with people having beer (alas, no more!), calling them irresponsible and mentioning their cardinal sin of being in an open space close to other people and "eating olives using their hands".

The WHO only recently called this a "pandemic", while the MSM did so since the very first day relentlessly. Does this make the crisis a pandemic though? There really isn't even an quantified definition of "pandemic", merely being an epidemic that has spread to various countries. Would you call the common cold a "pandemic"?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now the second largest donor to the WHO, after the US government (think about it). It has also financed a vaccine that will be ready in April. No conflict of interest there then. Call me cynical but I bet you Bill and Melinda themselves won't be having that vaccine.

The drastic and bourgeois measures being taken, confining people to their homes, prohibiting visits to friends, closing all public spaces, and so on, are extremely detrimental to vulnerable people: old people who are spending days without seeing anyone and watching scary content incessantly on their TVs, children who depend on school dinners, people who live with mentally ill or violent people, and so on. Not to mention the homeless. The closing of schools and daycare centres means that many health workers will stay at home in order to look after their own children or dependent relatives.

You may no longer go outside, not even to a park, although no one ever got a virus by walking in the park. Your children must stay indoors for the foreseeable future. You are allowed to take a crowded tube or bus to work, and to work in a cramped call centre, using headsets that many other have used minutes before. You may not go shopping unless it is to a supermarket, on your own, and you can buy sweets and tobacco. Drones and the military are being used to enforce the law. Meanwhile, 30,000 US soldiers are arriving in Europe in its largest military operation for the last 25 years, with no sanitary measures being taken and with absolute freedom of movement in their leisure time. (The US's aggressive stance has put Russia on maximum alert.)

Now that the obsessive disorder of repeated hand-washing has become prescriptive, an order even, now that our very hands have been rendered untouchable, now that we are no longer to physically engage with other people - excluding the ridiculous elbow bump -, is there nothing that is not prohibited or prescribed in this new totalitarian regime?

In such a short time we have succumbed to the brainwashing and herd mentality that dictates that it is irresponsible, or even a dereliction of civic duty, to meet up with other people, talk face-to-face and touch other human beings, all these things now potentially severely sanctionable. Where is the hard-won right to free movement on our common planet, to public or private association with others and to public demonstration against corruption and power that overreaches itself? Who will now stand up for the persecuted or those who are discriminated against? Has real selflessness and sacrifice really become, in the popular eye, a dangerous, subversive, inconsiderate behaviour that must be stopped at all cost. Instead we are obliged to show a herdlike patriotism by clapping on our balconies in solidarity with health workers, clapping alongside all those same people who voted over and over again for political parties that destroyed the national health service.

There is no level of threat to health - and the current coronavirus is very far from being even a significant threat to public health - that warrants the elites dictating who can meet up inside or outside their home, or where they can go. The rich have, as things go, not confined themselves, but have headed off, staff and all, to enjoy the next few weeks in the luxury of their second homes and in the company of their gangster friends. They will not risk losing their livelihood. You will not see many images of them as they live it up in their gated compounds, or unseen at the beach. As Orwell said, "The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Goering's bombing planes." After all, we are told this is a war, but it is not the one we think it is.

Meanwhile, central banks have just injected another fortune into the pockets of the very rich. Please note that they have not pardoned student debt or the mortgage debt of those who lose their jobs. For example, the ECB has injected some some 120 billion euros ($135.28 billion), all of which was siphoned off in minutes. The Fed's amount was $1.5 trillion. You could throw a dollar away every second for nearly 50,000 years (think about it). This money, in essence just printed up, will be paid for by you and me in reduced public services, the merming of our scant savings, the loss of our jobs or further reduction of our remaining labour rights. In fact the amounts are far higher. They've been injecting money surreptitiously for months now, patching over a crumbling economic system that has now found the perfect scapegoat.

At the same time we have lost our hard-won right - people died for it - to demonstrate against having our most basic rights to movement and association taken away. Add to that the fundamental right to bodily integrity (legally recognised as habeas corpus in 1679), shortly to be thrown out the window when you are forcibly vaccinated, or arrested and strip-searched (and then vaccinated) for not doing so.

Like 11S, which also had a before-and-after as concerns civil rights, we're succumbing shockingly easily to the passive-aggressive bombardment we're receiving. The two messages are in fact incompatible, but don't let that put you off: the "don't worry, stay calm, carry on working and then lock yourself indoors" message, followed by the "Pandemic! Killer virus! You're going to die!" one.

Don't fall for it.