Why Private Healthcare Makes Public Healthcare Worse

Like so much that goes on today, there's an idea that private healthcare does not impact public healthcare and can even lessen the burden on the public system. Years of neoliberal simplification of everything into pounds and pence, always understood as today's pecuniary cost, often an imaginary spin on the real cost, without taking into account other repercussions or future impacts, have meant that, even though we can see that every year is a little worse than the previous one, we cannot see why that is. We continue to be told that, if we just apply the selfish, everyone-in-it-for-themselves, I'm-all right-Jack doctrine, suddenly, magically, everything will come out fine.

It was a historic triumph in almost all modern countries - excluding the USA - to achieve a National Health Service, a stunning symbol of solidarity in the community. 

As Aneurin Bevan, the creator of the NHS in England and Wales in 1948, said, “Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community.” We apply the same principle of solidarity to state education or welfare payments and the arguments for a national health service are more or less the same as for other forms of solidarity within a community.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is no society, only individuals. Were this true, it would be a sad and depressing reflection on humankind. But it is not true: we are social animals and become dysfunctional the more isolated we are.

Most people in favour of private health care pay at least lip service to the notion that the national health service should be maintained.

But...

The very existence of private health care undermine the principle of solidarity, one of the most precious foundations of our coexistence with other beings. Do we really want to return to having to avoid others in the street for fear of their carrying dangerous diseases that they cannot afford to have cured?

Bill Gates used to have a huge public image problem, arising from his unattractive personality, his criminal undermining of all competition to Windows (and its awful browser), his sullen and shifty performance in the the US anti-trust court case against him, and his ubiquitous and horrible OS and browser. That was until he took advantage of the neoliberal creed that the wealthy managed to foist on us of hardly taxing the very rich. His soaring wealth allowed him to reinvent himself as a health expert and philanthropist. Luckily for him, all that giving was mostly to his own organisations or those he controlled, and it always worked towards his own interests (of gaining power over 99% of the world) so that, although Microsoft is only 20% of his portfolio, his wealth has doubled during these years of "giving", from $50 billion to $100 billion over the last decade.

Amancio Ortega, Zara's immensely rich owner, chooses to produce its garments using cheap labour abroad where the minimum wage is truly minimum and where health and safety measures are in short supply. Zara pays taxes in Holland, Ireland and Switzerland, not Spain, saving itself at least 585 million euros from 2011 to 2014.

There are Irish companies belonging to Inditex that report millions of euros in turnover, but do not have a single employee on the payroll and paid no corporate tax at all.

Ortega is worth more than 62 billion euros, and his yearly dividend is around 270 million euros per year or, if you like 739,726€ per day. Just 514€ per minute, every minute of every day of the year! He  donates from time to time to the health service in specific machines - mostly inappropriate for the public health service and requiring expensive maintenance - or surgical masks, gaining huge popularity. His donation, made possible by starving the Spanish state of the taxes it should receive and by ensuring that Spain's unemployment rate is never mitigated by his company, is always specific, never in cash, and never democratically accountable. It gives him an incalculable value in cheap publicity at an insignificant cost. 

Worse still, as these donations reduce his tax bill, a substantial sum of money comes out of the public purse to pay for these generally useless so-called gifts, should they be accepted. As they say - and, pertinently, was first documented as being put into common parlance in the 1930s during the Great Depression -, there's no such thing as a free lunch (TNSTAAFL).

Philanthropy does not, and cannot, substitute for a proper, solidaristic State. State institutions, when they work, when they have not been undermined and infiltrated by rich, vested interests, protect against the venal interests of particular individuals. Both Gates and Ortega have no medical nor medical research training, yet are able to use their tremendous wealth in order to pressure governments into buying into their agenda. Neither support, either ideologically or economically, the national health service. Gates has received huge pledges of money from most western governments in order to fund the vaccine he intends to use on the entire world population against Covid-19 (excluding his own family, I have no doubt). They will start with Africa, I suspect, although Africa really does not have a problem with the coronavirus. Yet.

As we have just seen, the private health services do NOT generally cover serious new infectious diseases, be they Covid-19, Sars, Mers, Ebola, HIV, tuberculosis..., nor do they cover pre-existing illnesses. New minor ailments are covered but the yearly premium quickly becomes prohibitive once they become serious or chronic. Private health services scrimp on personnel costs, often employing trainees and insufficient qualified staff. When things go wrong, as they often do, patients are frequently transferred to the public hospital, at public cost, never the other way round, and the public sector ends up with patients who may need very expensive life-long treatment, often as a result of mala praxis or incompetence while in private care.

For years, governments have been stealthily selling off the NHS, sending patients for minor treatments to private clinics and paying these clinics for the service. The private clinics make a profit (that is what they are there for), money that should have been saved or invested into the public sector. The public sector increasingly ends up with a disproportionate number of poor, very ill, or chronic patients, making its cost per patient far higher than the private sector's. This leads it to be criticised by unscrupulous people who can then justify further privatisation.

The Centre for Health and the Public Interest claims that post-operative care is generally carried out by a junior doctor, one who is working up to 168 hours a week without supervision.

The criminal surgeon Ian Paterson, who treated more than a thousand patients fraudulently at private hospitals under Spire Healthcare and carried out useless, life-changing operations where many of his patients died and hundreds were mutilated, cost the NHS more than £17m in compensation to victims. Patients were referred to him due to the NHS's long waiting lists, following decades of intentional mismanagement of the NHS, despite Ian Paterson having a dubious background and previous suspension. He was ultimately sentenced to 20 years' prison, and his motive is assumed to have been simply to earn more money.

Such is the incentive to make a profit and line some specific pockets that in Madrid during the Covid scare the authorities dolled out free masks, overalls, gels and the like to the private care homes, valued at 3.2 million euros; and sent many patients to these private centres although there was room in the public ones, costing another million euros. At the same time the overwhelming proportion of deaths was in the private care homes, where many patients were isolated, abandoned, and purposefully not given treatment for illness, nor water, nor food. These deaths tended to be of old people over 70 years of age, in private macro-'care' homes, while the small public sector homes had much better outcomes. Private 'care' and hospitals cost up to six times more than public sector ones.

As Noam Chomsky famously said, "That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital."

Other surgeons, like Dr Arackal Manu Nair who carried out unnecessary prostate operations at Spire Parkway private hospital in Solihull, have also been suspended after years of abusing patients, years too late for their victims, due to lack of oversight and the way that doctors are outsourced and allowed to have private practices elsewhere.

In small, fragmented clinics, consultants, who carry out the surgery, do not hang around to look after their patients afterwards but disappear home. Private clinics often do not have intensive care facilities and, if they do, they may well not have sufficient qualified staff permanently on hand. The transfer to a public hospital also transfers a large cost to the public sector and, at the same time, further endangers the patient's life by the transit.

In 2018, a report by the CQC into the independent sector was scathing. It found two in five private hospitals were failing to meet safety standards. In particular it raised a major concern into the lack of effective oversight of consultants "working" for the hospital but not formally employed by them. It also said there was not enough reporting of serious incidents or transparency when something went wrong.

Mr Patterson worked independently, the private hospital he worked at did not employ him (clinicians are effectively freelance) and he had his own insurance.

So, when something went wrong, as it so cruelly did, the hospital was able to claim it was not liable (though Spire healthcare has paid out some damages to some patients as has Mr Paterson’s insurance company, but the victims had to fight tooth and nail to get it).

The public health system often seems expensive not only because it treats the most expensive patients (and continues to do so even when extensive private healthcare is available), but also because it incorporates safety and quality procedures and maintains permanent in-house staff. The private sector charges far more in fact but will always end up cutting corners, because it exists in order to make a profit, the larger the better. The US has a highly privatised healthcare system that per capita is the most expensive in the world, yet the US is ranked number 38 in life expectancy.

But far more insidious is the fact that private healthcare starves the public sector of its resources. Imagine if $9,892 per person were used for a public sector healthcare budget in the US. Instead, the biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in the US is medical treatment, despite the country's huge healthcare cost. And yet, over 6 decades, surveys have repeatedly shown that the US population is overwhelmingly in favour of a public, single-payer healthcare system; yet, the private industry's lobbyists ensure that this never happens.

A near-universal single-payer public service can negotiate cheap medicines and supplies, due to the fact that its very size makes it a match for negotiating with any laboratory. Witness the cost of medicines in the US compared to Canada: an Epipen (for serious allergic reactions) typically costs $100 in Canada and $300 in the US. In the UK you will be charged £8.80 ($11). However, the NHS buys them for around £45 ($58).

The last reason why a private system will never coexist in harmony with a public system is that the current system is now out of date. Covid-19 and other recent pandemics shows that infectious diseases, which have been long on the back foot, are perhaps coming back, for whatever reason. Possibly the reliance on vaccines for decades has allowed viruses to mutate and, together with increasing poverty and precarious health for a significant part of the population, allowed them to get a new hold on us.

These infectious diseases must be kept separate from chronic diseases and, indeed, Covid-19 has been shown to be on a practical level dangerous only for those who are chronically ill, who should have been kept away from the Covid-19 patients, but were not or - equally worryingly - have not been able to receive their customary treatment due to hospital saturation with Covid-19 patients.

For any area with sufficient population to warrant a hospital, at the moment the paucity of the public sector ensures that, although there will also be various private clinics, there will not be sufficient resources for there to be a second public hospital, to treat the infectious patients in a different facility to the chronically ill.

We should realise that health is a communal issue and that other people's health affects ours. For that reason alone we should invest in a first class public health system and ditch the idea that a two tier system can do anything decent for us. 

Nero and Why Who Controls the Message Controls the Masses

Nero has gone down in history as a mad, bad guy - the crazy emperor who fiddled while Rome burned.

Nero was Roman emperor from 54 to 68 AD. The last of the Julio-Claudians to rule the Roman Empire, his 14-year reign seems to represent everything decadent about that period in Roman history. We're told that he was self-indulgent, cruel, and violent - as well as a cross-dressing exhibitionist! His lavish parties combined with the burning of Rome continued the economic chaos that had plagued the Roman citizenry since the days of Tiberius (r. 14-37 CE). According to the historian Suetonius in his The Twelve Caesars, upon hearing of the emperor's death by suicide, "…citizens ran through the streets wearing caps of liberty as though they were freed slaves."

Nero's rule is associated with tyranny and extravagance. Roman sources - such as Suetonius and Cassius Dio - offer overwhelmingly negative assessments of his personality and reign. Tacitus claims that the Roman people thought him compulsive and corrupt. Suetonius tells that many Romans believed that the Great Fire of Rome was instigated by Nero to clear the way for his planned palatial complex, the Domus Aurea. According to Tacitus he was said to have seized Christians as scapegoats for the fire and burned them alive, seemingly motivated not by public justice but by personal cruelty.

However...

Some modern historians question the reliability of the ancient sources on Nero's tyrannical acts. There is evidence of his popularity among the Roman commoners, especially in the eastern provinces of the Empire. At least three leaders of short-lived, failed rebellions after his death presented themselves as "Nero reborn" to enlist popular support.

Agrippina

Nero was brought up by his mother, Agrippina. After poisoning her second husband, Agrippina became the wife of her uncle, the emperor Claudius, and managed to get him to nominate her son, Nero, as his successor, rather than Claudius' own son, Britannicus. She eliminated her opponents among the palace advisers and had Emperor Claudius himself poisoned, poisoning Claudius' son Britannicus one year later.

Nero as emperor

Upon the emperor Claudius' death, Nero was proclaimed Emperor at the age of nearly 17. Nero was encouraged by his old tutor and the philosopher Seneca to think for himself and not be entirely under Agrippina's influence; and one year later Agrippina was forced into retirement, leaving Burrus, one of her previous allies, and Seneca as effective rulers.

Nero put an immediate end to some of the worst features of Claudius' latter reign, including secret trials, and he gave the Senate more power. His early years were full of generosity and clemency, banning bloodshed in the circus and capital punishment, reducing taxes and permitting slaves to bring civil complaints of mistreatment. Nero pardoned those who wrote against him and even those who plotted against him. He inaugurated poetry and theatrical competitions and encouraged athletics, against gladiatorial combats. Cities that suffered disaster received assistance and aid was given to the Jews.

He inherited the empire at a moment of great decline and financial difficulty. Rome had in fact entered into a period of rapidly changing emperors and instability. Nero undertook a typically Keynesian approach of public works, increasing taxes on the rich, which probably earned him an everlasting black mark in the history books.

It is true that, after he tired of his mother's constant meddling, he had her killed in the year 59, five years after acceding to the throne. He was also, at his young age, scandalously debauched, having no limits to his behaviour. He felt that his artistic talents were appropriate to giving performances in public, which was viewed as indecorous by many around him, but was actually very modern, rather like our current leaders on TV.

When the Great Fire of Rome started in 64, Nero rushed back from Antium, helped the effort to put out the flames, distributed food to the needy, and lodged the homeless in his palaces. When the fire started he was 35 miles (56 km) from Rome, so clearly did not start the fire. He did not "fiddle" during the fire either, as bowed stringed instruments would not reach Europe for almost a thousand years. He did, however, start a ridiculously ostentatious palace shortly afterwards, which was designed to cover fully one third of Rome. He would not be the first leader in history to be attracted to megalomaniacal building works, nor the last.

Claudius, the previous emperor, lost control to Agrippina while away fighting in the numerous wars that beset the Roman Empire in its decline. Claudius had allowed Armenia, an important buffer state, to gain a king that was no longer amenable to Rome. Nero managed to solve the problem, but the empire was increasingly stretched by wars and unrest. Nero had to raise taxes. It is said that the taxes were to pay for his excessive personal expenditure, but the constant military cost associated with all declining empires would have been far, far higher. His personal expenditure would have been publicised by his enemies and used to foment criticism.

As was typical in those years, there was constant plotting against Nero, and he was frequently saved by his slaves giving him warnings about imminent attempts on his life, in the nick of time. One such attempt, the Piso conspiracy, included 41 participants, only 18 being executed. This clemency shows Nero's great leniency.

By the year 68 he had the Senate against him, plus the wealthy families and a large part of the middle class, who were resentful of having to pay taxes and who found his artistic pretensions inappropriate for an emperor.

He was away when the Senate communicated to him that he was to be put to death. Apparently the aim was for him to abdicate but, taking the message seriously, Nero asked his private secretary to help kill him.

He died, age 30, in the year 68.

Most of what we hear is from the historian Tacitus, himself not perhaps an entirely impartial recorder of events. Throughout history, taxes raised on the rich tend to provoke a propaganda blitz of bad press.

Added afterwards to this article:

The Guardian (23.4.21): https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/apr/22/was-nero-cruel-british-museum-offers-hidden-depths-to-roman-emperor

Cómo renunciar a tu herencia y no perder ni un céntimo

Hace poco más de un mes se supo que el Rey de España, Felipe VI, era beneficiario de las fundaciones Zagatka y Lucum, esta última investigada por la Fiscalía Anticorrupción por recibir supuestamente 100 millones de dólares de Arabia Saudí. El padre del Rey, D. Juan Carlos de Borbón, en sus muchos viajes a Saudi Arabia había recibido comisiones por vender armas letales a ese país, muchas de las cuales se están usando para literalmente destrozar a un país entero, Yemen.

Entre las muchas curiosidades se encuentra el asunto de recibir dichas comisiones por vender, cuando el comprador es habitualmente el recipiente de algún obsequio por haber realizado la compra. Esta vez recibió este dinero en 2008, cuando a los españoles nos pidió "tirar del carro en la misma dirección", en plena crisis económica. Se supone que la "comisión" tiene que ver con la adjudicación del Ave a La Meca a empresas españolas y también por la firma de un acuerdo bilateral con Saudi Arabia, así como acoger en Madrid una cumbre que lavó la cara del integrismo religioso saudí. Los millones recibidos repetidamente a lo largo de muchos viajes con cargo de las arcas públicas no fueron ingresados en las cuentas del Estado sino ocultados en paraísos fiscales como Suiza. Además, las adjudicaciones beneficiaron a una élite corporativa, no a la ciudadanía.

Los presupuestos de Defensa están siendo tremendamente abultado en muchos países, como una forma de permitir movimientos de dinero ilícitos debido al poco escrutinio que hay sobre gastos de "defensa", justificado en nombre de la seguridad del Estado. La Reina, sus hijos, yernos, la familia del Rey actual, todos reciben un elevado salario público. D. Juan Carlos, cuya partida futura de fondos públicos se acaba de retirar, tiene una fortuna colosal, en paraísos fiscales, de la cual nunca ha tenido que justificar su procedencia.

D. Juan Carlos tuvo de abdicar del trono en 2014 tras una larga serie de escándalos que incluyeron a varias amantes y matar a elefantes. Ofreció una disculpa en la que aceptó como un niño pequeño haberse portado mal y que no volvería a ocurrir. Como un niño pequeño, eran solo palabras.

A una de sus amantes, Corinna Sayn Wittgenstein, y al hijo de esta, regaló 65 millones de euros. Se rumorea que el Rey Emérito tuvo un total de unas 5.000 amantes pero no pudo ser tan sex symbol, ya que tuvo que pagar bien por ello. Hubo otros pagos millonarios que se conocen: 2 millones a su amante Marta Gayá, y 500 millones de pesetas (€3 millones) a Bárbara Rey, por ejemplo.

Cómo renunciar a una herencia y no renunciar a nada (método 1)

El Rey Felipe hace unas semanas retiró la asignación que recibía su padre de las arcas públicas, unos €200.000 al año (sin contar su uso de aviones, guardaespaldas, coches, etc.), una nimiedad en comparación con su fortuna conocida y también la oculta. Debido al nuevo escándalo de su padre, el Rey anunció que renunciaba a la herencia relacionada con esas dos fundaciones de fondos oscuros que están siendo investigados. No renuncia al resto de la fortuna de D. Juan Carlos. Tampoco anunció que supo de esos fondos hacia más de un año, ni que una renuncia en el presente sobre a una herencia futura no tiene efecto. Y tampoco ha explicado que, cuando llegue el momento, si renuncia, sus propias hijas pasarán a ser las herederas.

[Añadido posteriormente]

Cuando ha habido un riesgo real de perder la herencia, cuando ha aparecido un hijo mayor del Rey Emérito Juan Carlos identificado por ADN, poniendo en riesgo tanto la herencia como el trono, ya que Felipe VI es el menor de los hijos e hijas conocidos, dicho riesgo se ha esfumado, en vísperas de aparecer en un programa de televisión, con la muerte repentino del hijo no reconocido por el Rey Emérito, Albert Solà.

Cómo renunciar a un sueldo vitalicio y no renunciar a nada (método 2)

Se difundió el bulo de que Mariano Rajoy había renunciado a sus privilegios tras perder la Presidencia del Gobierno. No renunció ni al coche, ni al chófer, ni al guardaespaldas, ni a la oficina, ni a los dos ayudantes, ni a la dotación para gastos de oficina, ni a su indemnización por cese, ni a la posibilidad de acceder de forma libre y gratuita a transportes terrestres, marítimos y aéreos del Estado. Tampoco su derecho a entrar en el Consejo de Estado con una remuneración de 100.000 euros anuales. Una posibilidad que de momento sólo ha aprovechado Zapatero y que es incompatible con cobrar de la empresa privada, opción elegida en su día por González y Aznar, en nómina de varias compañías.

Según el Portal de Transparencia, no es cierto que haya renunciado a sus privilegios y tampoco ha renunciado ningún Presidente a su sueldo vitalicio en España. Por acogerse a su antiguo trabajo, Rajoy perdió el derecho de percibir 6.736,09€ al mes (en 12 mensualidades) como ex-Presidente - aunque lo percibió mientras tramitaba su reinserción laboral como Registrador; y en su nuevo (y viejo) trabajo recibía en su lugar un sueldo variable de entre 1 millón y 1,2 millones de euros brutos anuales, en Madrid, que es - junto con Barcelona - la plaza más lucrativa de España.

En Santa Polo donde se incorporó cinco días después de dejar su vida política y donde su amigo le había guardado el trabajo durante 28 años, el sueldo era de 15.000€/mes como Registrador de la Propiedad, a pesar de haber trabajado en ello menos de 5 años desde que aprobó la oposición, con su correspondiente pensión, ahora que se ha jubilado.

En 1978 su primer destino fue Villafranca, León.

En 1980 mejora su plaza y cambia a León.

En 1981 se hace diputado del Parlamento gallego. Así que, usando una ley de 1947 un interino coge su puesto y Rajoy sigue cobrándole a este individuo entre el 25 y el 50% del salario.
Mejora su plaza de nuevo y sigue cobrando a su interino en Berga (Barcelona).

Pero en 1984 el gobierno de Felipe González cambia la ley y Rajoy ya no puede cobrar por el puesto.
Rajoy ya es Presidente de la Diputación de Pontevedra.

En 1986 coge la plaza de Santa Polo.

En 1987 pierde su escaño en una moción de censura y retoma su trabajo.

En 1989 es diputado de Pontevedra y deja su puesto en manos de un viejo compañero de su promoción que guarda el puesto durante todos estos años.

En 1998 Aznar ya es Presidente de España y el Reglamento Hipotecario cambia para permitir que el titular pueda conservar su plaza indefinidamente, lo cual beneficia a Rajoy y a pocas personas más en España, si hay alguna. Y los registradores se convierten en "funcionarios públicos y profesionales de derecho", permitiéndoles ganar mucho más dinero, a la vez que conservar sus derechos de funcionario.

En 2007 el Real Decreto RD2007 iba a dividir Santa Polo en dos distritos. Rajoy, como Vicepresidente y Ministro del Interior, lo bloquea.

En 2014 el Registro Civil pasa a ser competencia de los Registradores; y en 2015 también la tramitación de la nacionalidad (año en que se dispara el tiempo de tramitación).

Los Registradores pasan a tener un salario muy elevado. Su salario es colectivo dentro de su ubicación.

En 2018 Rajoy se reincorpora a su puesto de Santa Polo, con un sueldo de unos 15.000€/mes pero consigue cambiar su plaza a Madrid con solo un mes de trámite, la ubicación con los sueldos más elevados. Llega 50 minutos tarde para su primera jornada (de 9-17 h, con 2 horas para comer). Goza de una antigüedad de 40 años y un salario variable de entre 1 millón y 1,2 millones de euros, dependiendo del volumen de negocio de su oficina. El Registro en efecto tiene un monopolio en su zona y funciona como el comunismo: se reparte el dinero de forma equitativa, después de pagar los salarios de los demás trabajadores.

En 2019 publica su libro Una España mejor.

Se jubila el 27 de marzo de este año, con pensión.

Los dos hermanos de Rajoy también son Registradores de la propiedad.

Rajoy empezó siendo un estudiante mediocre, según sus notas de la escuela, pero sacó el título de Registrador como el más joven de España, con 24 años. Su hermano es el segundo más joven. Ambos estudiaban para su oposición mientras aún cursaban Derecho (Mariano se licenció con 23 años). En cambio, el malagueño Jacobo Fenich Ramón, con 23 matrículas de honor en 25 asignaturas de derecho, y estudiando unas 10 horas al día durante 5 años, aprobó la oposición de Registrador con 27 años.

De tal palo tal astilla

Su padre, Mariano Rajoy Sobredo, fue Presidente de la Audiencia Provincial de Pontevedra y se vio envuelto en un turbio caso, denominado el Caso Redondela o Caso Reace. La Comisaría de Abastecimientos y Transportes (CAT) almacenaba aceite para satisfacer las exigencias del mercado y regular los precios. Pero la CAT recurría a depósitos alquilados a empresas privadas. En Vigo esos depósitos estaban (hoy desmantelados) en la zona de Guixar y fue REACE (Refinería del Noroeste de Aceites y Grasas, SA) la empresa que contrató con la CAT entre 1966 y 1972 el almacenamiento de aceite. La CAT era el único propietario de ese aceite y un seguro dejaba a cubierto la mercancía contra cualquier eventualidad.

El 25 de marzo de 1972 se descubrió que los grandes depósitos estaban totalmente vacíos, y el Director General de CAT, don José María Romero González (perito industrial), denunció en el Juzgado de guardia de Vigo la desaparición de 4.036.052 kilos de aceite de oliva, propiedad de CAT con un valor de 167.615,172 pesetas. Sumario 43/1972.

Se realizó un juicio que duró hasta noviembre de 1974 y el Presidente del Tribunal era Mariano Rajoy Sobredo, el padre del ex-Presidente del gobierno. El listado de implicados llegó a ministros y ex-ministros del régimen y a otras personalidades con tratos preferentes en Ministerios, adjudicaciones gubernamentales, y similares. Nunca se supo la verdad del asunto.

Uno de los implicados directos, el Presidente de Reace, Isidro Suárez, murió en la cárcel de Vigo en extrañas circunstancias; otro implicado, José Maria Romero, que fue la persona que destapó la corrupción,  apareció muerto también en su casa de Sevilla (padre, madre e hija, asesinados en su domicilio).

Uno de los principales accionistas de Reace era Nicolás Franco Bahamonde, hermano de Francisco Franco, militar y político español, participante en la sublevación militar contra la II República, y que dio origen a la guerra civil española. Uno de los abogados era José Maria Gil Robles, que puso gran interés en demostrar la implicación de Bahamonde.

En la sentencia Rodrigo Alonso Fariña, fundador de Reace, considerado principal responsable y beneficiario del fraude, fue condenado a 12 años de cárcel y a pagar, por responsabilidad civil, 167 millones de pesetas. Fue el único que ingresó en prisión tras el juicio. Para entonces, el Presidente de la Compañía, Isidro Suárez, había fallecido en la cárcel, cuando se estaba duchando, según la versión oficial por asfixia al producirse una fuga de gas. Un empresario, administrador judicial de la empresa, murió por una angina de pecho antes de comenzar el juicio.

Alfredo Román Pérez, contable y secretario del Consejo de Administración, fue condenado a 4 años de cárcel. Miguel Ángel García Canals - funcionario de la Comisaría de Abastecimientos y Transportes, era el responsable de comprobar los precintos de los depósitos, y no lo había hecho, recibiendo soborno mensual por ello de Reace, desde 1968 hasta 1972 - fue condenado a suspensión y multa. Nicolás Franco Bahamonde no acudió al juicio, siendo ya Embajador de España en Portugal.

El presidente del Tribunal, don Mariano Rajoy Sobredo, llevó férreamente la vista evitando que salieran a la luz los aspectos más comprometidos de este grave asunto: las muertes, la participación del hermano de Franco en la trama, la falta de investigación sobre dónde estaba el aceite, dónde se había vendido, dónde estaba el dinero ganado...

Los 5.000 folios de sumario quedaron depositados en la Audiencia Provincial de Pontevedra ¡y al poco rato resulta que se habían perdido!

Posteriormente se ha sabido que la corrupción no se limita a Rajoy y su padre. El hermano de Mariano Rajoy, Enrique Rajoy Brey, facilitó datos al despacho de abogados del ex-comisario Villarejo, el "fixer" de las cloacas del estado, para sus investigaciones “jurídico-económicas” privadas. Ocurrió en el 2015, cuando Mariano Rajoy era Presidente del Gobierno.

Como último pensamiento, y reconozco que esto lo he añadido un par de meses después, pero no podía resistirme, lo más probable es que Mariano Rajoy (tal vez ese M. Rajoy de PP que la Guardia Civil no fue capaz de identificar) no es el brillante intelectual que algunos quieren creerse, sino un hombre que ha tenido la suerte de nacer en una familia forrada y bien conectada, a pesar de sus escasas luces. El vídeo te debería hacer reír ¡por lo menos!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s0qOlHpoJ0.

The Conformist Is Always Wrong

Just because everybody believes something does not make it right. In fact it makes it very likely to be wrong.

There is really no idea that was widely held in the past that has not had to be radically modified by later generations. This is true of how we understand empirical facts about the world, using science in general: physics, chemistry and mathematics.

Newtonian physics, taught in all secondary schools, is a wonderful thing. And is incidentally never quite as it should be in the real world! Pythagoras was, it is reputed, killed by the other members of his sect-like group when he showed with an easy proof that irrational numbers exist, irrational numbers being those that cannot be written as fractions. His irrefutable proof went against one of their most cherished beliefs, leading them to kill the messenger, rather than deal with the message.

The concept of imaginary numbers was strongly resisted in mathematics, despite their elegance. Although Greek mathematician and engineer Hero of Alexandria is noted as the first to have conceived these numbers, and Rafael Bombelli first set down the rules for multiplication of complex numbers in 1572, they did not really take off till the 1800s, but with many influential detractors. Nowadays, the study of electronics depends on them.

The Galileo affair began around 1610 and culminated with the trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei by the Roman Catholic Inquisition in 1633. Galileo had shown that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the centre of the Solar System. Heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to abstain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas. But Galileo gained some considerable popularity with these ideas and in 1633 Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy", and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment (in his case, house arrest, which lasted until his death).

The Catholic Church tends to be anathema to scientific knowledge. Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – c. 230 BC) was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe with the Earth revolving around it. Galileo's findings were thus not entirely new but ran against the Catholic Church imposed widely-held belief that the Earth was the centre of the universe, the maximum exponent of God's creation.

We are still, in the West, encouraged to believe without reflexion that we are at the top of God's creation, that there even is a God, and one interested in our personal lives to boot. This belief system encourages us to accept without question that our values, ideas, use of language, interests, etc are the only ones worthy of intellectual and ethical consideration. We believe in a food chain, with us at the top, rather than a virtual circle, where we too are eaten, often alive, by bugs, fungi, bacteria...

Organised religion has a huge problem with scientific knowledge, ranging from the Theory of Evolution, where God ends up being a sort of watchmaker that sets things in motion and then leaves the rest to evolution; to the idea of multiverses, where there most likely exists a possible infinity of life forms, and where it is even probable that whole civilisations appear on a planet, gain in technological knowledge and sophistication, and then provoke their own extinction; and thus have never been known to find each other. In the one case, God has no ostensible power nor significance beyond pushing the start button; in the other there is no reason to believe that Man is made in God's image and, worse still, humankind only exists for a minuscule moment in all eternity.

We give up other childish beliefs, like the Tooth Fairy, or Father Christmas, but it is considered heretic to suggest that belief in God is equally irrational, despite there being no empiric, scientific reason for religious faith. This very year, in Spain, a EU country, an actor was taken to court by a group of Christian lawyers for blasphemy against God and the Virgin. A year ago, a twitter joke about one of Spain's Ministers during the violent and repressive dictatorship the country suffered until 1975 landed Cassandra Vera in prison, for supposedly insulting victims of terrorism in general. There is an underlying supposition that repressive regimes do not encourage terrorism and to challenge that idea, even with a mild joke, should put one in prison; and that God is a real thing, not akin to the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, and not to be joked about.

Until the middle 1800s there was no concept that germs existed and were the cause of many diseases and there was huge resistance to the idea that something one could not see with the eye could have such an effect. In the Crimean War (1853-1856) the nurse Florence Nightingale - not the surgeons nor doctors - was revolutionary in recognising that hygiene was crucial to saving lives, although she was opposed to germs theory itself. She was not the first in perceiving that nutrition was a key factor for health (Hippocrates in Ancient Greece came before), but she was outstanding at the time for this.

On a political level, people only got universal suffrage after a long, often violent struggle. The first countries in modern times were Spain in 1933, followed by Greece in 1952. Spain's universal franchise was quickly eliminated by a brutal dictatorship, following a civil war instigated by the wealthy classes, together with the Catholic church. Greece later had its own dictatorship, although less long-lived than that of Spain, both regimes being characterised by right-wing cultural policies, restrictions on civil liberties, and the imprisonment, torture, and exile of political opponents.

Prior to universal suffrage the argument was that non property owners had no real stake in the country's well being and should therefore not have the vote. The modern version of this is the idea that the corporations should only have to respond to their shareholders (owners), rather than other stakeholders who live in the area and are, thus, affected by pollution, for example; or workers, who both live nearby and also depend directly on company policy; or the community in general, which is affected by tax regimes that benefit large corporations to the detriment of smaller companies and to the community's infrastructure and services. Why are tax payers not informed in detail how their money has been used? This would be really easy to do now that the internet and computers are available for one and all.

The vote for women was generally denied using the argument that women's brains are smaller or that women are more emotional than rational, thereby permitting that the most idiotic man be allowed to vote while the entirety of womanhood could not.

We now accept that, even if someone has the economic power and another does not, slavery is wrong and should not be allowed. This was not the case for thousands of years, and would not be the case if the "markets" were allowed free reign in everything. Shockingly, many forms of slavery are well and alive, but hidden from our gaze, such as overt slavery in many countries that have been destroyed by war, very often war from the liberal West. Libya, once the richest African country, now has since Nato's 2011 invasion open-air slave markets. We are also currently normalising the basest of uses of women's bodies, calling it surrogacy, forgetting that the women used and abused are de facto slaves. Calling prostituion 'sex work' is another form of whitewashing slavery.

In the field of animal welfare, a large part of the population has - against all evidence - wanted to believe that animals, specifically mammals and other vertebrates, are not sentient creatures who have their own personal interests. Animal consciousness is a proven fact, in as much that anything can be proved. We could argue that you do not really exist and are merely a figment of my imagination, and yet we both know that you do.

And until neoliberalism took hold some 70 years ago, it was recognised even within capitalism that the rentier, ie the financial sector, was parasitic and not productive within the economy. The modern confusion between freedom from limitations, rather than freedom to be able to do certain things, means that we have convinced ourselves that there there should be no limit to how much money a few individuals should extract from others, be it from having once had a good idea and the means to put it into action, or from having inherited privilege.

People are led to believe that writing off individual debt in the case of poor people is unfair and that writing off corporate debt is a good thing, as is the existence of de facto slavery, whether it be real slavery used to bring rare earth materials to our mobile phones and seafood to our table, or Wall Mart's and Amazon's coercive labour practices in a world where you have no real freedom to decide whether to work or not, nor in what sort of company or job. The UK's Queen Elizabeth's 2022 Platinum Jubilee celebrations forgot in their pomposity and futility that the original concept of a Jubilee was to reset debt to 0.

We accept as fair the fact that where one is born, both geographically and in what sort of household will to a huge degree determine the opportunities life will offer and where one will end up later on. Socioeconomic mobility is by and large a myth, and our societies are anything but meritocracies. The average life expectancy between two Glasgow city areas in Scotland, UK, barely 5 miles apart, is 28 years, and the only difference is wealth. Those who life in the poorer district can be expected to live fewer years than the citizens of Kabul, in Afghanistan.

The idea that you might have to pay high taxes in order to offset the environmental damage caused by taking a flight (maybe being allowed one flight per year with lower taxes) makes many people feel that their right to a cheap fancy holiday abroad is God-given. And, yet, being poor and never being in a financial position to afford that dream trip abroad, let alone decent housing, barely crosses the radar of most people.

Wall Mart, belonging to the US's richest family and the richest non-royal family in the world, is the largest retail store outlet. It pays such low wages that a third of its workers are on food stamps. It costs the US taxpayer (pretty much everyone) an estimated $6.2 billion per year in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing. It clearly does not create many quality jobs, and the owners ultimately depend on the state for their own outrageously inflated wealth, as the miserly salaries they pay are subsidized by the state; and, yet, collectively we do not see a problem with an economic model that permits the very rich to get richer still, all the while being subsidized by the rest.

Raising taxes on the very rich is over and over again excluded from public policy, as governments constantly promise to reduce taxes, talking as though someone earning 40,000€, say, were in the same bucket as a millionaire or billionaire. In the 70s taxes were made more and more regressive instead of progressive. Taxes on wealth or income are progressive, more so taxes on financial income (currently below the tax rate on wages - why?).

VAT taxes on basic necessities, like in Spain on food or electricity, are regressive, affecting a much higher proportion of poor people's wealth, or lack of it, than of the rich. Why is taxing the rich so controversial when taxing the poor is not?

A philosophy teacher at the University of Salamanca in Spain often asks his new students who the President of Venezuela or Cuba is. They all know. Then he asks who the President of Portugal is. No one ever knows. Yet Portugal is 250 km from Salamanca. A friend retorted to me that this is because Venezuela is a very big country with a large population. It isn't. (It does have loads of oil though.)

I won't hardly mention the past horrors of medical belief, such as bloodletting, mercury or arsenic to cure syphilis, epilepsy as demonic possession, sow’s dung to relieve labor pains, caesareans to fit in with doctors' schedules (a very modern horror), the medieval Italian advice that keeping weasel testicles near one’s bosom was an effective form of contraception, and lobotomies and electric shock treatment to control rebellious patients. Many of our current drug and clinical treatments for depression have been shown to be counterproductive in so many cases and despite this are widely prescribed.

We all know that some 4% or more of hospital patients are there precisely because of infections they got while in hospital and 11% of those infections turn deadly. The US CDC estimates that some 99,000 patients die every year because of these infections. The real figure is without doubt far higher. One of the most common infections was precisely neumonia.

Yet, here we are with the coronavirus scare, a virus that looks exactly like the seasonal flu, and the loudest medical voices insist on locking people in their homes, despite viruses thriving indoors, and then taking them precisely to crowded hospitals wards and ICUs, if they look even slightly ill - crowded because all non-essential wards have been closed down and all primary medical care has been discontinued. You can see how unhealthy hospitals are in the high level of medical staff who are getting CV-19, with many actually dying from it, compared to the rest of the population. In Spain, where lockdown has been truly draconian, healthcare workers account for more than 13% of the country’s Covid-19 cases. This suggests that hospitals are making the general infection rate worse as their staff spread the infection. The worst part is that this is the entirely predictable outcome for the measures taken.

We are not thinking for ourselves. Who is thinking for us?

The thoughts we think we have, if they are held by almost everybody else, they are almost certainly all false, if history shows us anything. They are not even our own thoughts. If we believe anything that really goes against popular belief, at least we have a chance of getting it right.

Conformism is intellectual laziness and it is time to think for ourselves.

How Not Being Allowed to Walk Means We Are Not Allowed to Think

Our very way of thinking comes in great part from the Ancient Greek way of reasoning and seeing the world. Unlike the oriental tradition which sees value in finding a common ground between two opposing thoughts, Western reasoning postulates that at most one of two contradictory ideas can be true.

The Peripatetic school was a school of philosophy in Ancient Greece where discussions were held as one walked about. Unlike Plato (428/7–348/7 BC), Aristotle (384–322 BC) was not a citizen of Athens and so could not own property; he and his colleagues therefore used the grounds of the Lyceum as a gathering place, just as it had been used by earlier philosophers such as Socrates.

Later on German philosophers walked as they thought: Hegel along the Philosophenweg (the Philosophers' Walk), in Heidelberg; Kant along the Philosophen-damm in Königsberg. Kierkegaard walked along the Philosopher's Way in Copenhagen every day, getting ideas that he would later write down.

In England, Thomas Hobbes even had a walking stick with an inkhorn built into it so that he could jot down his thoughts as he walked. Walking sticks were until recently often beautiful objects, handsomely crafted, nothing like modern day hiking staffs, used by badly clad urbanites to simulate rurality in groups and clutter up what passes for the natural world at the weekend.

Bertrand Russell said of Wittgenstein that he would come to Russell's rooms at midnight and pace around for hours. Wittgenstein had a series of insights about language and thought that are difficult even to put into words they are so conceptual. Language is central to reasoning and it has been shown that each language lends itself to a particular form of thought. To be able to transcend the limits of one's own vocabulary and typical linguistic structures and formulate thoughts that have a universal significance requires stepping outside oneself and observing one's thought processes.

But now, with CV-19, we have our walking drastically limited. In Spain, no walking is allowed at all unless there is an immediate purpose to it, such as going to the local supermarket or taking the dog out, and both have to be frequently justified to the police. In England, you may walk so long as it is not far from your home and a maximum of an hour's walking for exercise is allowed per day. No mindless dawdling allowed.

Walking is the most natural form of transport, requiring no special kit or expenditure except for some decent shoes. The human body is perfectly suited to it and thrives through it. The body and brain is oxygenated and it is good for our lungs. If you spend enough time you can go far and see the world first hand as it is, on a scale that is relevant to humankind.

At the moment, we are not allowed to share time or space with people that are not immediate family. Yet those very conversations with people we are less familiar with, and outside set social contexts, are those that so often lead one to unexpected thoughts at the most unexpected times. Our conversations online, often tapped out on a mobile phone, are a poor substitute for the sort of deep thought and inspiration that can pop up while striding or ambling along, conversing with strangers or lesser acquaintances.

Clearly you can think without moving around - Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist and astrophysicist was an active man in his youth but almost totally immobile in his later years. But in general being crammed into the typical house or flat is not conducive to original thought, less so with the level of distraction, especially visual distraction, we all have, with our mobiles, tablets, emails, Netflix, memes, video messages...

Our current physical immobilization, with our facial expressions covered up by a mask, our capacity to touch also covered up by latex gloves, is without a doubt not the whole story of what is going on. Our future liberties, for a start, are being drastically curtailed under law for the foreseeable future.

Equally worryingly, maybe our intellectual possibilities are also being curtailed.

The germ of this idea is from the writings of Rebecca Solnit (writer and journalist).

Debt and War Metaphors

Before CV-19 struck massive debt had been built up over decades in western nations. Trickle-down theory, much propounded by Margaret Thatcher, was in fact more like Make-the-filthy-rich-even-richer, and everyone else quite a bit poorer.

In the UK, external debt is $127,000 per capita (116,135€), ie for every man, woman and child. I bet you did not know you owed quite so much! In Spain it is $48,700 but Spain is a much poorer country and this figure is equally distressing. Of course, this amount does not include what you owe within your country to banks and other lenders, so your patrimony is probably far lower.

The secret of our capitalist world's functioning is debt, which is just another way of saying that our wealth will have to be paid for by future generations (be it money, depleted resources, dealing with climate breakdown, species extinction, pollution...).

The US debt clock is a scary thing to look at, and more so if you look at the bottom and see that unfunded liabilities, ie those with nothing to back them up, are running at $147,506,000,000,000 ($148 trillion) at the time of writing. By the time you look at the clock, it will be far higher. We have, over decades of neoliberal creed and austerity (what an Orwellian term that is!) built up the sort of debt that in other times would have been the result of war and destruction.

Our economic system is also one that mercilessly pits one person against another, where we see others as competitors for resources (be it money, housing, the latest iPhone...), not as collaborators in a common project and certainly not as allies in order to stand up to the real enemy, the 1%, whose lifestyle is trashing the planet and which purchases power and ensures that our democracies, with their two competing and identical parties, cannot function as such. We live in a permanent state of literal war (all the large Western nations are participating continually in diverse wars in which yesterday's ally is very often today's enemy), and in a metaphorical permanent war as we compete with others and against our very selves, battling against disease or punishing ourselves with arduous workouts on a treadmill.

Our current belligerent vocabulary of fighting the virus, being all in it together (the little people, that is), taking it on the chin, etc provides a fitting metaphor for the huge debt, ie fitting for a war economy. The debt itself in turn requires a continual state of austerity for the 99%, itself a state of war against the poor and the very vulnerable. As your birth will largely determine your level of wealth, or in other words as meritocracy is a lie, the idea that the poor should shoulder almost all austerity is truly gross.

When I was a child I had a funny graphic-novel T-shirt that had an ill-looking man and his girlfriend asking him, "Is it angst, Jim, or too much beer?" Now, we are indeed most of us almost clinically alcoholic, like the inhabitants of the USSR at the moment of its decline, enjoying nothing - literally nothing - as much as sinking wearily onto the sofa with a glass, or bottle, of wine. But angst? - there is no room in our world for artistic or alternative visions. Those who cannot man up and march off to work (no CV-19 problem there) and then hurry home, never interacting with others, whether because of street crime or CV-19, to drink a bottle of wine, those people are today termed mentally ill. They will be ruthlessly medicated with antipsychotic drugs that will make them depressed, mad and bad; or thrown out into the street - either way the contribution they could have made to our overly predatorial and funcional society will have been neutralised.

Today's belligerent words, whether it be "war on terror", "battling cancer" or the "war against the coronavirus", these are all empty concepts, but full of emotion nonetheless. Edward Bernays built on Freud's insights, and created the propaganda industry, what we like to call advertising. We are animals manipulated by our emotions and fear overrides everything. We now, in our CV-19 panic, have a war on death!

The physical War on Terror was called, rather aptly "Shock and Awe", synonyms of what we were supposed to be fighting against, although we were in fact inflicting great harm (and shock and awe) on the planet's poorest people. Those who have cancer and die just haven't "fought" enough, although the problem is their own body, parts of which are removed and taken away in a futile show of making them whole again. And governments fighting against a virus - what does that even mean?

Almost the only ones who are dying in this war are old, infirm people, dying alone, scared witless by the incessant propaganda on TV and by the Star Wars-clad medical personnel around them, intubated, inarticulate and in horrendous loneliness, without so much as a cup of tea and chocolate biscuit to ease their passing. This is what our decadent civilisation has to offer as quality of life: useless, repetitive studies, followed by unmeaningful, precarious, stressful work, followed by illness, followed by painful and terrifying death.

Did the 3,000 years following the Ancient Greeks' ideal of a "good life" lead us to this?

How Prisons for Immigrants Were the Model for Imprisoning All of Us

The west's constant military and economic wars and interventionist policies have united with the climate change our economic model has created, and millions of people are on the march. When the coronavirus panic took hold a few weeks ago, people were videoed fighting over toilet roll in supermarkets, so just imagine the effect that bombs, mutilation and death must produce.

Hundreds of thousands have been stopped at the US or European borders for years now, trapped in de facto concentration camps in horrible life-threatening conditions. Thousands have drowned in the Mediterranean. A few brave people have faced jail for trying to save them, in our Alice-through-the-looking-glass world.

Some migrants - what we would have called in better times "refugees" - get through only to have to try to survive by selling tissues or counterfeit goods on the streets or, much worse, finding themselves interned in migration centres that are closed off to visitors and are simply modern-day prisons of the worse sort, where migrants are separated from family members and routinely abused. There are more than 13,000 immigrants interned just in Spain, a country that has some 2 millions citizens living abroad at the moment.

After the Twin Towers fell in 2001 - those two towers that were supposedly impacted by two planes flown by trainee Muslim pilots, although there were in fact three towers that fell -, we collectively decided that it was all right for terrorists to be whisked away to black sites to be tortured for decades without charge, nor habeas corpus of course. In fact they were not terrorists (after all they had not be found guilty of terrorism) but just people, normally only the brown skinned sort though. It is not that we did not know about this. Everybody saw the shocking images from the Abu Ghraib prison, after all.

As the famous poem puts it:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

(Martin Niemöller)

We have not protested loudly enough about these black sites and internment centres. The narrative was that suspected terrorists must be removed, for the good of the rest of us, even if it turns out that they are not terrorists. As Bush Jr's Vice President Dick Cheney put it in 2006: water-boarding (ie torture) of suspected terrorists is a "no brainer". The following US President, Obama, would peruse a list every week of suspected terrorists, most of them inhabitants of the very poorest of villages in rural Pakistan, deciding which were to be assassinated - along with scores of collateral victims -  using drones.

In 2013 Edward Snowden, an IT analyst, became a western outlaw for showing that the US government and others were unlawfully spying on all of us. We are now all of us presumed guilty, rather than innocent. He had a dramatic escape (from possibly the death penalty in the USA) and currently has asylum in Russia. He has been unable to return home since.

Wikileaks brought to light all sorts of criminal acts carried out by all sorts of governments, including in 2010 the notorious Collateral Damage video, in which US military shot down at least a dozen civilians including 2 Reuters journalists in Baghdad, and including small children, and laughed about the indiscriminate slaying as they did so. Chelsea Manning, a soldier in the US military and an intelligence analyst - the whistleblower -, has spent most of her time since then in US jails, receiving massive fines, and under treatment that can only be classified as torture. Julian Assange (Wikileaks) has spent the best part of a decade cooped up, never charged of a crime, and is currently in bad health in the notoriously awful UK Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the US.

These are the West's political prisoners. There are many others. A few people have protested, but the vast majority has not and sees no cause for alarm in how these heroic citizens have been treated by corrupted power.

Meanwhile, obsessing about possible slights to Jewish sensibilities, confusing the notions of Jewish and Zionist, we have failed to extrapolate from the huge crime the Nazis committed, and have not recognised that it was never about the Jews, per se, but about power and the other. Once the other is equated with some dangerous characteristic, be it usury, lack of hygiene, rabid religious sentiment, black beards..., we have unthinkingly allowed them to be demonised.

By the same measures, being confined in one's home during the coronavirus scare is entirely logical. After all, it is the choice between a deadly virus that is killing millions or your whim to step outside. The problem is that it is not killing millions, that your stepping outside makes no difference, and that the right to leave your home and wander around is not a whim.

You might wonder why you should be confined if you are seriously ill - surely the CV-19 should warrant being in a hospital at least. And if CV-19 has such mild symptoms why are we confined in our homes. If, on the other hand, we are not ill, why - again - are we confined? Instead of confining all of us, why are not the very vulnerable encouraged to stay in, with on-site health support and grocery deliveries?

The press is now reporting that quarantine may be lifted for those who have a test result to show that they have antibodies or have been vaccinated, as Bill Gates has suggested. Hello, Brave New World!

To be able to walk around our common world used to be one of the most basic of human rights. Not being allowed to was, until very recently, recognised as a characteristic of the most totalitarian regimes.

The Faustian bargain we entered into when we did not take to the streets and protest the horrific reality of migrant centres and those concentration camps found on our borders has given the Dick Cheneys of this world a free pass to do the same thing to us.

Strange Coincidences of Our Time

We are all a bit tired of conspiracies - actually, 'punch drunk' would be a better way of putting it. In these times of very fast change, sociopathic and corrupt leaders, and an undemocratic corporate state working tirelessly to make us redundant and trash the natural world, it seems that you either have to be a raving conspiracy theorist or drink from the MSM cup and believe anything, everything and nothing, no matter how relentless the coincidences.

Our new world was brought out into the open with the shock of the Twin Towers falling, falling endlessly on repeat loop on 24-hour news outlets. Our remaining liberties were removed overnight, with the US Patriot Act and similar laws quickly approved in most western countries.

Our right to privacy, free speech, protest and the presumption of innocence went up in smoke. Foreigners could be deemed terrorists with no evidence and summarily executed. Even nationals could be treated the same way, whisked off to torture chambers to languish for decades without charges levelled against them. Habeas corpus was consigned to history.

The other 9/11, the one we do not remember, is the one in which, on September 11 1973, President Salvador Allende, Chile's first democratically elected socialist, was trapped in La Moneda, Chile’s Presidential Palace, after a coup was orchestrated by the US, specifically by Henry Kissinger - the same Kissinger of the Nobel Peace Prize (you could not make this up). Allende died and General Augusto Pinochet took power in Chile. Recognised victims of the state terrorism practiced by the Pinochet regime number some 40,000. Over 3,000 were murdered or disappeared. Victims were tortured in all sorts of ways, given electric shocks, sexually abused with rats, forced to have sex with close family members, repeatedly raped... Margaret Thatcher felt a great admiration for Pinochet and later on became a close friend.

But, going back to the second 9/11, the one you remember, by coincidence a National Reconnaissance Office drill was being conducted on September 11, 2001. In a simulated event, a small aircraft would crash into one of the towers of the agency's headquarters after experiencing a mechanical failure. The NRO is the branch of the Department of Defense in charge of spy satellites. According to its spokesman Art Haubold: "No actual plane was to be involved - to simulate the damage from the crash, some stairwells and exits were to be closed off, forcing employees to find other ways to evacuate the building."

He further explained: "It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility." As a result, the real-life planes flying over New York were not recognised as a threat and stopped.

Four years later on 7 July 2005, at exactly the same time as the London bomb attacks, a fictional “scenario” of multiple bomb attacks on the London underground took place.

Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, a private firm on contract to the London Metropolitan Police, described in a BBC interview how he had organized and conducted the anti-terror drill, on behalf of an unnamed business client. The fictional scenario was based on simultaneous bombs going off at exactly the same time at the underground stations where the real attacks were occurring:

POWER: "At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now."

In actual fact, the stooges who had been sent to do the drill had missed their train and had not been where they were supposed to be, which put in jeopardy the official version that bombs had been in the trains and not on the tracks. No doubt very shocked that they had been sent on a drill to precisely the locations where the bombs went off, they tried to reach the UK press at Canary Wharf but were shot dead just before they arrived.

The Madrid bombs on 11 March 2004 - 911 days after 9/11 - killed 193 people and injured around 2,000. Purportedly al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, but 4 of the alleged perpetrators died, having committed suicide (no judge, no jury), and the others claimed they were not guilty but had been set up. Some had been under police surveillance since 2001. However, in this case, the right-wing PP government, which had taken Spain into Bush and Blair's invasion of Iraq, despite massive anti-war demonstrations, lost the election and the more moderate opposition party gained power.

And now, we have the coronavirus scare, which promises to reconfigure our western world like nothing we have experienced up to now. Just before CV-19 appeared, the exclusive Event 201 was held, hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, on 18 October 2019 in New York, with a very select and limited group of attendees. The subject of the event was a pandemic scenario arising from a coronavirus, and the conclusion was that "the next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering."

Luckily the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a key participant, gave us the following recommendation:

"Media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including through the use of technology."

There are, in fact, many coincidences happening in these dark times. Which are no doubt coincidental.

It is extremely lucky that our rulers are so prescient.

The Why's and the Wherefore's of What's Going On

The UK's epidemic expert Neil Ferguson has been drastically revising the coronavirus' mortality ever downwards, no longer the dramatic upper figure of half a million, but now more like 20,000. We have recently found out that the first mortal victim was in February, nearly two months ago, backing up Oxford University's research team that postulates that the number of infected is probably far higher than previously thought, maybe even half the population. Neil Ferguson also accepts that the total number of infected is far higher than he originally thought. This would make the current coronavirus more akin to seasonal flu, as all actual mortality data both in the UK and elsewhere has shown from the beginning. And, if so many have been infected, the CV-19's mortality is far, far lower than the screaming headlines have had us believe.

Two days ago, the OAP residence right next to my house, was found to have 69% of its inmates infected. No surprise there: the lockdown has deprived people of fresh air and has confined them inside in a perfect virus-breeding ground. The Spanish state has taken over the home, converting it into a "hospital" and installed general medical staff to tend to the inmates. All the people in the home are, by definition, old and very infirm. And, yet, no rushing of inmates to a proper hospital. Rather like you would expect if the CV-19 were simply seasonal flu.

The big question is, then, why are we being scared to death about the pandemic, if it is no different to any previous year over the last decade or more, and why are we living in a de facto totalitarian state as a result.

Quite obviously our throw-away, consumption-based world could not continue indefinitely. For all of us to live the American Dream (the one that far less that half of the US population lives), we would need more than seven planets. Our planet is on fire, almost irreversibly trashed, and capitalism cannot find a way out of the quandary, as central planning is anathema to the neoliberal creed. When the western economies crashed in the early 1970s, following the golden years of the 50s and 60s, capital was unleashed as the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher revolution allowed high-street banks to act like investment banks, permitting them to behave like casinos.

Corporations were given rights as "persons", more rights in fact than real people. When pressure on salaries and outsourcing of jobs to the lowest-paid and least-protected worker meant that people could no longer buy the products that capitalism needs us to buy, we were encouraged by cheap interest rates to borrow more and more, on the never-never. When that huge Ponzi scheme went tits-up, we were encouraged to keep on spending as goods got cheaper and cheaper. In the UK people change their mobile phone on average around every two years (without taking into account "burn phones", those that are used for days or weeks before being trashed). The improvements found in the new models are imperceptible for most buyers who simply do not have the necessary technical knowledge, but they get the new model anyway.

Huge pressure is put on countries like Bolivia (which has just suffered a coup and has the lithium that we need to keep all those battery-powered phones and cars running) or Venezuela (which has the largest world reserves of oil and which sets a bad example by being fairly democratic and by not being amenable to US expropriation, unlike head-chopping Saudi Arabia). Almost all the wars in the world - and the US is currently involved in some 134 war zones - are to do with fighting over scarce resources, whether water, lithium, gas, petrol, or rare earth elements. The rest are to do with stamping out the dangerous notion that looking after people, rather than corporations, is a good idea.

So things could not really go on as before. The planet is insufficient, there are so many of us and those that do not conform to being simple consumers are dying out or being exterminated.

In this New World Order, capitalism is once again bailed out, and unbelievable funds are right now being funnelled upwards to the very rich, as always perfectly on time, right after the bulk of bank bonuses had just been paid.

There is no debate on MSM about the hideous inequality in our societies, as all us little people face losing our jobs once the CV-19 scare has passed. We are already being told that China's relaxation of their quarantine rules has been problematic, I suppose so that we never imagine that we shall be able to take to the street and protest once this is over. This state of exception can be brought back at any time in the future.

The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population. Do we really think they are worth it? You are not among them and you will never be! We have computer nerd Bill Gates, made hugely wealthy by mafia-style shenanigans (the original antitrust court case has to be seen to be believed for creepy non-collaboration and amnesia from Mr Gates). Do we really think he is now a health expert, specifically a benign, disinterested health expert? He is the largest single donor to the World Health Organisation and his philanthropy is making him much wealthier as people's health becomes increasingly medicalised. Forget Windows: Microsoft only makes up 20% of his wealth and his net worth is larger than that of 130 countries. His vision is totalitarian: in a recent Ted Talk, Gates says that "eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person" in order to be allowed to travel.

For the 1% to continue living life as they wish, jetting from one mansion to another in exotic locations, the climate crisis dictates that the 99% (all of us) are kept restrained in our unproductive, little lives, as infertile as possible now that AI can do almost all our jobs. Once the CV-19 has disappeared from our screens, we shall no doubt, almost all of us, have our working week reduced, which is a good and necessary thing. But, instead of this being decided upon by us ourselves, we are shortly to join a subclass where, so long as we keep quiet and do not bother the elite, we shall be allowed to carry on. As money is at this very moment funnelled upwards, no one asks us if we think that having an elite with so much money may well be incompatible with democracy.

We have all seen doctors on TV telling us this is a dangerous virus and that they are in a desperate situation fighting it (who does not love being interviewed on TV?). We do not, however, get shown the many other doctors and experts who have a very different point of view. We do not get reminded that many hospitals were overcrowded and overwhelmed long before the virus appeared, or that many hospitals and wards are actually empty as resources are directed to intensive care and Emergency and as elective surgery is postponed. We do not get reminded how many people die every day in normal times and that the overall death rate has NOT gone up with CV-19.

The remaining question is why governments everywhere are overreacting, although they are not all implementing the same measures, not by a long chalk. Most governments operate on political terms. The MP and Ministers are given their information by political advisers primarily (did you really think that ministers were experts in their fields as successive cabinet shuffles move them around?). Western democracy means that political parties are constantly seeking political power and to keep that power. There is a huge political risk, as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have found out, in not taking measures when the MSM is ramping up the panic. It is politically far safer to do more or less the same as other nations, even if the model has been set by a country you have decried for years as totalitarian, unreliable and as a fragrant abuser of human rights (China). And, if it turns out that CV-19 is after all no different from seasonal flu, the MSM, who were the first to tell the lie, will keep quiet about it.

Governments are substituting the very real herd immunity of diseases for the equally real herd mentality of politicians.

There is another huge advantage for our short-termist western political parties, almost all of which serve the corporate state: the measures taken are truly totalitarian in nature, ensuring a compliant, conformist population with no opportunity for dissent.

A Stopped Clock Still Tells the Time

Newspapers and magazines get their money from advertisers, not from sales of the paper itself. That is the reason why free newspapers can be economically viable and why so much media is available online for free. Without a doubt the last four decades or more have seen a change from seasoned journalists to young interns, from the local, on-site reporter to rewriting copy from Reuters, Efe and so on. No media magnate wants to spend money he does not have to. Most people have grown used to seeing no anomaly in finding exactly the same news (sometimes with different words) everywhere they look, and those that notice that this undermines the plurality of human experiences are often too cash-strapped to finance a different sort of media.

We actually live already in a de facto totalitarian system on many levels, with a strict limit on what can be said or even thought outside of determined confines. (Post coronavirus it is likely that our regimes will be fully totalitarian.)

You might find a heated discussion about this or that car, or electric scooters, or travel to one exotic place or another, but you will in general never find serious space given to whether a capitalist economy is a good thing, whether all private transport should be discouraged, whether public transport should be abundant and free... Any newspaper is constrained by its advertisers and will not act against their interests. Once you understand that the newspaper's client is the advertiser and that the you are the product being delivered to the client, you can see why mass media is in fact a propaganda outlet.

All this is the same for TV, with the added impact of its intrusive nature: high, strident volume, imperceptible flickering, saturated colours, false dichotomies, lack of opportunity to stop and meditate on whether the reasoning being blared at one is well-founded...

The BBC, without overt advertising, depends on the government and the constant threat of having the substantial licence fee lowered or abolished and will, as a result, defend the interests of the deep state tooth and nail, and will relentless attack any politician that threatens these interests.

All of us above a certain age remember the shocking propaganda that justified the Iraq War. Actually, it was not convincing at any point: the politicians making the case for war (Bush Jr, with creepy and self-interested Cheney and Rumsfeld in the background, Blair, Aznar) were never going to be reliable truth tellers. Important civil servants resigned, stating clearly that there was no legal case for war. We all knew deep down that it was all about the oil in Iraq, about keeping the region in western hands and about keeping the world addicted to oil, not to mention maintaining Israel's privileges. Years later the mainstream media lamented how they had been hoodwinked and, yet, it is hard to believe they actually were hoodwinked, when so many of the public had seen through the lie (witness the huge antiwar demonstrations).

A massive exercise in cognitive dissonance is ongoing, that of believing the BBC and other MSM yet again, this time about the coronavirus. People are suffering and will die, mainly because of the hideous poverty (what is endearingly called "austerity") that will be rained down yet again as a result of shutting down people's lives and locking them indoors - just the 99%, mind you.

Cramming old people into OAP homes, quarantining them without fresh air or green spaces (a perfect recipe for a flu epidemic), stopping them from having visitors, over medicating them and forcing the flu vaccine on them every year (there is a link with the flu vaccine and getting CV-19) has created a perfect environment for this year's flu. And they are dying. No palliative care for them though. No kind attention to their last wishes of a relative or pet nearby, a warm hand, a cup of tea and a biscuit, none of that. Just scary face masks and latex gloves in the intensive care unit, while those who actually need intensive care (accidents, real acute illness) will be turned away. This is no way to die if you are old.

All the relentless propaganda - after all, who actually reads anything over a screen in length, if that, nowadays? - has made us see reality not as it is but a little off centre. We do not see the big picture as we take the little selfie. If, in your isolation, the clock on your mobile was a little off you could tell the time all day and never get it right. A mad man in the next flat might stare at a stopped clock and happily say all day, "It's 9:30!" He'd be right twice a day though.

Better to be neither of them, not the coherent but wrong individual, nor the mad person. Better to take off the blinkers, switch off the MSM noise, take on the arguments on the other side, and see what there is to them.