Monday, January 25, 2021

Timely Remarks Regarding Systemic US Corporate State Social, Economic & Democratic Fragility Exposed By Pandemic

Another unplanned post before I continue with the prior thread of professional class magical thinking.

I really view this pandemic as a truth serum.  It exposes the fragility of whatever is left of US society.  It exposes how leaving our society up to corporations to make decisions on our behalf is literally a fukcing disaster. Just as I noted it would early this year before a single death in the US.  The list below of examples of fragility goes deep and wide and includes literally hundreds, if not thousands of major shortcomings created by bludgeoning democracy and public policy and allowing the mythical corporate capitalist free market to dominate society; this dynamic has been discussed on here over the years. Those who believe Trump or Biden or anyone is going to fix anything are sadly mistaken. The system is so incredibly fragile that any changes such as paying all citizens a living wage or taxing those who have stolen from the poor are likely to cause it to substantially destabilize. Because my analysis concludes that 2008 was the “end” of globalization (I’ll talk more about my past comments on this and why the economic dynamics we have seen since 2008 looks more like continuation effects similar to the change in direction of a large ship, for lack of a better description, than a continuation of globalization. But, today it looks like 2020s attempted global reflation has been a failure and if so, serious crises like ahead.) and US economic wealth peaked forty-odd years ago, I expect 2021 to be a continuation in the expansion of the cycle of volatility that is the overarching theme on here; I expect a more volatile 2021 than 2020 across economic, financial, social and political dynamics. Globally.

Examples of US fragility-

  1. Paying people slave wages creates a fragile economy and society that lives on the edge of endless systemic crises. Period.
  2. Allowing corporate fascists to offshore ANY US jobs in industry that is still used and even crucial to US economic and democratic success is criminal and an act of treason by corporate capitalists.
  3. Denying people healthcare or forcing them into fascist corporate Obamacare that literally extorts massive sums from citizens with huge deductibles and copays creates massive economic and social fragility that only benefits investors and corporate capitalist bureaucrats.
  4. Creating global supply chains so US corporations can extort foreign slaves for profits greater than they can extort from US citizens creates massive social shocks beyond economic devastation within the US working class. It also creates shocks and fragilities where US citizens are reliant on dictatorships to provide necessary goods and services.
  5. Allowing corporations to destroy small business, municipality-owned business and localism creates a society lacking in local resilience, democratic determinism and diversity. Localities are unable to be self-sufficient in any meaningful way.
  6. Allowing corporations to close community hospitals or reduce beds needed to ensure resiliency with any natural, economic or social shocks because it serves investors and profits creates a fragile society unable to care of those in need of healthcare.
  7. Allowing corporate agriculture to consolidate its power and food production into dehumanizing, gargantuan factories destroys local community’s ability to provide resilience and deal with potential food shocks for its citizens. Not only that, but the corporate takeover of agriculture has made the US a food insecure nation.  We now import as much as we consume because taxpayer subsidized corporate agriculture produces what grants it the greatest profit. That profit is often served better overseas where it can then employ the same model it uses in the US to decimate small farmers and print monopolistic profits.
  8. Our educational system leaves citizens lacking in skills and resilience to defend democracy and themselves from the corporate state.  Corporate capitalism, a system of forced competition for resources by citizen slaves, relies on a society to be uneducated.  The uneducated or propagandized, useless education delivered to the masses via media, academia and corporations is fundamental to its success. Because the masses have to be controlled to accept their lot in life determined by a ruling economic class.  Education for the masses is an anathema for corporations. Because then you will question corporations determining your lot in life and your economic worthiness.  The lack of true education in the US is horrific and leads to conspiracies and magical thinking by those who otherwise follow authority and abandon their free will without a concern.  Compare this to the ancient Athenians who created the liberal arts to ensure citizens were educated to defend democracy.  Corporate capitalism hates liberal arts because it teaches people how to think rather than what to think. Corporate stooges mock liberal arts as useless and mock how it provides no skills needed to get a corporate job.
  9. In a nutshell, what I am stating above is corporate profits and resultant lacking democratic government and public policy come at the expense of social, economic and democratic resilience and have created a massively fragile society. The free market and corporate capitalism being synonymous with democracy is pure bullshit. What’s synonymous with democracy and resilience is localism, family businesses, community-owned businesses, democracy-owned businesses, local entrepreneurialism, employee owned businesses and cooperatives and on and on. A topic beaten like a rented mule on here over the last sixteen years and now being exposed as very lacking and creating massive fragility in the process.
  10. Citizen government is dead. Dead. And, this creates a fragile society in multiple ways. One is democracy doesn’t policy plan to build resilient society, individuals and communities. We don’t have public servants. We don’t have participatory democracy. The corporate state wants as much participation from you as the CCP does in China. Or, the Politburo in the USSR. You get to pretend to vote for corporate-approved stooges in a two-party duopoly and then you are told to go away. No fomenting democracy in the streets. No active participation in making laws or running government. The Athenians, who brought us liberal arts, philosophy, science, assembly government and the golden age of the average man noted 3000 years ago that if you don’t rule yourself (participatory, direct democracy), you’ll soon be ruled by idiots. That is the corporate state of the US of A in spades. Ruled by corporate, political, academic, religious state, military and corporate media idiots.  The way out is for the mass of citizens to exert their individual and community power and strip it from the corporate state. There’s no need for violence. It’s easy.  We simply need to stop carping at each (what the system is designed to force us to do) other long enough to realize the root cause of our ills are the economic plutocracy that steal our wealth, our jobs, our free will, our creativity, our democratic determinism and our communities.

I could go on and on and so could you.  But, just a few highlights to get your creative juices flowing in what you see. 

I think most by now are willing to stop pretending that the outbreak is fake. Especially because it ravaged rural communities in the US that were caught up in Trump’s power of suggestion and magical thinking. This virus isn’t the flu.  Most recover but many also deal with consequences of unknown longer term effects.  And, while we have responded with some treatments that improve recovery, our economic, social and political responses are an unmitigated disaster for citizens and citizen-owned businesses while the political elites and corporations continue their plunder of US citizens. 

I noted before the election that it would be hard for Trump to win the election if it hit rural areas, which were his strong base.  Trump would have won re-election if he would have taken his responsibilities more seriously.  Even the appearance of doing so.  I saw a poll soon after the election that only 25% of Americans who voted against Trump actually supported Biden.  Anecdotally, that sounds about right. We’ll see where Biden ends up in four years. But I’m quite confident the world will not unfold in any way that allows him or the Democratic Party establishment to dictate policy.  It’ll likely be chaotic and reactive given the disastrous state of US society and an economy that peaked decades ago.  Fundamentally, the US economy is and has been a growing disaster for decades.  Half of our citizens make less than $20,000 per year and the participation rate has collapsed since the 1970s.  The shocks it is taking are exposing our lack of social and economic resilience that cannot be measured in corporate profits.  In other words, the free market is an abject failure. Of course, never in human history has any type of self-government or democracy(republicanism is a form of democracy) thrown its citizens to private, wealthy economic interests and told them to sink or swim. Then, deal with the consequences of poverty, crime, addiction and insecurity.  The US is officially a failed state created by Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, Ronald Reagan and the founding neoliberals.

I noted in a couple of posts before any pandemic deaths in the US in substantial detail that the US would likely be a disaster zone if the pandemic was a serious one. Everything has been an abject failure since. The US is less of a country than it is a corporate plantation. (continued discussion in upcoming posts)  And, that corporate devouring of our democracy that has been ongoing for at least 150 years is substantially behind the US puppet government. 

We’ve been made promise after promise by corporations, politicians(that have been exposed as unaccountable lies) and in 2020 by experts at the FDA and CDC for a year.  They have all been abject failures.  It doesn’t help that we have an anti-science society that embraces magical thinking and conspiracies but in reality, the state created that too. 

We now are officially being told the RNA vaccines don’t provide immunity on new virus strains.  Per my post after the release of my vaccine, we still have no safety and efficacy data or science behind the ramrodded vaccine.  I can say with nearly complete accuracy that everything experts and government have told us about policy has been nearly 100% wrong.  They may not be wrong on the science but that has yet to be proven; which is why we do detailed data-driven trials to confirm the theory.  While I noted I won’t be taking the vaccine anytime soon, it’s not because I side with conspiracy theorists and the anti-science crowd.  The vaccine science itself is theoretically elegant.  But I want to see greater transparent data and it’s not forthcoming.  And, now side effects and outcomes that aren’t easily determined with 20,000 trial participants because they may happen only once every 25,000 times or once every 12,000 times or whatnot, seem to be popping up.  (These could lead to tens or hundreds of thousands of unanticipated vaccine outcomes.)

On that note, my family just suffered a death of someone who was in good health until receiving the first dose of the vaccine.  Coincidence? Possible. But, if this were a death that happened within a certain time frame of contracting the virus, it would be classified as virus-caused.  Yet, we aren’t doing the same with post vaccine deaths.  In fact, in this case, no one is investigating anything.  I’m sure that’s not an isolated situation.  Unfortunately, the government has no formal data collection process post vaccine so we don’t know the extent of side effects or deaths.  But, we do see a few hundred deaths and many times that in serious side effects in the CDC’s VAERS data reporting system.  Unfortunately, just like everything else, this data collection effort is a comedy of errors so we really don’t know what we don’t know.  In other words, unknown unknowns and unknown knowns.

The trifling with this virus by society is most disturbing because the longer it burns as a slow fuse, the more chance it has to mutate into something else.  Delaying second booster shots beyond the trial science as a few nations have started to do also leaves a weakened virus with more time to mutate against the vaccine.  The viral load data on new strains is disturbing.  Overloading the immune system in volume becomes another form of concern as relevant as mutation against a vaccine.

In closing, the debate about medical masks is more political than anything else. Medical masks aren’t to protect you from a single virus particle entering your nose or mouth. We don’t know how many viruses it takes to make someone sick.  But it isn’t one or two.  They are to protect you from the mass of sputum when someone coughs or is substantially virally shedding from the mouth or nose. Sputum that often floats in indoor air for an extended length of time.  If you don’t think masks work, let’s do a trial.  You can ask the most fragile, elderly amongst those you love to let someone who is infected to cough or spit in their mouth.  Let’s see if they get sick or die.  Because this is what masks are meant to protect. 

posted by TimingLogic at 2:15 PM