April 24,
2020 "Information
Clearing House"
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Among the
infinity of unknowns about Covid 19 there is one
incontrovertible fact: It is not another Black
Death or Spanish Influenza. Deadly as it is, it
will not kill a third of Europe’s population or
100 million people worldwide.
Contingent
on that fact is an obscure future about which
speculation is idle, but a few things have
become clear in its short, dramatic run. It has
hit countries unprepared for any outbreak harder
than those where some prophylaxis was
available. It hurt those that denied or
suppressed the knowledge of it and didn’t act
worse than those that did. It hit America very
hard as it was unprepared and didn’t acknowledge
it when it began.
With
infected numbers increasing, in widespread but
porous lockdown that has frozen the economy, and
with no certainty on its trajectory, the nation
is locked in bitter wrangling on what to do, how
to do it, and for how long.
Setting
aside the tragic, pathetic inadequacy of our
barbaric Capitalist Health Business Joke, the
pandemic has been curiously used by MSM
information meisters both to partially mask and
also to rationalize the latest monumental
implosion and crash of American Finance
Capital.
The
perversity of this ploy is patent, since beyond
their serendipitous timing, the two cataclysmic
events are entirely unrelated. The pandemic
blindsided the entire world; implosion of
American Jolly Roger Capitalism was widely
foreseen, overdue, and regularly predicted.
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For a
century and more, in scholarly works from many
perspectives, it has been established
incontrovertibly that this nonpareil engine for
looting and defiling the living world and
enslaving and brutalizing humanity, embodied
intrinsic contradictions that would cause it to
crash regularly, and finally to cannibalize
itself. This, in spite of a long history of
hagiographic eulogizing and sanctifying by its
tiny sliver of beneficiaries, the Capitalist
Grandees.
Reality
notwithstanding, the Capitalist juggernaut won
the minds of The People. It would be simply
pathetic and not worth examining this issue, if
Americans had been so profoundly stupid as to
swallow whole the poison bolus of ridiculous
bullshit Capitalists conjured and embedded in
tangles and thickets of solemn sophistry, foxy
jargon, and yahoo science to enslave them. As
it happens, they weren’t. It actually took
decades of betrayal.
Beyond the
endless propagandizing doled out by their
wholly-owned “free press”, their rigidly
disciplined organs of “public information”, and
their junk-peddling factories of
“entertainment”, they were able to capture our
public education system to buttress their
cartechism. History was boldly falsified,
distorted and deformed by corporate hacks to
sell Capitalism to children.
With
government bought by bribing the sleazy whores
with whom they packed the Congress and infected
the Courts, the toughest battle of Capital was
that for destruction of organized labor. From
our earliest history, the bloody war for
workers’ rights flared to flame repeatedly and
the struggle was battered down again and again
with great violence: elimination of the Molly
Maguires and Railroad Brotherhoods, National
Guard gunning of UMW miners at Cripple Creek and
the Ludlow Massacre, killing and jailing Coeur
d’Alene district rebels and coal miners of
Matewan, the Haymarket hangings, Joe HIll’s
execution, and the brutal eradication of the
Wobblies.
The Great
Depression caused by one of Capitalism’s
spectacular failures, put heavy pressure on
industry and FDR, creating space for unions. The
Reuther brothers organized auto workers, and
Labor made real gains, but they were soon lost
as Capitalism--rescued by the enormous
productivity of Labor through WWII and
after--attacked, denounced and betrayed it with
pious assistance from the corrupted government
it owned outright.
The last
fifty years have seen the near extinction of
organized labor and the total takeover, not only
of government and the courts, but of society
itself, by the ruthless dictatorial power of
debt-based Finance Capital. Since the crash of
’08, in which overtly criminal banks were bailed
out by trillions of Fed dollars while people got
pink slips, evictions, and bankruptcies, the
giant syndicate of Finance Capitalism has become
ever more concentrated in an economy the main
products of which are debt, poverty, and
weapons.
The last
decade saw the most flagrant financial scam ever
as the Fed and Big Capital made, in business
terms, a merger. The Fed cut rates to near zero
for giant banks, purportedly to fund loans to
Main Street. In practice, giant corporations
got boatloads of near free money to buy back
their own stocks, driving prices ever higher on
nothing but the bid-up: the classic recipe for
asset bubbles. Finally, as was inevitable, the
con crumbled.
This is
where serendipity comes in. At the very time
the whole manky monstrosity of Finance
Capital--with its arcane heraldry of monetary
hocus and pocus crafted by criminals for thieves
and gangsters, with its discount windows and
Repo markets; bonds, bills and notes; CDOs and
tranches; puts, calls, naked shorts and
derivatives--began to wickedly unravel, Covid 19
emerged from its unknown lair and began swiftly
to sicken the world.
This is
not a cause and effect scenario, though. This
is not A: therefore B. A and B are unrelated.
The Masters of Disaster would like you to see
the virus as a causal trigger. To downplaying
and background the financial meltdown’s actual
cause is to sell it as a force majeure wonder
that only a Black Swan event could have
perpetrated on a wise, responsible market.
The polite
term for that is horseshit. The Titans of Wall
Street have been so dizzily, voraciously out of
control in their hoggish chicanery, pumping
their empty, shoddy, socially damaging Potemkin
Rackets for so long with such criminally
lucrative rigged payoffs that they just can’t
believe the jig is up.
And it isn’t. It
would
be, if Capitalism and that magic Invisible Hand
of the Market actually existed, instead of just
the dead and stinking myths, the elaborate,
simple-minded fairy tales that let them screw
the world so long. The fact is, there is no
Capitalism, and there hasn’t been since WWI.
What exists is a fascist style union of
government and giant corporations in which the
latter go all in on wildly leveraged scams till
they crap out and go broke, when government
gifts them massive injections of public money
again.
In the
present plunge, the Fed and Treasury hooked up
to refloat dead Big Losers to the tune of many
trillions while dealing chump change to The
People. One contrarian hedge funder, to the
horror of his ilk, suggested that government
stop acting as Bag Man of Last Resort and just
let the corporate High Rollers crash and burn.
At last report he was still alive. But no way,
that would be Capitalism. What, hold those
shameless phonies feet to the fire and force the
degraded bastards to play by the rules they’ve
been hyping us with for generations?
All
pandemics run their course and their time of
death and terror ends. Covid will. The most
fatal one in history--Capitalism--will be no
exception.
Paul
Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana.
He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
