Bassoe
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Thoughts?The real "plandemic"
The American political establishment - both parties - consciously sabotaged the public health response to COVID-19 every step of the way. The assumption in polite discourse is that these people didn't know what they were doing but of course they knew. After China sequenced the virus and embarked on the most energetic anti-pandemic measures in world history, members of Congress made their inside trades. Later, these same politicians would claim that China deceived them, while citing as proof the alleged early warnings from their own intelligence services. In other words: "China was deceiving us and we knew this from the very start! Now if only they were honest the whole thing could've been avoided, believe me ... " How such transparently idiotic excuses can pass the laugh test is the story of COVIDiocy but we'll come back to that. Let's just say that these claims pass muster for the same reasons as the insane policies they are intended to excuse.
Phase I
At the outset, accredited experts in the medical establishment and self-diagnosed wonks in the liberal media insisted that the whole thing wasn't even "the flu" and loudly discouraged any personal precautions, most famously masks. Operating under the principle of "no bad news," the Trump administration sabotaged testing from the start. And while Trump boasted about keeping his beautiful border secure, US citizens were recalled en masse from China without any screening at the said border. According to Trumpist propaganda, the "China virus" was either the product foreign malfeasance or "just the flu" and the "Democrats' new hoax." One the other side of the "cultural divide," Democratic politicians focused on the scourge of racism, with Pelosi attending the festivities in Chinatown and AOC encouraging New Yorkers to get Chinese food.
As cases mounted, DeBlasio desperately fought parents and teachers' unions to keep schools open, and even made a point of taking the subway to assure folks there was nothing to worry about. De Blasio continued to deny asymptomatic transmission into late April. Desperate to wrap up his victory against Sanders, Biden prodded his geriatric supporters to take their booties to the polling booths. A short trip for many, since thousands of polling stations were located inside nursing homes. And of course a short while later Cuomo was to orchestrate a genocide of nursing homes of his state, a fact now largely buried under the revelations of his creepiness around young sexy staffers. As the crisis reached explosive proportions, Koch's astroturfers swung into action to protest non-existent "lockdowns", conducting armed demonstrations in pickup convoys, blocking hospital entrances, and sacking legislatures. Economic assistance - the prerequisite to any kind of real social distancing - was delayed to the last minute and amounted to pittance while business received its usual full luxury bailout.
Phase II
But that was just Phase I. The pathetic public health response got an assist from the summer heat and, against all odds, the virus started to go into remission. This was the second "missed opportunity" to clamp down on transmission, and here again the ruling class kicked away life raft. It was at this time, that the "real pandemic" of racism suddenly became a matter of true political urgency. Assured by the usual coterie of experts that being a liberal immunized you from COVID and host of other ailments, "the left" happily went on a riot. With BLM as the battering ram, containment measures were being dismantled in the blue state. For the ruling class, the tragic death of one man and the nebulous scourge of "racism" provided a welcome distraction from the catastrophic statistics of mass death and pauperization. That was Phase II, and it set the stage for the dark winter of 2020-21, where hundreds of thousands would perish. The second phase of the economic rescue package would be pushed back even further.
Phase III
It's now winter of 2021 and, while still dark, it's morning in America. Beams of decency project from the newly-anointed-one's arms, embracing America in its hour of need. By definition, the Trumpdemic is over and the Biden Recovery is nigh: time to reopen the country for business. Despite much early concern trolling from the liberals, Trump's beautiful vaccines proved to be more effective than many imagined, and they arrived sooner than people were told to expect, just in time for Bidens' coronation as luck would have it. There's an export ban on vaccines and big pharma is pumping them out like rivets, so despite the comically botched logistics there will soon be enough for everybody.
Slowly but surely the signal to gut public health restrictions propagates down the chain of command to the cadres at the state-local level and the liberal press. Now in power, liberals openly embrace the key planks of Trumpism: liberate the economy, open the schools, fund the police. On the eve of Delta (discovered in May), and against the better judgement of the vast majority of the population, Biden dismantes masking guidelines and guts OSHA regulations. Testing is basically a thing of the past and insurance companies are back to sticking COVID patients with the bill. By July 4th, with less than 50% of the country vaccinated, it's time for the proverbial mission accomplished photo-op before shit hits the fan again. In a well publicized appearance, "Dr." Jill Biden assures a crowd of liberal fart-huffers that the air "smell much sweeter without our masks."
Now the country's back to one 9/11 a day and hospitals are at capacity. The administration has restored the original masking guidance and has implemented a vaccine mandate, both measures that have overwhelming popular support if we pretend like that matters. But it's too little too late. Before delta, mRNA vaccines were incredibly effective at stopping both transmission and death. Hospitalizations plummeted even before half the country got vaxxed. This was no longer the start of the pandemic where officials were strapped for means to deal with a problem of their own making. The PPE, the vaccines, the testing infrastructure, the know-how and the precedents were all there. All of these in conjunction could have stopped the deadly Delta wave, at least long enough for most people to get vaccinated and for the immunocompromised to get another year of life expectancy. Instead, Biden responded with a vaccine mandate only after it became clear that overflowing hospitals and downtime would be bad for capital (aka the Biden Recovery).
Follow the money, fuck the science
At the every juncture, the ruling class has deliberately kicked away the life raft. The US ruling class in particular has worked to ensure not only national catastrophe but a global one as well, taking the opportunity to starve foreign "adversaries" and to shore up its pharmaceutical monopolies as it truned the country into a global super-spreader, making containment of the virus impossible internationally. The statetegy to the whole thing was clear from the beginning: barely-controlled spread and a flood of PR to deal with the fallout. Rick Santelli blurted out the plan in one of his trademark "fuck you I got mine" CNBC rants: just give everyone COVID and get it over with before profits tank any further. The likes of Trump and Boris Johnson echoed the same message.
While playing dumb comes naturally to politicians, they're not literally retarded. When Wuhan went into quarantine, members of Congress sold their stocks, then bought them again just before the bailout. The benefits aren't just personal. A million COVID deaths, with millions more in waiting, delivers savings on entitlements beyond the Koch Bros' wettest dreams. Business is booming in health care, bio-tech and Silicon Valley, while the bailouts have created a bull market for capital as a whole. The decision to make COVID go endemic has created a permanent market for the producers of vaccines. Cuomo's decision to let COVID-19 rip through nursing homes was the profit-maximizing move, not only for his allies in the care industry but also for his state's finances. Last, but surely not least, the population has been taught a valuable political lesson: you have no right to life, never mind the pursuit of happiness, so curb your expectations. Progressives hoped COVID would build political momentum for M4A. Instead, the "plandemic" - to borrow a term from the useful COVIDiots - has postmarked the policy as a letter to Santa Claus, and this time definitively and indefinitely. Who cares about about 20,000 yearly deaths due to private insurance when COVID kills that many every couple weeks?
Losing the battle against the pandemic is the point. With the unchecked spread of Delta, the Pandora's box has been opened for good. Suppose the govt took serious measures to contain the pandemic and they worked. That would cost a lot of money and would obligate the neoliberal state to continue in the same vein for possibly years to come. But if you let it rip and create a "hopeless situation", there's nothing to do except flatten the curve while hospital capacity catches up. In short, the ruling class knew the stakes and acted accordingly. The price of their decisions was, to quote Madeline Albright, "worth it."
The useful COVIDiots
The profundity of "failure" in the "richest country on earth" required a PR offensive of comparable breadth and depth, involving everyone from the The New York Times to The Epoch Times. Thus the task of ruling class propagandists was to convince a sizable chunk of the population that the calamity didn't either happen or wasn't such big a deal and even if it was it couldn't be helped and was somebody else's fault. All manner of excuses and diversions have been floated: it's either totally under control or it's unstoppable; the authorities are either doing their best or they're doing too much; it's just the flu; getting sick is the price of freedom; it's all the fault of the WHO/CCP/GOP/Trump/Gates/Bezos/Soros/Fauci, the anti-vaxxers, the smug liberals, the rednecks, the racists, the sexists, the Asians, the blacks and obviously the Jews. The only common thread in this torrent of mutually contradictory and transparently idiotic bullshit is the ultimate goal of getting the ruling class off the hook. As long as all the roads lead to Rome - the more the merrier. The strength of this propaganda lies in quantity, not quality.
Dumb and dumber
This PR operation may be summed up by the term "COVIDiocy." Contrary to the self-serving definition of COVIDiocy employed by the propagandists themselves, this term does not apply chiefly to obscurantism and scientific illiteracy of the broader population. COVIDiocy is "his masters voice," which is in turn disseminated to the broader layers, particularly to traditional social bases of reaction, where it is mashed up and amplified in all sorts of creative ways. It's no coincidence that the places with the most horrific COVID records and consequently the greatest need for COVIDiotic PR - countries like Brazil, Russia and the US - have seen a flowering of anti-vaxxerism, COVID denialism, snake oil marketing, idealistic conspiracy-mongering, national-patriotic hysteria, and sociopathic "libertarianism." Countries that have had less catastrophic responses have less COVIDiot propaganda circulating because there's less of a need for it.
Such sentiments were both directly disseminated by various factions of the political and business elite, including at the highest levels of govt, and indirectly legitimized by the state's overall policy of handling COVID-19 as if it was basically "just the flu." On COVID, as on all other issues, the far-right has served as a compatible "opposition" to the neoliberal "establishment," echoing the aforementioned master's voice in angrier and nuttier tones. And as we've seen with Trump, the far-right will posture as a beleaguered "opposition" even as wins power at all levels of government.
In this play of dumb and dumber, the extremist wing of COVIDiocy hogs a space that might otherwise become occupied by a genuine popular opposition, siphoning off a portion of latent popular discontent and silencing the rest. The establishment wing of COVIDiocy gets to appear reasonable in comparison, while throwing up its hands in pretend-desperation and moving to accommodate the ultras. One need only look back at the Tea Party's intervention in the Obama era "heathcare debate" to see how the game is played. The Tea Party was child's play compared to what we've seen over the course of the pandemic, where the psyop went global and recruited not only from the far-right but also from the center and parts of the left.
Despite the best efforts of the ruling class, COVIDiocy has by and large remained a fringe attitude among workers, with majorities supporting existing restrictions or advocating tougher ones. Trump lost the election due to his mishandling of the pandemic while even some of Bolsonaro's base is defecting to the PT. Biden rescinded masking guidelines against the clear wishes of the majority of the population. Anti-COVID policies have, by and large, enjoyed majority support even in Russia, the country with record-busting levels of vaccine hesitancy and COVID denialism.
None of this is to say that nihilistic quackery was somehow invented out of whole cloth by the ruling class while self-isolated in some smoke-free retreat. As with any other ideological and political phenomenon - including the state's response to the pandemic - it is determined in the last instance by the means and relations of production. For Marxists, the analysis of "root causes" in no way downplays the bourgeoisie's responsibility for the crisis but rather serves to pad and structure the class enemy's dossier. In the hands of bourgeois ideologues, by contrast, "deep analysis" invariably devolves into some bullshit about about a "hugely complex" situation in which "we" - but mostly "you" and "they" - are all complicit.
The "crisis of democracy"?
It has become popular in establishment COVIDiotic circles to blame pandemic failures on a "crisis of legitimacy," as if the virus would go away if only the public had trusted and obeyed the officials' frequent directives to basically ignore it. In the same vein, there is talk of a "crisis of democracy," as if Trump's America, Bolsonaro's Brazil and Putin's Russia have too much of it. Supposedly, our rulers wanted to protect the people's health, but alas the people said "no!" and they were too nice to press the matter. Truly, our ruling class is too good for this fallen world! The lapdog press will of course print any fairytale that makes their paymasters look good, even if it's an Orwellian inversion of reality as in this case. But, aside from frequent repetition, how does this fairy-tale earn literally any "credibility"? The ultra-COVIDiotic "populists" lend it that credibility by: a) vastly exaggerating the seriousness of existing anti-COVID restrictions, thereby giving credence to the idea that the govt is working super hard to protect public health, and b) protesting these chimeras in the name of "regular people" and against the "elites." While this right-wing "populist opposition" is in actuality a billionaire-backed lunatic fringe, they do put on a helluva of show.
As previously noted, COVIDiocy broke the sound barrier in countries where the most rapacious neoliberal kleptocrats and plutocrats ushered in the most disastrous COVID policies. The only question is whether this will go unchallenged. In places where political power has been fully monopolized by the bourgeoisie, the COVIDiocy dominates the entire political spectrum. This is the case in the US, a one-party plutocracy with two right wings, and in Russia, a presidential kleptocracy with a decorative multi-party hem. In such cases, nearly all "opposition" is either fully controlled by the ruling class or entirely marginal. In the American model, the two right-wing parties take turns playing "the resistance" while remaining in lockstep agreement on the substantive issues, especially when it comes to mass murder. Trump was impeached twice on issues completely unrelated to his handling of the pandemic. Joe Biden stated that he "did not want to have a political fight with Trump" on that point. The American left has for its part either endorsed Biden's reopen agenda, or remained silent on the issue. They didn't take it very seriously to begin with: some declaring racism to be the real pandemic and others eventually joined the libertarian right in opposing the "job and freedom-killing" restrictions. In the Russian case, the regime presides over the highest death rates in the world then blatantly lies about the numbers to reassure the public, while the "Communist" wing of the systemic opposition organizes anti-vaxxer rallies. In Brazil the situation has been radically different. The country has a dynamic and powerful left which has challenged Bolsonaro's COVID response at every step. Now Brazil's senate has launched an indictment against the president for crimes against humanity.
Addendum: Nuanced COVIDiots
A year and a half into this orgy of bloodletting - a decent interval in the current news cycle - a "fog of war" mythology that paints the ruling classes as the victims of circumstance has enveloped much of political commentary. It was a black swan you, they didn't know, we're all culpable, it's all very deep, complex, inevitable and multifaceted. To these lovers of nuance, the whole thing was both an unfortunate accident and a grim fate. The compatible left has predictably joined this circle-jerk with its own musings about neoliberalism, equity and the systems of oppression, most of these being vague tangents at best and deliberate distractions at worst.
This type of commentary is designed to blunt the political edge of the crisis and confuse the already confused "left". It touches the political and material ramifications of the crisis only in passing, quibbles over irrelevant minutia, and mostly focuses on cultural commentary. The common trait among these commentators is their singular obsession with "the discourse" and their own self-image as independent thoughful intellectuals.Instead of unearthing salient, often inconvenient facts - something that requires expertise and a certain amount of courage - they simply try to keep on top of the evolving ruling class discourse, triangulating to either the left and right depending on the situation. Instead of exposing the lies of the ruling class, they deviate from the elite consensus just enough to give off an of "independence" while fundamentally serving as its apologists. To the extent they make any definitely claims and predictions, they always hendge and maneuver in the hopes that nobody will notice when they are proven wrong.
In sum, their commentary has the carefully cultivated consistency of snot and their message boils down to to calling the pandemic a land of contrasts. Pseuds like Zaynep Tufekci, Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald figure among the luminaries of this COVIDiotic nuance.
