World Politics
Understanding the Current COVID Oppression Starts with Economy
What’s happening in the world?
This is not a pretty post. But it’s an honest one about what is happening in the world right now. To borrow the words of umair haque, economist and writer of ‘Betterness, economics for humans’:
“This post is going to make some of you angry, chill some of you, and make some of you weep with despair. You should.” — Covid Apocalypse
And he is right. His apocalyptic way of writing is not my style. But Umair and I and other economists do write about exactly the same things. And I do need to face his urgent call to action. Because I see what he sees. Our current capitalist mechanisms are wrecking our world in more ways than one. And I need to add my voice to his and many others to explain to you why. And how.
I do it every day, working with government and business leaders wanting change. So, I want you, my reader friends, to understand too.
And then? Is feeling the pain enough? Can we work out together how to change? As I said before, we humans made the economy, we can change her. But first, we have to face the truth of what’s happening.
Walk with me. And please keep your eyes open although the pain might drive you nuts.
Oppression
What oppression? How oppression? What’s happening that we close our eyes to? Umair Haque calls it Holocaust and I did in my title at first too.
But I changed my words. Oppression is a better word for me to use. My words are not meant to shock. They are always meant to inspire. But people are dying because of failing distribution. Because some people can pay and others cannot. Let me quote Umair.
The world’s population is 8 billion people, give or take. Covid’s mortality rate — this is just the current variants — is about 2%. Let’s assume half the world eventually gets infected — so far, somewhere between 5 and 10% of the world has.
How many deaths is that? 160,000,000. Holocaust enough for you? That’s too much, to be sure. Let’s assume just half the world gets infected, at a mortality rate of 1%. Total number of deaths? Forty million.
That is modern history’s greatest holocaust, by a very long way.
Humanity pays the price now for decades of destroying ecosystems. Rapid virus spread has before been warned about by ecologists. And if we think of it as humanity, we can shrug our shoulders. The word humanity has no face. But humanity is someone’s father, your mother, my grandmother. Often poor people don’t have the money to afford healthcare or prevention of illness and good immune systems. Their stress levels are the highest of all.
And then the quick fix has presented a vaccine. Who can afford it? How does it get to where it’s needed?
India, Africa, Indonesia
The pictures from India are devastating. But our minds are numb by now. We have already one year of fear behind us and our hearts can take no more. We want laughter, happiness. We want to party with our loved ones. Is that so wrong? No, it isn’t. But we do need to face what’s happening anyway.
Why? Because only if the truth of all of this reaches our souls will we change as humanity. Only then, will we create different human systems? Only then, our children and grandchildren will stand a chance to have a happy life.
So, what is the truth? The truth starts with humans living on a planet with planetary laws. But the same truth is that we created an economic system full of toxic triggers. Nature is abundant, nature heals, nature doesn’t discriminate.
Nature is just very clear and has a long-term vision. And what do we humans do? We try to come up on top, create confusion in our own heads and others so nobody sees or understands. And in the end, we are all slaves to a system that would not be like this if we follow nature’s laws.
In short, we created a system of riches for a few privileged people and poison the rest of humanity and other species. And now, with the pandemic, the results become clearer and clearer.
Read the work of Mariana Mazzucata, Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London. Or in my own words:
The biggest problem of our current economies is that companies are allowed to internalize all profits and externalize all costs. Public money pays for initial investments and cleans up the mess.
Let it sink in for a moment. Public money is used to create vaccines. Big pharma companies transform this public money into private profit for a handful of shareholders. And citizens pay with their lives now that solutions aren’t distributed equally.
In other words, all goodies may be swallowed by the shareholders of big companies, but all the costs are thrown over the wall into society. Pollution? You solve it! Waste? You solve it! Illness? You solve it! Deaths? You solve it!
So, what is toxic about global vaccine strategies right now?
- The knowledge to create vaccines should be open source because it is created with a lot of public money
- Instead, the vaccine patents are privatized, owned by Pfizer, Astra Zeneca, and a few others. They decide who gets what. How much. Where. They have claimed immunity from all lawsuits when their vaccines prove to have fatal consequences in the long run. That’s internalizing profits and externalizing all risks and costs
- Instead of producing vaccines in all corners of the world with an open-source vaccine recipe, we allow the multinationals to put a price tag on everything, ship it around the world to be bottled, create logistic nightmares, confuse everybody, and make loads of profit
It’s called divide and conquer as a military strategy. Creating confusion and havoc with the masses so the emperor can win a war. And in India? In Indonesia? In Africa? People are just dying.
I don’t agree with Umair it’s just the western world at fault here. It’s all rich and powerful people who do not feel their hearts right now. People who think with their wallets instead of common sense. The rich and powerful in India, in Africa, in Indonesia. As much as in the western world, China, Brazil, or Russia.
Small Shops and Mental Illness
But there’s more to this story. Because the pandemic is an ideal playground for other military strategies. The lockdowns are wonderful for Amazon, Facebook, big supermarkets, and online giants. Amazon’s profits increased nearly 200% since the pandemic started.
The small, local shops are the ones suffering. Restaurants? Not even a terrace can be open. Sports clubs are broken. Bookshops? Amazon is filling the gap with comfort shopping. Clothes shops? Online shopping is soaring with a 30% increase.
For now, governments are keeping the local shop owners calm with handouts. But these are loans. They will wreak havoc even more in the long run. And small shop owners have faces. They are my neighbor. Your friend. Our sisters. And they drown in stress right now. Health fears. Money stress. Debt stress.
With rising stress levels, mental health is suffering too. We all feel it. Everybody will agree the pandemic has a huge mental effect on us all.
I personally feel torn between active hope and desperation often. I feel the pain in the world. And I want to be part of the solutions. Having fun anyway. Connecting to nature all the time because that’s what keeps me sane.
Torn between active hope and desperation
Long Term Vision
It’s up to us all to feel the pain of the world in our souls right now and sit with it before we take our own personal next step. Especially, this is something for powerful leaders to consider.
Government leaders, why do you keep on letting this happen? CEOs, management team professionals, why?
There are definitely other ways. And we find them when we follow the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. And Deep Ecology. Stop trading quick fixes for big money the way we do now. Build a long-term vision instead and relate all our next steps to that vision. Think in multiple values instead of just money. Use our common sense. And our hearts. And create synergy in our economies. It’s no rocket science. But it does need radical systems changes.
Nature has a long-term vision
Toxic Tax System
The bottom line of this story? The world is chaos, yes. But we need to see the toxic triggers of our economies and human systems in general before we can take our own actions.
What’s the main toxic trigger in all of this? Neoliberalists say there is an open market and the mechanisms of those will solve all. It’s just not true.
The worldwide economic systems, whether you call them capitalism, communism, or anything else just suck.
Companies use linear models to maximize profits. Governments are blind enough to keep poisoning the market with subsidies, allowing companies to reap the profits, and then they even clean up the mess linear business models have created.
Public money should stay public. Discoveries for humanity by scientists should be available to all. Open-source. Production should be local. Profits created with this production should stay in local economies. We should not ship ingredients all over the world. It’s just stupid.
And taxes? Maybe the tax system is the most toxic of all. We want jobs to be created but we tax labor. How stupid is that? Why not shift the whole system in one go. Tax the scarce resources our planet gives us. It will make us reconsider our production methods. Become super-creative.
And we, citizens? We are blind enough to keep consuming, consuming without caring for anything else. Just to fill the holes in our souls. Hoping that everything will be alright when we close our eyes. While keeping them open, becoming aware, understanding the toxic mechanisms of our times might help us stop being a slave to the system and find our own way out.
The best solution to it all? Slow down and feel your soul’s longing. Be in nature. See the world’s chaos. Feel what we are doing to ourselves and each other. Make our lives more simple. And after a while, our own personal next step will appear from our intuition. We are all leaders.
Open eyes help us stop being a slave to the system and find our own way out
Some people call me naive. But I just refuse to think that all relatively rich and powerful people are evil. Maybe a handful of the superrich really have no heart, but I don’t know them. The people I know, well-off or poor, all have hearts.
This big middle group is powerful enough in all kinds of ways to change things. They are unaware, yes. They don’t always see the unintended consequences of their actions. They are sometimes distracted by the fear of not having enough or enjoying more luxuries. But evil? No, I don’t think so.
So, I just keep writing to make us all see. Life’s a journey. Sometimes I love it. And sometimes I cry with the pain of it all…
Want to connect? You can find me somewhere on our beautiful planet, with my hands in the soil and my eyes gazing at moonshots and quantum leaps. Or find me via Linktree. Thank you, Mike, for adding your wise energy to my words.
© Désirée Driesenaar