Saturday, June 20, 2020

Lesson From the Pandemic: We Can Do Anything We Want


For about a month or two the Canadian economy shut down a significant part of its output. The government stepped in and subsidized people who had lost their source of income. This government was the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. Had the Conservatives under Andrew Scheer won a majority under our archaic and anti-democratic "First Past The Post" electoral system (which the Liberals had vowed to replace but didn't) things would have been much worse. If one was a stupid partisan idiot the lesson to be drawn from that is that the Liberal Party is perfect and everything they do is perfect and there can be no criticism of the Liberals except from hateful, ugly, withered OLD MEN, who are DISGUSTING, with their grey pubic hairs sprouting from their drooping scrotums, who should all DIE SOON.

But that's how stupid, crazy people think. In actual fact, the Liberals have made quite a few important mistakes along the way. Together with the powerful premiers who all suffer from their own delusions and limitations and partisan ass-hattery. For instance; as I said recently - the Liberals are paying for their policies by borrowing from private banks instead of from the Bank of Canada. This deliberate policy impoverishes future generations for the present benefit of Bay Street. It is craven service to the oligarchy. We have not shut things down to the extent necessary and we are dragging out the crisis needlessly and taxing our healthcare systems that have suffered years of cuts under Liberal-Conservative-NDP policies of neo-liberal austerity. Canada's response has been half-assed.

"Half-assed" can be described scientifically by showing how Canada's accomplishments can be shown as lying half-way between the admirable achievements of countries like South Korea and New Zealand, and basket-cases like Bolsonaro's Brazil, Boris Johnson's United Kingdom and Donald Trump's United Sates of America. Which I guess is another important lesson to be gleaned from this crisis: That right-wing "conservative" policies are a disastrous mixture of incompetence, delusion and murderous callousness. And no matter how shameless a right-wing hack, racist fuckwad wants to behave, there's no arguing with the numbers. They have fucked-up big time. Enormously. Undeniably (to a sane person). Catastrophically. And they have killed their own supporters as well.

From this point on, listening to the fucking "conservatives" [The Republicans in the USA, the Conservative Party of Canada in, ...um, ... Canada, the Conservatives Party in the UK, the Wild-Eyed Fascist Party in Brazil] is a sign of total ignorance and total stupidity. It's like if you were a high school student and this kid in your class would occasionally give you answers for tests that turned out to be wrong, and then one time, for some bizarre reason, you bought a test from him with all the answers on it and copied from it and you got a "Zero." You would have to be a fucking idiot to listen to that guy ever again. There would have to be something wrong with you to trust that asshole. That's how it is from now on with "conservatives." Don't listen to them unless you want bad things to happen to you. (Obviously, I've felt that way about "conservatives" for a long time. But the death-rates from COVID-19 resulting from "conservative" stupidity should seal the deal for anyone who isn't as arrogantly dismissive of MORONS as I am.)

But the lesson that I was referring to in the title of this post is that this pandemic shows that we (the human race) can do anything we want.  We could close down the economy TOMORROW. We could pay people to stay at home. Stay at home while we figure out how to create an economy that obeys the laws of the eco-system while providing the basics for human dignity to everyone. Aside from central banks in big economies like the USA, the EU, Japan, China, and middle-sized countries like Canada and South Korea; ... there is also $30 TRILLION stashed in offshore bank accounts around the world. We would have no problem providing the essentials to everyone, while freezing rents and mortgage payments, and just telling the banks to CHILL while we sort shit out.

Shut-down car culture. Increase public transit. Bring sanity to our food system and break up corporate agriculture. Provide decent living standards for our elderly. Re-invest in schools. Invest in democratic, voluntary population control. Create jobs in environmental clean-up. Re-wild. Retro-fit homes for maximum energy efficiency. Teach actual survival skills, not marketing and public relations.

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