Robbery in Corona Times
Crises- the sorts of crises that have us cringing in fear, incomprehensibly hoping for magical relief, frightened for our kids, and unable to fathom the unknowns that lie ahead- such crises make for good business.
In one of the most important books of the era, Mike Davis shows us how imperial Britain used calamities (brought about by, inter alia, the El Nino Southern Oscillation) to further their reach into and control over India to incorporate vast populations into the modern world system and to thereby murder tens of millions of people by “the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham, and Mill.” Indeed, Late Victorian Holocausts painstakingly outlines how Britain used and exacerbated calamities to extend their dominion over much of Africa. Indeed, calamity and disaster- war even- played an enormous role in extending the British Empire, which at its zenith in 1920 (after the Great War) covered about 20% of the globe. No character from fiction could possible be as prodigal as regards human life than these “good men” of London.
Extending Davis’s magisterial work, Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine brings the argument to the present by illustrating how elites take advantage of and even manufacture crises to push far-reaching changes in the economic and political order that sideline democracy and the interests- and health- of ordinary people.
Indeed, as the Western Democracies, despite a head-start, are reeling from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US government is working at two speeds. On the one hand, the response as regards containment is slow, disconnected, bureaucratic and conducted at the whim of a man who loves to bash science and who could not care less about human life or the burden on the country’s people. The religious trifecta- Markets, God, Luck- have failed us; these gods have feet of clay. Even in one of the nodal points of Covid-19 in the US- the Seattle area- the state Governor- a champion of science and a liberal Democrat- is dithering and not ordering a complete lockdown. A medical system that has for so long been optimized for narrow and high-dollar medical procedures is buckling under the strain — which will only get exponentially worse very soon. The sort of societal retooling that was doable during World-War 2 (even in poor countries like the Soviet Union) seems nigh impossible in an advanced capitalist society in which manufacturing is stagnant and life is privatized; Covid-19 doesn’t get fought with derivatives, complex financial instruments, or cool “Apps” but with “real things” like masks, ventilators, and valves.
And then there is the breakneck speed- that will emerge in the form of an economic “stimulus.” Calamities make for great spending- on the wrong things. Large corporations will be first in line for bailouts, forgetting their theological love for free-markets, their “small government” rhetoric, and their utter lack of planning for Black Swans. Banks, Airlines, and other conglomerates are lined up at the trough while the rest of us cower in fear at home imagining the nightmare scenario- that our kids could be hurt or worse. We long for leadership, for a sign of hope. We are desperate. We’ll rubber stamp anything that looks like it might help. Our own political immune systems are eroded and at such a time, the virus of machination is replicating with breakneck speed.
Recovery is slow. Robbery is fast.
