Why is nothing being done to stop a pandemic? Because the mechanism for doing that, public health, was only…

Why is nothing being done to stop a pandemic? Because the mechanism for doing that, public health, was only forced upon societies by previous destructive epidemics. It wasn’t a creation of rational thought, it was panic. The ‘great stench’ in the UK, for example. But… /1 https://t.co/iLVlZBozha

…you have to add ‘the economy’ to the mix to really understand. Have a look at this chart. Post-WW2 there were glorious economic decades of rebuilding, where nearly everybody in the West got wealthier. Massive government investment, in ordinary people as well as elites. /2 https://t.co/gdbb7eAaeW

But when this work was mostly done, by the 1970s, the previous hierarchies in societies strategised to take back control. They invented the modern politics of ‘the economy’. Decades of collective effort after the war had to be dismantled, they thought, to return societies…/3 https://t.co/uw2O1ZBHt3

…to the hierarchies they’d been pre-war. But ordinary people by this time had a taste for growing prosperity and opportunity, so what to do? Simple, describe that shift with a set of beliefs that re-framed it as the victory of individual aspiration, in ‘markets’. /4 https://t.co/X3ptC3sQWy

And while doing that, gradually shift the distribution of wealth and resources in society away from the State, from collective or common wealth, towards individual responsibility. And so finally to the graph. Keep people happy by letting them retain their new lifestyles,…/5 https://t.co/sNWroM9tvp

…but now funded by their own personal debt. Look at how it exploded at the same time these new more libertarian, market-based political beliefs were introduced. It was cost-shifting the post-war social miracle, back onto ordinary people. Ably supported by the stripping away…/6 https://t.co/IUYUtPd1uV

…of financial industry regulation at the same time. The famous Glass-Steagall Act, signed into law in 1933 to help regulate banking after the Great Depression - have a guess when it started to be watered down and removed? The late 1970s. The same time these banks started…/7 https://t.co/kEXc1Ht8BP

…the massive refinancing of social progress by personal debt. When societies were turned into ‘free markets’, or labelled as that anyway (that fantasy has never actually existed, it’s spin, used to rationalise the shift to personal debt). So to get back to today, pandemics. /8

The excellent public health institutions most developed nations had developed in the late 19th century and used during the 20th, were tolerated by those who engineered this shift to personal debt-driven societies, so long as they didn’t threaten a return to collective…/9

…’common wealth’ driven government. So long as that great fiction, ‘the economy’ (a re-badging of society, in the new market-labelled personal debt societies) wasn’t interrupted. And there we arrive at our past 2 years, in Australia. In 2020 and for most of 2021, Australia…/10

…used that old-style public health, a massive collective endeavour, collectively funded and regulated. To the libertarian politicians and their backers, this was a moment of utter panic, the threat of undoing all of their work from the 1970s onwards, in reversing post-war…/11

…collective mechanisms. Immediately the pandemic started they issued the spin, about needing to balance all of this against ‘the economy’, they saw the danger. And by about a third of the way through 2021, schemes like JobKeeper were shut down, to starve States of support…/12

…and force people back to work. And then in late-2021 the floodgates were opened, letting Covid rip and prompting an orgy of Covid de-regulation in 2022. Politicians falling over themselves to see who could strip away the old collective mechanisms fastest. /13

And that’s why you won’t see fast action to fight this pandemic further. It threatens the whole project since the 1970s of reversing the gains made post-war to collective wealth, heath and democracy. It won’t be allowed for the same reason action on climate change hasn’t…/14

…been allowed. It threatens returning economies to being societies again. The economy always was a con, to rationalise this shift back to old hierarchies, by pretending society was some objective economic machine, that had to perform in certain ways to afford our lives. /15

It was the way these previous elites disguised the re-assertion of their pre-war dominance. Now they could go back to feudal-type life, but hidden behind a handful of economic indicators, that give the veneer of ‘objective’ science. /16

It was only total, lethal destruction that shifted these hierarchies during the wars, that gave birth to true government for the people, including women. As I Tweet a lot, only natural disasters and wars create real change in politics. To current governing elites, the…/17

…only real emergency of Covid is the threat to the economy-driven reversal of collective life they’d been engineering for over 50 years. It will sadly take a lot more death and disruption to force them to shift again. /ends