(Seven-minute read) 

Since its creation, Capitalism has been reinventing itself.  

If we look at COVID-19 through the lens of disaster capitalism, it promotes free-market, for-profit corporate solutions that may succeed in creating company profits but ultimately fail in terms of democracy, fairness, and justice.

The total mortality from COVID-19 on a global scale is as yet unknown, but we have been thinking of it as a disaster for months now till the arrival of a vaccine 

What exactly is the disaster, then? What makes something a disaster?

Why aren’t other more deadly causes of mortality (heart disease, cancer, diabetes) considered disasters?

Just imagine if cancer, heart disease, and diabetes were framed in the same language and sense of urgency as COVID-19.

This is difficult to imagine because chronic morbidities are a built-in artifact of the disaster that free-market capitalism has created.

A society that is organized around the principle that companies should not be prevented from making things that kill people must also accept as ‘normal’ that many people will die in large numbers from these things.

We now have what’s called Disaster \Capitlism enriching the few.

No longer able to sustain itself by selling dreams Capitalism now thrives on the management of nightmares online. 

Why?

Because of several events.

The Financial Crash in of 2007–2008 – Save the banks – Save the Economy – not the people – GDP at any cost. 

Covid-19 is now an opportunity to rebalance power and wealth in society. 

It has exposed the need to move GDP away from growth at any cost which makes no economic sense to start saving for the rainy day and redistributing wealth to those that make it possible in the first place.

Covid-19 or rather with the arrival of vaccines Post covid -19 is an opportunity to rebalance both power and wealth in society, away from labor and towards capital or the other way away of capital to labor. 

Even Diasters relief is transformed into profit and the current pandemic will be no exception as we are experiencing not one, but two disasters.

There is the virus, and then there is the societal reaction of bringing our entire fiscal and economic infrastructure to a near-complete standstill affecting the most vulnerable social and economic groups. 

There’s been a lot of dithering about whether or not COVID-19 is a disaster but rest assured if big business activities have the way they will seek to create products that consumers purchase due to fear of some type of potential or impending disaster.

Over time, the term disaster capitalism will be applied to profits made due to climate change that will generate anxiety that can only be relieved by consuming a given product.

Creating responses that may have a much more deleterious effect than the virus itself.

Now is the time to move away from GDP to the distribution of wealth.  

We have witnessed the weakening labor and strengthening the power of Capital with stimulus quantitive easing and tax cuts –  corporations dished out cash to their shareholders to buy up their own stock during the Financial Crises.   

Which would you pick?

The current capitalist objectives of growth at any cost – GDP

or

The redistribution of economic wealth, to one and all, by the introduction of a Basic Universal living wage.  

Save for the rain day

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