Alex Gutentag -- The New Covid Caste System

In the US, seventeen of the top 25 corporations will make $85 billion more this year than in previous years, and shareholders will reap the rewards. Over the same period, American workers have lost $1.3 trillion. 

Alex Gutentag is a California school teacher. This was posted in Dec. 2020.

https://www.thebellows.org/the-great-covid-class-war/

The Great Covid Class War 

The pandemic has created the perfect pretext for enacting economically destructive policies.

We are facing something much darker than a respiratory virus. 

A great theft is occurring under the pretext of safety. It is not just the theft of working people’s jobs, savings, and property–it is also the theft of a meaningful life.

In Japan, October suicides alone exceeded the country’s 2020 covid deaths. 

Lockdown was mentioned by 80% of callers to a suicide hotline in the UK. 

In the US over half of young adults are showing signs of depression, with 1 in 4 of them expressing suicidal ideation. Overdoses have increased 20% compared to 2019…

THE NEW CASTE SYSTEM

 In our new caste system the wealthy have political and social privileges because they are considered clean and disease-free, while the more low-income someone is, the more they are treated as contaminated. 

The goal of lockdown enthusiasts in the “work from home” caste is to shift risk away from themselves and onto essential workers and the poor. 

Only 40% of the workforce can afford to stay home. 

43% of US adults do not have adequate health insurance, and only 31% of low-paid workers have paid sick leave compared to 92% of high-paid workers. “Stay home” is the self-congratulatory mantra of professionals who believe that their virtuous behavior prevents them from contracting covid. In fact, income is the main determinant of covid mortality.

Lockdown fanatics have helped manufacture consent for a brutal reorganization of labor that will plunge millions of people into serfdom. 

The work-from-home lifestyle is only possible through the labor of logistics workers who transport, sort, and deliver goods. Currently about 10 million jobs that existed in February 2020 have not been replaced. Many workers have been forced to take on part-time, no-contract work, a labor model that is rolling back decades of hard-fought protections…

The beneficiaries of this neo-feudal dystopia are the ownership class, tech CEOs, investors, NGOs, and private foundations. Their ongoing immiseration of workers is intentional. 80% of covid loans offered by the IMF to developing countries were contingent on governments implementing austerity programs such as cuts to healthcare and elimination of public sector jobs. 

In the US, seventeen of the top 25 corporations will make $85 billion more this year than in previous years, and shareholders will reap the rewards. Over the same period, American workers have lost $1.3 trillion. 

Remnants of the covid class war will touch every domain of life for decades.

 Officials have suggested that social distancing will need to continue even after mandatory vaccinations. 

Masks have become a potent symbol of both physical purity and mutual mistrust. Our fantasy of a sanitized and deathless society has created a world where the home is a prison and friends and family are a health hazard. 

In this world, children are told they are killing their grandparents simply by existing.

Right now we are still at the beginning of sweeping changes that may include social credit, immunity passports, a rent-only economy, AI and robotics expansion, financialization of natural resources, increased mass surveillance, the Uberization of everything, and rolling lockdowns for climate change or the flu. 

We have a limited window of time to reclaim the things that make life worth living: family, community, cultural heritage, the social sphere, public institutions, common spaces, and free movement. That window may be closing quickly, but it is not fully closed yet.