Like others, I have thought from the first day of the Covid-19 pandemic that it was forcing us to awake from exponential life-system destruction by corporate ‘business as usual’ to our common life-ground.
In the words of the formerly neo-liberal Governor Cuomo of New York, “It is a test of our humanity over the economy – – – Health must come first. There is no other option.”
Yet what has been invading organic, social and ecological life organization for decades at every level remains unseen – the ultimate pandemic of the carcinomic Wall-Street money system whose countless global victims are continually sacrificed to grow it further.
The multi-trillion dollar state financing of Wall Street and company with no public notice or oversight now continues with the Covid-19 crisis into another spike of public wealth into its math-manipulating mechanisms to multiply its life-blind global demand, debt and futures control further.
What is ‘the System’?
The Mamos [spiritual leaders] of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia may inspire us here. They “see a message, a guardian, a teacher, a counselor, who offer us the opportunity to – – – dialogue with – – Mother Nature and with Mother Earth. – – Today, one single tiny entity is producing a huge disturbance forcing all of us to make a stop on our sacred pathway of life.”
But, the Mamos continue, “very few have acted with a consciousness of transformation wanting to change the system”.
‘The system’ is, as usual, not defined. But the Mamos are right that few think of transforming it. The Covid-19 crisis has drawn all public attention to stopping its spread, but the conditions giving rise to its epicenter outbreak in the US itself are kept out of the discussion. These conditions feature the absence of a working public health system in a privatized-for-profit disorder in which 80 million citizens are inadequately insured or not at all, at twice the expense of a public one-payer system, to deliver the lowest life expectancy in the developed world.
Yet the Democrat establishment as well as the Trump Republicans still repudiate a universal public system which spectacularly outperforms the for-profit black holes of the US corporate HMO’s which help finance US show elections. Trump goes further. His office silently abolished the Pandemic Disease Office of the White House before Covid-19 struck, and cut the funding of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) by 25%.
All this was to help pay for the “huge tax cut, I mean huge” that President Trump won the Republican Party with: “You are all going to be a lot richer”, he smiled to a smirking gaggle of high-end politicos as he signed the bill for an over trillion-dollar expropriation of public wealth to them.
The system is clearly rotten to the core. Yet in the weeks of world-wide lock-down to protect the lives of all from disease, suffocation and death by the uncontrolled Covid-19 virus growth, only this new and narrow invader of life is recognised. The sequences of the private money-multiplying system that pollutes and pillages all that supports life on the planet remains unseen.
Back to Business as Usual as Fast as Possible
US rulers seek only to restore the free feeding cycle of ‘business as usual’ as fast as Trump can get away with it. He is demonized, but he represents the corporate rich who plunder the world for ever more multiplying billions in obscene private take. He also ensures that his own multi-billion luxury enterprises are publicly subsidized during the lock-down with no Congressional oversight as cities and states are left to manage on their own, “we are not a delivery service”, he retorts to their pleas. It is “in the constitution”.
Meanwhile within the Covid-19 crisis itself, the president’s billionaire cronies in the fossil-fuel and resource-extraction businesses are deregulated further by his office while ever more US public lands and parks are laid open to their looting, again as fast as they can all get away with. This is disaster capitalism that feeds on the catastrophes it causes – the death spiral of the system.
While Trump leads the greatest expropriation in history of environmental protections, public wealth, and national resources for the privatizing rich, he calls this ruling disorder “the greatest country that has ever existed” while it serves a fraction of one percent of the people. In the living world, it is an increasing hell. The majority are insecure beyond their last paycheque, most are malnourished, and their children have no future or vocation to serve.
The American Dream goes to US Nightmare led by psychopath self-worship and militant ignorance. But the objections by the legacy press and the opposition leaders to Trump dwell only on ad hominem issues. They remain silent on the deep-system disorder he exemplifies.
Trump is America come round to meet itself – a life-blind bully greed of armed-force money power and self-adoration masked as the ‘free world’ where any dared alternative is attacked to death.
You Can’t Change What You Can’t See
Humanity and the living earth itself, say the first-people spiritual leaders, “are being destroyed, violated, by what is called development, civilization, modernity and which we, the Mamos, call UNCONSCIOUSNESS”.
Amen, but concepts need to be more exact. “What is called development, civilization”, is in fact neither. It is the polar opposite of each – a self-multiplying private money system which depredates life development and civil organization wherever it invades. But since no public record is kept of its life-destructive effects, they remain unconscious. Daily published records are only kept of private money-values like stock-markets, trades and GDP sales. No funded research goes to ongoing curves of morbidities, deaths and deprivations of life means by the private money-value system. They do not exist to market modellers. Only money-coordinates compute. .
The a-priori life-blind ruling mechanism thus remains unconscious. But it can be defined. It is an omnivorous life dispossession system engineered to multiply the private money-demand control of the richest with no upper or limit, and no life-coordinates of what it mind-numbingly equates to ever more ‘goods’ and never bads.
The invasive system is most deadly, as a virus is, when it is not sequenced in its exponential self-multiplication through life hosts. Everywhere liquidating, dismantling and polluting for private profit the life carrying capacities of organic, social and ecological life bearers, its morbidity trends and deaths are not connected, tracked or responded to by any public knowledge base or academic research funding. The system has destroyed their witness too to grow itself.
The tidal money-sequence drivers multiply market money and demand to the top as the only ruling constant of the system. No lives or life conditions are connected in graphs or reports. The upward curves of life capacity loss and destruction cannot be flattened because they are not seen.
The Unconsciousness of the System Disorder is Built into its Modelling
Unconnected by any science and unregulated by public life standards, cumulative global destabilization, degeneration and collapse of natural and civil life support systems become overwhelming. Dominant private money sequencing in ever more assaultive and derivative forms is so deregulated, de-taxed and subsidized out of any control that there is no collective life carrying capacity in society or on the planet now not at risk.
Yet even now the common cause, the system disease itself, is taboo to name – the guarantee of system omnicide spiking ever higher. From biodiversity and species in spasm extinction, to global climate and hydrological cycles in growing chaos, to the oceans poisoned and coral reefs bleaching, to the forests and life resources of the world looted without stop, the dots are not connected and the common cause remains unseen.
The social immune systems of societies’ long-evolved public and independent research sectors have been cumulatively hollowed out. Systemic defunding and corporate privatization of public goods and life-support systems have increasingly stripped civil commons across the world before Covid-19 emerged (perhaps from US bio-warfare labs). Yet the system disease remains unthinkable to its victims as well as its drivers, and spiritual intuition provides no resolution beyond personal states of mind.
Unconsciousness is at the roots of the world disorder plaguing us, as the first peoples know. And the rising global chorus and scientific finding today is that “protecting people’s lives is worth the lockdown”. Yet the emergent principle of life-coherent government has yet to awake us to the wider system disorder predating our common life support systems at every level.
This article was originally published by CounterPunch Magazine
John McMurtry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada whose work is translated from Latin America to Japan. He is the author of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his most recent book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: from Crisis to Cure.
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