Thread by @SteB777

1) On 24 February 2020 last year, I not only accurately predicted the COVID-19 global pandemic, but the wider impacts on our economy and system of governance. The way governments would be hamstrung by their need to maintain economic growth. See link below.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/f…

2) Here it is, please read the tweets below the first.

https://twitter.com/SteB777/status/1231769588410523648

3) There are many countries that only experienced a relative handful of deaths from COVID-19, or even none at all in January 2021. The only reason the UK received the highest death rates in the world in January is because it needlessly ended lockdown before Christmas.

4) People take it for granted that it is necessary to have high economic activity to "pay" for everything. This is not true, it is only "necessary" to maintain the current economic system, which is really about big profits for the very rich.

5) As countries which have had relatively low infection rates and death rates during the pandemic demonstrate, and they include China, about equally highest population in the world level, where the first outbreak occurred demonstrate, it was possible to contain the spread.

6) Absolutely the only reason for the unconstrained spread of COVID, was due to delays to implement measures, to vainly try to protect the economy. This actually lead to increased economic impacts, the opposite of that desired.

7) COVID deniers who claim the death rates from COVID are not that that high, are in some ways correct. Many potential pandemics could have far higher death rates, and COVID-19 has not made any of these other possible pandemic diseases less likely.

8) In fact most planning for pandemics were modelled on diseases like various influenza viruses, because they were thought more likely than coronaviruses, and nothing has changed about that.

9) Only a year after the outbreak began, are countries like the UK even starting to consider effective travel bans and quarantine on entry. Talk about closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

10) People wrongly think only the current economic model prevents people being tipped into dire poverty. Yet this whole economic model, the modern financial system, and even money itself, is entirely arbitrary, and maintains poverty.

11) The modern capitalist system, the industrial revolution, simply started as a get rich even quicker scheme for the already very rich. It was not started to lift people out of poverty as claimed.

12) In fact for the vast majority of the industrial revolution, ordinary people, the working classes, lived in dire poverty, even in Britain, where the industrial revolution started. This affluence of ordinary people only really started post WW2, and this was by accident.

13) Proponents of the current economic model want you to believe it was always intended to lift ordinary workers out of poverty. But until the 1950s even most futurist writers still perceived a relatively poor working class well into the future.

14) Take George Orwell's "1984", written in 1948 perhaps the most famous book about the future. In it, Orwell still had the relatively poor proles, who drank in pubs where the floors were covered in sawdust.

15) So from the mid-18th Century, until the 1950s, even the most staunch advocates of the industrialist capitalist system, at best envisaged a working class having a regular job, and not living in absolute and dire poverty. A middle class lifestyle for all was never foreseen.

16) What is more the affluent lifestyles for all is a bit of a mirage, because all that happened was sweatshop labour was transferred from the richer countries to lower wage countries.

17) It is physically impossible for the whole global population to live the affluent lifestyles enjoyed in the richest countries. It would need the resources of several Earths to maintain this.

18) Yet we are already facing a largely unacknowledged climate and ecological emergency, primarily driven by a minority of the world's population living this affluent lifestyle of high consumption. The idea of this being possible for over 8 billion people is beyond absurd.

19) As long as we have huge inequality. Extremely rich people, and relatively poor people, rich nations and poor nations, there will be a headlong rush to catch up.

20) Nor is it just poor people trying to catch up with rich people, poor countries trying to catch up with rich countries. The richest people, the billionaires are increasing their wealth at an incredible rate and the richest countries are desperately trying to economically grow.

21) You have to be deeply in denial of the big picture this paints to think this can go on.

22) The UK's Dasgupta Review, paints a pretty dire picture of the future if we try to carry on as were are. But bizarrely it largely assumes the current economic model continuing, just with some magical shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic to allow it to continue.

23) I started to imagine in my head 50 years ago, what a truly sustainable system would look like. There is only one type of sustainable system i.e. a human civilization which will persist without destroying the natural systems that sustain it.

24) There is no such thing as a partly sustainable system, a more sustainable system, because if it can't be sustained, it will cause the collapse of natural systems that sustain us.

25) Let's get it very clear, the conclusions of the first UN Environment in 1972, were that we had to entirely change direction for our civilization to survive i.e. we've know for 50 years that this can't continue.
un.org/ga/search/view…

26) I'm not going to reveal my insight into what a sustainable system looks like as it is only a working model in the manner of scientific conceptual models to use to think about the situation.

27) All I will say is that all official imaginings of how to address the climate and ecological emergency are so far from where we need to be, as to be pure delusional fantasy.

28) Let's get this crystal clear. The only reason for trying to maintain the current system is that it gives a relative handful of people unbelievable levels of luxury, wealth, power and status, and they don't want to give it up. But it's a fantasy that it can continue.

29) The whole current system is a con-trick, a multi-generational Ponzi scheme. It can't be maintained like an actual Ponzi scheme, it is merely that it's point of collapse is somewhere in the future, with generations currently not profiting from it.
alexsteffen.com/the_intergener…

30) To conclude it is going to be extremely difficult for the current economic system to recover after COVID, and insane to even try, considering we have to address the climate and ecological emergency, caused by this economic system.