I’m not sure ‘people alive and healthy’ could be bettered as a mission statement for a society. Look at this excess deaths graph (thanks @KarenCutter4) and try to isolate what it was we stopped doing in 2020/21, that we started doing again in 2022. /1 #auspol #covid19aus
My hunch is the dominant answer would be ‘we stopped functioning as an economy and this surge of good health was unsustainable, funded by government debt’. Unfortunately facts get in the way of that good story. Yes a big dip right at the start of the pandemic, but growth then…/2
…easily surpassing what we had *before* the pandemic. And this during two years of what idiots call our ‘lockdown’, when the economy was apparently under mortal threat. Remember this schematic, all that white space where we weren’t ’locked down’? Lockdowns were only needed…/3
…in that late-2021 stage when NSW and National Cabinet began lifting protections mid-pandemic. (The initial national lockdown was so effective it created all that white space afterwards.) Not only were people the healthiest they’d ever been, our ‘economy’ was smashing out…/4
…GDP in a way we could only have dreamed of pre-pandemic. So what happened in 2020-21 that we should bottle, rinse and repeat? We redistributed wealth. Out of the rarefied air of the top 1% of society, and back into the hands of ordinary working people. /5
It made society as a whole *drum roll* healthier and wealthier. After decades of siphoning off public investment to hand over to lobbyists, forcing those same ordinary people to take on astronomical personal debt to keep society running, suddenly the Treasury was used…/6
…to fund ordinary people. And look at the results. You can buy the propaganda that ‘opening up’ to Covid from late-2021 was about rescuing the economy. The economy was doing great, we weren’t ‘locked down’. It was about stemming the flow of public funds, to the public. /7
All politics is always about this. The battle between working people and the people who employ them. Right now the employers are back in charge, and we’re all crammed into infection-infested workplaces on our pathetic, stagnant wages. When they and their political reps say:…/8
…’we can’t go back to lockdowns’, remember:

1) we weren’t locked down, for most of 2020-21, and
2) the ‘we’ they mean is themselves. Not us, who did very well out of public health action, thank you.

I see many confused that the obvious disaster of ‘live with the virus’…/9
…still manages to win the day, despite all the evidence it’s not working. But for the people who introduced it, it is working. This was always about restoring who’s in charge. About who gets the keys to the Treasury. Workers have never been allowed to have those. /end

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More from @RageSheen

Aug 5
How does an infinitesimally tiny group in our society, the top 1%, attract mass support for policies that clearly benefit nobody except this tiny group? And how does it keep doing it, generation after generation? Graphic from ‘The Gilded Age’ in the US, 1870-1900. /1 Image
The trick is simple, but because we don’t talk about it, it’s a trick that keeps working, across centuries. Plutocrats and their strategists understand something about societies that their opponents don’t. That the glue that holds all human groups together is status. /2
Groups and societies are held together by copying, by the imitation of each other’s ideas and behaviour. It’s not a process of ‘free’ individuals each mulling over what to do. How do people decide who or what to imitate? That’s where status is the guide. Hierarchies of status. /3
Read 15 tweets
Jul 31
Defeating the myths of the economy defeats Covid. A biggie - ‘business’. There is no such thing as business. There are customers, workers and managers. Customers buy things, which pays the managers and workers. Nick Hanauer knows it. /1

politico.com/magazine/story…
Yes there are organisations that we call ‘businesses’ that produce things for sale, which customers buy. Undeniable. But as Hanauer has been saying for years, we have the causation backwards. It’s customers, with money, who generate ‘business’, for businesses. /2
Business doesn’t create jobs, as politicians and lobbyists say. Customers with money create jobs. If a population is well paid and flush with cash, any business can thrive and employ people. If all of the money is concentrated in the hands of a tiny handful of owners and…/3
Read 9 tweets
Jul 31
Maybe the best way to defeat Covid is to defeat the ‘economy’ that stops us fighting it. The economy is the name given to society post the 1950s, when the finance industry was let loose, with the gradual weakening and eventual removal of controls like the Glass-Steagall Act. /1
This picture shows the Glass-Steagall Act being signed into existence in the early 1930s, with its variety of measures to regulate banking/finance, after the terrible experiences of the Great Depression. Over the next 60 years it and related controls on banks were… /2
…stripped away. I Tweeted yesterday what happened next. Two millennia of distrust and outright hostility towards money-lending, usury, swept away in a few short decades. For the first time in 2 thousand years, ‘economic growth’ became a thing, and in celebration society…/3
Read 16 tweets
Jul 29
For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something remarkable happened. Have a look. A thread about the true infection in our societies, from which Covid was born. /1 Image
The most common explanation for that near vertical, sudden climb in economic growth in the 1950s is that humanity got super smart all of a sudden, and developed technologies that freed us at last from the burdens of existence. A miracle! But it’s not that. /2 Image
For the two thousand years leading up to the 1950s, the amount of stuff or GDP we produced and the number of people alive pretty much balanced. No great accumulations of either. But then something happened just after WW2 that changed all of history. We were infected. /3
Read 12 tweets
Jul 26
We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play in this pandemic. /1
The raw material of society is beliefs. Beliefs are the building blocks of all societies. Everything solid or ‘physical’ you see is constructed ultimately of beliefs too. Like our ‘hybrid’ junk NBN. Beliefs aren’t separate, they’re woven into the fabric of everything. /2
The Covid pandemic is the same. It doesn’t matter how many dire health and medical statistics you throw at it, the trajectory never shifts - more infections, more deaths. The most dangerous illusion is that facts have some sort of free-floating existence that compels action. /3
Read 22 tweets
Jul 25
Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Australians have gone gangbusters over rooftop solar. Their personal responsibility for it is the same as it is for most community-focused projects, world-leading. Governments got the ball rolling with generous rebates and tariffs, but this is where the story shifts. /2
Government incentives (feed-in tariffs in particular) have been gradually wound back over time, until sometimes people are now blocked from exporting any excess energy to the grid at all. This is largely because governments didn't do their personal responsibility bit.../3
Read 12 tweets

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