2020 began with Australia on fire and a billion animals dead. It’s sobering to think that will be the feel-good story of the year. Remember at the beginning of the year when Rod Stewart lamped a security guard and Justin Bieber announced that he had Lyme disease? Dizzying times: it genuinely felt like the world was a wonderful place to be. For many of you, it will have been surprising to learn what was expected of you during an apocalypse. You always wondered whether you would be fleeing; fortifying a bunker; or camping on a motorway roundabout. Turns out you’re working from home. Trying to get a spreadsheet about bodybags finished before the provisional deadline of your own death.
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Indeed, you have to wonder if the virus is so very different from extractive capitalism. It commandeers the manufacturing elements of its hosts, gets them to make stuff for it; kills a fair few, but not enough to stop it spreading. There is no normal for us to go back to. People sleeping in the streets wasn’t normal; children living in poverty wasn’t normal; neither was our taxes helping to bomb the people of Yemen. Using other people’s lives to pile up objects wasn’t normal, the whole thing was absurd. Governments are currently busy pouring money into propping up existing inequalities, and bailing out businesses that have made their shareholders rich. The world’s worst people think that everybody is going to come out of this in a few months and go willingly back into a kind of numbing servitude. Surely it’s time to start imagining something better.
Debbie Dingell is my Rep. Good to see her carrying her late husband’s legacy forward by joining with Tlaib.
@Brainspore: It only takes one person with a curb stop key to shut off a residential water service in SE Michigan. DWSD lets corporations pile up $100k bills without shutting them off (this was on local news in the last week), but residents get cut off for missing as little as two bills in a row.
Yeah but someone in local government decided that person was “essential” enough to send out to cut off water while most people are stuck at home. How effed up is that.
Like it or not, all water, wastewater and public works workers were deemed “essential” by Governor Whitmer. Much condemnation can and should be reserved for administrators of local water supplies who continue to engage in life-threatening, and sometime capricious shut offs. DWSD has been notorious for this sort of behavior for at least a decade.
Bonilla said the firm had continued to operate its assembly plant under the argument it provided an “essential” service, when most non-essential plants have been ordered closed to combat the pandemic.
But Bonilla ordered the Smiths Medical factory closed, because he argued it was providing no such essential service to Mexicans, and thus was not obeying health emergency contingency measures.
On the US side, the company was probably hit with the Defense Production Act, forcing them to only sell to the US government. Probably another brilliant move by Peter Navarro.
So now, no one gets the ventilators. STUPID-19 continues to spread.
You seem to have turned out okay! It’s occurred to me a time or two that the beats must’ve been horrible parents generally. But I suppose that’s based more on their general reputation than on much of what I know about their actual lives.
