There is no doubt that the modern coronavirus crisis is the greatest crisis to hit the world since World War II. There is also no doubt that the scale of the death toll and the scale of the disaster is ahead of us, not behind us. This is a fact. There is also no doubt that the number of people killed by the economic crisis it is producing is probably going to be at least as high, if not higher than the number of people killed by the virus.
An ominous reality is that we still don't know what's gonna happen when this virus enters countries such as India on a major scale and other countries where obviously people can't "shelter in place" with 6 feet apart from other people and so on and so forth. The full horror could be absolutely unbelievable. So that's an issue.
THE FAILURE OF TODAY'S PLUTOCRATS TO PREPARE US FOR THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC
Now, we are going to talk about some political realities relating to the crisis. The world today is a plutocracy. Economic inequality has reached levels that are beyond anything ever even conceived in world history. We have been told by a neoliberal ruling elite that this is all necessary because they are building us a high-tech utopia where we are all gonna live happily ever after. This is not true. It was never true, but the current scale of today's disaster reveals the truth, that the utopia they have promised is never going to appear. This is a fact. The utopia they promised is never going to appear.
BOTH REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRATIC LEADERS IGNORE 30 YEARS OF WARNINGS ABOUT AN EPIDEMIC
Now, we need to ask some tough questions here. How could this possibly have been allowed to happen? All the experts who study epidemics for the last 30 years have been warning about an epidemic coming. This is not some mysterious event that nobody knew about. And yet systems were not in place to deal with this. In America there's been a bipartisan agreement to gut social programs and we would agree that the Republicans deserve the majority of the blame for this, but the Democrats are hardly blameless, since people such as Obama and Clinton went along with horrendously vicious programs to gut programs that support the lives of the poor and the needy, such as Bill Clinton's despicable so-called welfare reform bill, which is certainly one of the most vicious pieces of legislation ever passed in the history of this country. So there is a bipartisan responsibility in America for the current crisis. Under Trump there has been a further evisceration of programs inside the government to monitor and respond to epidemics, part of a hate government nihilistic agenda that was set in motion by the ideology of Ronald Reagan.
Now look around you. Look around you and you see the legacy of Reagan's ideas. This is reality. This is a revelation. This is a destruction of illusion and the appearance of reality.
THE LIE THAT WE ARE "ALL IN THIS TOGETHER"
We want to address the concept that "we are all in this together." Our president and the ruling elites say we should stand together because we're in this together. Now if we are really in this together, there should certainly be shared sacrifice. Our president, Mr. Trump, says we are living in wartime. Well, let's take a look at wartime in World War I and World War II. The marginal tax rate on the upper classes was raised to 90%, even in the Vietnam and Korean war, the marginal tax rate was above 70%, as opposed to today's low tax rates on the super rich. So we clearly don't have tax rates on the upper classes that would suggest that we are in this together. They are clearly not being asked to sacrifice. By contrast, the lower classes in America and around the world are literally being asked to sacrifice their lives on a whole lot of different levels due to the total irresponsibility and incompetence with which the United States government prepared for all this, or more exactly, did not prepare for all this. There is an astronomical shortage of masks and protective equipment against disease. The U.S. government has defined national security as trillions of dollars for the very well organized and politically well-organized military contractors. We don't call them "defense contractors" because it's not very clear what they're building is for defense. They could be called "imperialism contractors." But we have of fleets of F 35 fighters, or an aircraft carrier that cost $15 billion, when the toilets don't work, the elevators don't work, so on and so forth. But we totally neglected any kind of serious defense against epidemics. So the American people are dying because of this false set of priorities.
LOW WAGE WORKERS ARE BEING LEFT TO DIE
Now this structure of death is not equal opportunity. It is the low-wage workers who are being required to go to work without protective equipment. It is the low-wage workers who are required to go to the hospitals and treat the sick and get paid ridiculously low salaries. It is the low-wage workers that are being laid off. And the scale of the layoffs is absolutely astronomical and the layoffs are going to lead to high levels of death. There's absolutely no question about that, along with restrictions about buying food to make sure you kill a large number of people. And we haven't really discussed that the entire healthcare system is in complete chaos because people are having difficulty even getting access to doctors, assuming that in America they could even afford to pay a doctor, because people are losing their health insurance as the whole system collapses. So let's get rid of the lie produced by corporate virtual reality. We are not in this together. No we are not. There is not equality of sacrifice. So as the crisis unfolds, this is going to lead to higher levels of social unrest. The system is failing and the specter of corporate virtual reality about what a wonderful utopia these people are building is being shot to pieces by the explosion of actual reality. As reality sets in, there's going to be a very big reaction and we hope that this reaction will be peaceful and responsible, but it is extremely unlikely that that will happen, and we are particularly concerned about what may happen in places like India where you have an absolutely horrendous death toll, or in places like Pakistan. We could have an absolutely horrendous death toll.
THE END OF AN AGE
THE RADICAL CHANGE TO COME
So the prospect is that radical change is coming. We are at the end of an age. And this whole thing should teach us a lesson that unsound systems have a tendency to collapse very quickly. And other aspects of the plutocratic world power structure are not in good shape. We will talk about the problems with the so-called "green revolution industrial agriculture." We will talk about the crisis in the oceans where virtually every major species of fish is currently being overfished right now. We will talk about the horrible garbage islands the size of entire continents floating in the ocean. And plastic turning into micro plastic and poisoning the entire aquatic food chain and threatening the entire food chain, particularly in so far as micro plastic is going into the streams and rivers and into the bodies of the people of the world. We could talk about a lot of things. We could talk about the danger from chemicals. We can of course talk about climate change.
The lesson is that unsound systems in history have a tendency to go down very fast and the argument for this whole situation was that "well maybe we had to make some environmental compromises for the economy," but the economy is turning into a giant upside down pyramid of debt that is absolutely unstable. And we're told, "don't worry, the plutocratic Masters of the universe got this." Well, there is reason to worry and there is reason to have a huge lack of confidence in what they're doing. So we are moving towards a great turning point in history, the end of an age, the plutocratic age is coming to an end. It is failing as it failed in ancient Rome, where the plutocrats failed as leaders and their whole operation was swept away by the revolution of Julius Caesar. So these are not new events. These people have failed in the past. The failure today is on a horrendous scale. So what is coming is a series of revolutions and the details of these revolutions and the direction of these revolutions will be discussed in future lectures. They have already been discussed on our website. There is a need for doing this in a manner that reflects social justice, and hopefully environmental sanity, and hopefully takes place in a nonviolent manner. But it is a moral imperative for responsible people to provide responsible leadership in this crisis, because in the huge upheaval that's coming, almost anything could happen as people react with rage, well justified rage, that something like this could have been allowed to happen.
So do not listen to the experts on Wall Street. Do not listen to the ruling plutocrats. They don't know where the hell they're doing. They don't. Put your tray table in the upright position, fasten your seatbelt. Great turmoil is ahead in world history. That's the end of this lecture.