COVID-19 has generated lots of headlines and stories both real and imagined. It’s an indictment of the for-profit system. This ensures competing media outlets try to outdo one another for audience share and advertising revenue. They do this rather than give public information on Covid-19.

In essence the for-profit greed driven system of the last 42 years, birthed by Thatcher and supported by all governments since, has colluded with Covid-19. This may not have been the intent but it was the consequence.

Dominic Cummings’s alleged outburst that pensioners deaths was a price worth paying to protect the economy only expressed in crude terms what the Tory social darwinist ideology is. In essence the Tories represent a rapacious class whose only concern is more quarterly profits. They don’t care if this system is choking life on the planet to extinction.

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Past economic progress was made possible by abegnation of the future. The future is now here. The chips are being cashed in.

All previous rises in living standards, life expectancy and economic growth are the product of an industrial civilisation that has raped and polluted the planet.

This produced temporary progress in living standards and enormous profits and power for a tiny elite.

That small band of billionaires own all the media. They own the means of mass communication. They use this to spread misinformation and ensure they keep their fortunes.

Tobacco barons for years engaged in propaganda to say smoking had no link to cancer. The constriction industry denied for years the harmful effects of asbestos. The fossil fuel companies have set up propaganda networks to deny the link between burning carbon and global warming. There are many other examples. The Covid-19 outbreak and all these others are linked by the psychotic need to make profits over everything else.

Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee