by Thomas Harrington, Off Guardian:

Ready for another rendition of the “no one could have known” routine made famous by all the self-proclaimed liberals who shamelessly went along with the Neo-Cons planned and lie-supported destruction of the Middle East nearly two decades ago?

As in “no one could have known” that by shutting down life as we know it to focus obsessively on a virus mostly affecting what is still a relatively small number of people at the end of their lives (yes, oh squeamish ones we must summon the courage to talk about Quality Adjusted Life Years when making public policy) we probably would:

1. Cause economic devastation and hence excess deaths, suicides, divorces depressions in much larger numbers than those killed by the virus.

2. Provide an already monopolistic and predatory online retailing establishment with competitive advantages in terms of capital reserves and market share that will make it virtually impossible at any time in the near or medium future for the country’s and the world’s small and even medium-sized businesses to ever catch up to them. And that this will plunge huge sectors of the world-wide economy into serf-like ruin, with all that this portends in terms of additional death and human suffering.

3. Cause greatly increased misery and countless additional deaths in the so-called Global South where many people, rightly or wrongly, depend on the consumption patterns of us relatively fortunate sit-at-homers to make it through the week.

4. Destroy much of what was attractive about urban life as we know it and lead to a real estate collapse of extraordinary proportions, turning even our few remaining showplace cities into crime-ridden reserves of ever more desperate people.

5. Force state and local governments, already struggling before the crisis, and unable to print at money at will like the Feds, to cut their already insufficient budgets at a time when their broke and stressed constituents need those services more than ever.

6. Push “smart” monitoring of our lives, already intolerable for anyone still clinging to memories of freedom in the pre-September 11th world, to the point where most people will no longer understand what people used to know as privacy, intimacy or the simple dignity of being left alone.

7. Train of a generation of children to be fearful and distrustful of others from day one, and to view bending to diktats “to keep them safe”, (no matter how empirically dubious the actual threat to them might be), rather than the courageous pursuit of joy and human fullness, as the key goal in life.

We will also no doubt be told that no one could have imagined or known at the time:

That governments often make policy on the basis of information they know to be largely unsubstantiated or flat-out false. Because they know (Karl Rove spilled the beans in his famous interview with Ron Susskind) that by the time the few conscientious researchers out there get around looking past the hype to debunk their initial storylines, the structures favorable to them put into place on the basis of the false narrative will have been normalized, and thus be in no danger of being dismantled.

That our educational institutions, already failing miserably in the essential democratic task of educating the young to engage in productive conflict with those whose ideas are different than their own, will only further promote dehumanization of “the other” through ever-greater reliance on the disembodied practices of remote learning. And that this, in turn, will only encourage the further growth of the “drive-by shooting” approach to “coping” with new and challenging ideas seen so often in our public “discussions” in recent years.

That further fomenting the alienated and alienating educational practices mentioned above will make than it easier than it already is for our oligarchs to enhance their already obscene levels control over our daily lives and long-term destinies through divide and rule tactics.

That according to the Institute for Democracy and Election Assistance (IDEA) fully twos thirds of elections scheduled to be held since February have been postponed due to COVID. And that this does much to accustom citizens and populations to the idea that one of their few remaining democratic rights can essentially be taken away on the basis of bureaucratic whims, creating a dangerous “new normal” that obviously favors the interests of established centers of power.

Read More @ Off-Guardian.org