"We love our customers..."

In this episode we explore what happens when the money-economy collides head-on with a pandemic…

Unlike some other countries, here in Australia we’ve taken the COVID pandemic very seriously indeed, relying on lockdowns, mandatory masks and a rigorous system of contact-tracing to keep the human cost as low as possible. Masks are everywhere - the only place we’re not required to wear them is inside our own homes - but we’ll also see the other two themes illustrated by this sign outside a bakery-cafe a few miles to the east of Bendigo in north-central Victoria, where I currently live:

The two upper parts of the sign are fairly straightforward. Contact-tracing is to identify who needs to do a COVID test after someone’s who’s found to have been infected had visited there. To support this, we’re required to check in at every place we visit, either by scanning the QR-code with a smartphone, or signing in on a simple paper register. It’s tedious, yes, but it literally saves lives, and reduces the risk of a breakout spreading out of control across the entire state.

That sign at bottom - “We love our customers from Melbourne but we can’t serve you right now” - does take a bit more explaining. Right now, our more rural region of the state is down to zero cases, so for now we’re back to a soft-lockdown - which is why the cafe is open, and why I can visit there. Out here, away from the big city, we still can’t visit friends at home, or go to any kind of big event; yet at least we can go just about anywhere else, and most shops are open. But for the past few months, Melbourne has been and still is hitting up to a thousand cases a day, so right now they’re still stuck in hard-lockdown: supermarkets and suchlike are the only stores open, and residents there are not allowed to travel more than five kilometres from home. Every store outside the city has to check photo-ID - and if the would-be customer is from Melbourne or any other hard-lockdown location, they’re not allowed in. Which also means that the cafe can’t do business with them either. In that sense, everyone loses.

Necessary? From a sociomedical perspective, arguably yes, though some people might disagree, of course. (I’ll carefully refrain from making any further comment on that point…) But from the perspective of the money-economy, it has huge impacts on almost everyone.

Even if it’s just a soft-lockdown like we have in our area right now, a lot of people are forced out of work - anyone in the performing-arts, for example, or anyone working in a bar or sports-venue. If the lockdown is any harder, most stores have to close down for the duration, and food-service is takeaway-only: that’s another huge number of people out of work, with barely even a day’s notice. Construction sites, warehouses and suchlike have to run somehow on a quarter of their staff, while everyone else languishes at home, unpaid. The state provides some payments for people who are forced out of work this way - but somehow most of those payments go to their employers instead, and there’s no guarantee, and often no check, to ensure that those employers do pay their staff the money that they’re then owed. Some companies have acquired hugely-increased profits during the past year or so that way - but somehow still haven’t paid those ill-gotten gains back to the taxpayer, to whom they undoubtedly belong.

And that’s just one of the problems here. For example, with auctions and house-inspections suspended for much of the time across most of the country, you might expect the already-excessive house-prices to fall downward a bit, towards something resembling somewhat more-sane levels. But no, it’s been the exact opposite: those prices have risen sharply, an utterly absurd 13% just in the past year, more than four times faster than income levels were rising even before the steep downturn of the pandemic. For most industries, the stock-dividends have risen sharply too - or else their shares have crashed down to bargain-basement prices, ripe for the picking.

As described in the previous posts here, it’s a situation in which those who don’t have money will find it harder and harder to stay afloat; and in the meantime, those who do already have money will have less and less trouble in acquiring more, and more, and more. This kind of context is known as ‘disaster-capitalism’: and when even the RBA, the Australian state bank, now warns us that this is “becoming ever-further divorced from reality with each passing day”, we know that that entire smoke-and-mirrors ‘economic system’ is in danger of complete collapse at any moment. As with all of the money-economy, it’s time to bring this obscenity to an end before it kills us all…