Monday, March 5, 2018

The Grand Plan of Obfuscation: A Guest Post



In response to Saturday's post about the increasing momentum of the neoliberal creep evident in the Trudeau government, frequent commentator BM offered his detailed take on this sorry situation:

It's all part of the Grand Plan of Obfuscation.

Put in a haphazard system of Pharmacare, so that no citizen knows what is covered and by whom. Allow the private sector like Morneau Sheppell to set up systems to track every citizen to make sure they're covered by the eclectic mix of public and private schemes for pills, because it's so complicated, and thus skim off management fees for their "services".

Big Pharma rejoices. Not having a national scheme means nobody is going to bargain for cheap pill prices on a national scale. So drug prices stay high, and the financial corporatists skim off the cream for services rendered tracking all the mush with ZERO value-added for anyone but themselves. All the public has to do is pay over the odds for all the shenanigans, while the politicians issue glib statements as to how they've helped everyone. It'll all cost more overall than what we have now, you can be sure.

Then, at Bay Street banquets, the corporatists will toast each other as to how well they sold the citizenry that piece of goods. The talking will of course be in business code and jargon, the obfuscation of our age. Financial mags will feature glowing articles on how some "genius" spotted a service "missing" from the "market", and worked out a scheme to profit from it. All hail a new "business" Titan! And if you believe all that guff, you'll believe the BS from corporate media on war reporting too.

These business people strike me as the lowest of human life forms, sucking and siphoning money into their pockets from the masses, while maintaining what they have helped society out, but in reality being parasites on the body politic. There is no shame left for those people. They believe their own lies, and act all patrician like Morneau, a man so apparently ill-informed and dim-witted, he'd never heard of business divestiture for holding public office, or if he had, regarded himself as so honest, ethics policies simply didn't apply to him.

Does anyone trust Bell and their ripoff cell phone and cable/internet plans? How about the banks? - Nah, they don't try and flog useless services to little old ladies over the phone, do they? Upstanding corporate citizens, the lot of 'em. The execs claim the moral high ground - "That's not our company policy!" Meanwhile, they incentivize middle management with bonuses to get more and more business, and leave that rapacious class to work out the details on the QT, while issuing highly moral company "policy", and tut-tutting their lowest-ranked employees' behaviour. Then doing bugger all to change things. It's all utter and complete bollocks from beginning to end.

Is anyone honest these days? I find precious little evidence of it. Everyone is trying to rip off everyone else just to make a living. It didn't use to be so obviously bent. But big business with the federal government in their pockets seem intent on ruining the ethics of the average citizen by lying, innuendo and complex ripoff schemes like National Pharma, and allowing it to be just obvious enough that we all turn into scheming thieves ourselves because it's the norm. You can't trust anyone these days - we're all stealthily trained to be greedy. Everyone is out for their own advantage.

A population ruined like this has no empathy, couldn't care less about anyone else, and if you expect them to really care about the environment, well good luck. Thus the brain dead cheer lower "taxes" as if it were some sort of universal truism, and society gradually turns into sh*t, with no hope of altruism whatsoever.

2 comments:

  1. BM alludes to a social psychopathy that appears to mirror what we've seen spread through other nations, especially the really big one to our immediate south. How many times have we - you, me and so many others - pointed to these malignancies and warned it was only a matter of time before the disease reached our homeland? We're not yet in free fall but we are creeping ever nearer to the edge of that cliff.

    As we entered the 21st century, the commencement of the third millennium, some highly educated types forewarned of the advent of a "century of revolution." Around the world, freedom is in retreat. Liberal democracy is faltering. The moat is being filled, the drawbridge raised and the portcullis is being lowered.

    An emergent plutocracy that, through the use of sketchy tax havens, is now more global, freed of national restraints, could soon usher in a high-tech iteration of semi-feudalism.

    Our own government tells us we must learn to accept the peasant's fate - "job churn" and doesn't lift a finger to realign the competing interests of labour and capital so essential to progressive democracy.

    A clash is coming, Lorne, probably many clashes and we don't have an abundance of time to prepare ourselves.

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    1. I have the distinct feeling that the odds are stacked against us, Mound, especially since the regressive forces of neoliberalism now seem to have all of their courtiers in place.

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