Aidonian's blog

How can it spread so fast?
Well, in a global world where we live, where you’re all around the world on one day, no one should be surprised that a virus like this can quickly spread around the world.
In addition to the personal views, disinformation widely spread about this virus, there is something else that helps the virus spread among the population: the profits.
Why? We live in a world where CEOs want to collect as much money as possible from their company, but want to spend as little as possible. This is about wages, equipment to work safely. Usually this is enforced by unions, but if they are weakened or absent, the CEOs like Jeff Bezos have free play. Jeff Bezos, boss of Amazon, who has a wealth of over 100 billion euros, but forces his staff to wear diapers, because they dont get breaks for going to the bathroom. Dare they go, they could be fired. They’re not well paid to be humiliated like that. How humiliated must it be, being a grown man who’s fine, working with a diaper because the boss doesn’t want there to be a break to go to the bathroom. The CEOs of Bol.com, big stores like carrefour, colruyt, Amazon have become richer during the lockdown. And they pay almost or no taxes and they dare complain that they have to pay too much in Belgium. Not Amazon, because so far they have no branch in Belgium.If you save on work equipment, you should not be surprised that people at work can get sick and then go home to infect their friends and family. Seasonal workers are particularly vulnerable to this.
This health crisis will also be an economic one.
When the country went into lockdown, a lot of people weren’t allowed to go to work. They were either fired, or put on economic terms (70% of their wages). The companies were supported. The workers who were placed economically received 200 euros from the Flemish government to assist them. This amount did not come into the account until sometime in May. While people could use this in april.
Nothing was done to help people with the rent. You do when you make payments. But tenants, they were abandoned. They had to hope for the Good Will of the landlords. Same for restaurant and cafe owners. Everywhere people were quick to help the companies. Which is normal somewhere, but when you think about it, you don’t. If a company made millions of profits last year, and now it has to apply for state aid: where did last year’s money go? Why should they be entitled to support and smaller companies, self-employed people who pay blue?
In America, companies have kept the money that was meant for smaller companies to help them pay their staff, which was originally the purpose of that money. Only one company returned the money. Everything else has kept it to itself.
At the lockdown, a lot of companies fired interim workers and put their personnel on economic terms. However, it is expected that many companies will take advantage of this in order to save even more on their workforce. All they care about is their profits. Every year it has to go up, because not only the CEO has to get his salary, as his bonus, but so does the board of directors. This hunger for more profit cannot last and is actually very perverse. It is based on a system where one crisis follows another, because that is the system’s own. The capitalist system in which they find us does not exist that long, but has been through many crises. Many of them are of their own making. The 1970s and 1980s of the 20th century, the stock market crash of 1928 and 2008, even in the 1990s of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, there were crises that arose from capitalism.
This health crisis has also come about. Animals are pumped full of antibiotics, which indirectly also enter people, in order to sell as many healthy animals as possible, butchered, and then sold the meat. This in itself makes people more and more immune to antibiotics. The environmental crisis is also a product of capitalism. The drive for profit drives us to destroy ourselves and the planet. Capitalism will never correct itself, for it cannot. It will hit the finish line if it can make even more profit. Marx said in Capital vol. 1, that is, if there is a large concentration of wealth among a small group of people, you can see that the system is rotten to the core. It’s like a predator that will never have enough. It is a system that will promote inequality and racism, because it benefits from the fact that these things exist. Poverty, discrimination, racism, will never disappear.