Comrade Joti Brar (@joti2gaza) joins the panel on RT’s flagship discussion show CrossTalk, hosted by Peter Lavelle.
Discussing the background to concepts such as the ‘great reset’, ‘green new deal’ etc, Joti points out that the pandemic lockdown in western countries wasn’t called at the moment it would have been most effective as a health measure, but when the government realised that the stock market crash of February/March 2020 was making a bailout of big business inevitable.
Rishi Sunak’s ‘generous Covid measures’, announced alongside the first lockdown in Britain, were in fact a bailout of big business disguised as a health strategy.
The bailout had to be disguised because our rulers knew that the public would never accept another massive handout of public cash to private coffers. After all, workers are still paying a heavy price via the 12 years (and counting) of austerity that followed the bank bailout of 2008.
As with the ‘Covid’ bailout, in which hundreds of billions were handed over to the crisis-ridden monopolies, Joti points out that concepts such as the ‘great reset’, ‘build back better’ and the ‘green new deal’ are in fact mere marketing slogans, a giant PR exercise aimed at persuading the public to accept yet another huge subsidy from the state’s coffers to the monopolies, this time under the guise of ‘saving the environment’, ‘going green’, ‘achieving carbon neutral’, etc.
While our environment will continue to deteriorate as a result of profit-driven decision-making, the same corporations that are causing the problems will stand in line to receive huge handouts from national treasuries in order to provide new ‘green’ versions of products and infrastructure that we are told must be destroyed in order to ‘save the planet’.
This is the logic of capitalism: yet another desperate attempt to inject ‘demand’ into an economy that workers will be expected to pay for (through their taxes and through cuts in their wages, services and benefits), and which will thus further impoverish the masses, whose poverty is the cause of the chronic ‘lack of demand’ in the economy in the first place.
While being asked to believe that we can solve global warming and other environmental problems without removing the rampant and warmongering capitalist imperialist system that has created them, we are also being told that the solution lies in throwing away everything from cups and straws to cars, houses and even hospitals and roads, and replacing them with new ones.
Capitalism, as ever, is utterly impotent even in the face of its own destruction, constantly caught on the horns of the same old dilemma: how to survive the crisis it has created and how to inject new demand into an oversupplied market. As more and more of society’s wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the problem of how to invest such huge fortunes in a profitable way becomes ever more insoluble.
As Comrade Joti points out at the end of the show, only a planned economy can save us from this downward spiral and enable humanity to put the productive forces and scientific knowledge it possesses at the service of all.
It is perfectly possible to provide a decent life to every person on the planet while also solving problems like climate change. The only thing that stands in our way is the profit motive.
This programme was aired on 12 November and featured co-panellists Jeffrey Tucker and Tony Ewing.
