Sunday 22 November 2020

okay BOOMERang..

This is horrifically EPIC though I may be understating the scope of this MASSIVE Con job exercise in predatory capitalism. 

First, Linda McQuaig states the facts and sets the context: 
"..regardless of what industry spokespeople say, a private company in the nursing home business is focused on maximizing profits, as its board of directors demands.

And it will typically do this by scrimping on staff costs — hiring fewer workers and paying them rock-bottom wages with no benefits. This generally results in high turnover and worse conditions for the residents, as well as the workers.

Certainly, Ontario’s three big private nursing home chains, which receive government funding under the same formula as not-for-profit homes, have been good at maximizing profits.

Over the past decade, the three chains paid out $1.5 billion in dividends to shareholders and $138 million in executive pay.." 

I have seen the lack of resources and actual avariciously-geared services: shoddy cleaning, food preparation and meals, support for personal hygiene, space allocation -- some residents are literally stacked 3 to a room -- in private long term care residences. 

Next, a startling yet not unexpected disclosure, given how pension funds are managed.

Add to the cauldron The Great Barrington Declaration. Wait, perhaps the latter *is* the cauldron or more likely, the crucible — an instrument routinely used by savage profiteers or scammers along with a strategically-purposed alembic for transforming base materials into gold or a reasonable enough facsimile thereof that it might spark a stock market buying frenzy.

The death of millions of boomers and of members of the generation born before 1945 would materially free up Billion$ currently disbursed as pension benefits. Economists employed by the 1% wealthy are salivating at the thought of assets, including valuable real estate, being liquidated and harvested to their clients' benefit. Prosperity gospel reigns, right!?

Culling the herd under the guise of advocating for herd immunity presents considerably profitable, windfall opportunities. Another triumph for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and its rightwing extremist funders and associates. Cleaves perfectly to the rules of Disaster Capitalism as Naomi Klein periodically reminds us. A critique with regard to the sacrifice of the elderly, the poor and the precariously employed being happenstance sacrificed to a crass economic imperative. More hereand here.

And who can forget how that venal, opportunistic, self-righteous Trump shill R. R. Reno blathered on about the economic imperative for older and feeble folks to take one for the team, early in the pandemic? Such contemptible pseudo-moral and theological doctrine he deployed in support of his basic yet cleverly cloaked argument: Greed is Go(o)d


Blither on, ye disciples of Mammon! What comes around, goes around.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My private nightmare of us all eventually oppressing and victimizing each other in our capacity as shareholders, even when we don’t personally own shares, has come true. Through pension investment funds, we can now steal each other’s water and stifle each other’s freedom of expression—and hasten each other’s death, obviously, if we invest in LTCH. Remember back in 2008 when Norman Greenspan pulled out, “There is a flaw in the model” to explain the meltdown? I’ve always wondered whether he got off on adding silently, “…but it’s a feature, not a bug.”
—A. St-Laurent

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