The UBI Scam Gains Momentum
Ruling class will attempt to leverage current crisis to ram UBI down our throats.
It appears that Trudeau’s fascist Canada, the testbed for authoritarian attacks on dissent, will lead the ruling class campaign to impose Universal Basic Income on the people.
UBI sounds tempting — free money, right? — but at bottom it’s a scheme aimed at destroying Social Security and privatizing the people’s assets.
No wonder the Wall Street Journal loves the idea.
It goes without saying, I hope, that UBI is in no real sense “free money.” You and I will pay for it through taxes, and via the sacrifice of benefits that are now due to us as of right. In effect, the system requires the people to pay themselves subsistence-level support while the ruling class continues its unprecedented spree.
Moreover, one can safely guess that UBI will come pre-loaded with a work requirement. Just like SNAP. To qualify for your support check, you’ll be forced to work when and where the rulers please. Amazon warehouses will be stocked with ultra-low wage subsidized labor, just as a union drive is beginning to threaten Bezos’s elaborate system for super-exploitation. Our rulers will have the extraordinary power to deploy the reserve army of labor according to their whims, shuffling the workforce through various sectors like pawns on a chessboard.
Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be surprised if UBI comes packaged with health-related requirements. No jab, no cash.
It’s worth recalling Eric Hobsbawm’s analysis of the Speenhamland system, a prototypical form of UBI enforced in rural Britain in the early 1800s. Hobsbawm argued that such measures are catastrophic for the working class:
The Speenhamland system, like the UBI so deeply desired by the contemporary ruling class, allowed employers to lower wages below starvation levels because public finances would automatically take up the slack.
Key sentence from the above: "They lacked even the only real resource of the British laboring poor, the capacity to constitute themselves a class to fight collectively as such." This is the future promised us by UBI.
One could see this coming even before the COVID scam, with its intentionally ruinous economic policies, kicked off the current phase of the class war.
So don’t be too relieved that the rulers are at last thrusting virus terror into their back pockets — to be redeployed if and when deemed necessary. Phase Two of the COVID operation is now in train. Expect an all-out attack on the people and our property, to be launched under cover of a laptop war and an economic crisis (hyper-inflation, food shortages, stock market crashes, etc.) that has been intentionally engineered.
And expect all the phony leftoid social media celebs, like The Squad, to spin the plunder as some sort of boon to the working class. UBI is, in short, a Trojan horse.
Great analysis. The neoliberals understand they have to couch all their coercion and plunder in 'progressive' language. The traditional right-wing rhetoric has lost its cache and acceptability in public discourse. Now you can spin a surveillance system which will help paralyze the working class by calling it a "UBI", and the neoLs know that any authentic criticism towards it will be dismissed as heartless capitalist apologetics ('how can you deny people a basic income?!'). It's similar to calling all the truckers "Nazis".
BTW just saw this quote from Morales:
Evo Morales: "...I continue having doubts about …corona virus. I read…a report from the IMF that said…it’s important to reduce unnecessary population, & who are they? The old, the disabled, poor people, the working class. It looks like, brothers & sisters, that this pandemic is part of a biological war. Let the poor die, the old die, the disabled die.. It looks like… this pandemic is part of a biological war…”