Economic depression, delusion and the media

As Leonard Cohen sang in 'Democracy':

From the homicidal bitchin
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat…

Let me give you an example of political delusion from the ruins of my old home state of South Australia.

For 40 years, there has been a concerted effort by the local media and a cabal of business leaders, to make SA seem 'normal'. When by any social and economic measure, it makes the hillbillies in the back blocks of the Appalachian Mountains, look like sophisticates who stepped out of a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

Adelaide's media is still banging on about how $90 billion worth of submarines, will save the state. Even non-navy types like me know that social isolation in a submarine isn't a goer. The Chinese are also developing detection weapons to sink submarines below the dive depth of the French-designed Barracuda vessels. You read that first here.

Let's admit that we all can be delusional. It oils the rusty wheels of ego. Many of us hover over the sweet vapours of delusion, that we are made for grander stuff, rather than spending 20 years crunching the numbers on the 5^th floor of a dodgy financial services provider.

But there is more to it than that. Editors and corporations don't want the media agenda fixed and focused, on the incalculable damage the virus is wreaking across all classes and tiers of Australian society.

Sure, they'll runs stories on how corporations allowed aged care homes to be run like Soviet gulags; how private education providers ripped billions of dollars from the battler's VET FEE-HELP accounts or how the major banks and insurance companies, sunk their fangs into our savings.

They will certainly run stories about 'flattening the curve' until the cows come home. It's as if epidemiologists now sit in the News Editor's chair. "What story shall we run tonight?" "How about a self-congratulatory story on flattening the curve?" "How about a story on the fear, death and doom, if we don't?"

The long term economic ramifications of 'curve flattening' have gone missing. Any analysis of the collapse of global supply chains has gone with it. Deflation? Don't worry about it.

The last thing the government, media moguls and business tycoons, want to see is stories of young, middle-class people on the street, of houses repossessed by the banks, of millions of people looking for work.

Because this so radically undermines what's left of an already shaky status quo, social cohesion may unravel.