We're Living In A Permanent Crisis Mode.

Corona crisis, financial crisis, climate crisis, migration crisis, bankruptcies, heat waves, refugee flows, you name it.  And, you don't have to be a redemption-hungry euphoric to realise that we live in a permanent crisis mode, but that we have reached the end of neo-liberalism is of course nonsense. 

Saturated commodity markets and a surplus of idle capital first triggered waves of speculation and then the world financial crisis of 2008. Politicians shouted: “Everything has to change, we need a new concept of growth, the market cannot regulate everything.” Well, you know what happen: Politics did not come out of it. 

Shortly afterwards, the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued an alarm call, saying that everything must change, and this very quickly. So the gangs met in Paris and all countries of the world agreed to protect the climate in 2015. This was indeed a historical surprise, but the commitment was lagging behind, and the expansion of the markets, the politics of sanctions and last but not least the new inhabitant in the White House destroyed all the efficiency gains partly through obstruction partly through incompetence and most of all due to greed. 

And when in 2015 the German chancellor offered Germany as a refuge for millions of war and climate refugees, demographers began to calculate that in 2050, eventually even earlier, 37% of all the world's under-18s will be at home in Africa, - in absolute figures around one billion. It is unimaginable that they will stay there, unimaginable that they can live there as we do now. India’s north will become desert, 50% of Iran’s agricultural regions will vanish…

With all these corona crisis, financial crisis, climate crisis, migration crisis, bankruptcies, heat waves, refugee flows, there was a growing realisation that global agreements are difficult to make and few comply with them - not to mention solutions. On top of it a TV reality star became president, elected by a “base” that knew him well from his TV appearances and he wanted to make their view on America great again after all the illegal conquests out of an ill guided understanding of “humanitarian interventions” ended up in becoming wars of occupation that had damaged the image of a strange US democracy. Well we all see the work in progress: it is at least diplomatically paralysed if not just a laughing spot.

Look at Corona as an experiment: it can be used as a symptom of our  global way of life. Not even the White Houses and Fox News in all our all countries are willing to blame individual states, cultures or politicians. The corona crisis problem is experienced as systemic, as a symptom of our global way of life.  In this experiment, it was quickly recognised that governments can find with surprising speed to the brutal primacy of politics over the economy. The individualised consumer became citizen and was suddenly capable of solidarity and radical renunciations.

This now can lead to a dream of a true step for humanity: If a global tax reform were to take place now, in which all billionaires on this planet would immediately and without delay hand over 50% of their possessions to the public, so under the control of honestly elected governments and these governments would be constitutionally committed to 100% transparency, even mankind could take a step towards its own survival. 

the photos here are from a saltworks, a saline, in the Camargue that had been completely closed during the Corona crisis because nobody was allowed to work.