Using the premise identified by Scott, think back 200 years. Before widespread vaccines and modern healthcare.

This is exactly how disease has been addressed through history.

If you lived through to old age, it was sheer luck. https://twitter.com/shmitzysays/status/1337073005403328514

Small pox, tuberculosis, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, pulmonary diseases, the flu, pneumonia, polio, diphtheria, typhoid, cholera.

The working class was expected to put themselves at risk to keep the economy going. No matter what the risks were.

Yes wealthy people succumb to infirmity & disease too, but not nearly at the same rates as the rest of the population.

Eradicating & mitigating disease explains why human lifespans increased about 20 years in length in 2 generations. In Alberta the average life span is 82.

People used to die all the time from disease & illness. Children & adults suffered miserably to maintain the wealth of plutocrats. If one worker died, he was replaced immediately. There was no welfare state & the work ethic required to survive was to push through illness.

That’s what cons are advocating to return to now. There are more people in society than required to effectively run the economy. Losing those who don’t contribute to the maintenance and growth of plutocracy’s wealth through disease is a sacrifice being normalized.

Plutocracy has always normalized working through illness as a test of strength, endurance & sheer will. In my youth, it was common for employees to receive awards for never missing work. It wasn’t that they never experienced a cold or the flu. They just kept showing up to work.

Awarded by owners and employers for sacrificing health for the company/business. An expectation of toughness & will power to be “responsible” and “reliable” as an employee. It’s a perpetuation of toxic masculinity that benefits plutocrats at the worker’s expense.

Unions fought for workers rights to take time off to recuperate when sick. Time for employees to stay home during the worst portion of contagious disease. Sick days, short term disability, long term disability insurance helped limit the transmission of disease.

The amount employers spend on insurance coverage to cover the costs of sick benefits is enormous. It’s been flagged as an increasing expense that plutocrats want to contain. Andrea Shandro runs a business that promises to do just that, reduce costs of employee benefits.

Current trends demonstrate employers reducing or eliminating sick benefits and disability insurance. Conservative govts are introducing policy to reduce coverage for sick days and recovery from illness.

There is abundant evidence employers are winning this battle.

And the public still wonders if cons are prioritizing economics over human lives?

They’ve never stopped prioritizing wealth and profits over human life.

It was unions and workers who stopped accepting the callous disregard of their meagre insignificant existence.

It was unions who fought and won the battle to be considered human, not just human “capital.”

And who are cons attacking directly: unions and collective bargaining. Starting with employees of the government. Teachers, Nurses, Doctors, Public Servants. The strongest unions.

It’s a fascist strategy. Repeated often by fascists. Eliminate the strongest unions and collective bargaining associations and all others will fall in line.

Who is being impacted the most by the pandemic as workers in Alberta? Teachers, Nurses, Doctors and Public Servants.

It’s really not difficult to recognize the con strategy if you look at the bigger picture & know some history. Con provincial govts have delayed action to contain the pandemic. Con premiers have been sitting on federal dollars meant to contain the pandemic. We all ask why?

The care of the aged is expensive. Privatization of this care to enable women to reliably enter the workforce, has made every cut to expenses possible to enable efficiency and increase profits.There is no more room for growth of profits in that industry.

Eliminating the highest expenditures means eliminating those that cost the most to sustain.

If you remove the human factor, which capitalist decision makers always do, the deaths of the oldest and sickest is a boost to the profit margin.

But that’s combining men’s and women’s averages. Women actually live longer than men on average. Significantly longer. Drawing on their and their husband’s pensions for close to 20 years after retirement. Declining in health, requiring more and more expensive care, until death.

Examine the statistical evidence to see the trends in lifespan and determine which demographic is declining in lifespan (it’s women).

This is called population health. It’s the aggregated data epidemiologists & statisticians use to make recommendations.

https://open.alberta.ca/opendata/life-expectancy-in-alberta-at-birth-and-age-65

Families have become smaller. Old Age Security and pensions were created as average five year funding gaps until death. But more & more working class people are living much longer lives.

It’s cutting into plutocrats profit margins. Employers are legally bound to fund pensions.

So who is the most expendable in society to capitalists?

Plutocrats intentionally increased productivity and profits by paying for education & for healthcare of workers. It made sense to the bottom line & they wouldn’t have agreed to it otherwise. It wasn’t only union pressure.

It’s a fallacy to think workers won the battle on their own. Capitalists are ONLY interested in one thing: profits. Not human lives.

Aggregated health data reveals pensions are an ever increasing cost that cuts into profits.

So how do they contain costs? By limiting lifespans.

It is irrelevant to cons how many people over the age of 70-80 die. Every death saves expenses & boosts profits.

Plutocrats want available reliably healthy workers. Those with special needs are costly to maintain. Those past their ability to contribute are superfluous.

There are job creators & workers. If this bothers you to think of people as cogs in the economic machine, it doesn’t bother plutocrats. This is how capitalists approach problems. They eliminate the human factor. Humans are capital to expend. Workers aren’t human, they’re capital.

The policies enacted by Con premiers do one thing. Increase the risk that those most vulnerable to COVid will contract and die from the virus.

Kenney stated this clearly and without reservation.

He has never hidden his priorities.

https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/braid-kenney-begins-to-normalize-covid-19-as-a-risk-mainly-to-the-elderly-almost-zero-danger-to-the-young

Kenney is not just a malignant narcissist like Trump, he’s a sadistic sociopath & self appointed arbiter of life & death, installed by plutocrats to increase profits.

If you missed that, it’s because you weren’t paying attention or you chose not to believe your eyes & ears.

@threadreaderapp compile please