[JoeP]

I feel like crosses too many existing threads to fit in just one.

The main point is on the ability of business-controlled governments to deal with covid-19, but it touches on climate change denial and tobacco harm denial ( I don't think we have a thread for that).

Our politics isn’t designed to protect the public from Covid-19 | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

The politics of denial, first honed in the tobacco industry, has serious consequences for a floundering Johnson government

In the UK, the US and Australia, the politics of the governing parties have been built on the dismissal and denial of risk. Just as these politics have delayed the necessary responses to climate breakdown, ecological collapse, air and water pollution, obesity and consumer debt, so they appear to have delayed the effective containment of Covid-19.

Politics is best understood as public relations for particular interests. The interests come first; politics is the means by which they are justified and promoted. On the left, the dominant interest groups can be very large – everyone who uses public services, for instance. On the right they tend to be much smaller. In the US, the UK and Australia, they are very small indeed: mostly multimillionaires and a very particular group of companies: those whose profits depend on the cavalier treatment of people and planet.

I'll try not to quote every second paragraph and just round off with this:

The greater the risk to public health and wellbeing a company presents, the more money it must spend on politics – to ensure it isn’t regulated out of existence. Political spending comes to be dominated by the dirtiest companies, ensuring that they wield the greatest influence, crowding out their cleaner rivals. While nobody has a commercial interest in the spread of coronavirus, the nature and tenor of the governments these interests have built impedes state attempts to respond quickly and appropriately.

He doesn't mention Big Pharma and the US insurance-medical complex, but they are surely among the denialists controlling politics, and directly influencing the availability of tests and so on.