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David Brunnen

The Poverty Pandemic, fossil fuels and consumer advertising

By David Brunnen | Tue 5th December 2023 - 9:09 am

The UK’s Poverty Pandemic (aka ‘Cost of Living Crisis’) was already coursing through the lifeblood of society long before COVID-19. Over the past decade, the Poverty Pandemic has been more damaging than COVID-19 and far less easily treated. Indeed, many who promoted this Poverty Pandemic’s root causes may dismiss the inequities as collateral damage in the cause of the Conservative’s economic treadmill — a heartless Darwinian devotion to the survival of top dogs.

To excuse this Poverty Pandemic as ‘a crisis’ as if it might one day pass away is ‘deflective marketing’ where ‘problems’ are progressively reframed as ‘challenges’, and ‘challenges’ become ‘opportunities’, and imagined opportunities become the elusive ‘sunlit uplands’ in the search for infinite compound growth or some such supposedly faster-spinning hamster wheel, further fuelled by Brexit. Foodbanks, Pantries, and ‘charity shops’ were well established before that Brexit twist of the economic knife and before Covid-19 preyed upon endemic poverties that lacked insulation against escalating energy prices.

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