Bajo, talking about people delivering meals on bikes for money (pretty decent money btw), slavery and castration in the same sentence is hysterical melodramatic crap.
If you don’t get that, that’s fine but it may be worth your while - just to retain some credibility - to
pretend you get it.
Any problems, to the extent they even exist, are eminently solvable. You want people to wear helmets? Make a police operation in which every rappi driver without a helmet means a fine for the parent company and/or the driver. Done.
To be clear, this is a concerted political effort, not just bajo mouthing off. I listened this morning to Radio 10 for as long as I could handle it - this was bajo's slavery claptrap x10. This is now the party line.
And let’s be honest for a minute. This is not about the helmets. Everybody knows it isn’t about the helmets.
What’s it about? It’s about the ongoing fight against the emergence of a new economy in which traditional middlemen and power centers are bypassed. Who does that threaten, you ask? Two words: organized labor.
Uber et al got a foothold in BsAs, notwithstanding that every possible action was taken to ban them. Aside from blocking credit cards, not much could be done to stop it - unlike rappi, nothing identifies an Uber as being such and there is nothing anyone can do to stop people from getting into cars.
The result of the democratization of transit?
The cancellation of a transit strike that was to include both buses and taxis. Why was it called off? Because, as noted at the time by yours truly, Uber et al meant that transit had become decentralized enough that a taxi strike would not paralyze the city. It would just underline their own impotence.
This, and not slavery or any other similar hogwash, is what scares the bejeezus out of the establishment here. The entire premise of Argentina-cum-peronismo - and Macrismo has not done very well at distinguishing itself from peronismo - is about using labor, gremios etc as a parallel power independent of that of the state. Where some connected people who purport to represent the workers, become a Mafia who can paralyze society at will. Where if the “wrong” policy is adopted, by the people’s elected representatives, they can quickly mobilize mobs of people who will take the streets, and if need be orchestrate riots and saqueos. In short, paralyze society.
For this parallel power to exist, absolutely depends on workers being subservient to state handouts, to the state and the gremios protecting them from harms and dangers real and imagined. Otherwise, the way people resolve political differences is at the ballot box - and that, these people find unacceptable. They
must have a level of power which does not depend at all on who won this or that election. And every time that a part of the economy begins to emerge from under these scoundrels’ thumbs, you see hysterical ranting about slavery, organized crime, and now - I shit you not - castration. Really. Bajo_cero just mentioned castration.
Why this melodramatic nonsense? Because the powers that be are deeply, deeply, scared. Of a bunch of guys on bikes. Of freedom.
