COVID-19 epidemic as the second stage of the crisis of neoliberalism
COVID-19 epidemic is another nail in the coffin of neoliberal globalization.
"Neoliberalism ignores or misvalues the role of healthcare:
it convert it into machine for extracting profits from sufferings "
Profound lack of human decency’ is a immanent feature of neoliberalism, especially the neoliberal elite
(financial oligarchy)
The USA handing of the coronarovirus epidemic is interesting by the stale of its incompetence, because the performance of the
neoliberal state i recent times has been anything but competent. The incompetence is a symptom of a morally-degenerate managerial
class Infected with neoliberal ideas and having no sense of responsibility to anyone other than themselves. The bank bailout in 2008
buried neoliberal ideology (the preachers of the neoliberal agenda suddenly found themselves without an audience) but also
exposed the level of hijacking of the state by financial oligarchy. It is hard to distinguish between incompetence and fraud.
Much that looks incompetent conceals fraud (stock buybacks, Boeing fiasco, etc). And note that Boeing moved its headquarters to
Chicago “to be more like GE”. Well they’ve destroyed the company to be more like the looters and liars and cheats. Along with GE
there are some other notable poster-children of how private enterprise has committed suicide through the wanton bloodletting of its
skilled employees (Boeing being a recent case-in-point).
this same phenomena can be found in universities, colleges where faculties are no longer bolstered by a strong bench of
tenured staff, contract and non-tenured hire-and-fire disposable staff are now the norm. No matter how many “systems” and “quality
functions” they put in place, experience matters
One of the problems is that financialization and securitization of everything revealed during this epidemic is that has
effectively separated the managerial class in both private and public sector from knowledge and experience of actual logistics and
execution. Transferring securities with the push of a button is not the same as getting an industrial plant or phone center built,
trained, and running efficiently. Companies and organizations with a history of doing this well manage to lost that capability in
only a couple of years after financial shark CEO was installed (e.g. IBM, CDC, FEMA, numerous companies taken over by private equity
). They know the price of everything and the value of nothing
The rise of the FIRE sectors as a percentage of GDP has been obvious. the USA economy is over-financialized. All this has done is
with layer after layers of debt and interest payments to the detriment of the real economy. Financialization
creates a positive feedback loop. Every system with positive feedback loop will crash, sooner or later. Neoliberals worked really
hard to remove not just the negative feedback, but any traces of the negative feedback on financial sector.
The idea that “never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence” (Hanlon's
razor - Wikipedia ) is not longer true. The neoliberal America has a lot of corruption. Some obviously stupid actions are
explainable for short term greed motives. That explains much of what we are seeing now.
CDC botched testing program during COVID-19 epidemic became a textbook example of bureaucratic incompetence. They do not do
competence in Washington. You need to start holding people responsible and that's impossible with the new neoliberal aristocracy
(financial oligarchy), which inherited all vices of the old but none of its virtues.
Epidemic control is not something in which a neoliberal society, based on the idea that profit is the king ("Greed is good")
motives and "homo homily lupus est" style of promotion of competition excels. It requires cooperation, which is discouraged under
neoliberalism. See Neoliberal rationality The
neoliberalized healthcare is
clearly rotten for 90% of the population (truthdig)
“I was born in 1936. My father lost his job the day I was born,” recalls the Truthdig editor in chief. “Roosevelt was the hero
in our house. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Why? Because the ruling class in our country, the robber barons, the rich people — and
he was from a rich family — they undermined their own system. They were so consumed with greed and short-term profit and
swindling, the market and everything else that they forgot about stability in society.”
We can add that the US political system after 2008 crash entered prolong crisis and its economy -- "secular stagnation" phase --
neoliberal ideology is dead, but neoliberalism marches on like a zombie. Actually pretty bloodthirsty zombie.
In case of COVD-19 the relevant public health officials may know what needs to be done, but they’re not doing it because of the
reflexive reliance on neoliberal, market-based solutions is also at fault. At least in part,
because state resources are simply not available. It’s also due to the way we the authority for such problems was pushed down from federal
to the state and local level. There are some
things government is uniquely positioned to provide, but neoliberals are not capable of recognizing that simple fact.
The most important thing we learned from SARS was that infectious diseases do not respect borders or government edicts, and
cannot be hidden. It requires international cooperation, transparency and sharing of information to control an epidemic.
We also learned the importance of providing good, balanced, reliable information to the public. In any epidemic, there is the
outbreak of disease and then there is the epidemic of panic. And nowadays, there is also what the WHO
has termed the Infodemic, the explosion of information
about the epidemic. Some of it is good information, but some of it is rumour, myth, speculation and conspiracy theory, and those
things feed the anxiety. It can be hard to sort out which information to believe, so it is important to choose trustworthy
sources. Panic and misinformation make controlling the outbreak more difficult.
Neoliberalism as a social system based on lies and disinformation so this is impossible under neoliberalism. So the fact that
Trump administration is lying about the epidemic is not a bug, it is a feature (BTW Chine is a neoliberal society too; although the
remnants of socialism still are visible; the same is even more true for Russia - it is typical and rather cruel neoliberal
society)
In the USA the neoliberal policies undermined the healthcare system to the extent that dealing with the epidemic like
COVID-19 in privatized healthcare system represent tremendous challenges. Neoliberalism takes privatization of social services
such as government hospitals and health facilities to the extreme. Privatization is the exact opposite of making health
services more affordable and accessible to the public
“The first rule of public health is to gain the trust of the population.” Neoliberalism is doing exactly opposite: population
distrust providers of medical services which often abuse ill patients for profit (surprise ambulance billing, surprise
hospital billing, unnecessary medical procedures like insertion of stents, unnecessary surgeries, etc). The CoVid19 is about to
expose millions without health insurance, more millions with enormous deductibles and co-pays that discourage doctor visits, and
still more millions who can't afford to stay home when they're sick if they want to avoid eviction and homelessness.
Well, hygiene is fine, but that's only a secondary issue, the proverbial lock on the barn door after the horse is stolen. And
clearly, we can have nationalism without having epidemics. The problem is that the current form of Capitalism is built on
looong supply chains to countries with cheap labor and lots of government support. I worked for a large aircraft manufacturer
for many years,whose modus operandi was to avoid outsourcing parts and structures to American companies, and it worked pretty
well for quite a long time for them. But now the weak links in the 'chain' come to the foreground. Rule #1 (and the only
rule!) of Capitalism is 'there is no such thing as too much profit'.
A CEO's corporate life expectancy is about 3 years, so he (usually a 'he') has to plunder fast and make a good severance
deal while they have the chance. Nationalism only deals with national matters.
Meanwhile, the financial and business world could care less about the welfare of any nation, whose citizens exist merely to
contribute to quarterly profits. Any given corporation does not make lightbulbs, cars, air conditioners or any other thing.
The entire enterprise exists to provide huge salaries to a few hundred executives. Nations supposedly exist to provide
security to their citizens, among other services, such as infastructure and public health. They have failed, badly, because of
the corruption of our leadership, which now consists of elevator boys and room service for the Wealthy.
Add to this weakened emergency response capabilities and it looks like another Katrina moment. SNAFU started with CDC botching
the development of virus test kits (and producing 10 time more expensive kits that China and Korea used) and then trying to
hide this by maximum restrictions on "eligible" for testing patients. Typical for all neoliberals Trump preoccupation with the
health of stock market, not so much with the health of the USA people also played some role (Although one positive thing about
Trump's behaviour is that he opposed MSM panic about the virus) The USA could benefit from replication China and South Korea
path to suppressing the virus, but choose not to do so. Moreover Trump administration created fiasco with tests which was
notable, painful and will have negative consequences for the duration of the epidemics in the USA
The Coronavirus Debacle The
American Conservative
The president has been
unwilling to tell the public the truth about the situation because he evidently cares more about the short-term political
implications than he does about protecting the public:
Even as the government’s scientists and leading health experts raised the alarm early and pushed for aggressive action,
they faced resistance and doubt at the White House — especially from the president — about spooking financial markets and
inciting panic.
“It’s going to all work out,” Mr. Trump said as recently as Thursday night. “Everybody has to be calm. It’s going to work
out.”
Justin Fox
comments on the president’s terrible messaging:
The biggest problem, though, is simply the way that the president talks about the disease. His instinct at every turn is to
downplay its danger and significance.
Minimizing the danger and significance of the outbreak ensured that the government’s response was less urgent and focused than
it could have been. It encouraged people to take it less seriously and thus made it more likely that the virus would spread. Then
when the severity of the problem became undeniable, the earlier discredited happy talk makes it easier for people to disbelieve
what the government tells them in the future.
Neoliberalism decimated social protection of workers (sick days, sick leaves, etc) and forces workers to come to the job
even while having symptoms. Part time workers (which are the fastest growing part of the US work force) are generally
treated like slaves in the USA. The vast majority of hourly employees in the hospitality business don’t have health insurance. "Average
working class folks cannot afford to voluntary quarantine themselves. Or to stay home from work for any reason. Even if they have
symptoms. They will continue going to work. They have to, in order to economically survive."
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/09/covid-19-and-the-working-class/
Consider the typical scenario in the US: there are literally tens of millions of workers who have no more than $400 for an
emergency. As many perhaps as half of the work force of 165 million. They live paycheck to paycheck. They can’t afford to miss
any days of work. Millions of them have no paid sick leave. The US is the worst of all advanced economies in terms of providing
paid sick leave. Even union workers with some paid sick leave in their contracts have, at best, only six days on average. If they
stay home sick, they’ll be asked by their employer the reason for doing so in order to collect that paid sick leave. And even
when they don’t have sick leave. Paid leave or not, many will be required to provide a doctor’s slip indicating the nature of the
illness. But doctors are refusing to hold office visits for patients who may have the virus. They can’t do anything about it, so
they don’t want them to come in and possibly contaminate others or themselves. So a worker sick has to go to the hospital
emergency room.
That raises another problem. A trip to the emergency room costs on average at least a $1,000. More if special tests are done.
If the worker has no health insurance (30 million still don’t), that’s an out of pocket cost he/she can’t afford. They know it.
So they don’t go to the hospital emergency room, and they can’t get an appointment at the doctor’s office. Result: they don’t get
tested, refuse to go get tested, and they continue to go to work. The virus spreads.
... ... ...
Then there’s the further complication concerning employment if they do go to the hospital. The hospital will (soon) test them.
If found infected, they will send them home…for voluntary quarantine for 14 days! Now the financial crises really begins. The
hospital will inform their employer. Staying at home for 14 days will result in financial disaster, since the employer has no
obligation to continue to pay them their wages while not at work, unless they have some minimal paid sick leave which, as noted,
the vast majority don’t have. Nor does the employer have any obligation legally to even keep them employed for 14 days (or even
less) if the employer determines they are not likely to return to work after 14 days (or even less). They therefore get fired if
they go to the hospital after it reports to the employer they have the virus. Just another good reason not to go to the hospital.
In other words, here’s all kind of major economic disincentives to keep an illness confidential, to go to work, not go to the
hospital (and can’t go to the doctor). That risks passing on the highly contagion bug to others–which has been happening and will
continue to happen.
McJobs in service sector are in especially bad shape because they already have a third world country conditions imposed on them.
Ask Wal-Mart workers about their sick leaves problems; and Wal-Mart is not the worst retailer in the USA as for the personnel abuse.
This backfire during virus epidemics and makes the USA a third world country as for the prognosis of the severity of this epidemics
in the country.
https://www.bangladeshpost.net/posts/neoliberalism-and-the-coronavirus-25315
capitalism is all about externalizing costs. “Some people” (because corporations are legally people) don’t take responsibility
for their carbon footprint. “Some people” scrape the surface off the earth to get at “their” lithium. Some polluters don’t take
responsibility for the health costs of their effluent.
The shorthand definition of neoliberalism is capitalism on steroids. No longer does capital have to exploit workers in its own
country. It can scour the world for the cheapest, most exploitable labor. No longer does capital have to fret about environmental
regulations in its own country.
Just manufacture those goods someplace where the government says air that you can’t see through, or water that is green from
algae is A-OK. Those goods end up a continent away, but as long as the shipping costs are cheap (burn, baby, burn), it makes more
profit than employing local people for what they think is a livable wage.
... ... ...
In sum, the strategy of wringing every last dollar out of child, prison, and slave labor for the sake of private profit is
nearing the point of diminishing returns. Unleashing a fatal virus from bats into humans is a negative return. By wrecking the
neoliberal-driven global economy, SARC-CoV-2 may just push the world into embodying that final section of the post-climate
catastrophe, post-Ebola, post-rat fever world of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. The question is, do you find the final section
pessimistic or optimistic?
Another factor is that the working class families in the USA lack any significant savings to shoulder work disruption. Presence
of homeless on the streets of cities such as San Francisco is another aggravating factor. The vulnerability of the US in the
current political environment comes because the gerantocratic neoliberal regime is concerned only about the prosperity of the top
10% (and especially top`1%) of the population; all other are treated as "deplorables" (Truthdig)
:
Nowhere, though, is the rusty, rickety nature of America’s civic society more recently evident than in the hilariously,
harrowingly inept response to the advent of the COVID-19 virus as a global contagion. Whether it is more or less dangerous and
deadly than the media portrays is quite beside the point.
The abject incapacity of any government, least of all the feds, to offer even simple, sensible guidance, much less mobilize
national resources to examine, investigate and ameliorate the potential threat to human health and well-being is astonishing,
even to a tired old cynic like me.
At present, the most proactive step has been to pressure the Federal Reserve into goosing the stock market — the sort of pagan
expiation of dark spirits that you’d expect in a more primitive world, when a volcano blew or an earthquake hit.
One positive factor in this story is that "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of
America.."(attributed to Otto von Bismarck) -- epidemics in the USA actively started in March and warm weather usually halts such
epidemics. If this is true, then Northern Europe/Russia/Canada/Northern USA will have at only the extra 1-2 months vulnerability, if
there is a pandemic, as warm weather in those regions often comes as late as May.
Also despite feredal authorities stance, considerable aprt of the population bought masks and were using them in public places.
when the tax rates increase even more, it just encourages automation or DIY (bring your own sheets to avoid paying the cleaning
fee), which just grinds down growth rather than accelerates it.
Notable quotes:
"... Applebee's is now using tablets to allow customers to pay at their tables without summoning a waiter. ..."
Companies see automation and other labor-saving steps as a way to emerge from the health crisis with a permanently smaller
workforce
PHOTO:
JIM THOMPSON/ZUMA PRESS
... ... ...
Economic data show that companies have learned to do more with less over the last 16 months or so. Output nearly
recovered to pre-pandemic levels in the first quarter of 2021 -- down just 0.5% from the end of 2019 -- even though U.S.
workers put in 4.3% fewer hours than they did before the health crisis.
... ... ...
Raytheon Technologies
Corp.
RTX
0.08%
,
the biggest U.S. aerospace supplier by sales, laid off 21,000 employees and contractors in 2020 amid a drastic
decline in air travel. Raytheon said in January that efforts to modernize its factories and back-office operations
would boost profit margins and reduce the need to bring back all those jobs. The company said that most if not all
of the 4,500 contract workers who were let go in 2020 wouldn't be called back.
... ... ..
Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. HLT -0.78% said last week that most of its U.S. properties are adopting "a
flexible housekeeping policy," with daily service available upon request. "Full deep cleanings will be conducted
prior to check-in and on every fifth day for extended stays," it said.
Daily housekeeping will still be free for those who request it...
Unite Here, a union that represents hotel workers, published a report in June estimating that the end of daily
room cleaning could result in an industrywide loss of up to 180,000 jobs...
... ... ...
Restaurants have become rapid adopters of technology during the pandemic as two forces -- labor shortages that are
pushing wages higher and a desire to reduce close contact between customers and employees -- raise the return on such
investments.
...
Applebee's is now using tablets to allow customers to pay at their tables without summoning a
waiter.
The hand-held screens provide a hedge against labor inflation, said John Peyton, CEO of Applebee's
parent
Dine
Brands Global
Inc.
... ... ...
The U.S. tax code encourages investments in automation, particularly after the Trump administration's tax cuts,
said Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the impact of
automation on workers. Firms pay around 25 cents in taxes for every dollar they pay workers, compared with 5 cents
for every dollar spent on machines because companies can write off capital investments, he said.
A lot of employers were given Covid-aid to keep employees employed and paid in 2020. I
assume somebody has addressed that obligation since it wasn't mentioned.
But, what happens to the unskilled workers whose jobs have been eliminated? Do Raytheon
and Hilton just say "have a nice life on the streets"?
No, they will become our collective burdens.
I am all for technology and progress and better QA/QC and general performance. But the
employers that benefit from this should use part of their gains in stock valuation to keep
"our collective burdens" off our collective backs, rather than pay dividends and bonuses
first.
Maybe reinvest in updated training for those laid off.
No great outcome comes free. BUT, as the article implies, the luxury of having already
laid off the unskilled, likely leaves the employer holding all the cards.
And the wheel keeps turning...
Jeffery Allen
Question! Isn't this antithetical (reduction of employees) to the spirit and purpose of
both monetary and fiscal programs, e.g., PPP loans (fiscal), capital markets funding
facilities (monetary) established last year and current year? Employers are to retain
employees. Gee, what a farce. Does anyone really care?
Philip Hilmes
Some of this makes sense and some would happen anyway without the pandemic. I don't need my room
cleaned every day, but sometimes I want it. The wait staff in restaurants is another matter. Losing
wait staff makes for a pretty bad experience. I hate having to order on my phone. I feel like I might
as well be home ordering food through Grubhub or something. It's impersonal, more painful than telling
someone, doesn't allow for you to be checked on if you need anything, doesn't provide information you
don't get from a menu, etc. It really diminishes the value of going out to eat without wait staff.
al snow
OK I been reading all the comments I only have a WSJ access as the rate was a great deal.
Hotel/Motel started making the bed but not changing the sheets every day for many years I am fine as
long as they offer trash take out and towel/paper every day
and do not forget to tip .
clive boulton
Recruiters re-post hard to fill job listings onto multiple job boards. I don't believe the reported
job openings resemble are real. Divide by 3 at least.
Canadian Cents@9 The book Capitalism on a Ventilator is a collection of essays or articles
produced by the Workers World Party, one of the Communist Parties in the US.
Amazon lists the book as currently unavailable (and asks if you want an email if it
becomes more available.)
It is indeed possible this is a surreptitious way of censoring the book, especially if the
unavailability means WWP (which operates the International Action Center) simply hasn't
complied with technical requirements imposed by Amazon.
Such as guaranteeing delivery within a limited number of days. Amazon has, apparently,
tightened up a lot to make it difficult for independents to sell on Amazon.
But it is also possible that the limited budgets and other resources led to limited
numbers of copies which are now sold out. When the new press run is complete, the book
becomes available again.
"... "We are more and more disoriented. There is a little good news, but at the same time there are new dimensions to the virus, and new variations that might turn out to be more dangerous. We now have this fake return to normal. The really frustrating thing is this lack of basic orientation. It's the absence of what [the philosopher and literary critic] Fredric Jameson calls 'cognitive mapping' – having a general idea of the situation, where it is moving and so on. Our desire to function requires some kind of clear coordinates, but we simply, to a large extent, don't know where we are." ..."
"... In his book, Zizek recalls the warnings of scientists after the SARS and Ebola epidemics. Persistently, we were told that the outbreak of a new epidemic was only a matter of time, but instead of preparing for the various scenarios we escaped into apocalypse movies. Zizek enumerates different scenarios of looming catastrophes, most of them consequences of the climate crisis, and calls for tough decisions to be made now. ..."
"... he coronavirus crisis is just a dress rehearsal for future problems that await us in the form of global warming, epidemics and other troubles. I don't think this is necessarily a pessimistic view, it's simply realistic. ..."
"... Now is a great time for politics, because the world in its current form is disappearing. Scientists will just tell us, 'If you want to play it safe, keep this level of quarantine,' or whatever. But we have a political decision to make, and we are offered different options." ..."
"... What if we will need another lockdown, even longer? Or multiple lockdowns? It's a sad prospect, but we should get ready to live in some kind of permanent state of emergency. ..."
"... The coronavirus epidemic is a universal crisis. In the long term, states cannot preserve themselves in a safe bubble while the epidemic rages all around ..."
"... It's tragic, I know, that all kinds of big companies are in deep shit, but are they worth saving? ..."
"... My formula is much more brutal, and darker. The state should simply guarantee that nobody actually starves, and perhaps this even needs to be done on an international scale, because otherwise you will get refugees. ..."
"... "I'm talking about what Naomi Klein calls the 'Screen New Deal.' The big technology companies like Google and Microsoft, which enjoy vast government support, will enable people to maintain Telexistence. You undergo a medical examination via the web, you do your job digitally from your apartment, your apartment becomes your world. I find this vision horrific." ..."
"... "First, it's class distinction at its purest. Maybe half the population, not even that, could live in this secluded way, but others will have to ensure that this digital machinery is functioning properly. Today, apart from the old working class, we have a 'welfare working class,' all those caregivers, educators, social workers, farmers. The dream of this program, the Screen New Deal, is that physically, at least, this class of caregivers disappears, they become as invisible as possible. Interaction with them will be increasingly reduced and be digital." ..."
"... "The irony here is that those who are privileged, those who, in this scenario, will be able to live in this perfect, secluded way, will also be totally controlled digitally. Their morning urine will be examined, and so on with every aspect of their life. Take the new analysis capabilities that can test you and provide results [for the coronavirus] in 10-15 minutes. I can imagine a new form of sexuality in this totally isolated world, in which I flirt with someone virtually, and then we say, 'Okay, let's meet in real life and test each other – if we're both negative, we can do it.'" ..."
"... As Julian Assange wrote, we will get a privately controlled combination of Google and something like the NSA ..."
"... Zizek divides workers during the crisis into those who encounter the virus and its consequences as part of their daily reality – medical staff, welfare-service people, farmers, the food industry – and those who are secluded in their homes, for whom the epidemic remains in the realm of the Lacanian spectral and omnipresent. ..."
Slavoj Zizek's 'Brutal, Dark' Formula for Saving the World
The pandemic is liable to worsen, ecological disasters loom and technological surveillance will terminate democracy.
Salvation will come only by reorganizing human society. A conversation with the radical – and anxious – philosopher
Slavoj Zizek
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Slavoj Zizek.
This is not an easy time for Slavoj Zizek. Quite the opposite, and he's the first to admit it. Reoccurring panic attacks
incapacitate him for hours at a time and, unlike in the past, the nights have stopped providing him with an easy escape.
His sleep is wracked by nightmares of what the future holds for humanity. There are days when he fantasizes about being
infected by the coronavirus. At least, that way all of the uncertainty would come to an end, or so he imagines. Finally, he
would be able to cope with the virus concretely, instead of continuously being haunted by it, as some sort of a spectral
entity.
... ... ...
At age 71, Zizek is currently closeted in his home in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, with his fourth wife, the Slovene
writer and journalist Jela Krecic, who is three decades younger than him. During the past couple of weeks the epidemic
seems to have faded in his country, with only two or three new cases being reported daily. But Zizek, who spoke to Haaretz
via Skype, is in no hurry to breathe a sigh of relief.
We need to abstract from pro-China propaganda here. The critique of the USA handing of the
epidemic is a better part of the article. It is true, that the US neoliberal elite was more
conserved about the health on military-industrial complex then about the health and well-being of
the American people.
Writes Margaret Kimberley (in "Opposing War Propaganda Against China," Jan. 25, 2020):
"Now whenever we see a reference to China in the corporate media we always see the words
communist party attached. This silly redundancy is war propaganda along with every other
smear and slur. We are told that 1 million Uighurs are imprisoned when there is quite
literally no proof of any such thing. China, the country which first experienced the COVID-19
virus, was the first to vanquish it, and has a low death rate of less than 5,000 people to
prove it. We depend here in America on China to produce masks and other protective equipment
but China is declared the villain. The country that within one month of realizing there was a
new communicable disease gave the world the keys to conquering it.
"Instead the country which fails where China succeeds, in providing for the needs of its
people and their health, is an international pariah, with most of the world barring Americans
from travel and turning us into a giant leper colony. Trump speaks of the "kung flu" and the
"Wuhan virus," but it is China which conquered the disease that has killed 130,000 Americans
and forced a quarantine which has caused economic devastation to millions of people here.
"But Americans get nothing but war propaganda. Trump and Joe Biden outdo one another
bragging about who will be tougher to China. This week we saw the U.S. government violate
international law again and close the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas."
Writes Roxana Baspineiro in "Solidarity vs. Sanctions in Times of a Global Pandemic":
"Chinese and Cuban doctors have been providing support in Iran, Italy, Spain and have
offered their services and expertise to the most vulnerable countries in Latin America,
Africa, and Europe. They have developed medicines and medical treatments such as Interferon
Alpha 2B in Cuba, one of the potential medicines to combat the virus, which reduces the
mortality rate of people affected by COVID19. But above all, they have offered their interest
in distributing them to the peoples of the world without any patent or benefit
whatsoever."
Regardless of whether citizens of the US know about Chinese efforts, people in other nations
have noticed, according to Stansfield Smith, who writes:
"From the responses to the coronavirus pandemic, the world has seen the model of public
health efficiency China presented in controlling the problem at home. It has seen China's
world leadership in offering international aid and care. It has seen the abdication of
leadership by the US and even its obstruction in working to find solutions. Now the US still
cannot control the virus, and remains mired in economic crisis, while China is rebounding. In
sum, the pandemic has made the world look at both China and the US in a new light. And it has
dealt a serious blow to the US rulers' two decade long effort to counter the rise of
China."
... ... ...
The final section of the book, "Escalating anti-China campaign," is a diverse collection of
essays on subjects such as: US accusations of Chinese repression of Uyghurs; NATO exercises
that threatened to exacerbate COVID spread even while China was bringing aid to Europe; COVID
in the US armed forces; US military belligerence toward China; the color revolution in Hong
Kong; Vietnam's response to COVID; and a call from Margaret Flowers and the recently deceased
Kevin Zeese to replace the US pivot to Asia with a "Pivot to Peace."
Ajamu Baraka writes:
"The psychopathology of white supremacy blinds U.S. policy- makers to the political,
economic, and geopolitical reality that the U.S. is in irreversible decline as a global
power. The deep structural contradictions of the U.S. economy and state was exposed by the
weak and confused response to COVID-19 and the inability of the state to provide minimum
protections for its citizens and residents.
"But even in decline, the U.S. has a vast military structure that it can use to threaten
and cause massive death and destruction. This makes the U.S. a threat to the planet and
collective humanity because U.S policy-makers appear to be in the grip of a deathwish in
which they are prepared to destroy the world before voluntarily relinquishing power,
especially to a non-European power like China.
"For example, when Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo declared in public that the United
States and its Western European allies must put China in "its proper place," this represents
a white supremacist mindset that inevitably will lead to monumental errors of judgment."
So COVID-19 is, to put it mildly, a teachable moment. Looking around the world right now, we
can see who is learning and who isn't. As "Capitalism on a Ventilator" vividly illustrates,
China is leading the way, and the United States is slipping into obsolescence. Those who hope
to survive the coming travails can see who to follow and who to avoid.
Kollibri terre Sonnenblume is a writer living on the West Coast of the U.S.A. More of
Kollibri's writing and photos can be found at Macska Moksha Press .
If you still believe that America's Sickcare is "the finest in the world" and is endlessly
sustainable, please study these three charts and extend the trendlines.
I've long been making the distinction between healthcare and sickcare : healthcare is the
service provided by frontline operational caregivers (doctors, nurses, aides, technicians,
etc.) and sickcare is the financialized system of Big Hospital Corporations, Big Insurers, Big
Pharma, etc. and their lobbyists that keep the federal money spigots wide open.
This financialized sickcare system is being consumed by the cancer of greedy profiteering
pursued by self-serving insiders. The delivery of healthcare is secondary to maximizing
revenues and profits by any means available .
To believe such a corrupt system is sustainable is magical thinking at its most
destructive.
Covid-19 is revealing this cancerous underbelly. Knowledge of the inner workings of
corporate administration is not evenly distributed, so every participants' experience of the
systemic dysfunction will vary.
Here is one MD's observations of the system's priorities. Others may have different views
but the maxim follow the money is clearly the correct place to start any inquiry of how
America's financialized sickcare functions in the real world.
From what I'm hearing from the front line, a not insignificant number of admissions are of
folks who would not have been admitted in March when there was fear of both the unknown and
systemic failure and, not coincidently, when COVID diagnoses didn't pay as much.
Today, the admission criteria for COVID is so much more flexible than for standard
diagnoses like CHF, and pays so much better than other diagnoses that our 'healthcare' system
is rapidly becoming a 'COVID care' system.
The surge in hospitalizations and subsequent COVID-identified deaths may be driven, in
part, to health systems adapting to new COVID revenue streams.
This would seemingly be good news, after all if it's the hospital administrator's desire
to fill empty beds that's driving admissions rather than infection rates, then systemic
failure can be averted through moderating those admission rates based on system capacity.
If your hospital fills up, just start sending the marginal cases
home--inpatient/outpatient; the outcome for the patient will be pretty much the same and
you've made as much money as your capacity will allow.
Unfortunately, our healthcare 'system' doesn't work like that.
Health systems are in the business of generating revenue, not value. Recent COVID-related
demand destruction has crushed that revenue so they're hungry for more.
Those in health-system operations and those in leadership live in two different worlds.
Leadership will push COVID admissions far beyond any operational limits in their quest for
short term performance. One cannot overstate their mendacity and drive for lucre.
Hospitals are becoming 'COVID factories' with all other admissions (which pay far less)
relegated to second tier status.
Health systems are evolving into an 'all COVID, all the time' format with the emphasis on
testing and (soon) vaccination, at the expense of all else.
Not a few systems of my acquaintance are laying off outpatient medical staff because their
supporting personnel have quit and are not replaced--those resources are being re-directed to
COVID testing and in preparation for mass vaccination.
For the health system in the business of generating revenue, it's an excellent tactic.
They save themselves significant overhead by not paying the clinicians and they make up the
revenue through high-margin COVID services and government bailout payments.
For patients who actually need healthcare, though, this tactic is deadly.
The perversion is end-stage, the health systems pretend to deliver healthcare and the
government pays them to continue the pretense.
There is no long term thinking here, no empathy for the workforce, no thought to the
mission beyond window-dressing--just a relentless, risk-adverse financialization machine.
Think of COVID as a new widget for which the customer will pay 2.5 times the going price
with no quality control, but only for a limited amount of time. Add in talentless,
rent-seeking leadership and all becomes clear.
Of course the real risk is that maxed out hospitals could find themselves in a situation
where admissions suddenly become driven by demand rather than the business model, with a true
non-linear path to failure laying beyond.
The longer daily national hospital occupancy stays above the approximate pre-COVID
capacity of 100k, the more likely you'll see systemic breakdowns--local at first, then
regional.
You won't see it in the press, the healthcare cartels have a pretty good lock on the local
media. Once news starts getting censored on social media, though, then you know it's
happening.
Hold me to that, And call me out in three months if I'm not right.
If you still believe that America's sickcare is "the finest in the world" and is endlessly
sustainable, please study these three charts and extend the trendlines.
The First World is leaving the "sweet spot" of its capitalist development stage, marked by
a relatively inflated petit-bourgeois middle class, and is reentering a proletarianization
phase. Call it the reproletarianization of the First World.
According to Time : "in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic –
and its cruelly uneven impact – the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.
How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution
of income has cost American workers over the past several decades." Economics as a zero sum
game in other words
By Arthur Allen, editor for California Healthline, joined Kaiser Health News in April
2020 after six years at Politico, where he created, edited and wrote for the first health
IT-focused news team. Previously, he was a freelance writer for publications such as The New
York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, Lingua Franca magazine, The New Republic, Slate
and Salon. Earlier in his career, he worked for The Associated Press for 13 years, including
stints as a correspondent based in El Salvador, Mexico and Germany. He is the author of the
books "V
Kaiser Health News. accine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver" (W.W.
Norton, 2007); "Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato" (Counterpoint Press, 2010) and "The
Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl" (W.W. Norton, 2014). Originally published at Kaiser Health
News
Kaiser Health News .
When he started researching a troublesome childhood infection nearly four decades ago,
virologist Dr. Barney Graham , then at
Vanderbilt University, had no inkling his federally funded work might be key to deliverance
from a global pandemic.
Yet nearly all the vaccines advancing toward possible FDA approval this fall or winter are
based on a design developed by Graham and his colleagues, a concept that emerged from a
scientific quest to understand a disastrous 1966 vaccine trial.
Basic research conducted by Graham and others at the National Institutes of Health, Defense
Department and federally funded academic laboratories has been the essential ingredient in the
rapid development of vaccines in response to COVID-19. The government has poured an additional
$10.5 billion into vaccine companies since the pandemic began to accelerate the delivery of
their products.
The Moderna vaccine, whose remarkable effectiveness in a late-stage trial was announced
Monday morning, emerged directly out of a partnership between Moderna and Graham's NIH
laboratory.
Coronavirus vaccines are likely to be worth billions to the drug industry if they prove safe
and effective. As many as 14 billion vaccines would be required to immunize everyone in the
world against COVID-19. If, as many scientists anticipate, vaccine-produced immunity wanes,
billions more doses could be sold as booster shots in years to come. And the technology and
production laboratories seeded with the help of all this federal largesse could give rise to
other profitable vaccines and drugs.
The vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, which are likely to be the first to win FDA
approval, in particular rely heavily on two fundamental discoveries that emerged from federally
funded research: the viral protein designed by Graham and his colleagues, and the concept of
RNA modification, first developed by Drew Weissman and
Katalin Karikó at the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, Moderna's founders in
2010 named the company after this concept: "Modified" + "RNA" = Moderna, according to
co-founder Robert Langer .
"This is the people's vaccine," said corporate critic Peter Maybarduk, director of Public
Citizen's Access to Medicines program. "Federal scientists helped invent it and taxpayers are
funding its development. It should belong to humanity."
Moderna, through spokesperson Ray Jordan, acknowledged its partnership with NIH throughout
the COVID-19 development process and earlier. Pfizer spokesperson Jerica Pitts noted the
company had not received development and manufacturing support from the U.S. government, unlike
Moderna and other companies.
The idea of creating a vaccine with messenger RNA, or mRNA -- the substance that converts
DNA into proteins -- goes back decades. Early efforts to create mRNA vaccines failed, however,
because the raw RNA was destroyed before it could generate the desired response. Our innate
immune systems evolved to kill RNA strands because that's what many viruses are.
Karikó came up with the idea of modifying the elements of RNA to enable it to slip
past the immune system undetected. The modifications she and Weissman developed allowed RNA to
become a promising delivery system for both vaccines and drugs. To be sure, their work was
enhanced by scientists at Moderna, BioNTech and other laboratories over the past decade.
Another key element in the mRNA vaccine is the lipid nanoparticle -- a tiny, ingeniously
designed bit of fat that encloses the RNA in a sort of invisibility cloak, ferrying it safely
through the blood and into cells and then dissolving, thereby allowing the RNA to do its work
of coding a protein that will serve as the vaccine's main active ingredient. The idea of
enclosing drugs or vaccines in lipid nanoparticles arose first in the 1960s and was developed
by Langer and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and various academic and
industry laboratories.
Karikó began investigating RNA in 1978 in her native Hungary and wrote her first NIH
grant proposal to use mRNA as a therapeutic in 1989. She and Weissman achieved successes
starting in 2004, but the path to recognition was often discouraging.
"I keep writing and doing experiments, things are getting better and better, but I never get
any money for the work," she recalled in an interview. "The critics said it will never be a
drug. When I did these discoveries, my salary was lower than the technicians working next to
me."
Eventually, the University of Pennsylvania sublicensed the patent to Cellscript, a biotech
company in Wisconsin, much to the dismay of Weissman and Karikó, who had started their
own company to try to commercialize the discovery. Moderna and BioNTech later would each pay
$75 million to Cellscript for the RNA modification patent, Karikó said. Though unhappy
with her treatment at Penn, she remained there until 2013 -- partly because her daughter, Susan
Francia, was making a name for herself on the school's rowing team. Francia would go on to win
two Olympic gold medals in the sport. Karikó is now a senior officer at BioNTech.
In addition to RNA modification and the lipid nanoparticle, the third key contribution to
the mRNA vaccines -- as well as those made by Novavax, Sanofi and Johnson & Johnson -- - is
the bioengineered protein
developed by Graham and his collaborators . It has proved in tests so far to elicit an
immune response that could prevent the virus from causing infections and disease.
The protein design was based on the observation that so-called fusion proteins -- the pieces
of the virus that enable it to invade a cell -- are shape-shifters, presenting different
surfaces to the immune system after the virus fuses with and infects cells. Graham and his
colleagues learned that antibodies against the post-fusion protein are far less effective at
stopping an infection.
The discovery arose in part through Graham's studies of a 54-year-old tragedy -- the failed
1966 trial of an NIH vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. In a clinical trial,
not only did that vaccine fail to protect against the common childhood disease, but most of the
21 children who received it were hospitalized
with acute allergic reactions, and two died .
About a decade ago, Graham, now deputy director of NIH's Vaccine Research Center, took a new
stab at the RSV problem with a postdoctoral fellow, Jason McLellan. After isolating and
obtaining three-dimensional models of the RSV's fusion protein, they worked with Chinese
scientists to identify an appropriate neutralizing antibody against it.
"We were sitting in Xiamen, China, when Jason got the first image up on his laptop, and I
was like, oh my God, it's coming together," Graham recalled. The prefusion antibodies they
discovered were 16 times more potent than the post-fusion form contained in the faulty 1960s
vaccine.
Two 2013 papers the team published in Science earned them a runner-up
prize in the prestigious journal's Breakthrough of the Year award. Their papers, which
showed it was possible to plan and create a vaccine at the microscopic structural level, set
the NIH's Vaccine Research Center on a path toward creating a generalizable, rapid way to
design vaccines against emerging pandemic viruses, Graham said.
In 2016, Graham, McLellan and other scientists, including Andrew Ward at the Scripps
Research Institute, advanced their concept further by publishing the prefusion structure
of a coronavirus that causes the common cold and a patent was filed for its design by NIH,
Scripps and Dartmouth -- where McLellan had set up his own lab. NIH and the University of Texas
-- where McLellan now works -- filed an additional patent this year for a
similar design change in the virus that causes COVID-19.
Graham's NIH lab, meanwhile, had started working with Moderna in 2017 to design a rapid
manufacturing system for vaccines. In January, they were preparing a demonstration project, a
clinical trial to test whether Graham's protein design and Moderna's mRNA platform could be
used to create a vaccine against Nipah, a deadly virus spread by bats in Asia.
Their plans changed rapidly when they learned on Jan. 7 that the epidemic of respiratory
disease in China was being caused by a coronavirus.
"We agreed immediately that the demonstration project would focus on this virus" instead of
Nipah, Graham said. Moderna produced a vaccine within six weeks. The first patient was
vaccinated in an NIH-led clinical study on March 16; early results from Moderna's
30,000-volunteer late-stage trial showed it was nearly 95% effective at preventing
COVID-19.
Although other scientists have advanced proposals for what may be even more potent vaccine antigens ,
Graham is confident that carefully designed vaccines using nucleic acids like RNA reflect the
future of new vaccines. Already, two major drug companies are doing advanced clinical trials
for RSV vaccines based on the designs his lab discovered, he said.
In a larger sense, the pandemic could be the event that paves the way for better, perhaps
cheaper and more plentiful vaccines.
"It's a silver lining, but I think we are definitely pushing forward the way everyone is
thinking about vaccines," said Michael Farzan , chair of the department of
immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research's Florida campus. "Certain techniques that have
been waiting in the wings, under development but never achieving the kind of funding they
needed for major tests, will finally get their chance to shine."
Under a 1980
law, the NIH will obtain no money from the coronavirus vaccine patent. How much money will
eventually go to the discoverers or their institutions isn't clear. Any existing licensing
agreements haven't been publicized; patent disputes among some of the companies will likely
last years. HHS' big contracts with the vaccine companies are not transparent, and Freedom of
Information Act requests have been slow-walked and heavily redacted, said Duke University law
professor Arti Rai.
Some basic scientists involved in the enterprise seem to accept the potentially lopsided
financial rewards.
"Having public-private partnerships is how things get done," Graham said. "During this
crisis, everything is focused on how can we do the best we can as fast as we can for the public
health. All this other stuff is going to have to be figured out later."
"It's not a good look to become extremely wealthy off a pandemic," McLellan said, noting the
big stock sales by
some vaccine company executives after they received hundreds of millions of dollars in
government assistance. Still, "the companies should be able to make some money."
For Graham, the lesson of the coronavirus vaccine response is that a few billion dollars a
year spent on additional basic research could prevent a thousand times as much loss in death,
illness and economic destruction.
"Basic research informs what we do, and planning and preparedness can make such a difference
in how we get ahead of these epidemics," he said.
I appreciate the recent re-look at the nexus of public investment funding private profit
in the pharma space. I'm not old enough to recall how things were done prior to the 1980s
with regards to promising academic discoveries getting commercialized in the United States.
There is also a glaring omission here in that there are mechanisms for the Federal Government
to take control of patents and price fix in an emergency, but it's clear that was never going
to happen and was never whispered in the lead up to operation Warp Speed. Pfizer keeps
pointing out they never took government money, which is a set up for them to set the price at
whatever they want while executives line their pockets.
The second point, that is not a focus of the article, is that these technologies are still
completely unproven. I am optimistic about the early results, though would feel better if
they were published in quality journals and not press releases. We simply don't know anything
about long term affects of dosing with this technology. These articles make it sound like
we're out of the woods and these vaccines are here to stay, but what if there are high
percentages of people that get major side effects? We still have no idea.
I was just thinking about that this morning. I thought about the little boy who cried
wolf. If Don had not tarnished his (??where-with-all??) by not leading. He still be the
Prez.
I applaud you for standing with power of your convictions. Not many have the integrity to
do so. This is meant sincerely.
On the other hand I think Larry has a point. Hopefully his and my concerns will prove to
be unfounded. I believe it is too soon to tell. Your question about the quantification of
risk is a fair question and is difficult for the layman judge.
I share the concerns that have been and are voiced here. Still, there is a class aspect to
it all. It seems as if this war is like every other war; the poors are sent in first. There
are many, perhaps the majority of volunteers, that need the couple of hundred bucks the
pharmas are offering the participants. They are the same people that line up to sell their
blood plasma every week. Big business, that. So, I woke up, looked in the mirror, and told
the old man there to "Suck it up, Buttercup."
And Lambert and others are right when they say our leaders should be first in line to roll
up their sleeves. Just don't forget the many that have already done so.
It was a revelation to me that RNA vaccines had been in the works since the 60s. That
makes me a little more in-favor of them. It is still frightening that this vaccine will be
mandated for all medical personnel before the rest of the population. Also interesting that
RNA gets greased up to slip past the enzymes(?) that destroy errant RNA I'm still trying to
think how that might not be such a good thing. But you are right – it looks like it
works. Extremely well in fact. But a timeline to prove it is safe? I'd say one or two
generations. If this mRNA slips past the mechanisms to protect the cell from foreign RNA then
it could hang around long enough to communicate itself back to the genetic DNA – it's
just that they don't quite know how that process works yet. And that's scary as hell.
(Lamarck's Signature). I'd say maybe we should not give this vaccine to anyone under the age
of 35 until we know more about possible negatives involving inheritance. Instead we should
produce good medicines to treat these infections.
Yes, we need volunteers. And they need to be fully informed. I hope you noticed this
remark in yesterday's Water Cooler. Of course, we don't know that the commentor's claimed
bona fides are factual, but if so, his/her take seems appropriate to me.
The publications and a full accounting of side effects are important for a new technology
like this. Traditional vaccinations are in the billions of doses at this point and quite
safe. For this new technology, it's quite hard to say. The publications might bowl me over
and convince me, but press releases do not.
It should be noted that, so far, we have proof of effectiveness in the form of press
releases that are intended to goose stock prices.
Long story, but the neoliberalization of basic biomedical science is complete. This was
foreseeable upon passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. I remember how such science was done
way back then. Scientists did science. Those without the patience and essentially
self-abnegation required for that, went to work at Ciba-Geigy or Burroughs-Welcome or Merck.
The system worked, more or less. At the time I was a very junior lab member, and I told my
labmates that Bayh-Dole meant only that we would pay for most science (at least) twice, the
first time when NIH/NSF/ACS/AHA/March of Dimes funded it and the second time when Big Pharma
"bought" it and charged what a false, not free, market in research and health care would
bear. They just stared at me, with stars in their eyes.
Dolly Parton is a great songwriter and performer but is also a shrewd businesswoman who is
hyper-focused on helping "her people" in the region where she grew up dirt poor. "Coat of
Many Colors" is one of the truly great autobiographical songs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_Many_Colors_(song)
1.So if there were to be no vaccine and the virus had it's way with us, killing 1% of us,
that's what, -- 3 million souls?
2. Alternatively, if there is a vaccine and everyone is vaccinated and that brings an end
to the pandemic, with deaths much curtailed, but 25,000 get Guillian Barre', that's still a
win right?
(Though not if you are one of the 25,000.)
3. Lastly, given their penchant for maximizing clicks and eyeballs,
how do you think the media would handle situations 1 or 2?
Trust in Public Health is easier to knock down than to build back up, especially
vaccines.
As Greg Brown says, "It's a long way up but it's a short way down."
South Dakota will be very informative on this front. It appears to be trying to drag-race
herd immunity through infection before a vaccine shows up. It will probably be the control
group for the statistical study of the relative efficacy on lives saved by a vaccine vs.
letting the disease take its natural course. Beer appears to be the placebo vaccine of choice
in South Dakota.
My reading of this is that even if Pfizer didn't take government money as part of the Warp
Speed initiative, as a mRNA vaccine it still likely builds on the earlier work. I have no
problem with pharma companies making a profit of their later work – they did do the
last critical developments – but nothing for the earlier work isn't right.
We pay for it but they profit from it. Why? Why is there for profit pharma and corporate
medicine to begin with? Why is there competition instead of cooperation in the production of
life saving/extending and other commonly needed goods and services? The provision of
pharmaceuticals and medicine are a free market failure. We are not adequately provided with
what we all must have at prices we all can afford. They've failed not because of the
scientists and medical practitioners who do the real work. They've failed because of the
capitalist parasites that own the corporations that employ the professionals who create the
products and provide the services on the ground.
One thought unsupported by any relevant technical expertise: the delivery mechanism sounds
well suited for bio weaponry given it bypasses your immune reaction to RNA.
The protein design was based on the observation that so-called fusion proteins -- the
pieces of the virus that enable it to invade a cell -- are shape-shifters, presenting
different surfaces to the immune system after the virus fuses with and infects cells. Graham
and his colleagues learned that antibodies against the post-fusion protein are far less
effective at stopping an infection.
Reminds me of this other mysterious shape-shifter: From Wikipedia:
Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal
variants of the same protein. They characterize several fatal and transmissible
neurodegenerative diseases in humans and many other animals. It is not known what causes the
normal protein to misfold, but the abnormal three-dimensional structure is suspected of
conferring infectious properties, collapsing nearby protein molecules into the same shape.
The word prion derives from "proteinaceous infectious particle".
Long-term follow-up of individuals who have received this vaccine versus their placebo
compatriots is essential!
Not likely to be similar. The "shape shifting" of the viral fusion protein means that
different epitopes (i.e., different constellations of 3-D structure that elicit
immune/antibody responses) of the fusion protein, which is embedded in the viral membrane
envelope, are presented pre- and post-fusion. Antibodies against "post-fusion" fusion protein
are unlikely to work because fusion with the host cell is the key phase of infection. But,
and this is a big consideration, rushing into this is foolish, despite the rise in Big Pharma
stock prices.
COVID vaccine revelation sinks like a stone; disappears
In major media, certain stories gain traction. The trumpets keep blaring for a time before
they fade.
Other stories are one-offs. A few of them strike hard. Their implications -- if anyone
stops to think about them -- are powerful. Then nothing.
"Wait, aren't you going to follow up on that? Don't you see what that MEANS?"
Apparently not, because dead silence. "In other news, the governor lost his pet parakeet
for an hour. His chief of staff found it taking a nap in a desk drawer "
One-offs function like teasers. You definitely want to know more, but you never get
more.
Over the years, I've tried to follow up on a few. The reporter or the editor has a set of
standard replies: "We didn't get much feedback." "We covered it." "It's now old news." "There
wasn't anything else to find out."
Oh, but there WAS.
A few weeks ago, I ran a one-off. The analysis and commentary were mine, but the story was
an opinion piece in the New York Times. The Times called it an opinion piece to soften its
blow. I suspected it would disappear, and it did.
Its meaning and implication were too strong. It would be a vast embarrassment for the
White House, the Warp Speed COVID vaccine program, the vaccine manufacturers, the coronavirus
task force, and vaccine researchers.
And embarrassment would be just the beginning of their problem.
So here it is again. The vanished one-off, back in business:
COVID vaccine clinical trials doomed to fail; fatal design flaw; NY Times opinion piece
exposes all three major clinical trials.
Peter Doshi, associate editor of the medical journal BMJ, and Eric Topol, Scripps Research
professor of molecular medicine, have written a devastating NY Times opinion piece about the
ongoing COVID vaccine clinical trials.
They expose the fatal flaw in the large Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Moderna trials.
September 22, the Times: "These Coronavirus Trials Don't Answer the One Question We Need
to Know"
"If you were to approve a coronavirus vaccine, would you approve one that you only knew
protected people only from the most mild form of Covid-19, or one that would prevent its
serious complications?"
"The answer is obvious. You would want to protect against the worst cases."
"But that's not how the companies testing three of the leading coronavirus vaccine
candidates, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, whose U.S. trial is on hold, are approaching the
problem."
"According to the protocols for their studies, which they released late last week, a
vaccine could meet the companies' benchmark for success if it lowered the risk of mild
Covid-19, but was never shown to reduce moderate or severe forms of the disease, or the risk
of hospitalization, admissions to the intensive care unit or death."
"To say a vaccine works should mean that most people no longer run the risk of getting
seriously sick. That's not what these trials will determine."
This means these clinical trials are dead in the water.
The trials are designed to show effectiveness in preventing mild cases of COVID, which
nobody should care about, because mild cases naturally run their course and cause no harm.
THERE IS NO NEED FOR A VACCINE THAT PREVENTS MILD CASES.
There. That's the NY Times one-off. My piece analyzing it went on much longer, but you get
the main thrust:
The leading vaccine clinical trials are useless, irrelevant, misleading, and
deceptive.
But now, it gets much worse. Because Pfizer has just announced their vaccine is almost
ready. CNBC headline, November 9: "Pfizer, BioNTech say Covid vaccine is more than 90%
effective -- 'great day for science and humanity'"
And not a peep about the NY Times one-off. That's gone, as if it never was.
Trump's coronavirus task force knows the truth. Biden's new task force, waiting in the
wings, knows the truth. But they don't care. They're criminals. They'd sell a car with a gas
tank ready to explode to a customer with cash.
But you care, because you can read and think.
You can raise hell.
Now, in case anyone is interested in knowing WHY the major clinical trials of the COVID
vaccine are designed only to prevent mild cases of COVID, I'll explain.
A vaccine maker assumes that, during the course of the clinical trial, a few of the 30,000
volunteers are going to "catch COVID-19."
They assume this because "the virus is everywhere," as far as they're concerned. So it'll
drop down from the clouds and infect a few of the volunteers.
The magic number is 150. When that number of volunteers "catch COVID," everything stops.
The clinical trial stops.
At this point, the vaccine maker hopes that most of the volunteers who "got infected" are
in the placebo group. They didn't receive the real vaccine; they received the saltwater
placebo shot.
Then the vaccine maker can proudly say, "See? The volunteers who caught COVID-19? Most of
them didn't receive the vaccine. They weren't protected. The volunteers who received the real
vaccine didn't catch COVID. The vaccine protected them."
Actually, the number split the vaccine makers are looking for is 50 and 100. If 50 people
in the vaccine group catch COVID, and 100 in the placebo group catch COVID, the vaccine is
said to be 50% effective. And that's all the vaccine maker needs to win FDA approval for the
vaccine.
But wait. Let's look closer at this idea of "catching COVID." What are they really talking
about? How do they define that? Claiming a volunteer in the clinical trial caught COVID adds
up to what?
Does it add up to a minimal definition of COVID-19 -- a cough, or chills and fever? Or
does it mean a serious case -- severe pneumonia?
Now we come to the hidden factor, the secret, the source of the whole con game.
You see, the vaccine maker starts out with 30,000 HEALTHY volunteers. So, if they waited
for 150 of them to come down with severe pneumonia, a serious case of COVID, how long do you
think that would take? Five years? Ten years?
The vaccine maker can't possibly wait that long.
These 150 COVID cases the vaccine maker is looking for would be mild. Just a cough. Or
chills and fever. That scenario would only take a few months to develop. And face it, chills,
cough, and fever aren't unique to COVID. Anyone can come down with those symptoms.
THEREFORE, THE WHOLE CLINICAL TRIAL IS DESIGNED, UP FRONT, TO FIND 150 CASES OF MILD AND
MEANINGLESS AND SELF-CURING "COVID."
About which, no one cares. No one should care.
But, as we see, Pfizer is trumpeting their clinical trial of the vaccine as a landmark in
human history.
And THAT'S the story of the one-off the NY Times didn't think was worth a second
glance.
Because they're so stupid? No. They're not that stupid.
They're criminals.
And the government wants you to take the experimental COVID vaccine, whose "effectiveness"
was designed to prevent nothing worth losing a night's sleep over.
The only worry are the adverse effects of the vaccine, about which I've written
extensively. These effects include, depending on what's in the vial, a permanent alteration
of your genetic makeup, or an auto-immune cascade, in which the body attacks itself.
"... And, objectively, how is the neoliberal model doing? For starters, there is so much money around that doesn't know what to do with itself, that the price of money (interest rates) has never been lower. Ever. Basic supply and demand. ..."
We really need to accept that we may not know what we think we know. For 40 years, we've all
been bleating the mantras of neoliberalism which were promoted as The Natural Order of Things,
but are in fact just a model, one of many.
And, objectively, how is the neoliberal model doing? For starters, there is so much money
around that doesn't know what to do with itself, that the price of money (interest rates) has
never been lower. Ever. Basic supply and demand.
At the same time, neoliberal governments, citing lack of money, have imposed austerity
measures on the working class, cutting services and support to such an extent that serious
social problems have arisen.
The reason the governments are short of cash is because they have continually reduced the
share of GDP that goes into public coffers.
Blind Freddy can see the resultant inequality is a highly undesirable state of affairs,
generating social unrest and unstable markets. Bizarrely, it is also contrary to the most basic
of economic truisms: give poor people money and they spend it right away, generating a ripple
of economic activity that reverberates through the real economy.
But according to neoliberalism, what we have here is perfectly fine because it accords
with the model. And then the High Priests move in and blow smoke over the whole thing with
incantations of why this must be so, again according to the model, which they themselves drew
up to coordinate the way we do things. And of course, they believe their economic theory is the
Natural Order of Things.
The pandemic has blown the lid off a few of those mantras. It'll take fifty years to
decarbonise? We advanced decades in a few weeks. There is no magic money tree? Yes, there is
and you just used it. Giving poor people money undermines the economy? No, it doesn't –
you've just proved it. Government debt is a drain on the economy? Not if it stimulates
activity. Tax is an expense that needs to be curtailed? No, it's an investment in the economy
for everyone.
There are so many things we think we know and many of them are nonsense. We need to take the
opportunity this disruption presents and design a society for humans, not for corporations.
Yeah .and how many of those deaths were from the complete mismanagement of the sick elderly
ie throwing them back into nursing homes. American facilities for many of our poorer, middle
class elderly are disgusting places of squalor and nosocomial infections. How many were among
elderly that were already on death's door step? This scamdemic has destroyed this country. If
there is one demographic in this country that should burning it to the ground it's young, white
20 something conservative males who are seeing their future destroyed before their eyes. Seeing
Americans walking around with what amounts to respiratory diapers on their face is disgusting,
pathetic and embarrassing. The elderly, who for the most part have overall lived the peak
American dream, are living in hysteria and fear. The boomers in America are confirmed now as
some of the most selfish, self absorbed, and enfranchised generations ever. To blame the covid
deaths on Trump is the most stupid and intellectually dishonest argument in this whole election
narrative. Dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery you want to wear a worthless diaper on your
face fine .don't force tyranny on the rest of us!
Although many details about the Great Reset won't be rolled out until the World
Economic Forum meets in Davos in January 2021, the general principles of the plan are clear:
The world needs massive new government programs and far-reaching policies comparable to those
offered by American socialists such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in their Green New Deal plan.
Or, put another way, we need a form of socialism - a word the World Economic Forum has
deliberately avoided using, all while calling for countless socialist and progressive
plans.
"We need to design policies to align with investment in people and the environment,"
said the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, Sharan Burrow.
"But above all, the longer-term perspective is about rebalancing economies."
Escobar reviews the UNGA's
first day that revealed Trump's desperation a few alluded to above. Psychohistorian will
be pleased to read Pepe's channeling his #1 premise:
" As for the 'rules-based international order,' at best it is a euphemism for
privately-controlled financial capitalism on a global scale ." [My Emphasis]
As I wrote yesterday, every national leader I read backed a Multilateral UN and its
Charter while including various degrees of reproach for the illegalities of the Outlaw US
Empire and its vassals, even the
Emir of Qatar :
"The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us that we live on the same planet,
and that multilateral cooperation is the only way to address the challenges of epidemics,
climate and the environment in general, and it's also preferable to remember this when
dealing with the issues of poverty, war and peace, and realizing our common goals for
security and stability....
"And during the unjust and unlawful blockade it is going through it also has securely
established its policy founded on respecting the rules and principles of international law
and the United Nations Charter, especially, the principle of respecting the sovereignty of
states and rejecting intervention in their internal affairs.
"And based on our moral and legal responsibilities towards our peoples, we have affirmed,
and we will continue to reaffirm, that unconditional dialogue based on common interests and
respect for the sovereignty of states is the way to solve this crisis which had started with
an illegal blockade, and whose solution starts with lifting this blockade."
If the Saudi blockade is "unjust and unlawful," then all those imposed by the Outlaw US
Empire are also.
Pepe apparently doesn't agree with Lieven's essay and writes:
"Sinophobia is the perfect tool for shifting blame -- for the abysmal response to
Covid-19, the extinction of small businesses and the looming New Great Depression -- to the
Chinese 'existential threat.'
"The whole process has nothing to do with 'moral defeat' [Lieven] and complaints that 'we
risk losing the competition and endangering the world.'
"The world is not 'endangered' because at least vast swathes of the Global South are fully
aware that the much-ballyhooed 'rules-based international order' is nothing but a quite
appealing euphemism for Pax Americana -- or exceptionalism [Neocolonialism].
"What was designed by Washington for post-World War II, the Cold War and the 'unilateral
moment' does not apply anymore."
As the dirty domestic underwear of the Outlaw US Empire becomes more visible to nations,
they are emboldened to stand up for themselves and join the Strategic Partnership's Eurasian
project.
Israel raises an important question about the role on neoliberal MSM is spreading COVID-19
panic.
Notable quotes:
"... Sinaisky claims that they brought the pandemics upon us because of the high debt problem, or by their inability to continue colonial plunder. Alternatively, a notable commenter to his text suggests that it was done because of overproduction of capital. In other words, the bank-lending rate is so close to zero, or even negative, that the whole machinery of capitalism was deluged in a flood of capital, and needed a major war, or indeed a global pandemic, to use it up. ..."
"... Because of this freak combination of forces, Sweden left its health policy in the hands of local professionals and remained free, while its neighbouring countries transferred the responsibility to globalist politicians and embraced quarantine. ..."
"... Thus the liberal Blairite media (beginning with the NY Times and the Guardian) played a key part in the Corona crisis. They were the piper; but who ordered the piper? ..."
...Do the US plutocrats (that is, the American über-wealthy) control all that? I think
they would be amazed to learn that, especially "for generations", bearing in mind that the US
was not a very significant factor before the WWI. In my view, the rich are not that smart. But
the network exists; I have called its obscure controllers The Masters of Discourse .
Sinaisky claims that they brought the pandemics upon us because of the high debt
problem, or by their inability to continue colonial plunder. Alternatively, a notable commenter
to his text suggests that it was done because of overproduction of capital. In other words, the
bank-lending rate is so close to zero, or even negative, that the whole machinery of capitalism
was deluged in a flood of capital, and needed a major war, or indeed a global pandemic, to use
it up.
Finally, Sinaisky claims that "atomization of society, breaking up community solidarity,
eroding all non-monetary connections between people, destroying family relations and weakening
blood ties, is a long-standing plutocratic project. Now, using this fake pandemic, the
plutocrats have gone even further, now they train us to see each other not as friend, not as
brother, not even as a source of profit, but mainly as a source of mortal infection." I wonder
what makes him think that is an object of plutocratic desire? Certainly rich people want to
make money and have more power, agreed. Is it necessary for them to atomise society? Who will
they and their kids socialize with in such a ruined world?
I am not sure that there is a human agency with such goals. A non-human factor is a much
more suitable culprit. In the old days, such a culprit was called Satan, and there were mighty
organisations aka churches that fought Satan. In a charming movie, Luc Besson's Fifth Element,
'Love' defeats 'the Shadow', the personified evil that was about to obliterate Earth. Call it
Satan, call it Shadow, the thing surely has human collaborationists in the mainstream media. I
wrote about it in a piece called The Shadow of Zog . Indeed media
should be sorted out in order to deal with it.
Sweden, this lucky country that avoided lockdown and its consequences, was saved by a rare
media misstep. (This story has never been published though it is known to many Swedes.) Corona
propaganda was carried out by the same liberal Bonnier-owned newspaper, DN (Dagens Nyheter),
that played up Greta Thunberg. (Sinaisky's senses served him right: indeed Covid is a new Greta
multiplied by a factor of 50). The Greta campaign had as its favourite high horse
flygskam , or flight-shaming. Stop taking flights to lower carbon emissions ,
was the idea. Now we have no flights at all, so this movement disappeared after achieving its
goals.
In February 2020, the DN organised a week-long sleeper train culture trip to North Italy for
the Greta-following liberal elite. A berth on this train was priced starting at ten thousand
Euros. The group went up to the Italian Alps and down to the Carnival in Venice and finally
returned home, full to the brim with interesting experiences and coronavirus infections. A few
days after the train returned to Stockholm, the disease broke out at large. Many of the liberal
journalists that travelled on the Corona Express (as the train became known) fell sick, and
their close relatives suffered, too. This incident caused the death of many elderly Jews,
parents or uncles of those liberal journalists. It was a media phenomenon, and the
Jewish media reported that the death rate among Swedish Jews was 14 times higher than
their share of the population (well, it is not as bad as it sounds; only nine very old Jews
died, all over 80).
As the people in authority knew all about the Corona Express, the liberal lobby was too
ashamed to call for quarantine against the disease they has carried to Sweden. (Or they did
call, but in sotto voce.) Furthermore, the DN was their only significant liberal media outlet,
as Bonnier had sold his TV channel to a state-owned company in December 2019, making heaps of
money but losing his ability to influence people.
Because of this freak combination of forces, Sweden left its health policy in the hands
of local professionals and remained free, while its neighbouring countries transferred the
responsibility to globalist politicians and embraced quarantine.
Thus the liberal Blairite media (beginning with the NY Times and the Guardian) played a
key part in the Corona crisis. They were the piper; but who ordered the piper?
Funny how "new normals" are rushing at us .9-11 was the new normal only 19 years ago, and
19 years later going on 20, a new "new normal" is upon us. The next "new normal" will only be
a few years away, 9 at the most Agenda 2030 and all that. By then, AI-enhanced RNA/DNA
altered "new humanity" will be upon us, and anyone not in this new "new normal" will be
outcast, shunned, shamed, and unemployed and if retired will not be able to get their SS and
MC.
"As it stands, there's only one thing we do know: the establishment at the core of the
Hegemon and the drooling orcs of Empire will only adopt a Great Reset if that helps to
postpone a decline accelerated on a fateful morning 19 years ago."
What?
I thought Covid 19 was a tool that the establishment is using to spark a Reset. And that
Agenda 21 is part of a Reset.
So why would the establishment object to a "decline"?
9/11 was just the first operation of the 21st century designed to accelerate the
disintegration of society and economy to achieve Agenda 21 . It was actually a continuation
of the 1975 TLC Project Democracy (sardonically named) that was kicked off by the Carter
administration in 1977 and went into warp speed under Reagan/Bush. Its continued ever since
but is picking up speed with the agreement of Agenda 21 in the 90's and its update Agenda
2030 in 2015. 2020 is the start of the final phase which will accomplish all of the
Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030, which is basically means total control over
every individual and all resources.
Its pretty much been an Open Conspiracy. Those who refused to question 9/11 will double up
on their blue pills to deny the Plandemic and expect a return to normal, dooming their
descendants to a life of serfdom should they be lucky enough to avoid the culling.
The new Normal will make some dystopian films seem like utopia. Watch some old movies and
TV series to remind you of old normal. They wont be available much longer unless you have the
DVD or VHS and a machines to play it. The tapes and discs age so don't last forever. Books
will last longer but those with digital collections will one day fund them disappeared
The beating heart of this matrix is – what else – the Strategic Intelligence
Platform, encompassing, literally, everything: "sustainable development", "global
governance", capital markets, climate change, biodiversity, human rights, gender parity,
LGBTI, systemic racism, international trade and investment, the – wobbly –
future of the travel and tourism industries, food, air pollution, digital identity,
blockchain, 5G, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI).
Since the US is a global has-been with most of its industry gone and living on debt
– it's probably useful for it to claim leadership of a "Strategic Intelligence
Platform". It can bury US problems internationally (same as it did with the dollar reserve)
but in a more comprehensive way than simple Globalization (only economic). If the USA NWO
claims international leadership of everything on all fronts, then they become the arbiters
(in their opinion) of everything everywhere on the grounds of a higher morality.
It actually looks more like the folie de grandeur of a old alcoholic than the
foundation of a new religion – and not something to pay attention to – apart from
the fact that he tends to get violent with anyone who disagrees.
Regarding your 50 questions, the fact that German and Russian intelligent warned the FBI
about an imminent Muslim terrorist attack is not compatible with the idea that there was a
controlled demolition.
Ah yes, the Beast reveals itself as a sensurround global hamster cage with a plethora of
control mechanisms hardwired through emergent software memes in celebration of the planned
future of total abstraction. Abstract reality. The hubris of the plutocratic, oligarchic and
technocratic elites is of a Promethean orgasm of trans humanistic values systematically
gorging itself on their perceived future of an enserfed humanity comprised of those who will
compromise truth, honor, justice, beauty and love–all in the service of mammon.
Not only is human nature to be subsumed to a mechanistic mindset gone ballistic in the
visions of absolute domination, but the ongoing assault on the natural world will be a
by-product of this Re-set. Stated simply, these schemers are playing God and have assembled
the tool-kit, which in their minds, will allow for no compromise, no mistakes. These people
are either spiritually vacuous or are imbued with an evil that totally negates a natural
order which is cosmic and universal in scope. Ultimately their dreams and schemes will
implode like the legendary Tower of Babel. Creation is not about to be undone by those who
have convinced themselves that they can control everything.
Mother Nature is not a mere lump of matter. She is a sentient being who is cosmically
connected and connective. Consider the storms, the blizzards, the fires and the systematic
destruction of our very atmospheres, to say nothing of oceanic life in all its magnificent
manifestations. Mama is not in a good mood and when she has had all she can take ..
" the fact that German and Russian intelligent (sic) warned the FBI about an imminent
Muslim terrorist attack is not compatible with the idea that there was a controlled
demolition."
How so? The US architects of a controlled demolition could have quite easily created fake
"chatter" and fake "intelligence" about an imminent Muslim terrorist attack.
@Intelligent
Dasein be found on Youtube titled "Former NIST Employee Speaks Out On World Trade Centre
Towers Collapse Investigation". It's 31 minutes long, but he says the following at
approximately 18 minutes in:
"Look at the symmetry. These buildings come straight down, or almost straight down.
Asymmetric damage does not lead to symmetric collapse. It's very difficult to get
something to collapse symmetrically because it is the Law of Physics that things tend towards
chaos. Collapsing symmetrically represents order, very strict order.
It is not the nature of physics to gravitate towards order for no reason. It will
gravitate towards chaos. It is very difficult to get a building to collapse
symmetrically."
@PetrOldSack
actor/author, how could he be, our cherished "thinkers" are as few and making up as they go,
seconded by the crude second tier public domain politicians, the corporate mongers, them
being even less prone to visionary skill. This "thing" can go wrong in all kinds of ways, but
real it is, and some derivative globally altered reality is there to stay. Brusquely,
genuinely."
The Atlantic tells us that "Overall, bots are responsible for 52 percent of web traffic"
and I think we're looking at Exhibit A.
an imminent Muslim terrorist attack is not compatible with the idea that there was a
controlled demolition
Q: Why not? In fact, just as the 3 WTC towers were pre-loaded with explosives, so the
alleged hijacker-piloted a/cs and resulting photogenic explosions were pre-planned 'Hollywood
special effects' as critical components. How else to convince the insouciant punters, except
with a well-scripted and executed 'whiz-bang?' Then, see the reports of putative Muslim
hijackers doing dope and/or booze with lap-dancing bar-girls beforehand. You do yourself a
disservice by denying *humongously obvious* controlled demolition. Tip: Try not to be
silly.
To unravel the enigma i wonder if one does not need to go completely eurocentric.
1848 unraveling the empires or at last a planting of the seeds.
1948 the new_world order is established. With its counterpart in the east. Essentially a
ynraveling of 1848 which was a crystallisation of the 30 year was and the peace of westphalia.
Neither established empire being a nation while a very different nationbuiling started in
europe compared to the pre-great war.
2048, no doubt some kind of replacing the new_world order with a new world_order.
One way or anothr to serve europes plutocrats. And with an eye on unraveling the previous 1948
situation. Soviets are gone, so now the disunited states of america has to go and be reduced to
a new balkans.
Perhaps sweeping away europe too this time. Arabobantustan unable to sustain a developed
economy certainly is on the timeline for europe.
Now. Regardless of whether the ghost of Herr Weishaupt is hanging around, the timeline is
awfully useful for anyone like the anglozionist cabal of assorted late 1800s multimillionaires
and their respective business empires cross inheritances into socalled NGOs. The names being
quite well known like rockefeller, carnegie, rhodes etc.
Then again maybe no one really knows what they are doing anymore and there is no plan at
all, just many very confused very badly planned plans. And all that will ensue is chaos and
destruction and no order afterwards worthy of the name. 150 years of pisspoor mismanagement
tends to have such consequences.
@Robert White
billion from its Term Securities Lending Facility. It wasn't until May 31, 2008, when JPMorgan
Chase closed its deal with Bear Stearns. However, the GAO reported that Bear Stearns "was
consistently the largest PDCF borrower until June 2008." The Fed shows that Bear Stearns
continued to receive funds until June 23, 2008.
This article pretty much sums it up as best as I can understand. I had often stated to
people of similar mind to watch for the next major 'move' after 9/11, it will be a dandy
because with possibly a few white knuckle moments, the Masters will have concluded that they
can get away with ANYTHING, internet or no. Truth simply fails to get traction in the minds of
the majority of 'screen zombies' and the majority is all they ever needed.
Now where things might get really scary is if/when they decide to implement the great cull.
From a dispassionate perspective, it is something they simply have to do. In 1950 the world
population was about 2 billion. Now it is about 8 billion. If a population graph was drawn from
say, 50,000 years ago it would be long and flat and then it would shoot up near vertically at
the end.
The problem now of course is that with technology and agricultural machinery of all sorts
the system doesn't even require the population of 1950. I recall one Master being on record as
mentioning 500 million as being ideal. That is somewhat more than a cull.
Some fools say that a war is imminent for that express purpose. Sorry wars (even nuclear,
which would affect the Masters too), won't result in the butcher's bill required. Only a global
pandemic could conceivably attain the goal and like a neutron bomb, leave the infrastructure
intact.
But this Covid is a hoax you say. Probably so, but what about this proverbial 'second wave'
that is repeated like a Hare Krishna mantra everywhere. What if they released a REAL nasty
virus (which we know they have somewhere) that has a proven vaccine for the 1% and then let the
fun begin knowing full well that they would not be fingered for it because a pandemic is
already on the move?
If it doesn't happen this fall then I may be wrong in my speculation. I always hope to be
wrong when dealing with topics of unfathomable evil.
Mama is not in a good mood and when she has had all she can take ..
Or, as some folks like to say, "God is mad". But it's all the same thing. Maybe the schemers
should be forced to read The Fisherman's Wife. However, they probably won't have any little
hovel to go back to.
@skrik neither
eyewitness testimony nor a visual documentation of the boarding process.
19 hijackers myth taken as " fact" by the 9/11 Commission. Any contradictions of this myth
were ignored by this Commission.
•By ignoring the numerous and glaring contradictions regarding the identities of the
alleged hijackers, the 9/11 Commission manifested its intent to maintain the official myth of
19 Muslim terrorists.
•By refusing to allow interviews with personnel who were responsible for passengers
boarding the four aircraft of 9/11, the airlines manifested their intent to conceal evidence
about the circumstances of the aircraft boarding.
When 9/11 occurred my immediate thoughts went back to an January 2001 when Lyndon LaRouche
warned that if John Ashcroft were to become Attorney General that then one could look forward
to a new Reichstag fire type situation occurring within the context of the fact that the world
financial system was finished and that the financial oligarchy was prepared to throw over the
chess board so to speak.
LaRouche was right and because his understanding of history was correct as it is based upon
a method of hypothesis that had already demonstrated the trajectories of economic collapse and
attendant political operations long before, with an understanding of how to get out of the mess
as demonstrated in history, particularly the Renaissance.
Of note here is a recent article of interest, which helps tell why LaRouche is hated!
This is a very interesting, all encompassing article, well done indeed. For a simpler and
perhaps more digestible and more narrowly focused look at the SARS-Cov2 issue specifically,
this is a worthwhile video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQE7S6c-SCk&t=50s
@PetrOldSack
ght in wars or participated in other combat operations in at least 24 countries. The
destruction inflicted by warfare in these countries has been incalculable for civilians and
combatants Between 2010 and 2019, the total number of refugees and IDPs globally has nearly
doubled from 41 million to 79.5 million .
These babies-loving American X-tians and other Samantha Powers and Obamas, have arranged quite
a spectacular mass slaughter of children of all ages to please the "deciders" (Masters of the
Universe).
None of the murderous idiots has been punished, yet Assange the truthteller is in a high-security
prison Belmarsh, handled by the same murderous scum. Kali , says: Next New
Comment September 11, 2020
at 12:24 pm GMT
@Majority of
One eation is not about to be undone by those who have convinced themselves that they can
control everything.
I couldn't agree more with this.
The intelligence of Existance Itself, the very Nature of Being is anathema to to those specs
of dirt who would attempt to determine the will of God.
The same sentience which is manifest in Man is repeated and applified throughout all of
existance. How could it be any other way when everything we experience is fractal? Just as God
may be experience at the centre of our very Being, so the same God is observed within the All of
Everything.
A great look into what is going on, and what is still to come. Yet the sleeping, brain dead,
face diapered, mind controlled masses of the global corporation formerly known as he United
States spend every waking hour saying "hooray for our guy". Never once does it occur to the
sheeple both are puppets, controlled by the international banksters and their minions.
One of these morons has undeniable ties to the Russian mob, while the other has deep ties to
the Chinese Communist Party. If that weren't bad enough, they both swear undying loyalty to
that little shit stain in the Middle East which seems to project more influence on world
politics than the two formerly mentioned giants.
I know it is no accident the printing of this article occurred on the anniversary date of
the last, greatest mind fuck to hit America since Dec. 7th, 1941. I guess the infidels have
been shown a lesson and the world is now safe for a one world government technocratic
Corporatocracy.
So here's to 3/11/2020(my official date for the roll out of the CV hoax), the ushering in of
a new slave system, and the idiocy and gullibility of the global citizenry.
So enjoy your new bosses, as they are going to be far more tyrannical than your old.
@Robjil
ry:'
[I see that the 1st image is not visible, kindly try this link: alleged 'recovered' flight
recorder ]
Q: How soft was that ground, anyway? Does anyone 'believe' that part of the official 9/11
narrative? Haw. Only the 'insouciant punters' were ever hoodwinked by such offensive, lying
rubbish, all faithfully echoed by the 'lame-stream media.' rgds
Condoleeza Rice resisting at Congressional enquiry "N-o-o-o" and then admitting in a faint
there was an "intelligence report" that said said "Ben Laden planning to use airplanes in
terrorist attack" was play acting to confirm what they wanted people to believe. You will
remember that you were taught to prepare in advance "red herrings" and leave deliberate
confusions behind you to cover your trail.
@Robert White
traitors and infiltrated enemies not by any brilliance of the vicious Chinese Communist mass
murderers -- if you like the idea of taking a van ride for expressing your anti-Government
thoughts you'll love the ChiCom "Model" being installed here now on all of us -- Ron Unz would
be one of the first for the van ride if he tried to run a site like this in China by the way --
there is zero disputing this fact. David Rockefeller gave us the CFR, Trilateral Commission
etc. and of course the WHO and:
https://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/the-true-agenda-of-the-who-a-new-world-order-modeled-after-china/
@Alfred Haw.
Or was that suppressed as well, along with the bulk-wreckage [=crime-scene evidence] which was
destroyed by being exported as scrap? Haw again.
Nitty-gritty: There is no need to posit any 'exotics,' from nukes to DEW; standard
explosives [both with OR without thermite/mate; only the 'best' tools = most suitable would
have been deployed]; standard explosives could quite easily do the job, for example det-cord
threaded into the floor-slab conduits can fully explain both the absence of floor in the rubble
plus the billowing pyroclastic white dust-clouds [incidentally, explaining scorched vehicles].
And so it goes. A term for such reasoning = Occam's razor.
To be clear; none more deserving of dignity than the working people of America; they keep the nation running; they are America's
better angels; and, they deserve to be better paid.
Those are lofty words. But what to do when there is not enough cookies for everybody. That's when economic ruptures occur (with
one form being Minsky moments)
In a sense, going back to Joan Robinson, the idea of rupture within the notion of historical time can also be found in Keynes,
although with an important difference. Here the emphasis put on irreversibility implies of course qualitative change, and indeed
the emphasis is put on the changing conditions underlying economic phenomena. Thus, for example, Joan Robinson discusses the notion
of scarcity in relation to historical time:
The question of scarce means with alternative uses becomes self‐ contradictory when it is set in historical time, where
today is an ever-moving break between the irrevocable past and the unknown future. At any moment, certainly, resources are
scarce, but they have hardly any range of alternative uses.
The workers available to be employed are not a supply of "labor", but a number of carpenters or coal miners. The uses of
land depend largely on transport; industrial equipment was created to assist the output of particular products.
To change the use of resources requires investment and training, which alters the resources themselves. As for choice among
investment projects, this involves the whole analysis of the nature of capitalism and of its evolution through time. (Robinson
1977: 8)
Although the emphasis on rupture is introduced, in this historical time, "where today is an ever moving break between the irrevocable
past and the unknown future," the sense of the "break," of rupture, is confined within the problems of capitalist accumulation,
of the problems posed by the right proportions of, following Robinson's example, carpenters and coal miners.
History here does not present alternatives and defines itself clearly and simply as "historical objectivism" in the continuum
of the capitalist relation, as contemplation of "what really was," that is, the "irrevocable [capitalist] past," and speculations
about an "unknown [capitalist] future."
In Keynes, the unknown character of this future is translated in the status of the long run expectations of the investors which,
to emphasize the difficulty of their modeling, in turn depends on their "animal spirits."
In Keynes, rupture as revolutionary, transcendental, rupture exists only in the form of a threat, implicit in the theoretical
apparatus, in the difficulty to endogenize variables, in the reliance on "psychological factors," on investors' animal spirits
which mysteriously respond to hints of this historical rupture, in the recognition of the difficulty to model behavioral functions,
etc.
This threat is recognized through the status of long run expectations of the investors.
In the case of the liquidity trap, in which the infinitely elastic demand for money curve is used to portray a situation of
hoarding that is, of capital's refusal to put people to work the threat is hanging over investors who perceive a gloomy future
without hope for their profit.
The truly unknown future from the capitalists' perspective, the true moment of rupture in their temporal dimension, is recognized
in order to be avoided, to organize the rescue of the capitalist relation of work. For this reason Keynes is not talking about
given functional relations, and is presupposing a moving marginal efficiency of capital schedule (Minsky 1975.
The future is there to puzzle the investors in the present. The aim of economic theory is to inform economic policy to limit
the puzzle within the borders of the capitalist relation of work. Although Keynes' theoretical apparatus is presupposing uncertainty
for the future, this uncertainty is seen with the sense of urgency typical of a world in transition. In the discussion of the
postwar Keynesian orthodoxy, it will be seen how this sense of urgency was lost, and the concept of time in economic theory changed,
although it was far from returning to the "timeless models" of the classical period.
@ 95 another rolling stone that illuminates the US necrotic process...unregulated dumping
of radwaste
tinyurl[dot]com/v3pva55
Evidently they actually spray the stuff on roads and, well, it's puckininsane stupid.
"..thing in this stuff and ingesting it are the worst types of exposure," Stolz continues.
"You are irradiating your tissues from the inside out." The radioactive particles fired off
by radium can be blocked by the skin, but radium readily attaches to dust,..."
(Honestly, I know it's hard to believe, but several immediate neighbors, possibly 1/3 of
the town, actually expect to be levitated to heaven in "rapture". Thus, according to their a
priori assumption, the poisoning is perfectly ok."
Anyway, both the bizarre beliefs and the idiotic actions (including with radwaste) are,
like Trump, a product, a manifestation. We agree.
About Rockefeller - Corbett Report has a very deep examination of that family and their
less well-known policy set.
"... Some of the neoliberal countries may be at the stage of the collusion; some of them may find themselves at the stage of oligarchy; some of them may be at the stage of corruption culture. ..."
"... In Japan, since 1957, there were twenty-one prime ministers of whom 75% were one-year or two-year prime ministers despite the four-year term of prime ministers. The short life span of Japanese prime ministers is essentially due to the short term interest pursued by the corrupted golden triangle composed of big business, bureaucrats and politicians. Unless, Japan uproots the corruption culture, it will be difficult to save the Japanese economy from perpetual stagnation. ..."
"... In the U.S. the big companies are spending a year no less than $2.6 billion lobbying money for the promotion of their interests, while the Congress spends $ 2.9 billion and the Senate, $860 million for their respective annual operation. Some of the big companies deploy as many as 100 lobbyists. ..."
"... It is unbelievable that the amount of lobbying is as much as 70% of the annual budget of the whole legislative of the U.S. ..."
"... Under such lobbying system, each group should deploy lobbyists to promote their interests. The immigrants, the native Indians, the Afro Americans, the alienated white people and other marginal groups cannot afford lobbyists and they are often excluded from fair treatment in the process of making laws and policies ..."
"... In the case of the U.S. its rank increased from 18 in 2016 to 22 in 2019. Thus in three years, the degree of corruption increase by 22.2% ..."
"... The U.S. is the richest country in the world, but it is also a country where income inequality is the most pronounced. I will come back to this issue in the next section. In relation to the corona virus crisis, income inequality means an army of those who are most likely to be infected and who are unable to follow CDC guidelines of testing, self quarantine and social distancing. Finally, the privatization of public health services has made the whole country unprepared for the onslaught of the virus. ..."
"... The experience of Japan shows how this can happen. The economic depression after the bubble burst of 1989, Japan had to endure 30-year deflation. The government of Japan has flooded the country with money to restore the economy, but the money was used for the bail-out of big corporations neglecting the healthy development of the SMEs and impoverishing the ordinary Japanese people. South Korea could have experienced the Japanese-type economic stagnation, if the conservative government ruled the country ten more years. ..."
"... The neoliberal pro-big company policy of Washington has greatly depleted consumer demand and SMEs even before the onslaught of the coronavirus. ..."
"... Fourth, the U.S. economy is shaken up so much that the neoliberal regime will not able to recover the economy. Thus, the survival of neo-liberalism looks uncertain. But, if the coronavirus crisis continues and destroys SMEs and if only the big corporations survive owing to bailout money, neo-liberalism may survive and we may end up with authoritarian governance ruled by the business-politics oligarchy. ..."
For the last forty years, neo-liberalism has dominated economic thinking and the formulation of economic policies Worldwide.
But the corona virus crisis has exposed, in a dramatic way, its internal contradictions, its incapacity to deal with the corona
crisis and its incompetence to restore the real economy ruined by the crisis.
In this article, we will focus on the relationship between Neoliberalism and the Corona Crisis:
Neoliberalism has prevented the governments from controlling effectively the initial outbreak of the corona virus.
Neoliberalism has made the wave of virus propagation higher and wider, especially in the U.S.
Neoliberalism can shake the foundations of the U.S. economy.
Neoliberalism may not survive the corona virus crisis in the U.S.
To save democracy and the global economy, We need a new economic model which supports the future of humanity, which sustains human
livelihood Worldwide.
1. Neoliberalism and the initial Outbreak of the Corona Virus
The most important part of neoliberalism is the relation -often of a corrupt nature- between the government and large corporations.
By corruption, we mean illegal or immoral human activities designed to maximize profit at the expense of people's welfare. In this
relation, the government may not be able to control and govern the large corporations. In fact, in the present context, the corporations
govern and oversee national governments.
Hence, when the corona virus broke out, it was difficult for the government to take immediate actions to control the virus break-out
to save human lives; It was quite possible that the price of stocks and large corporations' profit had the priority.
The theory known as neoliberalism distinguishes itself from the old liberalism prevailing before the Great Depression.
It became widely accepted mainly because of its adoption, in the 1970s and 1980s, by Ronald Reagan , president of the U.S. and
Margaret Thatcher , prime minister of Great Britain as an economic policy agenda applied nationally and internationally.
The justification of neoliberalism is the belief that the best way to ensure economic growth is to encourage "supply activities"
of private sector enterprises.
Now, the proponents of neoliberalism argue that public goods (including health and education) can be produced with greater efficiency
by private companies than by the State. Therefore, "it is better" to let the private enterprises produce public goods.
In other words, the production of public goods should be "privatized". Neoliberals put profit as the best measure of efficiency
and success. And profit can be sustained with government support. In turn, the private companies' policy is that of reducing the
labour costs of production.
Government assistance includes reduction of corporate taxes, subsidies and anti-labour policies such as the prohibition of labour
unionization and the abolition of the minimum wage.
Reduction of labour cost can be obtained by the automation of the production of goods
Under such circumstances, close cooperation between the government and the private corporations is inevitable; even it may be
necessary.
But, such cooperation is bound to lead to government-business collusion in which the business receives legal and illegal government
support in exchange of illicit money such as kick-backs and bribes given to influential politicians and the people close to the power.
As the collusion becomes wider and deeper, an oligarchy is formed; it is composed of corporations, politicians and civil servants.
This oligarchy's raison d'être is to make money even at the expense of the interests of the people.
Now, in order to protect its vested interests, the oligarchy expands its network and creates tight-knit political community which
shares the wealth and privileges obtained.
In this way, the government-business cooperation can be evolved by stage to give birth to the corruption culture.
Some of the neoliberal countries may be at the stage of the collusion; some of them may find themselves at the stage of oligarchy;
some of them may be at the stage of corruption culture.
South Korea
When the progressive government of Moon Jae-in took over power in 2017, South Korea under the 60-year neo-liberal rule by the
conservatives was at the stage of corruption culture.
The progressive government of Moon Jae-in has declared a total war against the corruption culture, but it is a very long way to
go before eliminating corruption.
In South Korea, of six presidents of the conservative government, four presidents were or are in prison for corruption and abuse
of power. This shows how deeply the corruption has penetrated into the fabrics of the Korea society
In Japan, since 1957, there were twenty-one prime ministers of whom 75% were one-year or two-year prime ministers despite the
four-year term of prime ministers. The short life span of Japanese prime ministers is essentially due to the short term interest
pursued by the corrupted golden triangle composed of big business, bureaucrats and politicians. Unless, Japan uproots the corruption
culture, it will be difficult to save the Japanese economy from perpetual stagnation.
Lobbying and "Corruption Culture"
Many of the developed countries in the West are also the victims of corruption culture. In the U.K. the City (London's Wall Street)
is the global center of money laundry.
In the U.S. the big companies are spending a year no less than $2.6 billion lobbying money for the promotion of their interests,
while the Congress spends $ 2.9 billion and the Senate, $860 million for their respective annual operation. Some of the big companies
deploy as many as 100 lobbyists.
It is unbelievable that the amount of lobbying is as much as 70% of the annual budget of the whole legislative of the U.S.
True, in the U.S., lobbying is not illegal, but it may not be morally justified. It is a system where the law makers give privileges
to those who spend more money, which can be considered as bribes
Under such lobbying system, each group should deploy lobbyists to promote their interests. The immigrants, the native Indians,
the Afro Americans, the alienated white people and other marginal groups cannot afford lobbyists and they are often excluded from
fair treatment in the process of making laws and policies
Some of the developed European countries are also very corrupted. The international Transparency Index rank, in 2019, was 23 for
France, 30 for Spain and 51 for Italy.
In the case of the U.S. its rank increased from 18 in 2016 to 22 in 2019. Thus in three years, the degree of corruption increase
by 22.2%
What is alarming is that, in the corruption culture, national policies are liable to be dictated by big businesses.
In South Korea, under the conservative government, it was suspected that the national policies were determined by the Chaebols
(large industrial conglomerates), not by the government.
As matter of fact, during the MERS crisis in 2015, the anti-virus policy was dictated by the Samsung Group. In order to save its
profit, Samsung Hospital in Seoul hid the infected so that the number of non-MERS patients would not decrease.
In Japan, the Abe government made the declaration of public health emergency as late as April 6, 2020 despite the fact that the
infections were detected as early as January, 2020.
This decision was, most likely, dictated by Keiretsu members (grouping of large enterprises) in order to save investments in the
July Olympics. Nobody knows how many Japanese had been infected for more than three months.
Similarly, Trump was well aware of the sure propagation of the virus right form January, but he waited until March 13, 2020 before
he declared the state of effective public health emergency. The obvious reason was the possible fear of free fall of stock price
and the possible loss of big companies' profits.
The interesting question is: "The delayed declaration of public health emergency, was it Trump's decision or that of his corporate
friends?" It doesn't matter whose decision it was, because the government under neoliberal system is controlled the big businesses.
So, as in Japan, Italy, Spain, France and especially, the U.K, Trump lost the golden time to save human lives to keep profit of
enterprises.
God knows how many American lives were sacrificed to save stock price and company profit!
Thus, the neoliberal governments have lost the golden chance to prevent the initial outbreak of the dreadful virus.
2. Neo-liberalism and the Propagation of Corona-Virus
We saw that the initial outbreak of the virus was not properly controlled leading to the loss to golden time of saving human lives,
most likely because of the priority given to business and political interests.
The initial outbreak of the virus was transformed into never-ending propagation and, even now, in many states in the U.S. the
wave of the virus is getting higher and wider.
This tragic reality can be explained by four factors:
people's mistrust in the government,
unbounded competition,
inequitable income distribution,
the absence of public health system.
These four factors (above) are all the legacies of neoliberalism.
The people know well that the corrupted neoliberal government's concern is not the welfare of the people but the interest of a
few powerful and the rich. The inevitable outcome is the loss of people's trust in the unreliable government.
This is demonstrated by Trump's indecision, his efforts of ignoring the warning of the professionals, his fabricates stories and
above all, his perception of who should be given the right to receive life-saving medical care at the hospital.
Under such circumstances, Americans do not trust the government directives and guidelines, allegedly implemented to protect people
from the virus.
The guideline of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) for self quarantine, social distancing and wearing face masks has little
effect. There is another product of neoliberalism which is troublesome. I mean its credo of unbounded competition.
It is true that competition promotes efficiency and better quality of products. However, as competition continues, the number
of winners decreases, while that of losers rises. The economy ends up being ruled by a handful of powerful winners. This leads to
the segregation of losers and leads to the discrimination of people by income level, religion, race and colour of skin.
In the present context, largely as a result of government policy, there is little to no social solidarity; each individual has
to solve his or her own problems. I was sad when I saw on TV a young lady in California saying:
"To be killed by the COVID-19 or starve to death is the same to me. I open my shop to eat!"
This shows how American citizens are left alone to fight the coronavirus. Furthermore, neoliberalism has another unhappy legacy;
it is the widening and deepening income inequality.
The U.S. is the richest country in the world, but it is also a country where income inequality is the most pronounced. I will
come back to this issue in the next section. In relation to the corona virus crisis, income inequality means an army of those who
are most likely to be infected and who are unable to follow CDC guidelines of testing, self quarantine and social distancing. Finally,
the privatization of public health services has made the whole country unprepared for the onslaught of the virus.
In fact, in the U.S. there is no public health system. For three months after the first breakout of the virus, the country lacked
everything needed to fight the virus.
There was shortage of testing kits and PPE (personal protective equipment);
there were not enough rooms to accommodate the infected;
there was shortage of qualified medical staff;
there was lack of face masks.
Thus, neoliberalism has made the U.S not only to lose the golden time to prevent the initial breakout but also it has let the
wave of virus to continue. Nobody knows when it will calm down. As a matter of fact, on July 4, there were 2.9 million infected and
132,000 deaths; this gives a death rate of 4.6%. Given U.S. population of 328 million, we have 402.44 deaths per million inhabitants
which is one of highest among the developed countries. The trouble is that the wave of virus is still going higher and wider. On
July 4, the confirmed cases increased by 50% in two weeks in 12 states and increased 10% to 50% in 22 states.
3. Neo-liberalism and the very Foundation of the U.S. Economy
The message of this section is this. The foundation of the American economy is the purchasing power of the consumers and the job
creation by small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The consumer demand is 70% of the GDP, the SMEs create 66% of jobs. Unfortunately,
because of neoliberalism, the consumers have become very poorer and the SMEs have been neglected in the pro-big-company government
policies. The COVID-19 has destroyed the SMEs and impoverished the consumers. Nobody would deny the contribution of neo-liberalism
to globalization of finance, the creation of the global value chain and, especially the free trade agreement.
All these activities have allowed GDP to grow in developed countries and some of new industrial countries. However, the wealth
created by the growth of GDP has gone to countries already developed, some developing countries and a small number of multinational
enterprises (MNE). The rich produced by GDP growth has led to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few privileged. What
is more serious is this. If the skewed income distribution in favour of a decreasing number of people continues for long, the GDP
will stop growing and decades-long deflation is quite possible, as it has happened in Japan.
According to the OECD data, in the period, 1975-2011, the GDP share of labour income in OECD countries fell by 13.8% from 65%
to 56%. In the case of the U.S., in the same period, 1970-2014, it fell by 11%. The falling labour-income share is necessarily translated
into unequal household income distribution. There are two popular ways of measuring income distribution: the decile ratio and the
Gini coefficient.
The decile ratio is obtained by dividing the income earned by the top 10% income earners by the income earned by the bottom 10%
income earners . The decile ratio in 2019 was 18.5 in the U.S. as compared to 5.6 in Finland. The decile ratio of the U.S. was the
highest among the developed countries. Thus, in the U.S. the top 10 % has an income 19 times more than the bottom 10%, while, in
Finland, the corresponding ratio is only 6 times. This shows how serious the income gap is in the country of Uncle Sam.
The Gini coefficient varies from zero to 100. As the value of the Gini increases, the income distribution becomes favourable to
the high-income households. Conversely, as the value of the Gini decreases, the income distribution becomes favourable to low-income
households. There are two types of Gini: the gross Gini and the net Gini. The former refers to Gini before taxes and transfer payment,
while the latter refers to Gini after taxes and transfer payment. The difference between the gross and the net Gini shows the government
efforts to improve the equality and fairness of income distribution The gross U.S.- Gini coefficient in 2019 was 48.6, one of the
highest among the developed countries.
Its net Gini was 38.0 so that the difference between the gross and the net Gini was 12.3%. In other words, the U.S. income distribution
improved only by 12.3% by government efforts as against, for example, an improvement of 42.9% in the case of Germany, where the gross
Gini was 49.9 while the net Gini was 28.5 The net Gini of the U.S. was the highest among the developed countries. The implication
is clear. The income distribution in the U.S. was the most unequal. To make the matter worse, the government's effort to improve
the unequal income distribution was the poorest among the developed countries. There are countless signs of unfortunate impacts of
the inequitable income distribution in the country called the U.S. which Koreans used to admire describing it as "mi-gook- 美國미국 –
Beautiful Country". Now, one wonders if it is still a "mi-gook".
The following data indicates the seriousness of poverty in the U.S. (data below prior to the Coronavirus crisis).
In the U.S. the richest 1% of the population has 40% of all household wealth. (2017 data)
More than 20% of the population cannot pay monthly bills.
About 40% do not have savings.
31% of private sector worker do not have medical benefits.
57% of the workers in the service sector have no medical benefits.
These data give us an idea on how so many people have to suffer from poverty in a country where per capita GDP is $65,000 (2019
estimate), the richest country in the world. Most of the Americans work for small- and medium-sized companies (SMEs). In the U.S.,
there are 30 million SMEs. They create 66% of jobs in the private sector. The SMEs are more severely hit than big companies by the
coronavirus.
In fact, 66% of SMEs are adversely affected by the virus against 40% for big firms. As much as 20% of SMEs may be shut down for
good within three months, because of the virus. Under the forty years of neoliberal pro-big corporation policies, available financial
resources and the best human resources have been allocated to big firms at the expense of the development of SMEs.
The most damaging by-product of neoliberalism is no doubt the widening and deepening unequal income distribution for the benefit
of the big corporations and the uprooting of SMEs. This trend means the shrinking domestic demand and the disappearance of jobs for
ordinary people.
The destruction of the domestic market caused by the shrinking consumer demand and the disappearance of SMEs can mean the uprooting
of the very foundation of the economy.
The experience of Japan shows how this can happen. The economic depression after the bubble burst of 1989, Japan had to endure
30-year deflation. The government of Japan has flooded the country with money to restore the economy, but the money was used for
the bail-out of big corporations neglecting the healthy development of the SMEs and impoverishing the ordinary Japanese people. South
Korea could have experienced the Japanese-type economic stagnation, if the conservative government ruled the country ten more years.
The neoliberal pro-big company policy of Washington has greatly depleted consumer demand and SMEs even before the onslaught of
the coronavirus. But, the COVID-19 has given a coup de grâce to consumer demand and SMEs To better understand the issue, let us go
back to the ABC of economics. Looking at the national economy from the demand side, the economy consists of private consumer demand
(C), the private investment demand (I), the government demand (G) and Foreign demand represented by exports of domestic products
(X) minus domestic demand for imported foreign products (M).
GDP=C + I + G + (X-M)
In 2019, the consumer expenditure (C) in the U.S. was 70% of GDP, whereas the government's spending (G) was 17%. The investments
demand (I) was 18%. The net exports demand (X-M) was -5%.
In 2019 the composition of Canadian GDP was: C=57%; I=23 %; G=21 %; X-M=-1%.
Thus, we see that the U.S. economy heavily depends on the private domestic consumption, which represents as much as 70% of GDP
compared to 57% in Canada. The government's contribution to the national demand is 17% as against 21% in Canada. In the U.S. a small
government is a virtue according to neoliberals. In the U.S. the private investments account for only 18% of GDP as compared to as
much as 23% in Canada. In the U.S., off-shoring of manufacturing jobs and the global value chain under neo-liberalism have decreased
the need for business investments at home. It is obvious then that to save the American economy, we have to boost the consumers'
income. But, the consumer income comes mainly from SMEs. We must remember that the SMEs create 66% of all jobs in the U.S. Therefore,
if consumer demand falls and if SMEs do not create jobs, the US economy may have to face the same destiny as the Japanese economy.
This is happening in the U.S. The corona virus crisis is destroying SMEs and taking away the income of the people.
The coronavirus crisis is about to demolish the very foundation of the American economy.
4. Corona Virus Crisis and the Survival of Neoliberalism
The interesting question is this. Will neo-liberalism as economic system survive the corona virus crisis in the U.S.?
There are at least four indications suggesting that it will not survive.
First, to overcome major crisis such as the corona virus invasion, we need strong central government and people-loving leader.
One of the reasons for the successful anti-virus policy in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore was the strong central government's
role of determining and coordinating the anti-virus policies. As we saw, the gospel of neo-liberalism is the minimization of the
central government's role. Having little role in economic policies, the U.S. federal government has proved itself as the most incompetent
entity to fight the crisis. It is more than possible that the U.S. and all the neoliberal countries will try to get away from the
traditional neoliberal governance in which the government is almost a simple errand boy of big business.
Second, the people's trust in the neoliberal leaders has fallen on the ground. It will be difficult for the neoliberal leaders
to be able to lead the country in the post-corona virus era.
Third, the corona virus crisis has made the people aware of the abuse of power by the big companies; the people now know that
these companies are interested only in making money. So, it may be more difficult for them to exploit the people in the era of post-COVID-19.
Fourth, the U.S. economy is shaken up so much that the neoliberal regime will not able to recover the economy. Thus, the survival
of neo-liberalism looks uncertain. But, if the coronavirus crisis continues and destroys SMEs and if only the big corporations survive
owing to bailout money, neo-liberalism may survive and we may end up with authoritarian governance ruled by the business-politics
oligarchy.
5. Search for a New Economic Regime: Just-Liberalism
One thing which the corona-virus crisis has demonstrated is the fact that the American neo-liberalism has failed as sustainable
regime capable of stopping the virus crisis, restore the economy and save the democracy. Hence, we have to look for a new regime
capable of saving the U.S. economy and democracy. We would call this new regime as "Just-liberalism " mission of which is the sustainable
economic development and, at the same time, the just distribution of the benefits of economic development. Before we get into the
discussion of the main feature of the new regime, there is one thing we should discuss. It is the popular perception of large corporation.
Many believe that they make GDP grow and create jobs. It is also the popular view that the success of these large corporations is
due to the innovative managing skills of their founders or their CEOs. Therefore, they deserve annual salary of millions of dollars.
This is the popular perception of Chaebols in South Korea.
But, a great part of Chaebols income is attributable to the public goods such as national defence, police protection, social infrastructures,
the education system, enormous sacrifice of workers and, especially tax allowances, subsidies and privileges. In other words, a great
part of the Chaebols' income belongs to the society, not the Chaebols. Many believe that the Chaebols create jobs, but, in reality,
they crate less than 10% of jobs in Korea. We may say the same thing about large corporations in the U.S. In other words, much of
the company's income is due to public goods. Hence, the company should equitably share its income with the rest of the society. But
do they?
The high ranking managers get astronomical salaries; some of them are hiding billions of dollars in tax haven islands.
We ask. Are large corporations sharing equitably their income with the society? Are the corporate tax allowances they get too
much? Is the wage they pay too low? Is CEO's income is too high?
It is difficult to answer these questions.
But we should throw away the mysticism surrounding the merits of large corporations; we should closely watch them so that they
do not misuse their power and wealth to dictate national policies for their own benefit at the expense of the welfare of the people.
The new regime, just-liberalism, should have the following eight features.
First, we need a strong government which is autonomous from big businesses; there should be no business-politics collusion; there
should be no self-interest oligarchy of corruption.
Second, it is the time we should reconsider the notion of human right violation. There are several types of human right violation
in developed countries including the U.S. For example, the racial discrimination, the inequality before the law, the violation of
the right of social security and the violation of the right of social service are some cases of violation of human rights defined
by the U.N. The Western media have been criticizing human right violation in "non-democratic countries", but, in the future, they
should pay more attention to human right violation in "democratic countries."
Third, the criterion of successful economy should not be limited to the GDP growth; the equitable distribution of the benefits
of GDP growth should also be a criterion; proper balance between the growth and the distribution of growth fruits should be maintained.
Fourth, market should not be governed by "efficiency" alone; it must be also "equitable". Efficiency may lead to the concentration
of resources and power in the hands of the few at the expense of social benefit; it must be also equitable. As an example, we may
refer to the Chaebols (big Korean industrial conglomerates) which kill the traditional village markets which provide livelihood to
a great number of poor people. The Chaebols may make the market efficient but not equitable. The Korean government has limited Chaebols'
penetration into these markets to make them more equitable.
Fifth, we need a partial direct democracy. The legislative translates people's wish into laws and the executive makes policies
on the basis of laws. But, in reality, the legislative and the executive may pass laws and policies for the benefit of big companies
or specific group of individuals and institutions close to the power. Therefore, it is important to provide a mechanism through which
the people – the real master of the country – should be allowed to intervene all times. In South Korea, if more than 200,000 people
send a request to the Blue house (Korean White House) to intervene in matters judged unfair or unjust, the government must intervene.
Sixth, those goods and services which are essential for every citizen must be nationalized. For example, social infrastructure
such as parks, roads, railways, harbours, supply of electricity should not be privatized. Education including higher education should
be made public goods so that low income people should get higher education as do high income group.
This is the best way to maximize the mass of innovative minds and creative energy to develop the society. Above all, the health
service should be nationalized. It is just unbelievable to see that, in a country where the per capita GDP is $63,000, more than
30 million citizens have no medical insurance, just because it is too expensive. Politicians know quite well that big companies related
to insurance, pharmaceutical products and medical professions are preventing the nationalization of medical service in the U.S. But,
the politicians don't seem to dare go over these vested interests groups and nationalize the public health system. Remember this.
There are countries which are much poorer than the U.S. But, they have accessible universal health care insurance system.
Seventh, the economy should allow the system of multi- generational technologies in which not only high-level technologies but
also mid-level technologies should be promoted in such a way that both high- tech large corporations and middle-tech SMEs can grow.
This is perhaps only way to insure GDP growth and create jobs.
Eighth, in the area of international relations, it is about the time to stop wasteful ideological conflict. The difference among
ideologies is narrowing; the number of countries which have abandoned the U.S. imposed democracy has been rising; the ideological
basis of socialism is weakening. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, 48% of countries are democratic, while 52% are not.
According to Freedom House, in 2005, 83 countries had net gain in democracy, while 52 countries had net loss in democracy.
But in 2019, only 37 countries had net gain while 64 countries had net loss. Between 2005 and 2018, the number of countries which
were not free increased by 26%, while those which were free fell by 44%. On the other hand, it is becoming more and more difficult
to find authentic socialism. For example, Chinese regime has lost its pure socialism long time ago. Thus, the world is becoming non-ideological;
the world is embracing ideology-neutral pragmatism.
To conclude, the corona virus pandemic has given us the opportunity to look at ourselves; it has given us the opportunity to realize
how vulnerable we are in front of the corona virus attack.
Many more pandemics will come and challenge us. We need a world better prepared to fight the coming pandemics. It is high time
that we slow down our greedy pursuit for GDP growth; it is about the time to stop a wasteful international ideological conflict in
support of multibillion dollar interests behind Big Money and the Military industrial complex.
It is therefore timely to find a system where we care for each other and where we share what we have .
***
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Professor Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics and co- director of the Observatoire de l'Asie de l'Est (ODAE) of the Centre
d'Études de l'Intégration et la Mondialisation (CEIM), Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He is Research Associate of the Center
of Research on Globalization (CRG).
Growing Social and
Wealth Inequality in America
On Monday, Gilead disclosed its pricing plan for Gilead as it prepares to begin charging for
the drug at the beginning of next month (several international governments have already placed
orders). Given the high demand, thanks in part due to the breathless media coverage despite the
drug's still-questionable study data, Gilead apparently feels justified in charging $3,120 for
a patient getting the shorter, more common, treatment course, and $5,720 for the longer course
for more seriously ill patients. These are the prices for patients with commercial insurance in
the US, according to Gilead's official pricing plan.
As per usual, the price charged to those on government plans will be lower, and hospitals
will also receive a slight discount. Additionally, the US is the only developed country where
Gilead will charge two prices, according to Gilead CEO Daniel O'Day. In much of Europe and
Canada, governments negotiate drug prices directly with drugmakers (in the US, laws dictate
that drug makers must "discount" their drugs for Medicare and Medicaid plans).
But according to O'Day, the drug is priced "far below the value it brings" to the
health-care system.
However, we'd argue that this actually isn't true. Remdesivir was developed by Gilead to
treat Ebola, but the drug was never approved by the FDA for this use, which caused Gilead to
shelve the drug until COVID-19 presented another opportunity. Even before the first study had
finished, the company was already pushing propaganda about the promising nature of the drug.
Meanwhile, the CDC, WHO and other organizations were raising doubts about the effectiveness of
steroid medications.
Months later, the only study on the steroid dexomethasone, a cheap steroid that costs less
than $50 for a 100-dose regimen, has shown that dexomethasone is the only drug so far that has
proven effective at lowering COVID-19 related mortality. Remdesivir, despite the fact that it
has been tested in several high quality trials, has not.
So, why is the American government in partnership with Gilead still pushing this
questionable, and staggeringly expensive, medication on the public?
Ending Emergency Unemployment Insurance Supplements
By DEAN BAKER
The Republicans have been working hard to ensure that the $600 weekly supplement to
unemployment insurance benefits, which was put in place as part of the pandemic rescue
package, is not extended beyond the current July 31 cutoff. They argue that we need
people to return to work.
They do have a point. The supplement is equivalent to pay of $15 an hour for someone
working a 40-hour week, and this is in addition to a regular benefit that is typically
equal to 40 to 50 percent of workers' pay. The supplement translates into an even larger
hourly pay rate for workers putting in shorter workweeks, which was the case for most
laid off workers in the restaurant and retail sectors.
It is hard for employers in traditionally low paying sectors to match these pay rates.
Even those of us who are big proponents of higher minimum wages would not advocate a jump
to more than $20 an hour at a point when businesses are crippled by the pandemic.
However, there is also the point that we don't want workers to have to expose
themselves to the coronavirus. That was the reason for the generous supplement. We wanted
to make sure that workers, who in many cases were legally prevented from working, did not
suffer as a result.
There is an obvious solution here. Suppose we reduce or end the supplement in areas
where the pandemic is under control.
This would not be determined by some Trumpian declaration that the pandemic is over,
but by solid data. The obvious metric would be positive test rates. Suppose that the
supplement was reduced or eliminated in states or counties where the positive test rate
is less than 5 percent. (This may not be the right rate.) This would mean that workers
going back to work would face relatively little risk of contracting the virus. It would
also give states incentive to conduct vigorous testing programs, as well as other control
measures, in order to get their positive rates down.
Our unemployment insurance system is badly broken and it would be desirable to have
more generous benefits, and also to focus more on work sharing, as other countries have
done. We can recognize this point and still agree that an arbitrary supplement to all
benefits is not the right long-term fix even if it was very good policy in the
pandemic.
"... The western response to the Coronavirus spoke loudly: The U.S. and Europe have appeared powerful because they projected the illusion of competence; of being able to act effectively; of being strategic in their actions. On Coronavirus, the U.S. has shown itself incompetent, dysfunctional, and indifferent to human affliction. ..."
The western response to the Coronavirus spoke loudly: The U.S. and Europe have appeared
powerful because they projected the illusion of competence; of being able to act effectively;
of being strategic in their actions. On Coronavirus, the U.S. has shown itself incompetent,
dysfunctional, and indifferent to human affliction.
Trump is fighting an existential war: on the one hand, the coming Election is not merely the
most important in the U.S.' history. It will be existential. No more is Blue/Red a contrived
theatre for the electorate – this is deadly serious.
For an important segment of the population (no longer the majority), to lose in this coming
election would signify their ejection from power and politics, and their substitution by a
culturally different class of Americans, with different cosmopolitan and diversity values. It
is the tipping point – two irreconcilable visions of American life believe that they can
continue only if they own the whole order, and the other side be utterly crushed.
And on the other hand, Trump sees the U.S. fighting a similarly existential war, albeit at a
global plane. He is fighting a hidden 'war' to retain America's present dominance over global
money (the dollar) – the source of its true power. For Americans to lose this parallel
competition to the EU's and China's multilateral values of global co-operation and financial
governance, would imply Americans' (i.e. white Anglo Saxon's) ejection from control over the
global financial system, and (again) their substitution by a quite different vision (i.e. a
Soros-Gates-Pelosi vision), advocating the 'progressive' values of ecological and financial,
global governance.
Again – two irreconcilable visions of the global order, with each party believing that
it must own the whole order to survive.
Hence Trump's full-spectrum disruption of China (and the whole multilateral ideology) to
maintain dollar hegemony. Europe, on one side, exemplifies the shift towards a transnational
regulatory and monetary super-state. And China , on the other,
is not only Europe's willing partner, but the only power capable of sitting atop this globalist
ambition, giving it the (required) financial weight and substance. This constitutes the
existential threat to the U.S.' exceptional control of the global financial system – and
therefore over global political power.
A sovereignty-ist Russia may not be as drawn to this cosmopolitan vision as China, but
really it has little choice. Because, as President Putin repeatedly points out, the dollar
constitutes the toxic problem plaguing the world trading system. And in this, Russia cannot
stand aloof. The dollar is the problem for the Middle East too, with its noxious corollaries of
oil, currency, trade and sanctions wars. The region will not long be able to sit on the fence,
keeping distant from this struggle for the global financial order.
The Middle East, as deference to the U.S. illusion of power wanes, has as little choice as
has Russia: It will be pushed to view the U.S. as its past, and to 'Look East' for its
future.
And Israel will cease to be the pivot around which the Middle East revolves.
Riots are not a political movement and they will dissipate soon. Leaving just strengthened the national-security state. That's
what will happen next.
Notable quotes:
"... If the combination of peaceful protesting, looting and violence witnessed across American cities over the past few days completely caught you off guard, you're likely to come to the worst possible conclusion about what to do next. The knee-jerk response I'm already seeing from many is to crush the dissent by all means necessary, but that's exactly how you give the imperial state and oligarchy more power. Power it will never relinquish. ..."
"... On the one hand, you can't pillage the public so blatantly and consistently for decades while telling them voting will change things and not expect violence once people realize it doesn't. On the other hand, street violence plays perfectly into the hands of those who would take the current moment and use it to advocate for a further loss of civil liberties, more internal militarization, and the emergence of an overt domestic police state that's been itching to fully manifest since 9/11. ..."
It's with an extremely heavy heart that I sit down to write today's post.
Although widespread civil unrest was easy to predict, it doesn't make the situation any less sad and dangerous. We're in the thick
of it now, and how we respond will likely determine the direction of the country for decades to come.
If the combination of peaceful protesting, looting and violence witnessed across American cities over the past few days completely
caught you off guard, you're likely to come to the worst possible conclusion about what to do next. The knee-jerk response I'm already
seeing from many is to crush the dissent by all means necessary, but that's exactly how you give the imperial state and oligarchy
more power. Power it will never relinquish.
What's happening in America right now is what happens in a failed state.
The U.S. is a failed state. Now the imperial national security state is going to flex at home like never before.
I spent the last decade of my life trying to spread the word to avoid this, but here we are.
I don't think people understand the significance of the President declaring "Antifa" a "terrorist organization". The Patriot
Act and provisions of the NDAA of 2012 make this frightening. Because Antifa is informal it puts all protestors in danger--like
declaring them un-citizens.
GOP @SenTomCotton : "If local politicians
will not do their most basic job to protect our citizens, let's see how these anarchists respond when the 101st Airborne is on
the other side of the street." pic.twitter.com/NyojLoOEAT
-- The American Independent (@AmerIndependent)
June 1, 2020
The pressure cooker situation that erupted over the weekend has been building for five decades, but really accelerated over the
past twenty years. After every crisis of the 21st century there's been this "do whatever it takes mentality," which resulted in more
wealth and power for the national security state and oligarchy, and less resources, opportunities and civil liberties for the many.
If anything, it's surprising it took so long to get here, partly a testament to how skilled a salesman for the power structure Obama
was.
Your election was a chance to create real change, but instead you chose to protect bankers while looting the economy on behalf
of oligarchs.
You and Trump aren't much different when it comes to the big structural problems, you were just better at selling oligarchy
and empire. https://t.co/QuSQNApeLY
The covid-19 pandemic, related societal lockdown and another round of in your face economic looting by Congress and the Federal
Reserve merely served as an accelerant, and the only thing missing was some sort of catalyst combined with warmer weather. Now that
the eruption has occurred, I hope cooler heads can prevail on all sides.
On the one hand, you can't pillage the public so blatantly and consistently for decades while telling them voting will change
things and not expect violence once people realize it doesn't. On the other hand, street violence plays perfectly into the hands
of those who would take the current moment and use it to advocate for a further loss of civil liberties, more internal militarization,
and the emergence of an overt domestic police state that's been itching to fully manifest since 9/11.
It's my view we need to take the current moment and admit the unrest is a symptom of a deeply entrenched and corrupt bipartisan
imperial oligarchy that cares only about its own wealth and power. If people of goodwill across the ideological spectrum don't take
a step back and point out who the real looters are, nothing's going to improve and we'll put another bandaid on a systemic cancer
as we continue our longstanding march toward less freedom and more authoritarianism
A pretty silly rant, but some point might worth your attention...
Notable quotes:
"... I don't believe Marxist Social/Communism is the answer, as it has proven to always fail, as it is at complete odds with human nature. It drains creativity and productivity because they aren't rewarded ..."
"... Protests and Maidan open up fabulous opportunities for protest leaders. Chocolate oligarch Poroshenko became president. The little-known leader of the party faction in the parliament, Yatsenyuk, became prime minister. ..."
Meanwhile, what is going to happen to assorted fascisms? Eric Hobsbawm showed us in
Age of Extremes how the key to the fascist right was always mass mobilization: "Fascists
were the revolutionaries of the counter-revolution".
We may be heading further than mere, crude neofascism. Call it Hybrid Neofascism. Their
political stars bow to global market imperatives while switching political competition to the
cultural arena.
That's what true "illiberalism" is all about: the mix between neoliberalism –
unrestricted capital mobility, Central Bank diktats – and political authoritarianism.
Here's where we find Trump, Modi and Bolsonaro.
...Even if neoliberalism was dead, and it's not, the world is still encumbered with its
corpse – to paraphrase Nietzsche a propos of God.
And even as a triple catastrophe – sanitary, social and climatic – is now
unequivocal, the ruling matrix – starring the Masters of the Universe managing the
financial casino – won't stop resisting any drive towards change.
... Realpolitik once again points to a post-Lockdown turbo-capitalist framework, where the
illiberalism of the 1% – with fascistic elements – and naked turbo-financialization
are boosted by reinforced exploitation of an exhausted and now largely unemployed
workforce.
Post-Lockdown turbo-capitalism is once again reasserting itself after four decades of
Thatcherization, or – to be polite – hardcore neoliberalism. Progressive forces
still don't have the ammunition to revert the logic of extremely high profits for the ruling
classes – EU governance included – and for large global corporations as well.
-- ALIEN -- , 2 minutes ago
Allowing the continued uncontrolled exploitation of planetary resources will lead to global
ecosystem collapse, killing most humans.
Cheap Chinese Crap , 10 minutes ago
Good God, it 's like this guy is giving a seminar in technocratic buzzword salad
recognition.
"It takes someone of Marx's caliber to build a full-fledged, 21st century eco-socialist
ideology, and capable of long-term, sustained mobilization. Aux armes, citoyens."
Aux armes, indeed. But not to erect an oligarchy of self-appointed experts to rule us with
an iron hand. I rather prefer the idea of pulling them off their comfy, government-compensated
sinecures and dragging them down into the mud with everyone else.
Anyone who thinks they are better qualified to run your life than you yourself is an enemy
of the Enlightenment. Away with them all.
Leguran , 1 hour ago
Something worthwhile to note is missing among Pepe's carnage....
What has happened is that
every imaginable organized group from doctors to pilots to lawyers, to farmers, to pharma
companies, etc. has carved out a special slice of the economy especially for themselves.
In
Feudal times rivers could not be navigated because cockroach lords would charge fees to use the
rivers. That is exactly the same arrangement today but instead of using force of arms, laws are
used. Our economy is choking on all these impediments.
mtumba , 2 hours ago
I agree that we need a revolution, and that the .01% globalist "elites" have proven to be
not only craven, arrogant and greedy - but also stupid beyond redemption.
But I don't believe Marxist Social/Communism is the answer, as it has proven to always fail, as it is at complete odds
with human nature. It drains creativity and productivity because they aren't rewarded, and it rewards laziness and inertia, because the absolute minimum of effort
results in the barest level needed to survive, which - oddly - is enough for many.
I think it would be great to give actual capitalism a try, with extremely limited govt - a
govt that ONLY provides for the common defense and enforcement of contract laws and protection
against crimes of violence and property theft. NOT crony-capitalism that takes command over the
resources of a nation's klepotcratic govt by the .01% richest and their sycophantic bottom
feeder lawyers, lobbyists, corrupt politicians and other enablers.
Snout the First , 3 hours ago
That was sure a lot of words, needlessly making something simple difficult. Here's what it
all boils down to:
- Who do you want setting prices? The market or a central planner?
- What percent of the economy do you want the government to own or control?
- What percent of your annual income do you want the government to take? Some small amount
to be used for valid purposes, the rest to be pissed away against your better interests?
PKKA , 3 hours ago
Protests and Maidan open up fabulous opportunities for protest leaders. Chocolate oligarch
Poroshenko became president. The little-known leader of the party faction in the parliament,
Yatsenyuk, became prime minister.
You know that on the project of an epic wall between Ukraine
and Russia, Yatsenyuk stole $ 1 billion but did not build a wall. A moron with a certificate
from a psycho hospital Andrei Parubiy became the speaker of parliament. You did not know that
Parubiy had a certificate of moronity from a psycho hospital? Now you know. Boxer Vitali
Klitschko became mayor of Kiev. Vitaly pronounces the words in syllables and wrinkles his
forehead for a long time before expressing a thought. You can even physically hear the creak of
gears as they spin and creak in Klitschko's head. Do you know what rabble passed in the
Ukrainian parliament? Bandits, crooks, nazis, morons, thieves and idiots! So the protests open
up fabulous career opportunities and enrichment!
play_arrow
Phillyguy , 4 hours ago
The American public has a front row seat, watching US economic decline. This process has
been ongoing since the mid 1970's, as corporate profits slumped. In response the ruling elite
enacted a series of Neo-liberal economic policies- multiple tax cuts for the wealthy, attacks
on the poor and labor, job outsourcing, financial de-regulation, lack of spending on public and
private infrastructure and spending $ trillions of taxpayer money on the Pentagon and strategic
debacles in Afghanistan (longest war in US history), Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. In total,
these policies have been a disaster for the average American family.
The ruling elite are well aware of American economic decline, accelerated by the Coronavirus
pandemic. Fascism comes to the fore when capitalism breaks down, and under extreme conditions,
the ruling elite use fascism as an ideological rationale to harness state power- Legislature
and police, to maintain class structure and wealth distribution. Western capitalism is
incapable of reversing its economic decline and as a result, we are seeing fascism reemerging
in the US, EU and Brazil. Donald Trump is the face of American fascism. Michael Parenti
provides an excellent historical analysis of fascism. See: Michael Parenti- Functions of
Fascism (Real History) 1 of 4 Jan 27, 2008; Link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0Bc4KJx2Ao
Vigilante , 4 hours ago
How come 'fascist' Trump is being attacked 24/7 by the Deep State though?
They should be on his side if your assertions are correct
Fascism resides mostly on the Left end of the spectrum...and 'Woke' capital is throwing its
lot with the 'progressives' these days
bshirley1968 , 4 hours ago
It's your perception he is being attacked. Dude, wake up.
The best the deep state has to run against Trump is Joe Biden? They are that stupid? They
are that weak? If they are that stupid and weak, how can they be a conceivable, real
threat.
You are being played. You imagine there are good guys that you can trust......and that is
why you are being played.
HomeOfTheHypocrite , 3 hours ago
The ruling class is currently divided between those who are ready to prepare fascism and
those who want to continue on with neoliberalism. Trump represents one faction of the ruling
class. His political opponents in the Deep State represent another. None of them have any
genuine concern for the fate of the American worker. Trump, if judged by his actions and not
his words, is nothing but a charlatan who mouths populist phrases while appointing billionaire
aristocrats to political positions and lavishing investment bankers with trillions of tax
dollars.
CatInTheHat , 2 hours ago
This is the problem with both sides cult followers: the insanity behind the idea that these
elite somehow have their hands tied behind their backs as they ALL move is toward fascism.
The 2 party system is a ONE party right wing fascist one. Trump is merely a figure head.
People listen to what a politician says and NOT what he does behind their backs.
Trump is 1000% Zionazi just like the rest of them
HomeOfTheHypocrite , 2 hours ago
"basically it looks alot like the age old battle between fascism and communism"
Perhaps on the streets, but not within the ruling class. The ruling class, including the
Democrats, are utterly opposed to communism or socialism. Every Democratic congressperson with
maybe one exception stood and applauded Trump's anti-socialist rants during his State of the
Union addresses. Nancy Pelosi: "We're capitalist and that's just the way it is." Elizabeth
Warren (supposedly a radical): "I'm capitalist to my bones."
"Let's say for example these protesters managed to organize well enough to stage a coup
d'etat and take over - what next ?"
There's little chance of that. They are completely disorganized and lack any sort of
political program. But, if you're giving me the task of developing a political program for
them, I'll try to offer some suggestions that could be accomplished without a Pinochet or
Stalin-style bloodletting.
1. Busting up the monopolies and cartels 2. Raising taxes on the rich 3. A government jobs program to combat unemployment 4. A massive curtailment of the military budget 5. A massive curtailment of the policing and prison budget 6. Free government healthcare (without banning private-sector healthcare)
The first three of these political tasks were accomplished in the US in the 1930s without
the need for "black ops, gulags, secret police, and all the rest of it." Major policy changes
have not always required mass repression. But they do require a serious enough political party
to disassociate itself entirely from the ruling class Democrats and Republicans. During the 30s
there was a significant rise in various populist and socialist parties. Much of FDR's policies
and statements were a response to the threat they posed to established power. There is a famous
quote where he talks about having to "throw a few of these [millionaires] to the wolves" in
order to save America from the crackpot ideas of the "communists" and "Huey Longians."
I completely share your concern related to the use of repression to implement social and
economic policies. Neither the fascists nor the communists have a thing to offer a free people
so long as they rely on tyranny to enforce their program. Above all democracy and the natural
rights of individuals must be preserved.
Jedclampetisdead , 5 hours ago
If this country has any chance, we have to execute the Zionist bankers and their minions
new game , 5 hours ago
What is and will be: Corporate Fascism.
I defy anyone to explain other wise.
Go to the World Economic Forum web page and meet your masters.
Billionaires shaping YOUR future with their fortunes from corporations.
Their wealth was had by joint ventures with bought and paid for politicians and lobbyist
crafted legislation to maximize their wealth. This fakdemic absolutely consolidates more
wealth
to fewer corporations by design. Serf and kings/queens. The club personified by immense
wealth disparity.
In a continuing process, the social scoring via digital systems will limit freedoms to state
approved corporate diktats
that clamp like a boot to the neck. **** here, 6 tissue sections and recycled bug **** for
food.
brave new gatsy world right now with the roll out out of 3 pronged vaccine controlling your
brains emotions.
It is all so obvious to anyone with an ability to see two steps into the future. navigate
the future accordingly.
They are in control, the first denial that must be removed to see clearly the next step. sad
but true.
TAC: Looking forward, if you do go back to Washington, what issues would you champion, and
what do you think America in 2021 should really focus on?
Sessions: Well, I have come to understand that the neocon foreign policy, the libertarian
free market ideology, beyond common sense, was not healthy, and resulting in damage to families
and to American citizens . It's our duty as public officials to protect American citizens
from damage from unfair foreign competition and other tactics. That's a big deal. I think our
Republican agenda has got to be more focused on helping American people fight back against
unfair attacks on our businesses, closing our factories, losing our jobs, transporting our
jobs. I'll be an advocate for that.
We have a nation, and the government's job is to protect the nation. President Trump said
it simply: Other nations protect their interests, why aren't we protecting ours? We don't
ever use a tariff? When people cheat you every day, how do you fight back, are you going to
drop bombs on them? Why don't you use tariffs, which Alexander Hamilton and George Washington
did at the very beginning of the republic, that's a perfectly normal response to an adverse
attack on your people. So those are the kind of things that I feel strongly about. I believe in
markets, competition, and international trade, but we can no longer sit quietly while are
savaged by very clever, devious mercantilists who want to advance their interests and weaken
the United States, while we sit there, based on some theory , that we can't impose a
tariff. Give me a break!
Also, we need to reestablish a foreign policy for this time in our country's history, and it
has to be really bipartisan. You remember the Kennan Long Telegram that laid the foundation for
the containment policy against the Soviet Union. It lasted for 40 years with basic bipartisan
support. That's the kind of thing we need to be rethinking today.
We cannot continue, as the president has warned us, getting involved in endless wars all
over the globe, thinking that we can just remake humanity. That's not conservatism.
Conservatism, as Bob Tyrell said, is a cast of mind, it's a thought process, about, 'wait, is
this realistic?
You sure this theory is going to work? Are you trying to put a square peg in a round
hole? It's just not going there. Aren't you getting feedback from reality, don't you adjust to
it?' Our fundamental goals are to make the American people happy, prosperous, and stable.
Family, traditions, culture, those kinds of things have got to be defended. And this
ideological view that we're not a nation, we're an idea, somehow our constitution is supposed
to apply worldwide, is ridiculous.
We have borders, and we have a right to defend those borders, to establish good, healthy
conditions within our country. Not just for the billionaires, wages need to go up for working
people. For example, for 20 years wages for average Americans did not increase. GDP was going
up, that seemed to be all the economists cared about, CEOs were making more and more money, but
the wages for the core American people were not going up. They have, under President Trump,
some, and we need to focus on that.
TAC: In both military and economic terms, how should we begin confronting China?
For starters, we need to take off the rose-colored glasses. This is a communist regime. We
can wish it weren't so, people hoped they would moderate when they got wealthier, but actually
the opposite is occurring. Xi Jinping is using technology to repress his people even more
ruthlessly. And they are not free market people. They are not free market people, they're
communists! They are using our free-market theories -- religion -- against us, to destroy us,
to gain market share, and they've been highly successful.
President Trump and I talked about it on the airplane a number of times during the
campaign, and he understands one thing: China needs our markets more than we need their
products.
We can make those products in the United States, we can make our drugs here, we can buy them
from Mexico, our neighbors like that, we can buy them from the Philippines, South Korea, Japan,
India, Vietnam, places that aren't threats to us strategically, and who will deal honestly with
us.
So we absolutely need to alter that supply chain system that has given China an advantage
over all the other nations of the world, and we can do that in a way that does not harm our
economy significantly.
As
Summit News reports , a video clip shows a black woman and former NAACP chapter president
trying to collect medication for her daughter outside a Target store in St. Paul telling
rioters "these motherf**kers need to go home!"
"Leave this shit alone – "these motherf**kers need to go home!" she shouts, "these
people don't give a damn about George Floyd."
Diane Binns, 70, of St. Paul is angry at the people here. Binns came here to get
medication for her daughter. pic.twitter.com/GA1EJpx4XL
The woman subsequently identified herself as Diane Binns, former president of the NAACP St.
Paul from 2016-2018.
Critically, for the narrative-minded among you, she says she attended the initial protest
against the killing of Floyd but after 30 minutes realized "it was going to be a riot, so I
left."
America is quickly descending into chaos as social unrest could spread to other major cities
this weekend. Wealth inequality in many inner cities is at record levels. More than 40 million
people are unemployed with a crashed economy, and people are already furious about virus
lockdowns. This all suggests a perfect storm of unrest could flare up across the country.
What's of particular interest is back in 2005, the PREP Act was brought into existence.
In essence the PREP Act provides for unlimited funding for drug companies to develop
'counter measures' , should a Notice of Declaration of National Emergency be
declared. Such declaration was made back in March of this year.
Under the PREP Act, drug companies are given COMPLETE IMMUNITY FROM ALL ACCOUNTABILITY,
ALL LIABILITY & ALL LAWSUITS.
By her latest count, there are 119 Covid19 vaccines under development worldwide.
2) CDC and AMA have been in cahoots over the flu and vaccines for years!
Read the start of paragraph 3 and all of 4.
"The probably biggest lesson we will learn from this pandemic is that we must work to change
that selfish mentality."
And this is sadly the biggest challenge of all. After many decades of neoliberal doctrine,
coupled with shunning positive patriotism (e.g. serving for the common good of a nation) as
"semi-fascist", we now reap what has been sowed.
But it must be the focus point of our work. Without it, every other effort regarding reviving
democracy, social security, and even changing the crazy geopolitics of our nations is
futile.
"The "western" cultures allow for more selfishness of the individual. But over the
longer timeframe [neoliberal] cultures that emphasizes personal liberty and ignore the
common good are likely to see their empire fail.
The probably biggest lesson we will learn from this pandemic is that we must work to
change that selfish mentality."
Ah, yes ... the common good ... the Great Leap Forward ... the Brave New World ...
individual rights reported as selfishness ... really?
Perhaps it's better to live with some risk and the admitted limited liberty and individual
rights afforded by a system of limited government (not that our governors are currently
acting in accordance to the laws they have sworn to uphold)?
Or perhaps one would rather have the false security of guaranteed life in a prison?
Btw, "empire failing" would be a great thing ... and individual rights and limited
governance are antithetical to empire.
The easiest way to register your disapproval is with your vote. Will it change things?
Absolutely not.
But I'm only asking for you to send a message. Asking you for more than that would be
presumptuous of me.
The media is quick to tell you that you only have two choices in our
"democracy" - Red Team or Blue Team.
That is a lie. The reality is that you have four choices.
Choice #1) Vote Team Neofeudalism
Do you enjoy being a serf? Then vote for the MSM-endorsed Republican or Democrat. Go Team!
If you think there is any
real difference then you
aren't paying attention .
Choice #2) Don't Vote
The game is rigged, so why participate?
Well, you got the first part right. It's all rigged, but you obviously don't understand the
game if you think you can opt out. We are all trapped in this system, and not voting is a
choice.
Think of it this way. Half of all eligible voters don't vote. Do you think that the political
class is worried about their legitimacy? Not in the slightest. If the voting rate dropped to
just 10% they still wouldn't care.
In fact, a disengaged, apathetic public is a close second preference to Choice #1 for the
ruling elite. Want proof? When is the last time (outside of the Sanders campaign) has any
politician done anything to increase the electorate? Historically the ruling class has always
tried to limit participation.
So the only message that you send by not voting is "I don't care" or "I give up."
Choice #3) Vote for someone you like
A.K.A. Throwing away your vote.
A.K.A. Helping Putin.
A.K.A. Voting for Trump (for people that flunked both math and civics).
The purpose of democracy is to vote for someone that represents your interests. The fact that
this logical, rational act has been demonized by the MSM is proof that the ruling elites don't
approve of this choice.
So if you want to tell the ruling class FU on their choices, this is an easy way to do it.
It's not the best way, but it is a way.
The reason that it's not the best way to send a message is because the Democratic Party truly
doesn't care if it loses to the GOP. The wealthy donors still win.
So as long as only a token number of voters vote for a 3rd party, then the ruling elite still
win. They just don't win in a manner that they would prefer, and that slightly annoys them.
Choice #4) Get Active. Get In Their Faces
The only way to really piss off the ruling elites is to threaten their power.
The Democratic Party establishment and the media will always be against everyone on the
left.
However, that isn't even the most important parts of the establishment, and it's something that
the Left absolutely must fix regardless of whether the strategy is to take over the Democratic
Party or jump to another party.
For starters, let's look at the one place where the Left should dominate - Labor Unions.
No left-wing movement worth a damn fails to have labor behind it. The rank-and-file are
generally economic leftists, but union leadership has often been totally corrupted.
That has to change.
The same goes for civil rights and enviromentalist groups.
Failure to do this will doom any leftist economic movement or party.
However, changing things > sending a message.
Halfway in between changing things and sending a message is primarying incumbents.
The political establishment gets furious when the grassroots challenges them.
You can tell by all the ways that they'll break every rule and violate every value when this
happens.
It's a true FU to the ruling class. It makes them fight over something they thought that they
had already won.
While Bernie's defeat (and abandonment of his own movement) was discouraging, there are
still people fighting the good fight.
For example, Justice Democrats have a 3 - 2 record in 2020 so far.
The DSA has 13 primary
challengers coming up.
This is only a request. You should only do what you are ready to do.
But I think it's not a bad strategy to act in a way most contrary to the wishes of the ruling
class.
The top nine nations with the most coronavirus cases were members of the Western Empire
(former democracies weakened by corporations and oligarchs to promote global trade) or the
Elite reaching an understanding with Authoritarians. "Profit over lives" was the result.
Endless wars, offshoring, corruption, exploitation and despair led to the decreased life
expectancy in the USA and England.
The novel coronavirus pandemic is the direct result of these dysfunctional governments.
Corporations see the epidemic as a profit center for their magical treatment or vaccine.
There is no US national public health system. US hospitals and nursing homes primary purpose
is to make money for stockholders and mangers. It is of no matter that nearly 100,000
Americans have died so far with many more to come. No great wealth will be spent to fight the
pandemic nationally in the USA using the proven public health practices of universal testing,
contact tracing and isolation of the ill.
This is now a bipolar world. The USA and UK are pariah nations quarantined from the
nations that have controlled the virus. The Western Empire has fallen.
The Democrats are just as responsible for the mess as the Republicans. I have yet to
receive my mail-in ballot for the postponed June 2nd Maryland primary. Besides being
incarcerated at home, it looks like I am also disenfranchised. Yet, I am very lucky, once
again, but for how long?
Either a democratic constitutional government retakes control of the USA or a second civil
war between the credentialed and the left-behind is inevitable. The aristocracy always loses
but with wholesale chaos, major loss of life and redistribution of wealth.
This is an extraordinary dangerous time for Homo sapiens due the Pandemic and the
resulting Greatest Depression leading to unrest, scapegoating and confrontation which could
result in the use of nuclear weapons. Plus, climate change looms ahead. How can this possibly
be addressed if the developed world is unable to control a once in a century pandemic; let
alone, evolve a sustainable civilization that can survive on a finite planet.
At the end of his essay today ,
Alastair Crooke asks a series of questions that many of us have already pondered and mostly
written about:
"Have governments given any thought to the implication of the financial crisis spreading
to the middle classes, for whom often their only cushion in life is the inflated value of the
house in which they live, but whose price may collapse? And if not, do they imagine that
their citizens will acquiesce to losing their homes because of Coronavirus? And that the
middle classes will still side with the élites?
"So much hangs on the evolutionary course of the virus. But judging this wrongly, risks
much. People will not so readily handover their homes and cars to the banks this time, as in
they did the wake of great financial crisis of 2008. Why would they? It was not their fault
[It wasn't their fault in 2008 either; it was massive Fraud that was never prosecuted and I'm
getting rather tired of that fact not being aired]. Convulsions ahead? The decay of an era,
and the inevitability of social and political mutation?"
IMO, within the Outlaw US Empire, the issue of state solvency will become paramount thanks
to the massive unanticipated shortfalls in revenue, an issue Hudson talks about in the video
I linked above. IMO, that issue has the power to cleave the states from the Union given the
Union's complete lack of interest in the wellbeing of citizens. It's very much like an
abusive marriage--When does the repeatedly beaten wife finally leave home or attempt to kill
her spouse? Aside from the very meager benefits from Social Security and Medicare, what ties
serve to promote loyalty to Washington, DC over your individual state? If the Union isn't
going to work for the goals articulated in the Constitution's Preamble, then why support it
any longer?
"... EU money intended for underfunded public-benefit research such as preparing for a pandemic has been diverted by the pharmaceutical industry into areas where it can make more money, according to a scathing new report. ..."
"... The target of the criticism is the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a public-private partnership that was equally funded, between 2008 and 2020, by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) lobbying group and the European Commission to the tune of 5.3 billion euros (US$5.8 billion). The money is supposed to go to areas of "unmet medical or social need," ..."
"... "We were outraged to find evidence that the pharmaceutical industry lobby EFPIA not only did not consider funding biopreparedness (ie, being ready for epidemics such as the one caused by the new coronavirus, COVID-19) but opposed it being included in IMI's work when the possibility was raised by the European Commission in 2017, ..."
"... "The research proposed by the EC in the biopreparedness topic was small in scope," ..."
"... "IMI's projects have contributed, directly or indirectly, to better prepare the research community for the current crisis, the Ebola+ programme or the ZAPI project." ..."
"... "belated interventions when an epidemic is already underway," ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
EU money intended
for underfunded public-benefit research such as preparing for a pandemic has been diverted by
the pharmaceutical industry into areas where it can make more money, according to a scathing
new report. Officials in Brussels wanted to co-fund research that would have ensured the
European Union (EU) was better prepared for a pandemic akin to the one we are experiencing
today. But their partners, the big pharmaceutical companies, rejected the proposal, ensuring
that taxpayer money would go instead into studies with more potential for commercial
application. In short big-pharma lobbyists were allowed to steer billions of euros of public
funds as they saw fit, a damning new report claims.
The target of the criticism is the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a
public-private partnership that was equally funded, between 2008 and 2020, by the European
Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) lobbying group and the
European Commission to the tune of 5.3 billion euros (US$5.8 billion). The money is supposed to
go to areas of "unmet medical or social need," but, in practice, corporate priorities
dominate the decision-making, according to the
non-governmental organization Corporate Observatory Europe (COE).
"We were outraged to find evidence that the pharmaceutical industry lobby EFPIA not only
did not consider funding biopreparedness (ie, being ready for epidemics such as the one caused
by the new coronavirus, COVID-19) but opposed it being included in IMI's work when the
possibility was raised by the European Commission in 2017, " a new COE report
said.
The rejected proposal would have directed money into refining computer simulations and the
analysis of animal testing models, potentially speeding up regulatory approval of vaccines,
according to the Guardian. But a spokeswoman for the IMI called the report
"misleading".
"The research proposed by the EC in the biopreparedness topic was small in scope,"
she said. "IMI's projects have contributed, directly or indirectly, to better prepare the
research community for the current crisis, the Ebola+ programme or the ZAPI project."
ZAPI, or the Zoonotic Anticipation and Preparedness Initiative, was launched in 2015 with a
budget of 20 million euros (US$21.8 million) after the Ebola epidemic a year prior. The COE
report said it exemplifies a pattern of "belated interventions when an epidemic is already
underway," much like this year's emergency funding of coronavirus research.
The think tank questioned whether EU public money was well applied through IMI. Much of it
went into research into cancer, Alzheimer's disease and diabetes – areas that are
potentially profitable and thus are given close attention by private business. But epidemic
preparedness, HIV/AIDS, and poverty-related and neglected tropical diseases have been
overlooked by the initiative, the report said.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
...China's Foreign Minister Yang Yi held a lengthy presser providing
detailed answers to many differing questions. The topic of "Wolf Diplomacy" is in the news
today and was asked about by CNN:
" Cable News Network : We've seen an increasingly heated 'war of words'
between China and the US. Is 'wolf warrior' diplomacy the new norm of China's
diplomacy?
Wang Yi : I respect your right to ask the question, but I'm afraid you're
not framing the question in the right way. One has to have a sense of right and wrong.
Without it, a person cannot be trusted, and a country cannot hold its own in the family of
nations .
... ... ...
"The world is undergoing changes of a kind unseen in a century and full of instability
and turbulence. Confronted by a growing set of global challenges, we hope all countries
will realize that humanity is a community with a shared future. We must render each other
more support and cooperation, and there should be less finger-pointing and confrontation.
We call on all nations to come together and build a better world for all." [My
Emphasis]
"... The coronavirus crisis has thrown the global economy into cardiac arrest, and now you are acutely aware of the very markets that you had previously just assumed would function as normal. The first indication was the precipitous drop in the stock market that took place in late February. Then, as the United States began to enter quarantine, the labor market collapsed and hundreds of millions of people were suddenly out of work. Shortages in a few key commodities -- masks, ventilators, toilet paper -- began to appear. ..."
How will the coronavirus transform the relationship between state and market? A look at oil,
food, and finance.
You pay little attention to the systems of your body --
circulatory, digestive, pulmonary -- unless something goes wrong.
These automatic systems ordinarily go about their business, like unseen clockwork, while you
think about a vexing problem at work, drink your morning cup of coffee, walk up and down
stairs, and head out to your car to begin your morning commute. If you had to focus your
attention on breathing, pushing blood through your veins, and metabolizing food, you'd have no
time or energy to do anything else. The body abhors the micromanaging of the mind.
The same applies to the world's markets. They whir away in the background of your life,
providing loans to your business, coffee beans to your nearby supermarket, labor to build your
house, gas to fill your car. You take all of these markets for granted. All you have to concern
yourself with is earning enough money to gain access to these goods and services. That's what
it means to live in a modern economy. The days of hunting and gathering, of complete
self-sufficiency, are long past.
And then, in a series of sickening shifts, the markets go haywire. As with a heart attack,
you no longer can take the optimal performance of these systems for granted.
The coronavirus crisis has thrown the global economy into cardiac arrest, and now you
are acutely aware of the very markets that you had previously just assumed would function as
normal. The first indication was the precipitous drop in the stock market that took place in
late February. Then, as the United States began to enter quarantine, the labor market collapsed
and hundreds of millions of people were suddenly out of work. Shortages in a few key
commodities -- masks, ventilators, toilet paper -- began to appear.
It is one of the central tenets of laissez-faire capitalism that markets behave like
automatic systems, that an "invisible hand" regulates supply and demand. Market fundamentalists
believe that the less the government interferes with these automatic systems, the better. They
argue, to the contrary, that markets should increasingly take over government functions: a
privatized post office, for instance, or Social Security accounts subjected to the stock
market.
Market fundamentalists are like Christian Scientists. They refuse government intervention
just as the faithful reject medical intervention. Much like God's grace, the invisible hand
operates independent of human plan.
Then something happens, like a pandemic, which tests this faith. States around the world are
now spending trillions of dollars to intervene in the economy: to bail out banks, save
businesses, help out the unemployed. Countries are imposing export controls on key commodities.
As in wartime, governments are directing manufacturers to produce critical goods to fill an
unexpected demand for greater supply.
These are emergency interventions. The market fundamentalist looks forward to the day when
stay-at-home restrictions are lifted, people go back to work, the stock market barrels back
into bull mode, and the invisible hand, with perhaps a few Band-aids across the knuckles,
returns to its job.
But some pandemics fundamentally alter the economy. In such emergencies, people realize that
an economy is constructed and thus can be reconstructed. Are we now at just such a moment in
world history? Will the coronavirus permanently transform the relationship between the state
and the market?
Let's take a look at three key markets -- oil, food, and finance -- to measure the impact of
the pandemic and the prospects for transformation.
Oil
Shutterstock
In 2007, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa
offered to forgo digging for oil beneath the Yasuni national park in exchange for $3.6
billion from the international community. No one took him up on the offer.
When the U.S. price of oil went below zero last week, I immediately thought of Correa's
offer. The mainstream scoffed at the Ecuadorian leader back in 2007. How on earth could you
possibly propose to keep oil under the earth? The world economy runs on fossil fuels. You might
as well ask your kid to keep her Halloween candy uneaten in the back of the cupboard.
Today, however, the world is glutted with oil. The global recession has radically reduced
the need for oil and gas.
In the United States, transportation absorbs
nearly 70 percent of oil consumption. With airplanes grounded, fewer trains and busses in
operation, and highways uncongested, the demand for oil has dropped precipitously. Businesses,
too, are using less energy. It's not just oil. Companies devoted to pumping natural gas out of
shale deposits are filing for bankruptcy as their market value drops precipitously: the price
of a share of fracking giant Whiting Petroleum fell from $150 a couple years ago to 67
cents on March 31.
It's gotten to the point that you almost can't give away the stuff.
After all, if you somehow found yourself with a bunch of barrels of oil, where would you
store it? Oil-storage tanks in the United State are near capacity. "Oil supertankers are
looking like petroleum paparazzi, crowding the Los Angeles shoreline, either as floating
storage or waiting on some kind of turn in sentiment," Brian Sullivan
writes at CNBC . "With prices higher in coming months, for now it pays to sit on oil and
hope to sell it for more money down the pipeline."
Oil-producing nations, after years of boosting their supplies, finally agreed in mid-April
to cut production
by 10 percent -- about 10 million gallons a day. In other words, they are deciding to leave
oil in the ground. Now, however, it doesn't even qualify as a half-measure, since demand has
dropped by 35 percent. The oil producers are awaiting the end of recession, when the
quarantined go back to work, and everyone jumps on their transport of choice to make up for
lost travel. They are awaiting a return to normal.
But the market for fossil fuels is not normal. The notion that the invisible hand will steer
economies in a sustainable direction is hogwash. We are long past the moment when we should
have paid Correa and everyone else to leave the oil and gas in the ground and move toward a
world powered entirely by clean energy. The market treats the environment either as a commodity
like any other or as an "externality" that doesn't factor into the final price of goods and
services. That is so nineteenth century.
Climate change demands an intervention into the energy markets with restrictions on
production, subsidies for clean energies like solar, and government purchases of electric cars.
Returning to "normal" after the pandemic is not a viable option.
Food
Shutterstock
Like the oil exporters, food producers in the United States are restricting production as
well.
In Delaware and Maryland, chicken producers are euthanizing
two million chickens because the processing plants don't have enough workers. Sickness and
death in these facilities, which has caused closures that are disrupting the supply chain, has
prompted Trump to classify
such plants as "critical infrastructure" that needs to remain open. Meanwhile, thousands of
acres of fruits and vegetables
are rotting in the fields in Florida because of the suspension of bulk food sales to
schools, theme parks, and restaurants. The shortage of pickers -- often migrant laborers whose
mobility has been restricted -- is complicating harvests.
Unlike oil, however, the overall demand for food remains high. The grocery business
is
booming . Food banks are
overwhelmed by a surge unlike any in recent decades. The U.S. Department of Agriculture
ordinarily could swoop in and buy up surplus production -- as it did for soybean growers during
the trade war with China -- for use in food banks and other distribution programs. But as with
so many other government agencies in the Trump era, the USDA has been slow
to act , despite repeated pleas from growers and governors.
The pandemic is highlighting all the problems that have long plagued the food supply. First,
there is the mismatch between supply and demand. Around
820 million people globally didn't have enough to eat in 2018, a figure that had been
rising for three years in a row, and contrasts with another rising number: the 672 million
obese people in the world. In the United States, fully 40 percent of food goes to waste every year.
So, obviously the invisible hand does a pretty poor job of achieving market equilibrium.
Second, despite a growing movement to eat locally and seasonally, the food system still eats
up a huge amount of energy. The problem lies not so much with bananas arriving by cargo ship,
which is relatively efficient, but with perishable items delivered by plane . And it's what we eat,
rather than where the products come from, that matters most. "Regardless of whether you compare
the footprint of foods in terms of their weight (e.g. one kilogram of cheese versus one
kilogram of peas); protein content; or calories, the overall conclusion is the same,"
writes
Hannah Ritchie. "Plant-based foods tend to have a lower carbon footprint than meat and dairy.
In many cases a much smaller footprint."
Third, because of economies of scale and abysmal labor practices, food in the industrialized
world is too often grown by agribusiness, processed by transnational corporations, and picked
or handled by workers who don't even make close to a living wage.
Returning to this kind of food system after the pandemic fades would be truly unappetizing.
The livable wage campaign must spread to the countryside, meat substitutes must get an
additional lift through government and institutional purchases, and innovative programs like
the Too Good to Go app in Europe -- which sells extra restaurant and supermarket food at a
discount -- must be brought to the United States to cut down on food waste and get meals to
those in need.
Finance
Shutterstock
The financial crisis of 2008-2009 exposed the fragility and fundamental inequality of the
global financial system. But all along the invisible hand has been pickpocketing poor Peter to
pay prosperous Paul. Bankers, stockbrokers, and financial gurus have constructed a casino-like
system that occasionally doles out a few pennies to the people playing the slots even as it
enriches the house -- the top 1-2 percent -- at every turn.
The most outrageous part of this scheme is that the financial crisis demonstrated just how
bad the financiers were at their own game. Not only did they not go to prison for illegal
activities, they were with a few exceptions not even punished economically for their market
failures. They were either too big, too rich, or too powerful for the government to allow them
to fail.
In The New Yorker , Nick Paumgarten quotes
a prominent investment banker at a bond fund:
"In the financial crisis, we won the war but lost the peace." Instead of investing in
infrastructure, education, and job retraining, we emphasized, via a central-bank policy of
quantitative easing (what some people call printing money), the value of risk assets, like
stocks. "We collectively fell in love with finance," he said.
After the last financial crisis, the wealthy, who are heavily invested in the stock market,
did quite well, while everyone else took a hit.
Explains Colin Schultz in Smithsonian magazine: "While families hovering around the
average net worth lost 36 percent over the past decade -- dropping from $87,992 in 2003 to
$56,335 in 2013 -- people in the top 95th percentile actually gained 14 percent in the same
tumultuous period -- going from $740,700 in 2003 to $834,100 in 2013."
The Trump administration is clearly in love with finance. Even before the pandemic hit,
Trump's tax reform provided the top six U.S. banks with $32
billion in savings . That's more than what the 2008 bank bailout provided (and remember,
banks mostly paid back those earlier loans). The stock market also benefited from
an unprecedented upswing in stock buybacks -- $2 trillion combined in 2018 and 2019 -- that
enriched shareholders at the expense of workers.
The $2 trillion in initial stimulus funds that the U.S. government is providing this time
around has gone to individuals (those Trump-signed checks in the mail), small businesses
(except when it went to big businesses), hospitals, and unemployed workers. There's also money
for farmers, schools, food stamps, and (alas) the Pentagon. Future rounds of stimulus spending
might include infrastructure, more aid to states and localities, and funds for smaller
banks.
There's not much enthusiasm, at least publicly, to bail out Wall Street. Stock buybacks were
explicitly excluded from the stimulus package. Meanwhile, the stock market has begun to climb
out of the basement in the last couple weeks, largely on the strength of the news of all this
new money being pumped into the economy.
But just as the tax bill was a covert giveaway to financial institutions, so have been
several of the administration's pandemic responses. Quantitative easing, by which the Federal
Reserve buys bonds and mortgage-backed securities, has increased the amount of liquidity
available to financial institutions.
In the latest effort, the Fed announced that it will buy $500 billion in corporate bonds,
but without
any of the strings attached to other assistance such as limits on stock buybacks or
executive compensation. The banks are even nickel and diming people by seizing
stimulus check deposits to cover overdrawn accounts.
Out of a total pie of around $6 trillion in potential stimulus spending, banks and major
corporations are well-placed to grab the lion's share.
Writes Nomi Prins at TomDispatch:
In the end, according to the president, that could mean $4.5 trillion in support for
big banks and corporate entities versus something like $1.4 trillion for regular Americans,
small businesses, hospitals, and local and state governments. That 3.5 to 1 ratio signals
that, as in 2008, the Treasury and the Fed are focused on big banks and large corporations,
not everyday Americans.
Invisible hand? Hardly. That's the very visible hand of government tilting the financial
markets even more in favor of the rich. As for the invisible enrichment that goes on beneath
the surface, otherwise known as corruption, the Trump administration has
gutted the oversight mechanisms that could bring those abuses to light.
It's time to end America's love affair with finance. That means, in the short term, higher
taxes on the very rich,
limitations on CEO pay built into all bailouts, and reviving all the reasonable proposals
for reforming the financial sector that were either left out of or didn't get full implemented
in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed in the wake of the last
financial crisis.
Post-Pandemic Economics
Shutterstock
The Black Death depopulated Europe, killing as much as 60
percent of the population in the middle of the fourteenth century. Feudalism depended on
lots of peasants working the land to support the one percent of that era. By carrying off so
many of these workers, the Black Death made a major contribution to eroding the foundations of
the dominant economic system of the time.
The coronavirus will not kill anywhere near as many people as the Black Death did. But it
may well contribute to exposing the failures of "free markets" and the scandal of governments
intervening in the economy on behalf of this era's one percent. The pandemic is already, thanks
to huge stimulus packages, undermining the "small government" canard. A state apparatus
deliberately hobbled by the Trump administration -- after earlier "reforms" by both parties --
did a piss-poor job of dealing with this crisis. That doesn't bode well for dealing with the
even larger challenge of climate change.
The short-term fixes described above in the oil, food, and finance sectors are necessary but
insufficient. They shift the balance more toward the government and away from the "free"
market. They're not unlike the New Deal: reforming capitalism to save capitalism. But this
pandemic is pointing to an even more fundamental transformation, to a new definition of
economics.
The tweaking of markets to achieve optimal performance is much like the rejiggering of
earth-centric models of the universe that took place in the Middle Ages. These models became
more and more complex to account for new astronomical discoveries. Then along came Copernicus
with a heliocentric model that accounted for all the new data. It took some time, however, for
the old model to lose favor, despite its obvious failures.
The global economy remains market-centered, even though the evidence has been mounting that
these markets are failing us and the planet. Tweaking this model isn't good enough. We need a
new Copernicus who will provide a new theory that fits our unfolding reality, a new
environment-centered economics that can maximize not profit but the well-being of living
things. John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus.
A lockdown in a lot of places seems to be justified on the basis of the fact that even if you
are middle aged, the chances of hospitalization are still around 5 percent, and in the US
going to the hospital for a week or weeks can leave you bankrupt.
@AP The interesting
& important thing to note is that fatalities are heavily tied to the related factors
of pre-existing conditions and advanced age. For example:
With CQ/AZ/ZN available everywhere, the bulk of the economy could reopen immediately with
or without masks. Given that psychology is important, odds are mask wearing will make the
restart more effective. However, masks provide partial protection at most.
@utu Epidemiology
uses R0 for an initial reproductive rate when a pathogen first invades a naive host
population. Re is the designation for later when immunity begins to exist and, for human
beings in the current pandemic, host behavior changes.
America's billionaires saw their combined net worth soar by $434 billion between March 18
and May 19 while the coronavirus pandemic killed tens of thousands of people and ravaged the
U.S. economy, forcing more than 30 million out of work.
The report shows that the five wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. -- Jeff Bezos of Amazon,
Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, and
Larry Ellison of Oracle -- saw their collective wealth grow by a total of $75.5 billion between
March 18 and May 19, a 19% jump.
Bezos -- the world's richest man -- saw his wealth jump by nearly $35 billion in the
two-month period. Yet even as Bezos' fortune continues to grow, Amazon
announced last week that it will not extend $2-an-hour hazard pay for warehouse workers
beyond the end of May.
A progressive organization of 23,000 physicians from across the U.S. demanded Thursday that
the American Hospital Association (AHA) divest completely from a dark-money lobbying group that
has spent millions combating Medicare for All and instead devote those financial resources to
the fight against Covid-19 and to better support for patients and healthcare workers.
Dr. Adam Gaffney, president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), said in a
statement that "the Covid-19 pandemic has stretched hospitals' resources to the limit, and the
AHA should not waste precious member hospitals' funds lobbying against universal health
coverage" as a member of the Partnership for America's Health Care Future (PFAHCF).
Because Medicare for All would provide a lifeline to hospitals in underserved areas that
have been hit hard by Covid-19, Gaffney argued, the AHA "cannot claim to represent hospitals
while also opposing a single-payer system that would keep struggling hospitals open." The AHA
represents around 5,000 hospitals and other healthcare providers in the U.S.
As Common Dreams
reported earlier this month, public health officials are accusing the Trump administration
of directing billions of dollars in Covid-19 hospital bailout funds to high-revenue providers
while restricting money to hospitals that serve low-income areas.
Tenet Healthcare, an investor-owned hospital company that has donated hundreds of
thousands to PFAHCF, has received $345 million in Covid-19 bailout funds, Axios
reported last month.
"The AHA should immediately leave the PFAHCF," Gaffney said, "and redirect that money to
supporting patients and frontline healthcare workers."
"As physicians, we can no longer tolerate a health system that puts profits ahead of
patients and public health," Gaffney added. "It's time for health professionals to hold
accountable the organizations that claim to represent us."
Formed in the summer of 2018 by an alliance of pharmaceutical, insurance, and hospital
lobbyists with the goal of countering the push for universal healthcare, PFAHCF's anti-Medicare
for All " army "
has grown rapidly since its founding, with the AHA joining the fray in 2019.
As The Interceptreported last
October, the for-profit hospital industry has played an "integral role" in the corporate fight
against single-payer.
Dear Corporate America: maybe
you remember the old Johnny Paycheck tune? Let me refresh your memory: take this job and shove it.
Put yourself in the shoes of a single parent waiting tables in a working-class cafe with
lousy tips, a worker stuck with high rent and a soul-deadening commute
--one of the tens of
millions of America's
working poor
who have seen their wages stagnate and their income
becoming increasingly precarious / uncertain while the cost of living has soared.
Unemployment and the federal
stimulus bonus
of $600 a week are far more than your
regular wages, including tips.
Exactly why do you want to go back to your miserable job and
low pay? Why wouldn't you take time off and enjoy life a little, which is what you've been wanting to
do for years?
Indeed--why not? The pandemic is giving many permission to get what they always wanted.
Consider
these examples:
1. The Federal Reserve has always pined for the power to bail out the top .01% / the New
Nobility the way they deserve, with unlimited money-printing and the Fed being able to buy every
rigged, fraudulent asset spewed by the New Nobility's financial and corporate predators and
parasites.
Yee-haw, the pandemic genie granted your wish: there's no limits on how many trillions you can
shove into the greedy maw of the top .01%, and bail out every single one of their predatory,
exploitive,
legalized looting
bets that went south.
2. Local officials always wanted to commandeer some motels and shove the homeless into them, to
clear the sidewalks and parks and then claim "homeless problem solved." Presto, your wish has been
granted.
3. Central government authorities have always resented all those pesky civil liberties
restraints on their unquenchable desires to control every tiny aspect of life, public and private,
and now--voila, the doors to Petty Authoritarian Heaven have opened. Question our authority? A
tenner
in
the gulag for you, Doubter of All That Is Great and Good.
4. Restaurant owners who on camera always have to say how much they love their customers and
business, never mind the money, who secretly have come to loathe their over-entitled,
self-absorbed, dilettante customers and are sick and tired of the soaring rent, business licenses,
insurance, payroll taxes and costs of ingredients.
You know what, pal? Here's the keys, you can re-open whatever the heck you want, I'm outta here.
I've been secretly wishing I could get out from underneath this crushing burden and get my life
back. Yes, it was exciting way back when, but now it's nothing but an endless grind that wasn't
making money even before the pandemic.
5. Since the financiers, Big Tech mini-gods and stock buyback crowd have looted and pillaged
their way to immense fortunes by lying, cheating, conniving and gaming, why not
follow the
money
just like the predators and parasites at the top of the heap?
Indeed, why not fudge the application for a federal small business loan and use the "free
money"
to
lease that shiny new Rolls Royce
you always desired? Well, haven't the authorities been begging
us to borrow and spend like there's no tomorrow?
6. Dear Corporate America: maybe you remember the old Johnny Paycheck tune? Let me refresh your
memory:
take this job and shove it, I ain't working here no more.
If there's a
will, there's a way, and I'm stepping off the rat race merry-go-round, thank you very much. You can
find some other sucker to do your dirty work and BS work, all for the greater glory and wealth of
your New Nobility shareholders. I'm outta here. So I won't get rich, that dream died a long time
ago. What I'm interested in now is getting my life back.
The pandemic might not follow the Central Casting script of a V-shaped return to debt-serf,
BS-work wonderfulness.
Everyone who was sick and tired of their pre-pandemic life and the
endless exploitation has had time to think things over, and some consequential percentage of them will
welcome "good-bye to all that" and others will decide not to go back, even if that is still an option.
It's called opting out, and it has always characterized the end of imperial pretensions,
pillaging, propaganda and predation. Financial parasites, beware the second-order effects of your
overweening dominance and limitless greed.
President Donald Trump told Republican senators during a private lunch Tuesday that he is willing to let expanded unemployment
benefits expire at the end of July, a decision that would
massively slash the incomes of tens of millions
of people who have lost their jobs due to the Covid-19 crisis.
The Washington Post
reported Tuesday that the president "privately expressed opposition to extending a weekly $600 boost in unemployment insurance
for laid-off workers affected by the coronavirus pandemic, according to three officials familiar with his remarks."
House Democrats passed legislation last week that would extend the beefed-up unemployment benefits through January of 2021 as
experts and government officials -- including Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell --
warn the
U.S. unemployment rate could soon reach 25%. The unemployment insurance boost under the CARES Act is set to expire on July 31, even
as many
people have yet to receive their first check.
"With nearly 1 in 5 Americans out of work, Donald Trump's plan is to cut off the boost to unemployment benefits and shower his
wealthy buddies with more tax cuts," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of the architects of the unemployment insurance expansion,
toldHuffPost . "This is the worst economic crisis in 100 years and Donald Trump is doubling down on Herbert Hoover's economic
playbook and pushing workers to risk their health for his political benefit."
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) -- who
declared earlier this month that Congress will only extend the boosted unemployment insurance "over our dead bodies" -- said
after the private lunch that Trump believes the benefits are "hurting the economic recovery." Graham was one of several Republican
senators who
opposed the initial expansion of unemployment benefits as too generous.
An
analysis
released last week by the Hamilton Project, an initiative of the Brookings Institution, found that expanded unemployment benefits
offset "roughly half of lost wages and salaries in April." Unemployment insurance has "been essential to families, and is vital for
keeping the economy from cratering further," the authors of the analysis noted.
Ernie Tedeschi, a former Treasury Department economist,
estimated that "come July 31, if the emergency
UI top-up isn't extended, unemployed workers will effectively get a pay cut of 50-75% overnight."
"It's increasingly looking like there won't be enough labor demand to hire them all back at that point," Tedeschi tweeted.
The latest Labor Department statistics showed that
more than 36 million
people in the U.S. have filed jobless claims since mid-March as mass layoffs continue in the absence of government action to
keep workers on company payrolls. Despite the grim numbers, the Post 's Jeff Stein reported Tuesday that the White House
is "
predicting a swift economic recovery " as it resists additional efforts to provide relief to frontline workers and the unemployed.
On top of rejecting an extension of enhanced unemployment insurance, Trump last month
publicly voiced opposition to another round of direct stimulus payments, instead advocating a cut to the tax that funds Social
Security and Medicare.
Demanding McDonald's prioritize public health and worker safety over profits, hundreds of
employees at the fast food chain
went on strike Wednesday, a day before the company was set to hold its annual shareholders'
meeting.
Instead of distributing dividends to its shareholders, the striking employees are calling
for the company to use its massive profits to pay for safety and financial protections for
workers, scores of whom have contracted Covid-19 in at least 16 states so far.
Employees and strike organizers at the fair wage advocacy group Fight for $15 are demanding
hazard pay during the pandemic of "$15X2," paid sick leave, sufficient protective gear for
workers, and company-wide policy of closing a restaurant for two weeks when an employee becomes
infected, with workers being fully paid.
The strike is taking place at stores in at least 20 cities. Fight for $15 and the SEIU,
which is also supporting the action, say it's the first nationwide coordinated effort targeting
the company since the coronavirus pandemic began in March.
"... In France, confinement has been generally well accepted as necessary, but that does not mean people are content with the government -- on the contrary. Every evening at eight, people go to their windows to cheer for health workers and others doing essential tasks, but the applause is not for President Macron. ..."
"... What we have witnessed is the failure of what used to be one of the very best public health services in the world. It has been degraded by years of cost-cutting. In recent years, the number of hospital beds per capita has declined steadily. Many hospitals have been shut down and those that remain are drastically understaffed. Public hospital facilities have been reduced to a state of perpetual saturation, so that when a new epidemic comes along, on top of all the other usual illnesses, there is simply not the capacity to deal with it all at once. ..."
"... The neoliberal globalization myth fostered the delusion that advanced Western societies could prosper from their superior brains, thanks to ideas and computer startups, while the dirty work of actually making things is left to low-wage countries. One result: a drastic shortage of face masks. The government let a factory that produced masks and other surgical equipment be sold off and shut down. Having outsourced its textile industry, France had no immediate way to produce the masks it needed. ..."
"... In late March, French media reported that a large stock of masks ordered and paid for by the southeastern region of France was virtually hijacked on the tarmac of a Chinese airport by Americans, who tripled the price and had the cargo flown to the United States. There are also reports of Polish and Czech airport authorities intercepting Chinese or Russian shipments of masks intended for hard-hit Italy and keeping them for their own use. ..."
"... The Covid–19 crisis makes it just that much clearer that the European Union is no more than a complex economic arrangement, with neither the sentiment nor the popular leaders that hold together a nation. For a generation, schools, media, politicians have instilled the belief that the "nation" is an obsolete entity. But in a crisis, people find that they are in France, or Germany, or Italy, or Belgium -- but not in "Europe." The European Union is structured to care about trade, investment, competition, debt, economic growth. Public health is merely an economic indicator. For decades, the European Commission has put irresistible pressure on nations to reduce the costs of their public health facilities in order to open competition for contracts to the private sector -- which is international by nature. ..."
"... Scapegoating China may seem the way to try to hold the declining Western world together, even as Europeans' long-standing admiration for America turns to dismay. ..."
"... The countries that have suffered most from the epidemic are among the most indebted of the EU member states, starting with Italy. The economic damage from the lockdown obliges them to borrow further. As their debt increases, so do interest rates charged by commercial banks. They turned to the EU for help, for instance by issuing eurobonds that would share the debt at lower interest rates. This has increased tension between debtor countries in the south and creditor countries in the north, which said nein . Countries in the eurozone cannot borrow from the European Central Bank as the U.S. Treasury borrows from the Fed. And their own national central banks take orders from the ECB, which controls the euro. ..."
"... The great irony is that "a common currency" was conceived by its sponsors as the key to European unity. On the contrary, the euro has a polarizing effect -- with Greece at the bottom and Germany at the top. And Italy sinking. But Italy is much bigger than Greece and won't go quietly. ..."
"... A major paradox is that the left and the Yellow Vests call for economic and social policies that are impossible under EU rules, and yet many on the left shy away from even thinking of leaving the EU. For over a generation, the French left has made an imaginary "social Europe" the center of its utopian ambitions. ..."
"... Russia is a living part of European history and culture. Its exclusion is totally unnatural and artificial. Brzezinski [the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter administration's national security adviser] spelled it out in The Great Chessboard : The U.S. maintains world hegemony by keeping the Eurasian landmass divided. ..."
"... But this policy can be seen to be inherited from the British. It was Churchill who proclaimed -- in fact welcomed -- the Iron Curtain that kept continental Europe divided. In retrospect, the Cold War was basically part of the divide-and-rule strategy, since it persists with greater intensity than ever after its ostensible cause -- the Communist threat -- is long gone. ..."
"... The whole Ukrainian operation of 2014 [the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kyiv, February 2014] was lavishly financed and stimulated by the United States in order to create a new conflict with Russia. Joe Biden has been the Deep State's main front man in turning Ukraine into an American satellite, used as a battering ram to weaken Russia and destroy its natural trade and cultural relations with Western Europe. ..."
"... I think France is likelier than Germany to break with the U.S.–imposed Russophobia simply because, thanks to de Gaulle, France is not quite as thoroughly under U.S. occupation. Moreover, friendship with Russia is a traditional French balance against German domination -- which is currently being felt and resented. ..."
"... "Decades of indoctrination in the ideology of "Europe" has instilled the belief that the nation-state is a bad thing of the past. The result is that people raised in the European Union faith tend to regard any suggestion of return to national sovereignty as a fatal step toward fascism. This fear of contagion from "the right" is an obstacle to clear analysis which weakens the left and favors the right, which dares be patriotic." ..."
"... Since WWII the US has itself been occupied by tyrants, using Russophobia to demand power as fake defenders. ..."
"... " French philosophy .By constantly attacking, deconstructing, and denouncing every remnant of human "power" they could spot, the intellectual rebels left the power of "the markets" unimpeded, and did nothing to stand in the way of the expansion of U.S. military power all around the world " ..."
"... From her groundbreaking work on the NATO empire's sickening war on sovereign Serbia, the dead end of identity politics and trans bathroom debates, to her critique of unfettered immigration and open borders, and her dismissal of the absurd Russsiagate baloney, better than anyone else, Johnstone has kept her intellect carefully honed to the real genuine kitchen table bread and butter issues that truly matter. She recognized before most of the world's scholars the perils of rampant inequality and saw the writing on the wall as to where this grotesque economic system is taking us all: down a dystopian slope into penury and police-state heavy-handedness, with millions unable to come up with $500 for an emergency car repair or dental bill. ..."
"... The mask competition and fiasco shows the importance of a country simply making things in their own country, not on the other side of the world, it's not nationalism it's just a better way to logistically deliver reliable products to the citizens. ..."
"... Some hold that they never departed, but mutated tools including CFA zones and "intelligence" relations in furtherance of "changing" to remain qualitatively the same. Just as "The United States of America" is a system of coercive relations not synonymous with the political geographical area designated "The United States of America", the colonialism of former and present "colonial powers" continues to exist, since the "independence" of the colonised was always, and continues to be, framed within linear systems of coercive relations, facilitated by the complicity of "local elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest, and the acquiescence of "local others" for myriad reasons. ..."
"... After reading Circle in the Darkness, I have ordered and am now reading her books on Hillary Clinton (Queen of Chaos) and the Yugoslav wars (Fool's Crusade), which are very worthwhile and important. I would recommend that her many articles over the years, appearing in such publications such as In These Times, Counterpunch and Consortium News, be reprinted and published together as an anthology. Through Circle in the Darkness, we have Diana Johnstone's "Life", but it would be good also to have her "Letters". ..."
"... Mr. de Gaulle like other "leaders" of colonial powers did understand that the moment of overt coercive relations of colonialism had passed and that colonialism to remain qualitatively the same, required covert coercive relations facilitated by the complicity of local "elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest. ..."
In France, confinement has been generally well accepted as necessary, but that does not mean
people are content with the government -- on the contrary. Every evening at eight, people go to
their windows to cheer for health workers and others doing essential tasks, but the applause is
not for President Macron.
Macron and his government are criticized for hesitating too long to confine the population,
for vacillating about the need for masks and tests, or about when or how much to end the
confinement. Their confusion and indecision at least defend them from the wild accusation of
having staged the whole thing in order to lock up the population.
What we have witnessed is the failure of what used to be one of the very best public health
services in the world. It has been degraded by years of cost-cutting. In recent years, the
number of hospital beds per capita has declined steadily. Many hospitals have been shut down
and those that remain are drastically understaffed. Public hospital facilities have been
reduced to a state of perpetual saturation, so that when a new epidemic comes along, on top of
all the other usual illnesses, there is simply not the capacity to deal with it all at
once.
The neoliberal globalization myth fostered the delusion that advanced Western societies
could prosper from their superior brains, thanks to ideas and computer startups, while the
dirty work of actually making things is left to low-wage countries. One result: a drastic
shortage of face masks. The government let a factory that produced masks and other surgical
equipment be sold off and shut down. Having outsourced its textile industry, France had no
immediate way to produce the masks it needed.
Meanwhile, in early April, Vietnam donated hundreds of thousands of antimicrobial face masks
to European countries and is producing them by the million. Employing tests and selective
isolation, Vietnam has fought off the epidemic with only a few hundred cases and no deaths.
You must have thoughts as to the question of Western unity in response to
Covid–19.
In late March, French media reported that a large stock of masks ordered and paid for by the
southeastern region of France was virtually hijacked on the tarmac of a Chinese airport by
Americans, who tripled the price and had the cargo flown to the United States. There are also
reports of Polish and Czech airport authorities intercepting Chinese or Russian shipments of
masks intended for hard-hit Italy and keeping them for their own use.
The absence of European solidarity has been shockingly clear. Better-equipped Germany banned
exports of masks to Italy. In the depth of its crisis, Italy found that the German and Dutch
governments were mainly concerned with making sure Italy pays its debts. Meanwhile, a team of
Chinese experts arrived in Rome to help Italy with its Covid–19 crisis, displaying a
banner reading "We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same
garden." The European institutions lack such humanistic poetry. Their founding value is not
solidarity but the neoliberal principle of "free unimpeded competition."
How do you think this reflects on the European Union?
The Covid–19 crisis makes it just that much clearer that the European Union is no more
than a complex economic arrangement, with neither the sentiment nor the popular leaders that
hold together a nation. For a generation, schools, media, politicians have instilled the belief
that the "nation" is an obsolete entity. But in a crisis, people find that they are in France,
or Germany, or Italy, or Belgium -- but not in "Europe." The European Union is structured to
care about trade, investment, competition, debt, economic growth. Public health is merely an
economic indicator. For decades, the European Commission has put irresistible pressure on
nations to reduce the costs of their public health facilities in order to open competition for
contracts to the private sector -- which is international by nature.
Globalization has hastened the spread of the pandemic, but it has not strengthened
internationalist solidarity. Initial gratitude for Chinese aid is being brutally opposed by
European Atlanticists. In early May, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the Springer publishing
giant, bluntly called on Germany to ally with the U.S. -- against China. Scapegoating China may
seem the way to try to hold the declining Western world together, even as Europeans'
long-standing admiration for America turns to dismay.
Meanwhile, relations between EU member states have never been worse. In Italy and to a
greater extent in France, the coronavirus crisis has enforced growing disillusion with the
European Union and an ill-defined desire to restore national sovereignty.
Corollary question: What are the prospects that Europe will produce leaders capable of
seizing that right moment, that assertion of independence? What do you reckon such leaders
would be like?
The EU is likely to be a central issue in the near future, but this issue can be exploited
in very different ways, depending on which leaders get hold of it. The coronavirus crisis has
intensified the centrifugal forces already undermining the European Union. The countries that
have suffered most from the epidemic are among the most indebted of the EU member states,
starting with Italy. The economic damage from the lockdown obliges them to borrow further. As
their debt increases, so do interest rates charged by commercial banks. They turned to the EU
for help, for instance by issuing eurobonds that would share the debt at lower interest rates.
This has increased tension between debtor countries in the south and creditor countries in the
north, which said nein . Countries in the eurozone cannot borrow from the European
Central Bank as the U.S. Treasury borrows from the Fed. And their own national central banks
take orders from the ECB, which controls the euro.
What does the crisis mean for the euro? I confess I've lost faith in this project, given
how disadvantaged it leaves the nations on the Continent's southern rim.
The great irony is that "a common currency" was conceived by its sponsors as the key to
European unity. On the contrary, the euro has a polarizing effect -- with Greece at the bottom
and Germany at the top. And Italy sinking. But Italy is much bigger than Greece and won't go
quietly.
The German constitutional court in Karlsruhe recently issued a long judgment making it clear
who is boss. It recalled and insisted that Germany agreed to the euro only on the grounds that
the main mission of the European Central Bank was to fight inflation, and that it could not
directly finance member states. If these rules were not followed, the Bundesbank, the German
central bank, would be obliged to pull out of the ECB. And since the Bundesbank is the ECB's
main creditor, that is that. There can be no generous financial help to troubled governments
within the eurozone. Period.
Is there a possibility of disintegration here?
The idea of leaving the EU is most developed in France. The Union Populaire
Républicaine, founded in 2007 by former senior functionary François Asselineau,
calls for France to leave the euro, the European Union, and NATO.
The party has been a didactic success, spreading its ideas and attracting around 20,000
active militants without scoring any electoral success. A main argument for leaving the EU is
to escape from the constraints of EU competition rules in order to protect its vital industry,
agriculture, and above all its public services.
A major paradox is that the left and the Yellow Vests call for economic and social policies
that are impossible under EU rules, and yet many on the left shy away from even thinking of
leaving the EU. For over a generation, the French left has made an imaginary "social Europe"
the center of its utopian ambitions.
" Europe" as an idea or an ideal, you mean.
Decades of indoctrination in the ideology of "Europe" has instilled the belief that the
nation-state is a bad thing of the past. The result is that people raised in the European Union
faith tend to regard any suggestion of return to national sovereignty as a fatal step toward
fascism. This fear of contagion from "the right" is an obstacle to clear analysis which weakens
the left and favors the right, which dares be patriotic.
Two and a half months of coronavirus crisis have brought to light a factor that makes any
predictions about future leaders even more problematic. That factor is a widespread distrust
and rejection of all established authority. This makes rational political programs extremely
difficult, because rejection of one authority implies acceptance of another. For instance, the
way to liberate public services and pharmaceuticals from the distortions of the profit motive
is nationalization. If you distrust the power of one as much as the other, there is nowhere to
go.
Such radical distrust can be explained by two main factors -- the inevitable feeling of
helplessness in our technologically advanced world, combined with the deliberate and even
transparent lies on the part of mainstream politicians and media. But it sets the stage for the
emergence of manipulated saviors or opportunistic charlatans every bit as deceptive as the
leaders we already have, or even more so. I hope these irrational tendencies are less
pronounced in France than in some other countries.
I'm eager to talk about Russia. There are signs that relations with Russia are another
source of European dissatisfaction as "junior partners" within the U.S.–led Atlantic
alliance. Macron is outspoken on this point, "junior partners" being his phrase. The Germans --
business people, some senior officials in government -- are quite plainly restive.
Russia is a living part of European history and culture. Its exclusion is totally unnatural
and artificial. Brzezinski [the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter administration's national
security adviser] spelled it out in The Great Chessboard : The U.S. maintains world
hegemony by keeping the Eurasian landmass divided.
But this policy can be seen to be inherited
from the British. It was Churchill who proclaimed -- in fact welcomed -- the Iron Curtain that
kept continental Europe divided. In retrospect, the Cold War was basically part of the
divide-and-rule strategy, since it persists with greater intensity than ever after its
ostensible cause -- the Communist threat -- is long gone.
I hadn't put our current circumstance in this context. US-backed, violent coup in Ukraine, 2014.
The whole Ukrainian operation of 2014 [the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kyiv, February
2014] was lavishly financed and stimulated by the United States in order to create a new
conflict with Russia. Joe Biden has been the Deep State's main front man in turning Ukraine
into an American satellite, used as a battering ram to weaken Russia and destroy its natural
trade and cultural relations with Western Europe.
U.S. sanctions are particularly contrary to German business interests, and NATO's aggressive
gestures put Germany on the front lines of an eventual war.
But Germany has been an occupied country -- militarily and politically -- for 75 years, and
I suspect that many German political leaders (usually vetted by Washington) have learned to fit
their projects into U.S. policies. I think that under the cover of Atlantic loyalty, there are
some frustrated imperialists lurking in the German establishment, who think they can use
Washington's Russophobia as an instrument to make a comeback as a world military power.
But I also think that the political debate in Germany is overwhelmingly hypocritical, with
concrete aims veiled by fake issues such as human rights and, of course, devotion to
Israel.
We should remember that the U.S. does not merely use its allies -- its allies, or rather
their leaders, figure they are using the U.S. for some purposes of their own.
What about what the French have been saying since the G–7 session in Biarritz two
years ago, that Europe should forge its own relations with Russia according to Europe's
interests, not America's?
At G7 Summit in Biarritz, France, Aug. 26, 2019. (White House)
I think France is likelier than Germany to break with the U.S.–imposed Russophobia
simply because, thanks to de Gaulle, France is not quite as thoroughly under U.S. occupation.
Moreover, friendship with Russia is a traditional French balance against German domination --
which is currently being felt and resented.
Stepping back for a broader look, do you think Europe's position on the western flank of
the Eurasian landmass will inevitably shape its position with regard not only to Russia but
also China? To put this another way, is Europe destined to become an independent pole of power
in the course of this century, standing between West and East?
At present, what we have standing between West and East is not Europe but Russia, and what
matters is which way Russia leans. Including Russia, Europe might become an independent pole of
power. The U.S. is currently doing everything to prevent this. But there is a school of
strategic thought in Washington which considers this a mistake, because it pushes Russia into
the arms of China. This school is in the ascendant with the campaign to denounce China as
responsible for the pandemic. As mentioned, the Atlanticists in Europe are leaping into the
anti–China propaganda battle. But they are not displaying any particular affection for
Russia, which shows no sign of sacrificing its partnership with China for the unreliable
Europeans.
If Russia were allowed to become a friendly bridge between China and Europe, the U.S. would
be obliged to abandon its pretensions of world hegemony. But we are far from that peaceful
prospect.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International
Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is
"Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via
his Patreon site .
Josep , May 19, 2020 at 02:04
It recalled and insisted that Germany agreed to the euro only on the grounds that the
main mission of the European Central Bank was to fight inflation, and that it could not
directly finance member states.
I once read a comment elsewhere saying that, back in 1989, both Britain (under Margaret
Thatcher) and the US objected to German reunification. Since they could not stop the
reunification, they insisted that Germany accept the incoming euro. A heap of German
university professors jumped up and protested, knowing fully well what the game was: namely
the creation of a banker's empire in Europe controlled by private bankers.
Thorben Sunkimat , May 20, 2020 at 13:45
France and Britain rejected the german reunification. The americans were supportive, even
though they had their demands. Mainly privatisation of german public utilities. After
agreeing to those demands the americans persuaded the british and pressured the french who
agreed to german reunification after germany agreed to the euro.
So why did france want the euro?
The German central bank crashed the European economy after reunification with high interest
rates. This was because of above average growth rates mainly in Eastern Germany. Main
function of the Bundesbank is to keep inflation low, which is more important to them than
anything else. Since Germany's D Mark was the leading currency in Europe the rest of Europe
had to heighten their interest rates too, witch lead to great economic problems within
Europe. Including France.
OlyaPola , May 21, 2020 at 05:30
"namely the creation of a banker's empire in Europe controlled by private bankers."
Resort to binaries (controlled/not controlled) is a practice of self-imposed
blindness. In any interactive system no absolutes exist only analogues of varying assays since
"control" is limited and variable. In respect of what became the German Empire this relationship predated and facilitated the
German Empire through financing the war with Denmark in 1864 courtesy of the arrangements
between Mr. von Bismark and Mr. Bleichroder. The assay of "control of bankers" has varied/increased subsequently but never attained the
absolute.
It is true that finance capital perceived and continues to perceive the European Union as
an opportunity to increase their assay of "control" – the Austrian banks in conjunction
with German bank assigning a level of priority to resurrecting spheres of influence existing
prior to 1918 and until 1945.
One of the joint projects at a level of planning in the early 1990's was development of
the Danube and its hinterland from Regensburg to Cerna Voda/Constanta in Romania but this was
delayed in the hope of curtailment by some when NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 (Serbia not being
the only target – so much for honesty-amongst-theives.)
This project was resurrected in a limited form primarily downstream from Vidin/Calafat
from 2015 onwards given that some states of the former Yugoslavia were not members of the
European Union and some were within spheres of influence of "The United States of
America".
As to France, "Vichy" and Europa also facilitated the resurrection of finance capital and
increase in its assay of control after the 1930's, some of the practices of the 1940's still
being subject to dispute in France.
mkb29 , May 18, 2020 at 16:33
I've always admired Diana Johnstone's clear headed analyses of world/European/U.S./
China/Israel-Palestine/Russia/ interactions and the motivation of its "players". She has
given some credence to what as been known as French rationalism and enlightenment. (Albeit as
an American expat) Think Descartes, Diderot, Sartre , and She loves France in her own
rationalist-humanist way.
Linda J , May 18, 2020 at 13:21
I have admired Ms. Johnstone's work for quite awhile. This enlightening interview spurs me
to get a copy of the book and to contribute to Consortium News.
Others may be interested in the two-part video discovered yesterday featuring Douglas
Valentine's analysis of the CIA's corporate backers and their global choke-hold on
governments and their influencers in every region of the world.
Part 1
see:youtu(dot)be/cP15Ehx1yvI
Part 2
see:youtu(dot)be/IYvvEn_N1sE
worldblee , May 18, 2020 at 12:26
Not many have the long distance perspective on the world, let alone Europe, that Diana
Johnstone has. Great interview!
Drew Hunkins , May 18, 2020 at 11:03
"Decades of indoctrination in the ideology of "Europe" has instilled the belief that the
nation-state is a bad thing of the past. The result is that people raised in the European
Union faith tend to regard any suggestion of return to national sovereignty as a fatal step
toward fascism. This fear of contagion from "the right" is an obstacle to clear analysis
which weakens the left and favors the right, which dares be patriotic."
Bingo! A marvelous point indeed! Quick little example -- Bernard Sanders should have worn an American flag pin on his suit
during the 2020 Dem primary campaign.
chris , May 18, 2020 at 04:46
A very good analysis. As an American who has relocated to Spain several years ago, I am
always disappointed that discussions of European politics always assume that Europe ends at
the Pyrenees. Admittedly, Spanish politics is very complicated and confusing. Forty years of
an unreconstructed dictatorship have left their mark, but the country´s socialist,
communist and anarchic currents never went away. I like to say that the country is very
conservative, but at least the population is aware of what is going on.
Perhaps what Ms.
Johnston says about the French being just worn out, with no stomach for more violent conflict
also applies to the Spanish since their great ideological struggle is more recent. The
American influence during the Transition (which changed little – as the expression
goes: The same dog but with a different collar) was very strong, and remains so. Even so,
there is popular support for foreign and domestic policies independent of American and
neoliberal control, but by and large the political and economic powers are not on board. I do
not think Spain is willing to make a break alone, but would align itself with an European
shift away from American control.
As Ms. Johnston says, Europe currently lacks leaders
willing to take the plunge, but we will see what the coming year brings.
Sam F , May 17, 2020 at 17:45
Thank you Diana, these are valuable insights. Since WWII the US has itself been occupied by tyrants, using Russophobia to demand power
as fake defenders.
1. Waving the flag and praising the lord on mass media, claiming concern with human rights
and "Israel"; while
2. Subverting the Constitution with large scale bribery, surveillance, and genocides, all
business as usual nowadays.
In the US, the form of government has become bribery and marketing lies; it truly knows no
other way.
It may be better that Russia and China keep their distance from the US and maybe even the
EU:
1. The US and EU would have to produce what they consume, eventually empowering workers;
2. Neither the US nor EU are a political or economic model for anyone, and should be
ignored;
3. Neither the US nor EU produces much that Russia and China cannot, by investing more in
cars and soybeans.
It will be best for the EU if it also rejects the US and its "neolib" economic and
political tyranny mechanisms:
1. Alliance with Russia and China will cause substantial gains in stability and economic
strength;
2. Forcing the US to abandon its "pretensions of world hegemony" will soon yield more
peaceful prospects; and
3. Isolating the US will force it to improve its utterly corrupt government and society,
maybe 40 to 60 years hence.
Drew Hunkins , May 17, 2020 at 15:40
" French philosophy .By constantly attacking, deconstructing, and denouncing every remnant
of human "power" they could spot, the intellectual rebels left the power of "the markets"
unimpeded, and did nothing to stand in the way of the expansion of U.S. military power all
around the world "
Brilliant. Exactly right. This was the progenitor to our contemporary I.D. politics which seems to be solely
obsessed with vocabulary, semantics and non-economic cultural issues while rarely having a
critique of corporate capitalism, militarism, massive inequality and Zionism. And it almost
never advocates for robust economic populist proposals like Med4All, U.B.I., debt jubilee,
and the fight for $15.
Drew Hunkins , May 17, 2020 at 15:10
The book is phenomenal. I posted a customer review over on Amazon for this stupendous
work. Below is a copy of my review:
(5 stars) One of the most important intellects pens her magisterial lasting legacy
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2020
Johnstone's been an idol of mine ever since I started reading her in the 1990s. She's
clearly proved her worthiness over the decades by bucking the mainstream trend of apologetics
for corporate capitalism, neoliberalism, globalism and imperialistic militarism her entire
career and this astonishing memoir details it all in what will likely be the finest book of
2020 and perhaps the entire decade.
Her writing style is beyond superb, her grasp of the overarching politico-socio-economic
issues that have rocked the world over the past 60 years is as astute and spot-on as you will
find from any global thinker. She's right up there with Michael Parenti, James Petras, John
Pilger and Noam Chomsky as seminal figures who have documented and brought light to tens of
thousands (millions?) of people across the globe via their writings, interviews and speaking
engagements.
Johnstone has never been one to shy away from controversial topics and issues. Why?
Simple, she has the facts and truth on her side, she always has. Circle in the Darkness
proves all this and more, she marshals the documentation and lays it out as an exquisite gift
for struggling working people around the world.
From her groundbreaking work on the NATO
empire's sickening war on sovereign Serbia, the dead end of identity politics and trans
bathroom debates, to her critique of unfettered immigration and open borders, and her
dismissal of the absurd Russsiagate baloney, better than anyone else, Johnstone has kept her
intellect carefully honed to the real genuine kitchen table bread and butter issues that
truly matter. She recognized before most of the world's scholars the perils of rampant
inequality and saw the writing on the wall as to where this grotesque economic system is
taking us all: down a dystopian slope into penury and police-state heavy-handedness, with
millions unable to come up with $500 for an emergency car repair or dental bill.
Whenever she comes out with a new article or essay I immediately drop everything and
devour it, often reading it twice to let her wisdom really soak in. So too Circle of Darkness
is an extremely well written beautiful work that will scream out to be re-read every few
years by those with a hunger to know exactly what was going on since the Korean War era
through today regarding liberal thought, neocon and neoliberal dominance with its capitalist
global hegemony and the take over of Western governments by the parasitic financial
elite.
There will never be another Diana Johnstone. Circle in the Darkness will stand as her
lasting legacy to all of us.
Bob Van Noy , May 17, 2020 at 14:43
"As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding
it" ~Albert Einstein
Many Thanks CN, Patrick Lawrence, and Joe Lauria. Once again I must commend CN for picking
just the appropriate response to our contemporary dilemma.
The quote above leads Diana Johnstone's new book and succinctly describes both the
universe and our contemporary experience with our digital age. President Kennedy and Charles
de Gaulle of France would agree that colonialism was past and that a new world (geopolitical)
approach would become necessary, but that philosophy would put them against some great local
and world powers. Each of them necessarily had different approaches as to how this might be
accomplished. They were never allowed to present their specific proposals on a world stage.
Let's hope a wiser population will once again "see" this possibility and find a way to
resolve it
Aaron , May 17, 2020 at 14:18
Well over the span of all of those decades, the consistent, inexorable theme seems to be a
trend of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, a small number of individuals,
not really states, gaining wealth and power, so everybody else fights over the crumbs,
blaming this or that party, alliance, event or whatever, but behind it all there are two
flower gardens, indeed the rich are all flowers of their golden garden, and the poor are all
flowers of their garden.
It's like the Europeans and the 99 percent in America have all
fallen for the myth of the American dream, that if we are just allowed more free, unfettered
economic opportunity, it's just up to us to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and become a
billionaire.
The mask competition and fiasco shows the importance of a country simply making
things in their own country, not on the other side of the world, it's not nationalism it's
just a better way to logistically deliver reliable products to the citizens.
AnneR , May 17, 2020 at 13:42
Regarding French colonialism – as I recall the French were especially brutal in
their forced withdrawal from Algeria, both toward Algerians in their homeland and to
Algerians within France itself.
And the French were hardly willing, non-violent colonialists when being fought by the
Vietnamese who wanted to be free of them (quite rightly so).
As for the French in Sub-Saharan Africa – they have yet to truly give up on their
presumed right to have troops within these countries. They did not depart any of their
colonies happily, willingly – like every other colonial power, including the UK.
And, as for WWII – she seems, in her reminiscences, to have mislaid Vichy France,
the Velodrome roundups of French Jews, and so on ..
Ms Johnstone clearly has been looking backwards with rose-tinted specs on when it comes to
France.
Randal Marlin , May 18, 2020 at 13:00
There may be some truth to AnneR's claim that Ms Johnstone has been looking with
rose-tinted specs when it comes to France, but it is highly misleading for her to talk about
"the French" regarding Algeria. I spent 1963-64 in Aix-en-Provence teaching at the Institute
for American Universities and talked with some of the "pieds-noirs," (French born in
Algeria).
After French President Charles de Gaulle decided to relinquish French control over
Algeria, having previously reassured the colonial population that "Je vous ai compris" ("I
have understood you"), there followed death threats to many French colonizers who had to flee
Algeria immediately within 24 hours or get their throats slit – "La valise ou le
cercueil" (the suitcase or the coffin).
In the fall of 1961, I saw Parisian police stations
with machine-gun armed men behind concrete barriers, as an invasion by the colonial French
paratroopers against mainland France was expected. The "Organisation Armée
Secrète," OAS, (Secret Armed Organization) of the colonial powers, threatened at the
time to invade Paris.
As an aside, giving a sense of the anger and passion involved, when the
death of John F.Kennedy in November 1963 was announced in the historic, right-wing
café in Aix, Les Deux Garçons, a huge cheer went up when the media announcer
proclaimed "Le Président est assassinée. Only, that was because they thought de
Gaulle was the president in question. A huge disappointment when they heard it was President
Kennedy. To get a sense of the whole situation regarding France and Algeria I recommend
Alistair Horne's "A Savage War of Peace."
OlyaPola , May 19, 2020 at 11:23
"They did not depart any of their colonies happily"
Some hold that they never departed, but mutated tools including CFA zones and
"intelligence" relations in furtherance of "changing" to remain qualitatively the same. Just as "The United States of America" is a system of coercive relations not synonymous
with the political geographical area designated "The United States of America", the
colonialism of former and present "colonial powers" continues to exist, since the
"independence" of the colonised was always, and continues to be, framed within linear systems
of coercive relations, facilitated by the complicity of "local elites" on the basis of
perceived self-interest, and the acquiescence of "local others" for myriad reasons.
Despite the "best" efforts of the opponents and partly in consequence of the opponents'
complicity, the PRC and the Russian Federation like "The United States of America" are not
synonymous with the political geographical areas designated as "The People's Republic of
China and The Russian Federation", are in lateral process of transcending linear systems of
coercive relations and hence pose existential threats to "The United States of America".
The opponents are not complete fools but the drowning tend to act precipitously including
flailing out whilst drowning; encouraging some to dispense with rose- tinted glasses, despite
such accessories being quite fashionable and fetching.
OlyaPola , May 20, 2020 at 04:32
" .. their colonies "
Perception of and practice of social relations are not wholly synonymous. A construct whose founding myths included liberty, egality and fraternity – property
being discarded at the last moment since it was judged too provocative –
experienced/experiences ideological/perceptual oxymorons in regard to its colonial relations,
which were addressed in part by rendering their "colonies" department of France thereby
facilitating increased perceptual dissonance.
Like many, Randal Marlin draws attention below to the perceptions and practices of the
pied-noir, but omits to address the perceptions and practices of the harkis whom were also
immersed in the proselytised notion of departmental France, and to some degree continue to
be.
This understanding continues to inform the practices and problems of the French state.
Lolita , May 17, 2020 at 12:05
The analysis is very much inspired from "Comprendre l'Empire" by Alain Soral.
Dave , May 17, 2020 at 11:27
Do not fail to read this interview in its entirety. Ms Johnstone analyzes and describes
many issues of national and global importance from the perspective of an USA expat who has
spent most of her career in the pursuit of what may be termed disinterested journalism.
Whether one agrees or disagrees in whole or in part the perspectives she presents,
particularly those which pertain to the demise (hopefully) of the American Empire are worthy
of perusal.
Remember that this is not a polemic; it's a memoir of a lifetime devoted to
reporting and analyzing and discussion of most of the significant issues confronting global
and national politics and their social ramifications. And a big thanks to Patrick Lawrence
and Consortium News for posting the interview.
PEG , May 17, 2020 at 09:11
Diana Johnstone is one of the most intelligent, clear-minded and honest observers of
international politics today, and her book "Circle in the Darkness" – which expands on
the topics and insights touched on in this interview – is certainly among the best and
most compelling books I have ever read, putting the events of the last 75 years into
objective context and focus (normally something which only historians can do, if at all,
generations after the fact).
After reading Circle in the Darkness, I have ordered and am now reading her books on
Hillary Clinton (Queen of Chaos) and the Yugoslav wars (Fool's Crusade), which are very
worthwhile and important. I would recommend that her many articles over the years, appearing
in such publications such as In These Times, Counterpunch and Consortium News, be reprinted
and published together as an anthology. Through Circle in the Darkness, we have Diana
Johnstone's "Life", but it would be good also to have her "Letters".
Interesting comparison between the aspirations of De Gaulle and Putin.
"Having a sense of history, de Gaulle saw that colonialism had been a moment in history
that was past. His policy was to foster friendly relations on equal terms with all parts of
the world, regardless of ideological differences. I think that Putin's concept of a
multipolar world is similar. It is clearly a concept that horrifies the exceptionalists."
Agree with Johnstone.
OlyaPola , May 19, 2020 at 11:55
"Having a sense of history, de Gaulle saw that colonialism had been a moment in history
that was past. "
Mr. de Gaulle like other "leaders" of colonial powers did understand that the moment of
overt coercive relations of colonialism had passed and that colonialism to remain
qualitatively the same, required covert coercive relations facilitated by the complicity of
local "elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest.
The exceptions to such strategies lay within constructs of settler colonialism which were
addressed primarily through warfare – "The United States of America",
Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia, Indonesia, Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Angola refer –
to facilitate such future strategies.
"I think that Putin's concept of a multipolar world is similar."
As outlined elsewhere the concept of a multi-polar world is not synonymous with the
concept of colonialism except for the colonialists who consistently seek to encourage such
conflation through myths of we-are-all-in-this-togetherness.
"... Yes it took parasites, sociopathic oligarchs and a power drunk national security state to bring us to our current state of affairs, but it also took the rest of us. For far too long we as a people have been apathetic, hoodwinked spectators to the life unfolding around us. Voting for "the lesser of two evils" for decade upon decade thinking it might be different this time. Putting up with the economic game that's been put in front of us, despite the fact that it demonstrably and systematically rewards and incentivizes predatory and destructive behavior. As a people, we have been superficial, indifferent and gleefully ignorant of reality. It's time to change all that. ..."
"... I think one reason mass media puts so much emphasis on voting at the national level is the owners of these propaganda channels know voting will change absolutely nothing. The oligarchy and national security state are fully in charge, and they're not going to allow the pesky rabble to get in the way of such a lucrative racket by voting. Getting those who are politically inclined to spend all their time and energy on a rigged and completely corrupt phantom democracy in D.C. is a great way to keep them busy with nonsense. It's also a perfect way to demoralize that portion of the population which understands it's just theater. If you can be convinced that voting at the national level is the only way to change things, you're much more likely to recede into apathy and become intentionally disengaged. This happens to a lot of people, but it's a big mistake. ..."
There's a passage in Teddy Roosevelt's famous 1910 "Citizenship in a Republic" speech I want
to share with you today:
If a man's efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the more
efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic. Courage, intellect,
all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for
that man's own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill
for the community if the community worships those qualities and treats their possessors as
heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no
difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no
difference whether such a man's force and ability betray themselves in a career of
money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man works
for evil, then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all
upright and far-seeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if
the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the
wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free
institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they
prove themselves unfit for liberty.
The above words strike me as a perfect description of the deep hole we find ourselves in
presently throughout these United States of America. It takes a whole nation to screw things up
as badly as we have, and boy have we ever.
Yes it took parasites, sociopathic oligarchs and a power drunk national security state to
bring us to our current state of affairs, but it also took the rest of us. For far too long we
as a people have been apathetic, hoodwinked spectators to the life unfolding around us. Voting
for "the lesser of two evils" for decade upon decade thinking it might be different this time.
Putting up with the economic game that's been put in front of us, despite the fact that it
demonstrably and systematically rewards and incentivizes predatory and destructive behavior. As
a people, we have been superficial, indifferent and gleefully ignorant of reality. It's time to
change all that.
You can consider today's post a rallying cry to step into the arena. Stepping into the arena
is often portrayed as becoming involved in national politics or some other large platform
action, but I see it differently. If you think the only way to have a real impact is by voting
or running for Congress, you're likely to give up and remain passive. The truth is your entire
life can be repurposed to be an expression of increased kindness, wisdom and strength. It's the
most impactful long-term action most of us can have on this earth, and anyone can do it.
Change yourself before trying to change the world. If enough people did this the world
would change without you even trying.
I think what keeps a lot of people on the sidelines of a conscious life is an inability to
intimately process the above. Many people discount the little things, the countless actions of
daily existence that impact those around you and cumulatively make you who you are.
I think one reason mass media puts so much emphasis on voting at the national level is the
owners of these propaganda channels know voting will change absolutely nothing. The oligarchy
and national security state are fully in charge, and they're not going to allow the pesky
rabble to get in the way of such a lucrative racket by voting. Getting those who are
politically inclined to spend all their time and energy on a rigged and completely corrupt
phantom democracy in D.C. is a great way to keep them busy with nonsense. It's also a perfect
way to demoralize that portion of the population which understands it's just theater. If you
can be convinced that voting at the national level is the only way to change things, you're
much more likely to recede into apathy and become intentionally disengaged. This happens to a
lot of people, but it's a big mistake.
When I look back at my life thus far, it was during my decade on Wall Street when I was the
most ignorant and superficial . So focused on stroking my ego, making a bunch of money and
career advancement, I lost a lot of who I am at my core during that time. I often wonder if
that's the case for a lot of people who achieve conventional success within the current
paradigm. It's fortunate I removed myself from that situation and began thinking more deeply
about who I am and what really matters.
Stepping up and getting into the arena will mean something different for each of us, but the
one word that keeps popping into my head is resilience. There are several clear ways to become
more resilient. There's mental and emotional resiliency, there's financial resiliency and
there's physical resiliency (where and how you live). I see all three as fundamentally
important and functioning best when working together. Resiliency starts at the most basic level
because if you and your family aren't resilient, then you won't be much use to anyone else. If
the people of a community or nation lack resiliency it provides the perfect space for
authoritarianism and evil to manifest and flourish.
Case in point, see the following comments by Alan Dershowitz during a recent interview.
"You have no right not to be vaccinated, you have no right not to wear a mask... If you
refuse to be vaccinated the state has the right to take you to a dr's office & plunge a
needle in your arm." @AlanDersh take on vaccines &
masks is vile & un-American. pic.twitter.com/j2C1Rk3d7h
This is despotism plain and simple, and it's being expressed by a guy who still has
considerable influence despite his many Jeffrey Epstein related controversies. It's going to
take a resilient, courageous and ethical public to stand up to scoundrels like this and just
say NO. No, you will not grab me, drag me off somewhere and inject something into my body
without my consent. We've been passive spectators in the destruction of our society for far too
long. It's time to both say no and to create something better.
When I walked away from New York City and Wall Street ten years ago it was clear what sort
of trajectory the country was on, and it's only gotten worse since. We're now in the crucial
period spanning 2020-2025 that will decide what the next several decades look like. The big
battle for the future is here. Right now. If there's ever been a time in your life to step up,
this is it.
* * *
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@Harold Smith There is an innocuous military term, incapable of maneuver , to
describe an army which is nothing more than a group of people in uniforms. They look like an
army but, when things go bad, they prove incapable of responding in a disciplined, purposive
manner. Arab armies come to mind.
Our government and much of our industry, especially defense and fintec, appear to be
incapable of maneuver. They're justself-seeking individuals with no loyalty to each other,
their clients, citizenry, or their country.
If we don't want to suffer an interim dystopia, we need to start work on a new
constitution because the old one is worn out and we're going over a cliff.
I keep harping on China because they read our Constitution and foundation documents and,
in 1950, drafted a 20th century constitution which is well worth reading. They've convened
every 10 years since then and amended it to keep it current. For them, the constitution is a
living document, not a totem, and they take it very seriously.
But it's not only Moderna's billionaire founder/CEO Stephane Bancel - once compared to a
post-scandal Elizabeth Holmes - who stands to profit from the action: the White House's new
vaccine czar also holds - or rather, held - more than 150,000 options contracts on Moderna
shares worht more than $12 million, and had resisted pressure to divest them despite the
blatant conflict of interest. We were joking yesterday when we speculated that he would
probably be glad to exercise these options at current prices. But just as every joke contains a
nugget of truth, that one turned out to be prophetic, too.
Alastair Crooke's in fine form today bringing Jung, Euripides, the Outlaw US Empire's
Culture Wars, and Zionist Imperialism together to illustrate "Our Civilisational Quagmire"
and the imperative of "Looking Truth in the Eye." But all that's initially hidden as he
begins by intoning:
"First, the bottom line: If you don't solve the biology, the economy won't recover."
A Truth far too many mostly in the West don't seem capable of grasping:
"But the biology is not solved, and the tension of trying to point in opposite directions
simultaneously is igniting a separate, raging political brushfire....
"The pretence that the U.S. and the global economy is about to snap back, as soon as virus
mitigation is lifted; the pretence that Covid-19 is either a fake (just another 'flu); or, is
'over'; the pretence that U.S. and Europe have competent and resilient political and economic
structures – and the pretence that once Covid is over, we will all return to a world,
just as it was?"
I wrote awhile ago that the pandemic provided an opportunity to use an analytical tool
known as the Franklin Reality Model to see the values and beliefs held by differing nations
and their cultures and ideologies as it exposes them so graphically they cannot be hidden by
any amount of spin or propaganda. The revelations provided my empirical basis for judging
Trump's response specifically and the West's generally to be one of complete Moral Failure.
And not just Trump, but Pelosi, Biden and the vast majority of Democrats, too--their shared
Neoliberal ideology's Immoral basis and Parasitic nature being one of the main roots of the
problem.
I suggest you read this
Atlantic article , "We Are Living in a Failed State: The coronavirus didn't break
America. It revealed what was already broken." And either before or during, take a gander at
this Real GDP
graph that still understates the genuine amount of GDP shrinkage since parasitic
financial "gains" are added to GDP instead of subtracted as a cost to the real economy.
Essentially since GHW Bush's recession, the real economy of the Outlaw US Empire's shrunk
about 1.5% annually or @45% overall with the vast majority of economic gains accruing to the
top 10%. That grim reality is the #1 reason why Trump won in 2016, and why he stands a very
good chance of losing in 2020--"It's the economy, stupid."
Re: Karl, did the 'West' (Anglo-Zionist world) buy (or actually promote) the 80's 'Greed is
Good' line, and ignore what Greenspan supposedly learned..."I have found a flaw...I made a
mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others,
were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity
in the firms."
Even the average American might be able to see that 'socialism' (i.e., Social Security, et
al) is better than 'trickle down'... to put it in simple terms. Neo-liberalism appears to be
killing many of us right now. The problem, seems to me, is how to turn the light bulb on for
Amerian non-voters... obviously Bernie would have 'had a heart attack' if he'd gotten the
nomination.
Re: Karl, did the 'West' (Anglo-Zionist world) buy (or actually promote) the 80's 'Greed is
Good' line, and ignore what Greenspan supposedly learned..."I have found a flaw...I made a
mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others,
were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity
in the firms."
Even the average American might be able to see that 'socialism' (i.e., Social Security, et
al) is better than 'trickle down'... to put it in simple terms. Neo-liberalism appears to be
killing many of us right now. The problem, seems to me, is how to turn the light bulb on for
Amerian non-voters... obviously Bernie would have 'had a heart attack' if he'd gotten the
nomination.
Greenspan issued his belated and stupendously weak mea culpa long after the horse left the
corral and had galloped several time around the planet. One vital component was already
deeply emplaced prior to his tenure that allowed those entities to "protect"
themselves--Regulatory Capture. Recall "Banking Crises" began to become regular occurrences
during Reagan/Bush. One of Hudson's great contributions is looking into how
political-economic theory was captured and transformed into just economic theory, which he
castigates as "Junk Economics" in his book of that title. At his website, there're numerous
essays that deal with that topic; out of the several dozen I might link to is
this one from 2011 . Discovering how we were manipulated into the Neoliberal religion
must be understood if we are to get out from under its boot, which is a tall task since
millions must become informed, and the Neoliberals control the media. You asked How. My
answer is for us to become informed such that we can inform others, which is why Hudson's
written an excellent series of books that make it all easy to comprehend and transmit--I
taught introductory college economics and know Hudson's works are vastly superior to the
texts we used. The two pertinent books for debunking Neoliberalism are Killing the
Host and J is for Junk Economics . For the overall historical perspective, his
trilogy that begins with and forgive them their debts will be a must, the second book
he says will be ready for publication by New Years.
Coronavirus has already begun to undermine the legitimacy of the European project in a
greater manner that nationalist movements had hoped to achieve. European finance ministers have
clashed over all EU nations sharing "corona bonds" debt, while France and Germany responded to
Italy's request for ventilators with a refusal accompanied by closing their borders with Italy.
At around the same time, the United States imposed a unilateral ban on commercial flights with
the EU.
China's economic growth strategy and foreign policy aspirations are being frustrated in the
wake of Coronavirus, as developing countries are likely to scrutinize China's Belt Road
Initiative. Among Western policymakers anti-China sentiment is increasing. In the UK, there is
mounting opposition to Huawei building its fifth-generation mobile networks. In late March, the
United States abandoned its long-standing policy of maintaining a status quo vis a vis Taiwan.
President Donald Trump signed into law The Taiwan Allies International Protection and
Enhancement Initiative (TAIPEI) Act, which increases U.S. support for Taiwan and "alters"
engagement with nations that undermine Taiwan's security or prosperity. Beijing responded that
it would respond forcefully if the law was implemented, all the while China increases its
military drills around Taiwan. This is increasingly likely to occur while the United States
increasingly supports Hong Kong's independence movement and demonstrates willingness to
confront China in the South China Seas. Similarly, Washington is likely to be drawn into a
confrontation with North Korea as the collapse of North Korea's health system may threaten Kim
Jong-un's regime leading him to militarily lash out.
The latest phase of globalization spearheaded by the West entailed that service economies
were not responsible for the manufacture of the products they consumed. Instead, they depended
upon outsourcing production of cheap goods in distant shores creating unprecedented levels of
economic prosperity, which at its root was artificial. Liberal democracies did not reach "the
end of history," where conflict was to be consigned to the dustbin of history, but could easily
be unraveled by a virus emanating from a society it was reliant upon that did not share its
norms. In a similar vein, the Roman Empire's apex contained the seeds of its decay as it had
become overstretched and difficult to manage. The historian Edward Gibbon, in his 1776 book
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , notes that Romans had become weak and
responded to the challenges of hyperinflation, civil wars and revolts by outsourcing their
duties to defend their empire in far flung regions to "barbarian" mercenaries such as the
Visigoths. Blowback occurred as these barbarians' increased economic production and their
ability to conduct warfare, which led them, ultimately, to turn against their benefactors and
sack the Roman Empire. Similarly, the West increased the prosperity of faraway nations and
ironically, as a result their military assertiveness by being beholden to extended global
supply chains. This along with the risk of globalization unravelling increases the prospects of
inter-state and great power conflict. All it took was a virus to detonate the fuse that was
shorter than anyone expected.
Barak Seener is the CEO of Strategic Intelligentia and a former Middle East Fellow at the
Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He is on Twitter at @BarakSeener .
"... The US has spent over $200 billion on antimissile systems, and once they come off the drawing boards, none of them work very well, if at all. ..."
In the very near future, countries are going to have to choose whether they make guns or
vaccines
"There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet plagues and wars take
people equally by surprise."
~ Albert Camus, "The Plague"
Camus' novel of a lethal contagion in the North African city of Oran is filled with
characters all too recognizable today: indifferent or incompetent officials, short sighted and
selfish citizens, and lots of great courage. What not even Camus could imagine, however, is a
society in the midst of a deadly epidemic pouring vast amounts of wealth into instruments of
death.
Welcome to the world of the hypersonic weapons, devices that are not only superfluous, but
which will almost certainly not work. They will, however, cost enormous amounts of money. At a
time when countries across the globe are facing economic chaos, financial deficits, and
unemployment at Great Depression levels, arms manufacturers are set to cash in big.
A Hypersonic Arms Race
Hypersonic weapons are missiles that go five times faster than sound – 3,800 mph
– although some reportedly can reach speeds of Mach 20, 15,000 mph. They come in two
basic varieties. One is powered by a high-speed scramjet. The other, launched from a plane or
missile, glides to its target. The idea behind the weapons is that their speed and
maneuverability will make them virtually invulnerable to anti-missile systems.
Currently there is a hypersonic arms race
going on among China, Russia, and the U.S., and, according to the Pentagon, the Americans are
desperately trying to catch up with its two adversaries.
Truth is the first casualty in an arms race.
In the 1950s, it was the "bomber gap" between the Americans and the Soviets. In the 1960s,
it was the "missile gap" between the two powers. Neither gap existed, but vast amounts of
national treasure were nonetheless poured into long-range aircraft and thousands of
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The enormous expenditures on those weapons, in
turn, heightened tensions between the major powers and on at least three occasions came very
close to touching off a nuclear war.
In the current hypersonic arms race, "hype" is the operational word. "The development of
hypersonic weapons in the United States," says physicist James
Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "has been largely motivated by
technology, not by strategy. In other words, technologists have decided to try and develop
hypersonic weapons because it seems like they should be useful for something, not because there
is a clearly defined mission need for them to fulfill."
They have certainly been "useful" to Lockheed
Martin , the largest arms manufacturer in the world. The company has already received $3.5
billion to develop the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (Arrow) glide missile, and the
scramjet-driven Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (Hacksaw) missile.
The Russians also have several hypersonic missiles, including the Avangard glide vehicle, a
missile said to be capable of Mach 20.
China is developing several hypersonic missiles, including the DF-ZF, supposedly capable of
taking out aircraft carriers.
"No Advantage Whatsoever"
In theory hypersonic missiles are unstoppable. In real life, not so much.
The first problem is basic physics: speed in the atmosphere produces heat. High speed
generates lots of it. ICBMs avoid this problem with a blunt nose cone that deflects the
enormous heat of re-entering the atmosphere as the missile approaches its target. But it only
has to endure heat for a short time because much of its flight is in frictionless low earth
orbit.
Hypersonic missiles, however, stay in the atmosphere their entire flight. That is the whole
idea. An ICBM follows a predictable ballistic curve, much like an inverted U and, in theory,
can be intercepted. A missile traveling as fast as an ICBM but at low altitude, however, is
much more difficult to spot or engage.
But that's when physics shows up and does a Las Vegas: what happens on the drawing board
stays on the drawing board.
Without a heat deflecting nose cone, high-speed missiles are built like big needles, since
they need to decrease the area exposed to the atmosphere. Even so, they are going to run very
hot. And if they try to maneuver, that heat will increase. Since they can't carry a large
payload, they will have to be very accurate – but as a study by the Union of Concerned
Scientists points out, that is "problematic."
According to the Union, an object traveling Mach 5 for a period of time "slowly tears itself
apart during the flight." The heat is so great it creates a "plasma" around the craft that
makes it difficult "to reference GPS or receive outside course correction commands."
If the target is moving, as with an aircraft carrier or a mobile missile, it will be almost
impossible to alter the weapon's flight path to intercept it. And any external radar array
would never survive the heat or else be so small that it would have very limited range. In
short, you can't get from here to there.
Lockheed Martin says the tests are going just fine, but
then Lockheed Martin is the company that builds the F-35, a fifth generation stealth fighter
that simply doesn't work. It does, however, cost $1.5 trillion, the most expensive weapons
system in US history. The company has apparently dropped the scramjet engine because it tears
itself apart, hardly a surprise.
The Russians and Chinese claim success with their hypersonic weapons and have even begun
deploying them. But Pierre Sprey, a Pentagon designer associated with the two very successful
aircraft – the F-16 and the A-10 – told defense analyst Andrew
Cockburn that he is suspicious of the tests.
"I very much doubt those test birds would have reached the advertised range had they
maneuvered unpredictably," he told Cockburn. "More likely they were forced to fly a straight,
predictable path. In which case hypersonics offer no advantage whatsoever over traditional
ballistic missiles."
Guns or Vaccines
While Russia, China, and the US lead the field in the development of hypersonics, Britain,
France, India, and Japan have joined
the race too.
Why is everyone building them?
At least the Russians and the Chinese have a rationale. The Russians fear the US antimissile
system might cancel out their ICBMs, so they want a missile that can maneuver. The Chinese
would like to keep US aircraft carriers away from their shores.
But antimissile systems can be easily fooled by the use of cheap decoys, and the carriers
are vulnerable to much more cost effective conventional weapons. In any case hypersonic
missiles can't do what they are advertised to do.
For the Americans, hypersonics are little more than a very expensive subsidy for the arms
corporations. Making and deploying weapons that don't work is nothing new. The F-35 is a case
in point, but nevertheless, there have been many systems produced over the years that were
deeply flawed.
The US has spent over $200 billion on antimissile systems, and once they come off the
drawing boards, none of them work very well, if at all.
Probably the one that takes the prize is the Mark-28 tactical nuke, nicknamed the "Davy
Crockett," and its M-388 warhead. Because the M-388 was too delicate to be used in
conventional artillery, it was fired from a recoil-less rife with a range of 2.5 miles.
Problem: if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, the Crockett cooked its three-man
crew. It was only tested once and found to be "totally inaccurate."
So, end of story? Not exactly. A total of 2,100 were produced and deployed, mostly in
Europe.
While the official military budget is $738 billion, if one pulls all US defense related
spending together, the actual cost for taxpayers is $1.25 trillion a year, according to
William
Hartung of the Center for International Policy. Half that amount would go a long way toward
providing not only adequate medical support during the Covid-19 crisis – it would also
pay jobless Americans a salary.
Given that there are more than 31 million Americans now unemployed and the possibility that
numerous small businesses – restaurants in particular – will never reopen, building
and deploying a new generation of weapons is a luxury the US and other countries cannot
afford.
In the very near future, countries are going to have to choose whether they make guns or
vaccines.
"In the worst-case scenario projected for a pandemic, Zylberman predicted that 'sanitary
terror' would be used as an instrument of governance....
"Agamben did square the circle: it's not that citizens across the West have the right to
health safety; now they are juridically forced (italics [Pepe's]) to be healthy. That,
in a nutshell, is what biosecurity is all about.
"So no wonder biosecurity is an ultra-efficient governance paradigm. Citizens had it
administered down their throats with no political debate whatsoever. And the enforcement,
writes Agamben, kills 'any political activity and any social relation as the maximum example
of civic participation.'"
Escobar's topic's been the subject of heated discussion here. How much of "reopening" in
meant to combat the implied totalitarian potential? Perhaps an entire thread ought to be
devoted? That such was a planned additional benefit of the COVID-19 attack seems very
reasonable. Since it was thought of, discussed and had books published about it seems to
indicate it ought to become a central topic at MoA.
On the one side, figures allied to American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vision for
an anti-Imperial world order lined up behind FDR's champion Harry Dexter White while those
powerful forces committed to maintaining the structures of a bankers' dictatorship (Britain was
always primarily a banker's empire) lined up behind the figure of John Maynard Keynes[
1 ].
John Maynard Keynes was a leading Fabian Society controller and treasurer of the British
Eugenics Association (which served as a model for Hitler's Eugenics protocols before and during
the war). During the Bretton Woods Conference, Keynes pushed hard for the new system to be
premised upon a one world currency controlled entirely by the Bank of England known as the
Bancor. He proposed a global bank called the Clearing Union to be controlled by the Bank of
England which would use the Bancor (exchangeable with national currencies) and serve as unit of
account to measure trade surpluses or deficits under the mathematical mandate of maintaining
"equilibrium" of the system.
Harry Dexter White, on the other hand, fought relentlessly to keep the City of London out of
the drivers' seat of global finance and instead defended the institution of national
sovereignty and sovereign currencies based on long term scientific and technological
growth.
Although White and FDR demanded that US dollars become the reserve currency in the new world
system of fixed exchange rates, it was not done to create a "new American Empire" as most
modern analysts have assumed, but rather was designed to use America's status as the strongest
productive global power to ensure an anti-speculative stability among international currencies
which entirely lacked stability in the wake of WWII.
Their fight for fixed exchange rates and principles of "parity pricing" were designed by FDR
and White strictly around the need to abolish the forms of chaotic flux of the un-regulated
markets which made speculation rampant under British Free Trade and destroyed the capacity to
think and plan for the sort of long term development needed to modernize nation states. Theirs
was not a drive for "mathematical equilibrium" but rather a drive to "end poverty" through REAL
physical economic growth of colonies who would thereby win real economic independence.
As figures like Henry Wallace (FDR's loyal Vice President and 1948 3rd party candidate),
Representative Wendell Wilkie (FDR's republican lieutenant and New Dealer), and Dexter White
all advocated repeatedly, the mechanisms of the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations were meant
to become drivers of an internationalization of the New Deal which transformed America from a
backwater cesspool in 1932 to becoming a modern advanced manufacturing powerhouse 12 years
later. All of these Interntional New Dealers were loud advocates of US-Russia –China
leadership in the post war world which is a forgotten fact of paramount importance.
It is vital to the United States, it is vital to China and
it is vital to Russia that there be peaceful and friendly relations between China and Russia,
China and America and Russia and America. China and Russia Complement and supplement each other
on the continent of Asia and the two together complement and supplement America's position in
the Pacific.
Contradicting the mythos that FDR was a Keynesian, FDR's assistant Francis Perkins
recorded the 1934 interaction between the two men when Roosevelt told her:
"I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of figures. He must be a
mathematician rather than a political economist."
In response Keynes, who was then trying to coopt the intellectual narrative of the New Deal
stated he had "supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking."
In his 1936 German edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
, Keynes wrote:
For I confess that much of the following book is illustrated and expounded
mainly with reference to the conditions existing in the Anglo Saxon countries. Nevertheless,
the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much
more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state.
While Keynes represented the "soft imperialism" for the "left" of Britain's intelligentsia,
Churchill represented the hard unapologetic imperialism of the Old, less sophisticated empire
that preferred the heavy fisted use of brute force to subdue the savages. Both however were
unapologetic racists and fascists (Churchill even wrote admiringly of Mussolini's black shirts)
and both represented the most vile practices of British Imperialism.
FDR's Forgotten
Anti-Colonial Vision Revited
FDR's battle with Churchill on the matter of empire is better known than his differences
with Keynes whom he only met on a few occasions. This well documented clash was best
illustrated in his son/assistant Elliot Roosevelt's book As He Saw It (1946) who quoted his
father:
I've tried to make it clear that while we're [Britain's] allies and in it to victory
by their side, they must never get the idea that we're in it just to help them hang on to their
archaic, medieval empire ideas I hope they realize they're not senior partner; that we are not
going to sit by and watch their system stultify the growth of every country in Asia and half
the countries in Europe to boot.
[ ]
The colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all
the wealth out of these countries, but never put anything back into them, things like
education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements – all you're doing is
storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war. All you're doing is negating the value of any
kind of organizational structure for peace before it begins.
Writing from Washington in a hysteria to Churchill, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said that
Roosevelt "contemplates the dismantling of the British and Dutch empires."
Unfortunately for the world, FDR died on April 12, 1945. A coup within the Democratic
establishment, then replete with Fabians and Rhodes Scholars, had already ensured that Henry
Wallace would lose the 1944 Vice Presidency in favor of Anglophile Wall Street Stooge Harry
Truman.
Truman was quick to reverse all of FDR's intentions, cleansing American intelligence of all
remaining patriots with the shutdown of the OSS and creation of the CIA, the launching of
un-necessary nuclear bombs on Japan and establishment of the Anglo-American special
relationship.
Truman's embrace of Churchill's New World Order destroyed the positive relationship with
Russia and China which FDR, White and Wallace sought and soon America had become Britain's dumb
giant.
The Post 1945 Takeover of the Modern Deep State
FDR warned his son before his death of his understanding of the British takeover of American
foreign policy, but still could not reverse this agenda. His son recounted his father's ominous
insight:
You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal
messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats
over there aren't in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston.
As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of
'em: any number of 'em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is
to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!" I was told six years ago, to clean
out that State Department. It's like the British Foreign Office
Before being fired from Truman's cabinet for his advocacy of US-Russia friendship during the
Cold War, Wallace stated:
American fascism" which has come to be known in recent years as
the Deep State [ ] Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon
imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and
writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and
intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.
In his 1946 Soviet Asia Mission, Wallace said:
Before the blood of our boys is scarcely
dry on the field of battle, these enemies of peace try to lay the foundation for World War III.
These people must not succeed in their foul enterprise. We must offset their poison by
following the policies of Roosevelt in cultivating the friendship of Russia in peace as well as
in war.
Indeed this is exactly what occurred. Dexter White's three year run as head of the
International Monetary Fund was clouded by his constant attacks as being a Soviet stooge which
haunted him until the day he died in 1948 after a grueling inquisition session at the House of
Un-American Activities.
White had previously been supporting the election of his friend Wallace for the presidency
alongside fellow patriots Paul Robeson and Albert Einstein.
Today the world has captured a second chance to revive the FDR's
dream of an anti-colonial world . In the 21st century, this great dream has taken the form
of the New Silk Road, led by Russia and China (and joined by a growing chorus of nations
yearning to exit the invisible cage of colonialism).
If western nations wish to survive the oncoming collapse, then they would do well to heed
Putin's call for a New International system, join the BRI, and reject the Keynesian technocrats
advocating a false "New Bretton Woods" and "Green New
Deal" .
[1] You may be thinking "wait! Wasn't FDR and his New Deal premised on Keynes' theories??"
How could Keynes have represented an opposing force to FDR's system if this is the case? This
paradox only exists in the minds of many people today due to the success of the Fabian
Society's and Round Table Movement's armada of revisionist historians who have consistently
created a lying narrative of history to make it appear to future generations trying to learn
from past mistakes that those figures like FDR who opposed empire were themselves following
imperial principles.
Another example of this sleight of hand can be seen by the sheer number of people who
sincerely think themselves informed and yet believe that America's 1776 revolution was driven
by British Imperial philosophical thought stemming from Adam Smith, Bentham and John Locke.
Since the days of Adam Smith, free market capitalists have held that human beings are
rational actors who pursue economic gain for self-interested motives. But here is Patrick, a
free marketer if there ever was one, talking about a gift-sacrifice economy model in which
people – some people, at least – lay down their lives to keep the economic
engines revved.
Patrick's words reveal an unspoken truth about capitalism. For the system to work smoothly,
there have always been requirements of human sacrifice -- a certain portion of the population
was expected to act not as self-serving homo economicus, but self-sacrificing
homo communis , focused upon what benefits the collective at their own expense. If
these people can't social distance at the workplace, they are expected to show up anyway. If
there isn't enough safety equipment, they are declared essential workers who must put their
lives and that of their families at risk for the greater good.
But for whom and for what is this sacrifice intended? How much dying will be figured into
state budgets and gross domestic product (GDP)? When ranked by GDP, the U.S. is the wealthiest economy
in the world, but is a country's wealth something totally separate from, or even contrary
to, the health and life the majority of its citizens?
Wealth v. "illth"
To help us navigate these questions, it is useful turn to someone who offered potent
challenges to the economic calculus of his day: John Ruskin , the 19 th
-century art critic-turned-political economist. He was one of the most outspoken critics
of capitalism and prevailing economic ideas of the Victorian era , and his work presciently
points to shortcomings that have followed us into the present day.
Ruskin questions the premises on which free market capitalism is based, returning to first
principles: what is wealth? What do we value? How should we understand the relationship between
people, the economy, and the state?
In his view, economies are, above all, social systems whose true end is to benefit the
people, and not, as the Texan politician would have it, the other way around. Anticipating the
behavioral economics of our own day, Ruskin rejected the idea advocated by such economists as
John Stuart Mill that there could be a deductive science of economics based on the assumption
that the human being is "a covetous machine" that when applied to actual situations could take
"the social affections," the non-rational aspects of human behavior, into account. Ruskin
recognized that such a system implicitly removed the marketplace from the constraints of
religion and morality that are supposed to apply to all human behavior. He compared it to an
assumption that humans are essentially a skeleton with flesh, blood and consciousness as
add-ons founding "an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul."
Ruskin defined wealth quite differently from many of his contemporaries, and ours. For him,
wealth is anything that supports life and health, from the supplies in your storeroom to the
song in your heart: "There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of
joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of
noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his
own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of
his possessions, over the lives of others." ( Unto this Last ).
By that definition, America is looking increasingly impoverished. And it is not a virus
which is stealing our wealth away.
Playing on the root of the word "wealth" from the Old English word "weal," signifying
health, Ruskin proposed that while wealth was anything life-supporting that could be used and
enjoyed, it had a dark counterpart that he called "illth" from the Old Norse word for bad
– the things that make people ill, their lives stunted and despairing, their environment
polluted. Wealth cannot be produced without illth, but great fortunes have been made by
extracting the means of wealth without paying the cost of illth. To take a Ruskinian example, a
factory that pollutes the water it uses, fouls the air and pays its workers below what a
healthy life requires will be more profitable than a business that cleans up after itself and
pays a living wage, but its illth becomes a form of national debt expressed in damage to the
health of others and the environment. Think of something like a toxic Superfund site.
Economists have a term for Ruskin's concept of illth, referring to it as "negative
externalities," even though they are not external to the capitalist economic system, but
intrinsic to it. The most daunting problems of the current age, environmental disaster and
inequality, are fueled by illth.
The Covid-19 crisis has merely amplified trends of rising illth, of despair, sickness, and
alienation, which have been on the rise for decades as globalization, money-driven politics,
decimated workers' rights, and privatization have tipped the economic balance far in favor of
the very few. If we are to judge a country's health not by GDP, which rises
in the face of a massive oil spill , but according to the criteria of the World Happiness Report (WHR), which measures
things like social trust and faith in institutions, America is in bad shape when it comes to
the ratio of wealth to illth. Scandinavian countries top the WHR, while the U.S. ranks a dismal
19 th .
According to the Columbia University study of the
2020 WHR report , the key factors that account for the relative happiness of Scandinavian
countries -- what makes them wealthy in Ruskin's terms -- are precisely those that have been
under pressure or cut back in the U.S. since the rise of neoliberalism: "emancipation from
market dependency in terms of pensions, income maintenance for the ill or disabled, and
unemployment benefits" together with labor market regulation such as a high minimum wage. Of
course, no one likes to pay taxes, but Scandinavian "citizens' satisfaction with public and
common goods such as health care, education, and public transportation that progressive
taxation helps to fund," meets with approval at all income levels.
Pandemics are exacerbated by illth. We can see it in communities of color where the
coronavirus strikes down those whose resources and access to health care have been limited by
discriminatory policies and high contact employment. We can see it in factory farms where
broken supply chains have caused farmers to euthanize livestock and plow under crops while
people across the country go hungry. Airlines got immediate stimulus aid in the U.S., but there
has been no subsidy for the restaurant supply chain that could be diverted for distribution by
food banks and favorably located restaurants thus sustaining at least some of our much-vaunted
small businesses. No one has to fly, but everyone must eat.
We sense illth accumulating in the comments of Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman, who, in her
eagerness to get the casinos back in business, told an astonished Anderson Cooper on CNN that
she would offer up the city's workers as a "
control group " in a reopening experiment. If they weren't able to social distance, Goodman
was unconcerned: "In my opinion, you have to go ahead,"
she said . "Every day you get up, it's a gamble."
Ruskin saw the capitalists of his day as gamblers heedless of the costs they foisted onto
ordinary people: "But they neither know who keeps the bank of the gambling-house, nor what
other games may be played with the same cards, nor what other losses and gains, far away among
the dark streets, are essentially, though invisibly, dependent upon theirs in lighted rooms." (
Unto This Last ).
In other words, not only do capitalists gamble with other peoples' lives; they are oblivious
to the fact that there are other ways to arrange society, to deal the cards differently, more
fairly.
Witness the post-Covid reality imagined by Governor Cuomo. Instead of focusing on what
changes could better support the health and lives of ordinary people, he has
called in Google CEO Eric Schmidt to head a commission to reimagine New York state with
more technology permanently inserted into every dimension of civic life. A better deal for
Silicon Valley, to be sure. But what is in the cards for everyone else? When educational
platforms and health protocols are mapped by gigantic and unaccountable corporations, who gets
lost? Surely the answer is those who can least afford it.
President Trump says that it is time to move on
from the coronavirus and get on with economy. Ruskin would have recognized the deity worshipped
by country's leader, which he called the "Goddess of getting on." Only Ruskin recognized that
she tended to favor "not of everybody's getting on – but only of somebody's getting on,"
-- what he called a "vital, or rather deathful, distinction." For capitalists, getting on
post-Covid means executives working remotely while the rank and file return to the factory
floor without adequate face masks, and large corporations, not public input, determines the
blueprints for our lives.
The issue of worker safety does matter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but
not because he fears that some will get sick or die, but for a potential "
epidemic of litigation ." In the next pandemic relief legislation, McConnell is looking to
solve the problem of worker safety by shielding corporations from lawsuits rather than
supporting Centers for Disease Control (CDC) mandated regulations that would both promote
safety and sort out what is and is not actionable.
The Visible Hand
Instead of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, Ruskin advocated a Visible Hand of reasoned
management, a government which could allocate resources effectively and create stores of what
citizens most needed in a crisis. In our day this need not be a literal storehouse but surge
capacity. The Obama administration, for example, contracted with Halyard Health to design a
machine that could turn out 1.5 million N95 masks per day. They were ready to build the machine
in 2018 when the Trump administration
cancelled the program .
In Ruskin's view, the Visible Hand was the guardian of the lives of the citizens, especially
the poor, whose health and lives were their essential property. Ruskin actually defined an
economy as the wise management of labor, applying labor, carefully preserving what it produces,
and wisely distributing those products. A country's wealth is in the people's strength and
health, not their illness and death.
Ruskin's concepts of wealth and illth help us understand the centrality of ethics and
responsibility to economic activity, and how economies are not an assemblage of atomistic human
units but whole systems of people interacting, where the activities of some impact the lives of
all. His work indicates the need for a whole systems approach to a crisis in which what happens
on the beaches of Georgia impacts a nursing home in North Carolina, and visitors to New York
City or New Orleans can carry the infection home. The decisions of one business in a complex
international supply chain can impact the fate of millions.
In unregulated capitalism, Ruskin sussed out what Sigmund Freud might have recognized as the
death drive. Decisions about the economy, he held, must be informed by the essential biologic
basis of life itself: "The real science of political economy, which has yet to be distinguished
from the bastard science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astronomy from astrology, is that
which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to life; and which teaches
them to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction" ( Unto This Last ).
The Covid crisis has exposed contradictions in market and America First ideology. Without
federal aid to state and local governments, essential personnel are being laid off even as we
declare them heroes. Employer based insurance is failing, but few American politicians are
willing to fully embrace single payer insurance. Meat plant workers are declared essential, but
still subject to deportation, as if famed Revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale had said, "I
only regret that you have but one life to give for my country."
Ultimately, the most dangerous pestilence that threatens the country is not a packet of RNA
called Covid-19 but an economic and political system that does not value true wealth, and
promotes the life of the few while condemning the many to literal sickness unto death.
Excellent piece by Parramore. Ruskin is an interesting thinker whose ideas have direct
application to our situation. This was central:
President Trump says that it is time to move on from the coronavirus and get on with
economy. Ruskin would have recognized the deity worshipped by country's leader, which he
called the "Goddess of getting on." Only Ruskin recognized that she tended to favor "not of
everybody's getting on – but only of somebody's getting on," -- what he called a
"vital, or rather deathful, distinction." For capitalists, getting on post-Covid means
executives working remotely while the rank and file return to the factory floor without
adequate face masks, and large corporations, not public input, determines the blueprints
for our lives.
There's one thing I hope the Left learns before too long. Human beings have a religious
impulse. It's not as powerful or as central to our existence as the sexual impulse, but it's
there in all of us, even Richard Dawkins. Like the sexual impulse, the real question is where
will this religious impulse lead us. For the Right, their twisted unChristian conception of
Christianity is a powerful force within their political movement. In fact, it might be said
to be what holds it together and provides the energy for their unfortunate efforts.
Meanwhile, the Left, considering itself too firmly ensconced in modernity to recognize the
reality of the religious impulse despite modern science's identification of it, denies the
existence of this basic and potentially powerful human trait. We saw some of the activists
and organizers in Bernie's campaign employ deep organizing techniques which are basically
spiritual exercises. We know Thomas Berry's calls for a new religion focused on humanity's
relationship to the Earth and its creatures. The Left needs to acknowledge our spiritual
aspects and work to turn our religious impulse away from patriarchalism, misogyny and
homophobia of the Right and toward love for the Earth, our fellow humans and our fellow
creatures. That's where reside the power and persistence necessary to overcome our
religiously misinspired opponents.
There is a gene that creates within the brain a structure that either perceives 'god' (my
view), or generates a sense of spirituality in [sic] reality. The university of Waterloo has
been doing studies on this for at least thirty years. Anything we have evolved has a calorie
cost to maintain, so it must serve purpose in furthering life. There have been many debates
about this gene but no one can argue it's not about spirituality, and/or god, and/or what the
Druids what call magic. To me there's always been, that question, we can go back and have
data to 1/billion of 1/billion to 1/billion⁶⁶⁷(minus) of a second before
the inflation singularity that created this universe. But then, why? As the said in the
'Little Prince', 'it's only with the heart one sees rightly'.
The little prince is right. What we call spirituality is intelligence above what is
necessary our daily existence. Our "daily bread". Our sixth sense is probably more accurate
and reliable than all our rationalizations combined. But it is a thing that can't be
orchestrated by religion or politics. What happens between people in groups when fear is
eliminated is a sudden change toward choices that are the most sensible. As long as the
process isn't interfered with. That's the difficulty. It's like leaving nature alone long
enough for it to recover from human devastation.
What we call spirituality is intelligence above what is necessary our daily
existence.
(although if I was trying to do your comment complete justice, I would have to simply
re-quote the whole thing, it was that good)
Sometimes Susan the other, you're so profound, it almost hurts!
Certainly for me, I've got very little, comparatively, in my life right. I've passed on
opportunities which would made me rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And much else besides.
Mostly because I've overanalysed and rationalised things away. What I've got right has been,
conversely, down to following my intuition. If humanity could unlock that potential within
us, just think what we could do.
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–
A response to Oliver's powerful poem from Thomas Berry:
The continuity between the human and the cosmic was experienced with special sensitivity
in the Chinese world [A] sense of the sacred dimension of the Earth is involved, a type of
awareness less available from our traditional Western religions. This lack of intimacy with
the natural was further extended when Descartes proposed that the living world was best
described as a mechanism, because there was no vital principle integrating, guiding, and
sustaining the activities of what we generally refer to as the living world.
Yet, strangely enough, a new sense of the sacred dimension of the universe and the
planet Earth is becoming available from our more recent scientific endeavors. The
observational sciences, principally through the theories of relativity, quantum physics,
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the sense of a self-organizing universe, and the more
recent chaos theories have taken us beyond a mechanistic understanding of an objective
world. We know there is a subjectivity in all our knowledge and that we ourselves,
precisely as intelligent beings, activate one of the deepest dimensions of the universe.
Once again, we realize that knowledge is less a subject-object relationship than it is a
communion of subjects, .
Thomas Berry, "The Gaia Hypothesis: Its Religious Implications" in The Sacred
Universe
I'm glad you are making this point to acknowledge:
Human beings have a religious impulse.
From my direct experience, Native Americans seem to center their activism in a Spiritual
Context. Prayer for Guidance–for courage–for wisdom–for
compassion–before starting up on anything. imo, it keeps the priorities in focus.
I'm posting in this thread even though I'm not sure it fits. The religious or spiritual
impulse appears to be universal, there doesn't seem any doubt about that. Here's an
interesting article on Big Gods, or moralizing Gods.
Big data analyses suggest that moralizing gods are rather the product than the drivers of
social complexity: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190320141116.htm
-- -- -- -- --
One prominent theory, the big or moralizing gods hypothesis, assumes that religious beliefs
were key. According to this theory people are more likely to cooperate fairly if they believe
in gods who will punish them if they don't. "To our surprise, our data strongly contradict
this hypothesis," says lead author Harvey Whitehouse. "In almost every world region for which
we have data, moralizing gods tended to follow, not precede, increases in social complexity."
Even more so, standardized rituals tended on average to appear hundreds of years before gods
who cared about human morality.
Such rituals create a collective identity and feelings of belonging that act as social
glue, making people to behave more cooperatively. "Our results suggest that collective
identities are more important to facilitate cooperation in societies than religious beliefs,"
says Harvey Whitehouse.
-- -- -- -
I can definitely recommend Ruskin's "Unto This Last". I obtained it(among several others
that had been on my list(from NC) for a while) just before Covid.
short book wonderfully written.
and kicks you in the gut like some new revelation.
turns out that divorcing "Economics" from "Political Economy" was a mistake.
treating the former as if it were a natural science, like Physics or Chemistry let alone Pure
Mathematics is deleterious.
It ignores and neglects all the amorphous and ephemeral things that make this Life worth
living .how can you quantify a sunset or a moonrise or the smell of your newborn's hair or a
first kiss?
the Economists have taken reductive essentialism to absurd extremes .and somehow convinced a
great many of us to go along to our ultimate destruction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHOhD0RT9NU
Marx called this sort of thing Reification .giving something a Quality it doesn't truly
possess. Money as the Holy Cracker in the Temple of Moloch.
or, the morality of a Serpent: I shall Devour.(see: Joseph Campbell:"a serpent is a "motile
alimentary canal")
we're expected to feed ourselves and our children into the flaming bronze maw of their idol(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch )
as if "The Economy" is some thunderstorm or Holy Mountain, instead of a Human Creation.
"There is no such thing as Society" .and "TINA" .and these moronic "protesters" holding signs
that say "Arbiet macht frie" apparently unaware of the provenance of that phrase .after all ,
we stopped really teaching the Humanities like History quite a while ago.
we forget that "They" require our assent and consent to this "sacrifice"(L:"to make holy")
that without that consent, they have nothing not even their precious wealth(which is what,
these days? electrons moving in a database, somewhere?).
now, "They" have as much as admitted that things like the Stock Market are disconnected
from Reality that the Casino doesn't need Main Street and Human Beings to function.
This, after decades of training us to believe just the opposite. Why else put a stock market
ticker at the bottom of every cable news channel as if all that mattered to us'n's?
One of my favorite words is Eudaimonia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia ) but
you only learn about that from the Humanities.
another of my favorite words is Thaumazein "Wonder", or "Awe" also from ancient Greek
Philosophy
we've allowed the most withered souls to define the Good for us
Now, when all their works lie in ruins around us .and their narrow and anti-humanist,
mechanistic absurdity and cruelty are on full display has there ever been a better time to
turn away? To sit and think about what matters?
Withdraw your Consent.
" O happiness! O happiness! Wilt thou perhaps sing, O my soul? Thou liest in the grass.
But this is the secret, solemn hour, when no shepherd playeth his pipe.
Take care! Hot noontide sleepeth on the fields. Do not sing! Hush! The world is perfect.
Do not sing, thou prairie-bird, my soul! Do not even whisper! Lo- hush! The old noontide
sleepeth, it moveth its mouth: doth it not just now drink a drop of happiness --
-- An old brown drop of golden happiness, golden wine? Something whisketh over it, its
happiness laugheth. Thus -- laugheth a God. Hush! --
-- 'For happiness, how little sufficeth for happiness!' Thus spake I once and thought myself
wise. But it was a blasphemy: that have I now learned. Wise fools speak better.
The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a
breath, a whisk, an eye-glance -- little maketh up the best happiness. Hush!
-- What hath befallen me: Hark! Hath time flown away? Do I not fall? Have I not fallen --
hark! into the well of eternity?
-- What happeneth to me? Hush! It stingeth me -- alas -- to the heart? To the heart! Oh,
break up, break up, my heart, after such happiness, after such a sting!
-- What? Hath not the world just now become perfect? Round and ripe? Oh, for the golden round
ring -- whither doth it fly? Let me run after it! Quick!"
( http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/70 )
Hey Amphortas the Hippie!
I enjoy reading your comments and the slices of your life served up to us – you are an
interesting guy and a good antidote to me whenever I am disheartened by the stuff I am
bombarded with by the exceptional Americans foisted upon the world as typical.
Who would believe that I read Thus spake Zarathustra 'cause of your comments? I sent the link
on to my son who is 16 and has been physically separated from us for months caught in this
vortex. We'll see how it is taken compared to Mnm.
Thanks
Aww. Thanks, dude/dudette.
zarathustra is very accessible.
i've noticed that lots of people(like my wife) have been taught somehow that they can't read
stuff like that, so don't even try.
just another crime against us all.
aristotle can be pretty dense as can a lot of the more familiar
philosophers(hegel=ugh–) but Nietszche is pretty easy to get into, due to his style
.although some translations are better than others(I like the translation linked above for
Zarathustra the KJV Tone works for me.)
One shouldn't be intimidated by Marcus Aurelius, Herodotus or Boethius, either.
Isn't it ironic, that ruskin was able to see our issues and spoke to people with such
force as to effect our lives and in a sense is partly responsible for the world we have
today.
When he spoke at oxford in 1870 cecil rhodes was so impressed he supposedly carried a copy of
it with him in the future.
The ideas expressed by ruskin convinced rhodes that he needed to save "good english society"
from "the masses"(the poor english and all the rest of the savages who wouldn't understand
how to be proper."
Rhodes and his cohorts,in the british upper crust and media establishment created "the
british rountable" in 1891. These roundtablers did lots of things..Both through official
channels and by ways of running the largest newspapers who really perfected propaganda,
decades before goebbels. Eventually they formed in 1919, "the royal institute of
international relations" in britian. and "the council on foreign relations" in new york"
Generations of these members have really "made" the world that exists today. Which is why the
"conspiracy theories" exist . when people look at the lists of who
Personally, I think there ought to be study in the relationships these people had with each
other and with history. As with any family, they may be related, but not always on the same
page but still have the power of the family name and the prestige.
The council on foreign relations is the wellspring of "neoliberalism" neo consevatism too ,
for that matter. Their place in history is central. This is the axis of the "anglo-american
establishment"
Hence the folly of an economy based on debt rather than equity: it must continue to run or
risk cascading defaults.
Then why do we have government privileges for private debt creation in the first place?
Because subtle theft is easier and more "efficient" than honest sharing?
Perhaps science is the religion of the PMC. An unquestioning belief in anything
scientists/big pharma/tech wizzards throw on the table, whether it's GMOs, vaccines
containing mercury, thalidomide, social media, driverless cars or trips to Mars.
I use to go to Nevada regularly and mostly via the Donner Pass. Just a roundabout way of
suggesting that some might consider the Donner Party as the right way to have a society. They
almost made it over the pass, missing it by a couple of days, despite taking a
shortcut that was actually a longcut using bad information from a book, IIRC. They were told
repeatedly by those who had gone West before not to do so, but
In Nashville, TN last month, a masked protester at the state capitol carried a sign
"Sacrifice the Weak." I was shocked when a local news show reported on protesters and filmed
this sign along with other signs and protesters, and the reporter did not comment on this
horrible, Nazi-like statement.
Have there been any prominent religious leaders who have given counsel on the sacrificial
nature of a return to work to save the economy. At what point is the risk to human life and
health compensated by an economic return?
Come to think of it, does it not seem odd that with many prominent religious figures, none
of them seem to be willing to speak up on how greed is destroying the world and all of the
wealthy owners of capital that are its promoters? Greed is a major sin in almost every
religion, yet you hardly ever see any religious clergy give sermons on how widespread and
dangerous greed is or publicly admonish Wall Street if they hold themselves up to be the
moral leaders of society.
The fundamental problem we have with all the "very smart people" who think economics is a
science is that I can't write an equation that will convince these masters of the universe
that they shouldn't be @$$holes.
I can't tell anyone that even if it doesn't profit you there's a reason to choose to help
your fellow humans.
I also can't define a relationship that explains why even if you can figure out how to
stay within the letter of the law and exploit a loop hole to make more money but only in way
that hurts other people, you shouldn't do it. Or why you shouldn't write a law or lobby for a
law that exists only so it can be abused.
These guys will never accept the concept of illth because it challenges their concept of
wealth. And so it goes
I dont gamble with my life. The shrewd will take the necessary precautions and keep
themselves concealed as much as possible. The stupid will not take these precautions, likely
get sick and some will perish .
It amazes me that protesters and policymakers are still treating this as an impossible
tradeoff -- a false dichotomy -- between life and money, when it's clear that success lies
with practical solutions, of which there are many, to achieve both. Starting with masks!
I love the idea of billionaires leading the way, demonstrating the efficacy of their
reopening plans through personal example.
An excellent article on the WSWS:
"...In the "brutal economics" of capitalism, the lives lost to the COVID-19 pandemic are
simply the cost of doing business. While trillions of dollars have been spent propping up
financial markets, no serious efforts have been made to contain the pandemic, and whatever
mitigation measures have been put in place, including the closure of businesses, are being
rapidly abandoned.
"The efforts by the ruling class to counterpose workers' lives to livelihoods is an
entirely false choice. Both can be defended with the necessary allocation of social resources
to stop and eradicate COVID-19 and all other communicable diseases. Non-essential workplaces
must remain closed for as long as it takes for these measures to be put in place.
"But containing the pandemic requires an investment in social infrastructure that the
capitalist class is not willing to make. The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the utter
incompatibility of the capitalist system with the preservation of the most basic social
right: the right to life." https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/16/pers-m16.html
"I also don't know why you would quote a Wapo article, uncritically, in response to fairleft.
Why would I care what they say about anything? They represent power. I consider them no more
reliable on pharma imperialism as they are on military imperialism."
oglalla@102
You answer the question yourself. Nobody is suggesting that anyone read the Washington Post
uncritically. I am surprised that you should accuse b of having done so. The evidence is that
he has read the Post critically-as we all have to do in a culture in which the major source
of news, for everyone, is a media compromised enormously by its allegiances, particularly its
allegiance to capitalism.
Read the Wapo critically and you will be left with a residue of information which can be
cross checked by various means, once you have done that you can evaluate the importance of
its conclusions. It is what we all have to do.
Maybe this story from the Toronto Star will help explain why so many people are dying:
"Three of the largest for-profit nursing home operators in Ontario, which have had
disproportionately high numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths, have together paid out more
than $1.5 billion in dividends to shareholders over the last decade, the Star has found.
"This massive sum does not include $138 million paid in executive compensation and $20
million in stock buybacks (a technique that can boost share prices), according to the
financial reports of the province's three biggest publicly traded long-term-care home
companies, Extendicare, Sienna Senior Living and Chartwell Retirement Residences.
"That's a total of more than $1.7 billion taken out of their businesses."
Beneath all the uninformed, pretentious anecdote swapping about stats and panaceas, the
drivelling over whether or not there is a pandemic or whether Bill Gates, Soros or the KKK
planned and executed it on behalf of haute finance, something very simple is taking
place.
Capitalism, which devours people and turns lives into capital, having made a pandemic disease
of the sort now surrounding us inevitable, is protecting itself. Its major fear is that if
there are too many victims-cf The Black Death- the price of labour may rise to the extent
that it impinges on the rate of profit. It dare not consider the possibility that the working
class will organise itself to put an end to the system, as an alternative to doing what men
have done throughout the history of epidemics- blaming everything on an angry deity or an
elite such as the Illuminati, the Council for Foreign Affairs or bloggers corrupted by
money.
"... What was "normal" for the past two decades was to turn a blind eye to the moral and financial bankruptcy of the American culture, the rot at the heart of its social, political and economic orders. The pandemic has shredded the putrid facade and revealed the rot, much to the dismay of the multitude of minions tasked with sanitizing the rot behind narratives promoting the normalization of predation, fraud and exploitation. ..."
"... As for winner takes all , this legalized looting is presented as a form of economic Darwinism that is nothing but the healthy manifestation of a free market. This is the Devil's handiwork, of course, presenting legalized looting that only benefits the few as the inevitable result of open markets. ..."
"... The greater the outrage of the technocrats and monopolists at being called what they are--evil--the greater the confirmation that the accusation is spot-on. The predators, looters and exploiters must strip away any moral assessment of their actions, as even the smallest shred of moral or karmic justice threatens their empires. And so economics has been reduced to bloodless quantifications of profits, costs and sales and obfuscatory mathematics designed to drain the risk of moral consequences from the parasitic pillage. ..."
Monopolies, quasi-monopolies and cartels are inherently exploitive and thus evil.
What was "normal" for the past two decades was to turn a blind eye to the moral and
financial bankruptcy of the American culture, the rot at the heart of its social, political and
economic orders. The pandemic has shredded the putrid facade and revealed the rot, much to the
dismay of the multitude of minions tasked with sanitizing the rot behind narratives promoting
the normalization of predation, fraud and exploitation.
What's been absolutely verboten is to call legalized pillage and predation what they really
are: evil. We've normalized exploitation and predation by the usual means: denial, legal
justifications, making excuses for the predators and the system that defends predation, and by
erasing the memory of a time when moral bankruptcy, predation and institutionalized fraud were
not yet normalized.
People have always been self-absorbed and greedy, so goes the excuse; or, greed is good
because that's the magic of the invisible hand at work.
By stripping fraud and predation of moral consequence, we've covered the putrid rot with a
thoroughly modern amorality which we can summarize as anything goes and winner takes all.
Monopoly, quasi-monopoly and cartels (i.e. Warren Buffett's entire portfolio) are presented as
the natural order of things rather than an evil construct of predation and exploitation that
benefits the few at the expense of the many.
Nothing outrages the apologists and the lackeys enriching themselves in the dens of thieves
more than accusations of evil, or indeed, anything smacking of moral standards or judgments.
Anything goes not just for individual choices, but for capital's choices as well, and so it's
simply not PC to question the morality of capital's predations.
As for winner takes all , this legalized looting is presented as a form of economic
Darwinism that is nothing but the healthy manifestation of a free market. This is the Devil's
handiwork, of course, presenting legalized looting that only benefits the few as the inevitable
result of open markets.
The greater the outrage of the technocrats and monopolists at being called what they
are--evil--the greater the confirmation that the accusation is spot-on. The predators, looters
and exploiters must strip away any moral assessment of their actions, as even the smallest
shred of moral or karmic justice threatens their empires. And so economics has been reduced to
bloodless quantifications of profits, costs and sales and obfuscatory mathematics designed to
drain the risk of moral consequences from the parasitic pillage.
POMPEO: Look, the best experts so far seem to think it was manmade. I have no reason to
disbelieve that at this point.
RADDATZ: Your -- your Office of the DNI says the consensus, the scientific consensus was
not manmade or genetically modified.
POMPEO: That's right. I -- I -- I agree with that. Yes. I've -- I've seen their analysis.
I've seen the summary that you saw that was released publicly. I have no reason to doubt that
that is accurate at this point.
Most of the West is still shut down but China is opening. Observers know that China is
becoming the world's top economy – the World Bank had already
given it that title in PPP terms in 2013 – and COVID-19 is sure to accelerate the
process by giving it a head start out of the economic slowdown. With cheap energy too .
As the coronavirus and its political combatants hold the world hostage, it is pertinent to
scrutinize the (geo) political and economic context within which the pandemic has emerged. Many
analyses view neoliberalism as the culprit, having given rise to a dismantling and
marketization of public services such as healthcare for which we are now paying the price. The
virus confirms the bankruptcy of neoliberal capitalism, based upon global production networks
of western corporations and Chinese factories, allowing the virus to spread across the globe.
Alas, neoliberalism is in trouble once again, perhaps terminally ill.
That said, the death of neoliberalism has been pronounced before, not least in the wake of
the 2007-08 financial crisis, from which it however quickly resurfaced stronger than before.
Moreover, western neoliberalism has witnessed a significant mutation over the last years, not
least to better accommodate the changing logics of global capitalism.
The coronavirus offers an opening to change the world for the better, not least by undoing
decades of neoliberalization to give vital professions in health care and education the
appreciation they deserve. Unfortunately, as detailed in Naomi Klein's ' The Shock Doctrine ', crises also offer
ample opportunity for the established order to realize ambitions which are inconceivable in
normal times. The global political economy before the outbreak of corona was defined by the
rise of a global billionaire class, tech platforms, and illiberal(izing) nationalist politics,
having jointly propelled a novel wave of (geo) political-economic restructuring which I have
called neo-illiberalism
. What will be the effects of coronavirus on this new status quo?
The New Normal
Alongside the 2008 financial crisis, the votes for Brexit and Trump have often been
described as ruptures to the neoliberal status quo. But as in the wake of 2008, the aftermath
of 2016 also brought about more of the same: more tax cuts for corporations and the rich, more
environmental and financial deregulation, more cuts in public services i.e. more policies of
neoliberal signature. That said, the politics peddling the same neoliberal policies has
substantially changed. Where preceding waves of neoliberalization have been variably executed
by centrist parties, seeing the center right commit itself to progressive politics in exchange
for center-left support for economic neoliberalization, since 2016 a new alliance has emerged
between center and far right, seeing the latter mainstream as center-right parties such as the
US Republicans and UK Conservatives have steadily radicalized themselves, thereby forsaking
their erstwhile commitment to what Tariq Ali has called 'the extreme center' .
Notwithstanding the fact that center-right parties co-produced the neoliberal world order, they
have since come to reinvent themselves as nationalist challengers to the 'globalist' status
quo, which they habitually present as leftist.
Where preceding waves of neoliberalization resulted in the limitation of democratic control
over economic policymaking, the present nationalist wave captained by Donald Trump and his
copycats is defined by efforts of political illiberalization , brazenly seeking to undo
the institutional setup of liberal-democratic checks and balances, seeing legislative and
judicial branches of government subjected to a power-hungry executive. Wider societal
counter-powers are also under attack, from academia and media to NGOs, along with attacks on a
range of constitutional basic and/or fundamental rights constraining the illiberal exercise of
absolute power. While this development heralds
the end of progressive neoliberalism , political illiberalization ultimately still protects
the
encasement of global capitalism , the core aim of the neoliberal project.
The rise of neo-illiberalism might be compared to a virus, whereby western liberal
democracies increasingly come to resemble illiberal democracies and (competitive) authoritarian
regimes elsewhere. Where illiberalizing regimes in Hungary and Poland are infecting the
neoliberal European Union (EU) as a whole, not least because of center-right political
cover offered by the European Peoples Party (EPP), neo-illiberalism constitutes a fundamentally
global phenomenon. For example, Brazil and India have recently embraced political
illiberalization without rejecting neoliberal economics, whereas illiberal China and Russia
have equally tightened their authoritarian rule. Amongst others, what unites these and other
regimes is the mobilization of divisive nationalisms, seeing variegated 'strongmen' adapt state
constitutions to their will, typically bulldozering pluralist political space whilst shielding
the respective neoliberal interfaces between national economy and global capitalism.
Global Capitalism
To grasp the rise of neo-illiberalism we need to go back to the turn of the millennium, a
time in which the various developments culminating in the neo-illiberal synthesis were put in
motion. Next to the terrorist attacks on US soil which ignited the gradual mainstreaming of far-right
narratives , the year 2001 is characterized by the entry of illiberal China into the
neoliberal World Trade Organization (WTO). Meeting in serene Doha following the riots of
Seattle, China's WTO entrance heralded a larger geographical shift captured by the famous
BRIC
acronym (Brazil, Russia, India, China) coined that year by Goldman Sachs economist Jim
O'Neill. O'Neill foresaw stronger economic growth in the non-west, and called upon western
leaders to incorporate leading non-western states into key governance platforms, which was
realized later that decade by elevating the Group of Twenty (G20) as the world's leading forum
on global governance.
Alongside the search for new markets and cheap labor, the 2000s were characterized by the
ascent of the financial offshore world
– a legal realm comprised of tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions where corporations and
the rich stash their cash and property – which became global capitalism's central
operating system by the turn of the millennium. Since then, offshore money from Russia and
elsewhere flooded into cities like London, igniting a spending spree on real estate, football
clubs, media conglomerates, and political influence. Amongst others things, the offshore world
enabled spectacular corporate fraud, such as that which led to the collapse of US energy giant
Enron, whose accounting gimmicks were copy-pasted by western banks, setting the stage for the
financial crisis later that decade.
The final key development traced back to the turn of the millennium is the birth of digital
platforms. Invented by Google as what Susanna Zuboff calls 'an automated architecture
functioning as a one-way mirror', surveillance capitalism has since grown into a worldwide machine dedicated to
behavioral observation, manipulation and modification, steadily enmeshing itself with the core
logics of capital accumulation. Crucially, digitization accelerated the aforementioned trends:
not only has digitization fueled global capital flight into offshore anonymity, it also
augmented the mainstreaming of far-right narratives via YouTube and Facebook algorithms. Much
like the invisible offshore world, the rise of surveillance capitalism largely went unnoticed,
assisted by anti-terrorism legislation like the 2001 Patriot Act enabling far-reaching
surveillance.
Growing up under the radar of the war on terror and financial turmoil, the first decade of
the twenty-first century saw the birth of a fundamentally global, offshore, digitized and
financialized hyper capitalism. Descriptions like shadow banks, phantom investments and dark
money do not do justice to their role as fundamental building blocks of the new world. Amongst
others factors, the offshore world was the ground zero of the financial crisis, where banks
kept their toxic investments. This new world is the 'home' of trillion-dollar tech companies,
who with other (shell) companies form an integrated web of corporate structures whose chief
ultimate owners constitute a global billionaire class of approximately two thousand individuals and families.
As such, this is also the world where neoliberal technocracy is increasingly fused with
oligarchy. Due to the spectacular growth of income and wealth inequality worldwide, oligarchic
enmeshment of the superrich and state power does not only define elites in Russia or the Gulf,
but increasingly defines western states such as the US, where multibillionaire
activists like the Koch brothers have effectively taken over the Republican Party.
Next to the economic recovery, the 2010s were defined by the increasing coalescence of
financial and technology sectors. Within a development model labeled The Wall Street Consensus by political economist Daniela Gabor, an adaption of the
neoliberal Washington Consensus within the framework of the G20, banks and financial
institutions worldwide have come to embrace financial technology (fintech), driven by an
insatiable hunger for personal data as raw materials for financialized surveillance capitalism.
Crucially, where Silicon Valley long enjoyed a global tech monopoly, the 2010s saw the arrival
of Chinese bigtech vying for global dominance. The western financial lobby has voiced its fears
of Chinese platforms like Alibaba and Tencent, which they describe as all American bigtechs
'rolled into one'
operating under tight control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These fears are not
unfounded: where Facebook encountered many difficulties in building a global cryptocurrency,
the Chinese central bank has developed its own alternative, and the CCP has recently ordered
China's banks and tech platforms to adopt it. In the words of Mark Zuckerberg: the American
state has to play a more active role 'otherwise our financial leadership is not
guaranteed'.
Whilst the rest of the world has steadily bought into Chinese technology, the other BRICs
have embraced (parts of) China's digital strategy. For example, where a small minority of
India's 1.4 billion population had a bank account in 2014, this number has since risen beyond a
billion. That said, these bank accounts are coupled to biometric personal data, and critics
identify this policy as part of Narenda Modi's political agenda to transform India into a Hindu
nationalist surveillance state. Taken together, around the time the coronavirus made the first
news headlines, the New York Times identified three
competing visions on the future of surveillance capitalism: where the Chinese are 'moving
fast and breaking things' without any regard for privacy and citizen rights, and the EU tries
to make a moral point around privacy and consent, with the US caught in the middle.
Nationalist Leninism
Although 'moving fast and breaking things' is a good description for Xi Jinping's China, it
should be remembered that this philosophy has long guided Silicon Valley, where asking for
forgiveness trumps begging for permission. The disruption of established industries, practices
and processes defines platforms like Uber, operating without any regard for the law or basic
decency. With the rise of western neo-illiberalism, moreover, this philosophy has also entered
into government. Brexit, for example, is best understood as a process of continuous disruption
of established political practices and procedures, from shunning press conferences to
unlawfully closing down parliament. As
The Economist noted: 'The Tories' disruptive strategies would not be out of place in
Silicon Valley'.
Where rampant digitization has disrupted a range of established industries since the turn of
the millennium, and set its sights on incumbent finance in the wake of the financial crisis,
the 2010s are marked by tech's infiltration of established politics. Where Facebook and Google
place their own employees in US political campaigns ever since the rise of Barack Obama, an
entire ecosystem of techno-metapolitical players has since grown up around these platforms:
next to dedicated bots and troll farms there now exists a media network dedicated to mainstream
far-right narratives, of which Breitbart News – financed by US billionaire Robert Mercer,
captained by the identitarian demagogue Steve Bannon – is the most prominent. The
adoption of far-right narratives by established media, whether global corporate players like
NewsCorp or national public broadcasters, brought right-wing culture wars into the established
arena of mass-mediated politics.
Other crucial players in this ecosystem are data analytics firms, like Cambridge Analytica
(CA), again featuring Mercer and Bannon, as well as Palantir Technologies owned by US tech
billionaire Peter Thiel. Where CA founder Alexander Nix was schooled at the elitist Eton
College alongside David Cameron and Boris Johnson, Thiel not only enjoys the ear of Trump as
advisor, but also those of Mark Zuckerberg as Facebook board member, where he kept the company
from fact checking political advertisements. Where US journalist Jane Mayer speaks of
'the Fox
News White House' to highlight the close relationship between Trump and the world's second
most powerful media magnate, in the digital age the world's first Twitter presidency might
equally be labeled the Facebook White House to emphasize the ways in which Trump has
become a digitally mass-mediated virus enabled by the world's most powerful media magnate. As
argued by Trump's digital campaign manager: 'without Facebook we wouldn't have won'.
The global rise of neo-illiberalism is covered with the fingerprints of tech firms: where
WhatsApp-mediated memes helped Jair Bolsonaro assume power in Brazil, the Philippines' Rodrigo
Duterte was an early adopter of Facebook's political capabilities. Once in power, moreover,
these 'strongmen' act like disruptive tech CEOs whilst demolishing liberal democracy, and
embrace surveillance tools to anchor their rule: in India, for example, encrypted WhatsApp was
recently found to be hacked, allowing Modi to track his political opponents. But although
Israeli spyware and Russian hackers play an important role in the cross-border spread of
neo-illiberal politics, to fully grasp the political possibilities of the digital age we need
to redirect our gaze to Beijing , where digital technology
is paramount in the exercise of social control.
In combining economic neoliberalization with illiberal political control since the late
1970s, the CCP has been one of the world's neo-illiberal vanguards. Experts describe the
governing ideology of the CCP as a
curious combination of nationalism and Leninism , following China's ideological rejection
of both the French and Russian revolutions, which according to
Wang Hui shaped up after the Cultural Revolution and was settled on Tiananmen Square.
Crucially, the rejection of
'two major emancipation movements – socialism and liberalism' – is exactly what
the western far right is after. In other words, what emerges under neo-illiberalism is a global
ideological convergence. Just consider this: at the height of the so-called European 'refugee
crisis' in 2015, which accelerated the mainstreaming of far-right narratives across the west,
neo-illiberal China also saw the emergence of its own Alt-Right lingo for 'libtards' or
'regressive liberals', with derogatory terms like
baizuo(白左) i.e. 'white left' popping up across the blogosphere.
Since 2016, this cocktail of nationalism and Leninism has put its mark on the west, with
nationalist projects like America First! and Brexit being guided by self-proclaimed
Leninists, like Bannon or Boris Johnson' advisor Dominic Cummings. Enabled by far-right culture
wars informed by another communist – Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci – these
disruptive Leninists have set their eyes on breaking down liberal democracy and the rule of
law. To do so, they pretend to represent 'the will of the people', and relentlessly discredit
the core infrastructure of liberal democracy, framing its key institutions as 'enemies of the
people', 'saboteurs', and 'traitors'. In the words
of Bannon , the identitarian toyboy of the billionaire class: 'Lenin wanted to destroy the
state, and that's my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of
today's establishment'.
Alibamazonia
Where economist Branko Milanovic foresees a
global clash between two ideal type political operating systems in the twenty-first century
– liberal capitalism captained by the US, versus political capitalism championed by China
– in reality the two have already substantially converged. Reduced to its core, where
China and the non-western world opened up economically in the image of the US and the west in
the closing decades of the twentieth century, today you can tentatively argue that the US and
the wider west are politically closing up in the image of China. The new synthesis is
neo-illiberalism, which speaks to what Thomas Piketty views as
'merchant nativism' i.e. the marriage between neoliberalism and identitarian nationalism.
Besides emphasizing a process of reglobalization rather than deglobalization, the rise
of neo-illiberalism also suggests that the center of capitalist gravity has shifted: where
parts of the traditional periphery have steadily assumed characteristics of traditional core
countries, the west has witnessed a reverse process of what the late Immanuel Wallerstein calls
semi-peripheralization. In the words of Martin Wolf : 'as western
economies have become more Latin American in their distribution of incomes, their politics have
also become more Latin American'.
Where historian Neill Ferguson once spoke of 'Chimerica' to emphasize the co-dependent
relationship between the world's two superpowers, today we can identify the contours of what
you might call 'Alibamazonia': a twenty-first century imperial federation of techno-nationalist
states, i.e. a global alliance between nationalist 'strongmen' and digital platforms. The
relationship is symbiotic, as the rollout of digital surveillance requires the rollback of
liberal democracy by design, which in turn strengthens illiberal political rule. In the words
of Susanna Zuboff: 'surveillance capitalism takes an even more expansive turn toward domination
than its neoliberal source code would predict Though still sounding like Hayek, and even Smith,
its antidemocratic collectivist ambitions reveal it as an insatiable child devouring its aging
fathers'. Indeed, digitization and surveillance not only disrupt Smithian competitive markets,
but also Lockean notions of private property, and ultimately threaten to undo all liberal
guarantees of individual freedom.
Besides heralding a territorial shift from west to east, amongst others symbolized by the
United Nations' (UN) recent contract with China's WeChat (Tencent) to streamline its digital
communication, neo-illiberalism also heralds a fundamental reconstitution between national and
global scales, respectively understood as public and private spaces, whereby decades of
neoliberalization transformed the former in the image of the latter, whilst the latter has
witnessed an extraterritorial shift into digital and offshore domains, giving rise to
private capitalist power of vast proportions, eating away at national states and international
state systems. This is the most banal explanation for the western rise of neo-illiberalism:
where decades of neoliberalism effectively put up the west for sale, neo-illiberalism heralds
the moment when neoliberalism's ultimate winners seek to buy up and privatize government
itself:
'neoliberalism's final frontier' .
Pandemic
Although coronavirus might be the final death knell to neoliberalism, it should be
remembered that neoliberalism is a highly mutable ideology – well equipped to utilize its
own failure for its advancement. Put differently, if neoliberalism is dying, we are looking at
a slow-motion demise: where some identified its imminent death after the dotcom crash at the
turn of the millennium, neoliberalism certainly lost its self-explanatory aura after the
financial crisis of 2008. Accordingly, although still carried forward by a centrist consensus,
western neoliberalism became more authoritarian. And where 2016 saw the centrist consensus
collapse, seeing neoliberalism's core economic project carried on by a decisive illiberal
politics, the question is whether today's coronavirus will bring an end to the economic
project. For example, the key pillars of that project, such as global capital mobility and
central bank independence, are still standing. Furthermore, although non-neoliberal policies
might well be enacted to stem the virus, like introducing capital controls, these might be
temporary measures to save the project in the long run.
That said, if coronavirus proves to be the final death knell to neoliberalism, which even
the Financial Times alludes
to, it still might prove a blessing for core features of neo-illiberalism. For example, where
the virus is regarded as an indictment of neoliberal globalization, it nonetheless fuels the
rollback of liberal democracy and rollout of digital surveillance. Indeed, for the world's faux
Leninists and tech billionaires the virus is the ultimate disruptive event to be exploited.
Where the US Republicans have used the pandemic to legislate neoliberal tax breaks and
deregulation, as part of a rescue package that trumps the 2008 financial bailout, we should not
underestimate the extent to which Trump might exploit the pandemic for his own benefit, not
least to escape the prospect of electoral loss and prosecution. Many 'strongmen' are embracing
the virus to anchor their rule, not least Victor Orbán cynically exploiting the virus to
accelerate Hungary's transformation from liberal democracy towards illiberal dictatorship, with
the EU once again looking the other way, thereby confirming its own neo-illiberal
corrosion.
Where many countries have yet to setup mass testing capabilities to track the virus and
create viable paths out of societal lockdowns, a whole range of states have watered down
privacy legislation to digitally track the virus, including left coalition governments like
Spain. In this sense, the virus has led to a reboot of neoliberalism's famous TINA mantra
– there is no alternative – because who cares about far-reaching surveillance when
lives are at stake? As argued by Jamie Bartlett, 'the looming dystopia to fear is a shell
democracy run by smart machines and a new elite of 'progressive' but authoritarian
technocrats'.
Mimicking core features of China's fin-tech-state integration, Apple and Google have joined
forces to allow governments to track the virus, whereas the US government has promised to
rollout a digital dollar and wallet as part of its coronavirus rescue package. Indeed, the
virus is a financial bonanza for tech companies, not least Thiel's Palantir having signed a
contract with the British National Health Service (NHS) to optimize data management. In one of
his first acts to tackle the virus, Dominic Cummings invited all bigtechs to Downing Street. As
noted in Wired magazine: 'for Cummings it's big
tech versus bad virus' . Palantir is currently in talks with governments across Europe.
Across the globe, the virus is spurring the development of digital apps, using locational
data and facial recognition technologies to track population health and whereabouts. In India,
Modi's henchmen are forcing citizens to take hourly selfies to track the virus through their
whereabouts, and non-compliance will result in enforced mass quarantine, where catching the
virus seems all but certain. In so doing, coronavirus threatens to deepen the ugly face of
neo-illiberalism, defined by mass incarceration programs, from Uighurs in China's Xijiang to
refugees indefinitely locked up along the Mediterranean and the US-Mexican border. And whilst
the pandemic has yet to reach the world's favelas and slums, threatening the lives of the most
vulnerable, lax responses to the virus in the developed world characterized by defunded health
care systems are making neoliberalism's implicit social Darwinist inclinations shockingly
explicit.
As the rise of neo-illiberalism signals profound geopolitical and economic shifts, the
pandemic might well be utilized to rewire the world's legacy operating systems. Are we moving
towards a financial reset, which was due in 2008 but was postponed via monetary gymnastics?
Will China liquidate its massive holding of US treasuries? Will the world's superpowers ramp up
the threat of war or will they compromise, or are we already looking at the contours of a new
settlement? Furthermore, with the world economy falling off a cliff, and the worst still to
come, many small-and-medium-sized enterprises are facing bankruptcy, whilst Amazon and a
handful other bigtechs are massively expanding their businesses. What will the post-corona
world look like? Will capitalism survive?
While we anticipate what might be coming, one of the biggest societal disruptions is the
loss of conventional social exchange, of physical closeness and contact, as we are all locked
up in our homes, forcing into digital interfaces, continuously leaking data into the expanding
machine of surveillance capitalism. Although there momentarily is no alternative, we'd better
make sure we seize the moment: the disruptive virus offers an incredible prospect for societal
reprogramming, for better and for worse. Lest we forget that this crisis is not merely
biological – it is deeply political.
Meaty stuff to digest on a Sunday. But very interesting. As to the 'name', I would suggest
crypto-neoliberalism.
One key take for me from the events of the last few months is that its increasingly clear
that when centrist/neoliberals are forced to make a choice between the far nationalistic
right and the populist left or Greens, they will pick the former every time. It's that
simple.
I think its an interesting idea that political movements are being shaped by the
techno-nationalism. Its certainly true that Tencent and Alibaba and Amazon and FB/Google have
a lot in common, and will see their own futures as mutually enmeshed with nationalist right
wing political movements. In China its very hard to see where Tencent ends and the CPP begins
– if Biden wins I think we'll see a similar enmeshing accelerate in the US (Trump being
too slow to realise that he needed those companies as his friends). In a smaller scale, the
same thing is happening in countries like South Korea. Europe is at a crossroads, simply
because it doesn't have those big data companies, so will face the prospect of keeping them
at arms length, or becoming enmeshed in their tentacles, and so becoming a battleground for a
sort of Huawai/Amazon battle.
I wonder if we are seeing a new schism developing between the large nations becoming
variants of techno-nationalisms, with mid sized countries from South Korea to New Zealand to
Norway to Canada and Chile, all trying to stay out of the fray, and perhaps co-operating in a
sort of Hanseatic league of smaller States trying to maintain some degree of
progressiveness.
PK: your last sentence is very interesting. I see those countries you mentioned as not yet
being "cryto-neoliberalist." I would like to think that they would co-operate in order "to
maintain some degree of progressiveness." However, our (Canada's) proximity to the US makes
it highly unlikely to last. Everything is so uncertain what with viruses running amok and
climate change marching onward. Who knows what is next?
There is an optimum size. It's not big and it's not small. It's somewhere in between.
Gotta have something to do with the maximum maintainable human synergy – aka politics.
Evolution seeks a central place to mutate, so for the sake of control, the wizards of our new
crypto-neoliberalism might want to do a massive project to issue citizenship rights to the
entire world. Digitally of course. For one thing, without individual human rights there can
be no local or regional sovereignty. And there will never be a global sovereignty until human
rights are guaranteed – traditionally by democracy but we have seen that it has it's
limits. But because there is a watershed whereby politics (sovereignty) always follows money
it would be smart to look to the actual source of "money" which is people. Whichever way they
are grouped. A smart crypto neoliberal, smarter than Zuckerberg, would first shuffle the
world's nations, then shuffle all their citizens, and then, blindfolded, reach into the mix
and pull out a name. Repeat until all the names are revealed – and each one is randomly
put in a group to be called their "peer group" or stg. like that. And all groups are
organizations of global peers with equal rights. And while that is being chopped up, a global
system of civil/environmental justice can be established gee this is sounding like a big
project maybe we should just stick with nations and give the smaller ones handicaps. This is
making me tired.
Open uncontrollable boarders are a neoliberal goal partly for labor arbitrage, but also to
reduce the power, by reducing its existence, of a nation-state to interfere with the creation
and domination of powerful international organizations like the IMF, or those agreements like
NAFTA. A new kind of economic colonization as ultimately it is being done by
non-nation-states. An economic Westphalia done in reverse.
How about klepto-neoliberalism. In fact I think neoliberalism has accomplished about
everything it can, so it's straight back to medieval times, with climate chaos leaving us as
a failed world, thus we get the dark ages. Unless of course people/citizens decided to take
action. As far as the post, ah, you just can't write like that. If he was a postdoc in my lab
that never would have seen the light of day. I have no idea who the intended audience is,
perhaps economists? The only thing missing was string theory. Historically, I do not believe
that the history of neoliberalism rolled that way. It didn't get better bigger & stronger
after 2008 not based on any risk analysis I've read – everything become deeply
destabilizing. Look kids in this country before the pandemic didn't have enough food now many
don't have any short of begging and handouts. The guy confuses nationalism vs. Nationalist
because he's working his argument backward. Obtuse and sensational at the same time. While
I'm at it, the only problem with democracy is there's not enough of it. Fascism? Where?
China? The EU? Nah.
Besides possessing even amplifying all the off-putting qualities of the term
'Neoliberalism' -- its smeared meanings and usages, its inherent oxymoronity, its ill-coinage
-- the term 'Neo-Illiberalism' is quite unnecessary given that Neoliberalism is anything but
dead. I believe the aftermath of the pandemic shows most uncomfortable promise of a great new
age of Neoliberalism. As currently configured the 'pandemic' policies in the US will result
in obliterating small and medium business, in widespread mortgage foreclosures, in personal
bankruptcies, in evictions and homelessness, and in a permanent loss of jobs with resulting
high levels of unemployment. The ruins will be grabbed up and consolidated by the large
Cartels, banks, and financial corporations.
The rest of this post interweaves dozens of themes and sub-themes without a coherence I
can perceive. The "key development" "the birth of digital platforms" sounds cool -- but what
is a digital platform when you strip away the 'cool'? It is marketing and media outlet. Are
the "behavioral observation, manipulation and modification" really so novel or so much more
effective? Is it more effective than the techniques of the Church practiced through early
education and socially enforced worship? Does it really lead to more sales, or the formation
of opinion any more effectively than radio or public speeches? Are the impacts of the
'digital platform' really as great and effective as Goggle and Facebook claim in their
advertising sales literature?
Mass surveillance was well underway long before the pandemic. I don't believe the pandemic
offers any better excuse for extending mass surveillance than the excuses already used. The
Internet and our phone systems offer ample hidden means to extend mass surveillance that need
no excuses since no one notices them. The post riffs on about "rampant digitization" and
"data analytics firms" as if they were critical tools of Neoliberalism. We live under the
watchful eyes of government panopticons, created to maintain control over the Populace. But
these panopticons are neither necessary for spreading Neoliberalism nor inherently Neoliberal
in their uses. The panopticons are enabled by digitization but they are hardly necessary to
control a population. The Gestapo was adequately served by neighbors, even family members
informing on each other.
Neoliberalism is alive and well and flourishing. Neoliberalism is an ideology created for
the Big Money by a large well-funded thought collective. It is designed to include multiple
layers and contradictions. The "key development" was not the development of digital platforms
-- the "key development" was the sale of Government to Big Money. This purchase enabled the
re-monopolization and consolidation of US Business, the Globalization of production, the
complete enthrallment of Labor, purchase of Education, Science, and the Media -- including
the Internet highways.
" One key take for me from the events of the last few months is that its increasingly
clear that when centrist/neoliberals are forced to make a choice between the far
nationalistic right and the populist left or Greens, they will pick the former every
time"
That has been true since 23 March 1933, when the German center decided it would rather
back the most vile, violent, radical Right rather than compromise with a moderate democratic
Left. That's the day that every single political party in Germany at the national level,
except the Social Democrats and the (banned & illegal, and therefore absent from the
vote) Communists decided it would be a good idea to give The Mustache the power to legislate
by decree.
The Centrists backed Nixon, Reagan, & Shrub, the Trumps of their respective times, all
manifestly unfit to govern.
As far as the name goes, I've got to pipe up from the peanut gallery and say,
'neoliberalism' has never been a good handle. After these many years, the average person is
not familiar with it. It implies 'some kind of liberal' and it implies 'no-harm-no-foul'. At
this point progressives know it means Bad Stuff but nobody else does. We have gone from bad
to worse by labeling 'centrism' as a bogeyman too, while most people find it a harmless
descriptor of reasonable people whose views are neither leftist nor rightist. So it is no
good as a better descriptor than 'neoliberal'.
The enemy, across the whole spectrum, is corruption. Call the DNC brand of it something
which the average person/voter can grasp.
'Illiberalism' is nothing new, but it is a useful term employed as it is here, in
describing the drive toward globalized fascism. Fascism has been described as "the iron hoop
that keeps the capitalist barrel from falling apart," and the steady steps of regimes to
circumscribe resistance today, paves the road towards crushing opposition tomorrow.
That may be one definition, but clearly it doesn't work that way as in operate and to
implement. Hitler and Mussolini didn't have skin heads doing the heave lifting they had all
unions buying into the master plan. And there was a master plan. Japan relied on a national
code of conduct based on the Bushidō Way and a real hatred of the Chinese.
Yup, you can't really argue with the substance of this. But the usual Open Democracy
blindspot is visible for all onlookers to see, even if the author is apparently oblivious to
it (although given the fancy footwork they need to employ to avoid it, you have to wonder if
they aren't all-too-well aware of it, but don't want to risk disclosure and the resultant
amplification).
Which is: somehow or other (and I really aren't sure how the non-authoritarian left ended
up being enmeshed and embroiled with the authoritarian left on this) the left as a whole has
become synonymous with being some sort of Lockdown Taliban. Only the purest, hardline-ist,
longest, unwavering-ist, toughest most lockdown-ey lockdown ev-ah is to be considered.
And it gets worse, folks. Having participated in the politicising of COVID-19 across
national boundaries, demonising dissenting approaches such as Sweden's and turning the rag
bag of current-knowledge and scientific theories into weaponisable collateral to be
factionalised and then acquired by and deployed by the right and the left in an ideological
turf war, the left has collectively painted itself into an ideological corner from which it
has no path to walk back from.
Proffering a policy response that is little more than lockdowns as far as the eye can see
is hardly likely to have voters flocking to political parties which have hitched themselves
to this wagon.
Or, they can try to wriggle their way out of this "There Is No Alternative"
humanity-under-house-arrest position without obviously surrendering to the opposing stand-off
with humanity-as-a-lab-experiment contrarians.
More likely, though, is the left will get bogged down, as it is continuing to do, in a war
of attrition. Yes, the Lockdown Fetish left can wave shrouds at the "gramps will just have to
jolly well take his chances if we are to be free" right. Neither is any better than the
other. Neither is going to make a breakthrough in popular opinion.
Honestly, I've been involved in the left side of politics for ages. Ending up, apparently
in perpetuity, as having set itself up for this sort of can't-win self-imposed rigid
positioning is as depressing as it is familiar.
Sounds like you are saying that the left has become intellectually stale and consumed with
petty quarrels. Hard to disagree and I also think the obsession with, say, insisting that
Sweden is wrong and that the lockdown consensus is right is an example of this. We are in a
whole new situation with the novel coronavirus and therefore experimentation is
necessary without reproach.
Yup, it's just like the border conversation – no solution on offer, just critique
with no dissent allowed. I keep thinking the cognitive dissonance will kick in at some point.
But for now at least the "solution" is just to keep narrowing the scope of acceptable
discourse.
What I find truly hilarious (and sad) is the faith in voting/democracy with the
consternation about voters continuing to vote "incorrectly."
Sorry to be the lone dissent on this, but the lockdown being turned into a "political
weapon:" that is s curious way of looking at the situation. If it is a weapon, who is it
being used against? (And by the left? Where is this left that is using the lockdown to attack
its enemies?) I guess I don't understand that part of it and perhaps I am completely ignorant
of the situation. But it seems to me the lockdown is more the result of public health
decisions, not some attempt to weaponize the situation and get even with anyone's
enemies.
I do think the pandemic response has been politicized though, but it seems to me
politicization is being generated by those who encouraged fascist militias to carry assault
rifles to lockdown protests at state houses, like in Wisconsin and Michigan. The
politicization seems far stronger to me from people like Chris Christie, who want to force
open the economy and claim everyone should just accept mass deaths (which will definitely
include those we can consider our loved ones).
And maybe the pandemic response has also been politicized a little by some economists, who
seem to think that because they know how to read a spreadsheet they can do this public health
thing themselves far better than any old clutch of medical doctors.
The left are using the COVID-19 to bash the right ("you want to end lockdowns and kill
people!") and the right are using COVID-19 to bash the left ("you want to continue the
lockdowns and kill people's livelihoods and freedoms so life isn't worth living!").
The public -- who are the voters, after all -- are merely caught in the crossfire.
In the absence of political credibility and media credibility, public opinion will simply
bypass both estates and make their own minds up. This is a societal lose-lose-lose.
Neither the left nor the right look like they are capable of leading opinion or
providing good governance. The media goes through the motions of ridiculing either the left
or the right but ends up merely looking ridiculous itself.
This is the stuff of failed states.
The ultimate loser in this scenario is always the left. While the right may be deranged,
the left is not only deranged, it's deranged in a internal dissent-riven, factionalist and
screeching banshee sort of a way. The right, which is merely deranged in an
internally-consistent and unified way looks the least-worst by comparison.
This sounds more like bothsiderism. Where is the left "using COVID-19 to bash the right?"
Do you mean some Twitter thing? Because if it is, this is definitely a case of "the right are
doing something bad so therefore the left must be doing something too," i.e. bothsiderism,
which I would consider a mirage.
Like I mentioned above, the right is showcasing fascist militias in state houses, and
their national politicians are calling for everyone to accept mass deaths so the economy can
get back to growth. And what is the left doing, by your description it sounds like they are
just getting behind the non-partisan public health response: the lockdown and social
distancing. I mean, is there really more to it than that? I am trying to consider your
argument carefully, but I'm not seeing the logic of it.
And besides, what do you mean, "the public" is caught in the crossfire? I would consider
myself a leftist, am I not a member of "the public?" And as a member of the public I find the
right is a palpable threat in this situation. A threat to me, my family, and my community.
And as a member of the public I too find the lockdown hard, oppressive, and worrying, but not
such a deadly threat. The lockdown is pretty much the only tool we have (and is not some
scheme concocted by the left), and still simply do not see how this is some weapon being used
to attack the right on any level that actually matters.
So the difference between the left/right "political responses" here: I don't think those
things are equivalent. And whether "the left is the ultimate loser", you haven't made clear
what they should be doing that they aren't already (should they have armed militias
intimidating elected politicians and calling for mass death too?). You seemed to mention they
should be "more open to options," but you didn't actually make a good case that they aren't
(again, is this some twitter thing? Because that is just the kind of mirage this looks like).
I have simply not hear any leftists do anything by accept policies put forward by medical
specialists.
Have a read of those or pick some random websites of your own choosing. Then come back and
try to tell me the left isn't using COVID-19 to ding the right and vice versa.
And yes, it is bothsidesism. Because both sides are being as bad as the other.
Just because you don't like it (and I don't like it either) doesn't unfortunately mean
it's not true.
No, it is an illusion of centrism (and face it: the Twitters is very much a factory of
illusions): following the advice of public health specialists simply isn't partisan
"weaponization". In fact, I would say the politicking involved here, which includes insisting
that listening to medical experts in equivalent to armed fascists marching through state
houses, is particularly egregious. As if centrists agree with those fascists and "mass
deaths" are called for at least that's the only conclusion I can come to after such
"bothersider" mystification. And that is exactly what this is, mystification of what is
really happening. And when that is the case, one can only ask who really wins here? I think
you're right, it isn't "the left," and I would also say it isn't the public alt large
either.
The results of a survey of 23,000 people in 50 states and the District: 93% of Americans
do not think the economy should reopen immediately.
Should we assume 93% of Americans are now considered "Left"? Regardless of how much some
people want to yell at each other on Twitter or the internet in general, this really is about
life and death. For some people, simply leaving their homes can be a death sentence. Maybe
they don't feel suicidal, yet.
Ideology does not conform with sanity or common sense, but some people would have you to
think different; facts also should agree with the approved ideology or else they are wrong.
The authoritarians, left and right, have doing this for a few years now.
I bet some well paid consultants are figuring out how to label the 93% as liberal moochers
or something.
And by the left? Where is this left that is using the lockdown to attack its
enemies?
Yes, can someone please tell me what the hell constitutes the left? It is incredibly
frusturating to read broad critiques of "the left" in a world when everyone from Nancy Pelosi
to George Soros to Bernie Sanders to Tony Blair to Xi Jinping fall under the heading of "the
left"
That is deliberate. The American left is mainly the DSA, the Greens with some other bits.
Bernie Sanders could be considered part of its rightwing. As the left was slowly destroyed
starting with the American Communist Party, then rolling rightward, what was acceptably
leftist or even liberal was gradually constricted. Now Senator Sanders is labeled a
socialist, which is a lie, but he labeled as such to smear his proposals as communism.
Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and G. H W. Bush would all be, or at perceived to be, to
moderate or even leftist . (Pardon me, I might be dying of laughter.)
In American politics, until a few years ago, there was no left since its remnants was
crushed by President Clinton.
The Democratic Party is now at best center-right and getting more so. It is a conservative
party much like the old Republic Party of the 1960s without a spine, more pro-war, more
authoritarian and comfortable using and being part of the police state and much more
corrupt.
The Republican Party is something new for the United States. It has a spine, it's
fanatically pro- wealth, and insane. Otherwise, it is much like the Democratic Party.
The differences in social issues are like the shell of a hermit crab. As soon as the money
is threatened they are discarded with the right soothing lies to quiet the true
believers.
A similar, but I guess less violent, process happened in Europe.
Clive, I beg to differ. Your own guy, at question time asked Borris "How on earth did we
get here?" Well, how did we? The post explains nothing. Your comments are all outcomes /
conclusions but not the mechanics of how it happened. I say with all due respect. Having two
incompetents as leaders is a start but not by far the whole answer.
Yes, if you can successfully pull off the line of attack you're suggesting the left tries
to pull off against the right, then you're definitely on to something.
But if this approach doesn't work (and it isn't -- read it and weep ; I
certainly do) how long do you want the left to keep going with it? Yes, sometimes persistence
pays off and repetition eventually yields results. However, sometimes it doesn't and it is
just flogging a dead horse.
How much longer should I give it? And if public perception is that your line of criticism
is only another variation on coulda-woulda-shoulda and England Derangement Syndrome, when
does what sounds like broken record'ing get to be simply annoying people rather than
converting them?
Put as simply as I can, is it worth my asking if the left seriously wants to govern or
does it just want to whinge?
An impressive description of world-historical developments. But there are some important,
I would say crucial, elements missing in this account. Here are a few of them:
1. What alternative would the author advocate? Is it a return to the "extreme center"?
Though the "center-left" is identified as "co-producers" of this world with the
"center-right," it is the latter, along with the various international representatives of
"Illiberalism" (China, Russia, Bolsonaro, etc.) that get almost all of the criticism. I
gather that the author is not advocating socialism. So what is the preferred model? Or,
worded differently, where is the *resistance* to this next stage of neoliberalism to come
from? The Obama or Clinton wings of the Democratic party? The "adults" on the Council on
Foreign Relations? A more authentic "mixed" economy or Social Democracy? I can't tell –
which keeps me from knowing how to interpret this.
2. Along those lines, completely missing from the framing of this article is the degree to
which the "illiberal" states of China, Russia, Iran, and others are attempting to *resist*
being swallowed up by US-led neoliberal globalization, and that an important part of what is
going on reflects this struggle between the old unipolar hegemon and the rest of the world.
This article collapses important distinctions between the US/West and the non-West in their
historical relation to neoliberal globalization. For most NC readers this is probably obvious
in the case of Russia, at least. Whatever we think of Putin's "authoritarianism," it does
*not* stand in the same relationship to global capitalism as that of Trump.
3. Similarly, while there is a lot here about the dangers of the Surveillance State (and
rightly so), I don't see much about how this might relate to global geopolitical conflict and
the military-industrial-intelligence complex. For example, I don't see anything about the US
military bases that surround China, Russia, Iran, etc., the steady expansion of NATO after
the fall of the Soviet Union, the role of US intelligence in the return of fascism to Brazil,
the destruction of lesser states that had the audacity to resist being absorbed by Western
Neoliberal advance (Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.). Yeah, Steve Bannon is a right-wing s**t. But
he didn't do any of this -- he is just the political beneficiary.
There are several other missing elements in this story, but I'd settle for a discussion of
these.
You seem to leave out how the virus will change "personal rights". Rights for businesses
to disobey govt orders. In Michigan, it is rising to a collision between the right to disobey
the law in the name of freedom versus govt acting to protect its citizens. So that what we
will have at the end is businesses being able to operate outside the law while individuals
will have their rights stripped.
One example, which has been fought repeatedly in the past, is the right for businesses to
serve who they want. Michigan businesses are saying they don't have to follow rules put in
place due to COVID. Then, citizens are saying they don't have to follow those rules if they
don't want to. So businesses don't have to serve minorities if they don't want to. Doctors
don't have to care for/accept patients that may not be able to afford a premium price &
premium services. Where will it stop?
The virus is a bright light is casting in bold relief the deficiencies of society: the
replacement of minimum wage workers with prisoners, the loss of healthcare for the
unemployed, the forfeiture of education to inadequate broadband, the replacement of humanism
with AI but above all, the absence of true statesmen.
The Koch bro's & their ilk fancy themselves as Libertarian which is, essentially,
plutocratic social Darwinism. Ya know, that "Because markets / Go die" thing.
Now the the tech. billionaires present themselves as benign saviors of humanity. They
propose that a Public Private Partnership for a total surveillance state is the way to go.
(See 'The Intercept' article "New Screen Deal" in yesterday's Links – a must read).
PPP's are an essential "feature" of fascism. It appears to me that this is the direction the
US is headed.
I think much of this discussion will be upended by climate change and the ongoing collapse
of our high-tech, high-manufacturing, high-consumption societies. The surveillance dystopia
in particular, although looking fearsome at the moment, is especially fragile: in order for
mass digital surveillance like that to be possible it is not enough for governments and a
handful of corps to have big computers, rather the surveillance technology must be ubiquitous
and woven into the fabric of everyone's life. That means, inter alia, cranking out hundreds
of millions of smartphones, home appliances and sundry digital gadgets every year,
distributing them, keeping them powered and networked etc etc. Will we retain that capacity?
Highly doubtful IMO, although I won't attempt to predict a timeline.
Sorry to rant, but this post lit my short fuse when it started talking, out of the blue,
about national crypto currencies. That's a total oxymoron. All mixed up with offshoring and
secret capital stashed away on Pirate Island – they tossed in almost a nonsequitir:
national crypto currency. No. It is not crypto. It is digital. Digital currency and Crypto
currency are light years apart. They have nothing in common. Except that certain people are
interested in stripping democracy and nations of their sovereignty to control their money.
With an article like this the death of sovereignty is sneaking in the back door. And money
– its actual value – cannot be separated from sovereignty. Unless there is a
greater sovereignty to include it. And that requires a lot of work because if it is not
accomplished "neoliberalism" will eat up the planet, all its resources, starve anybody who
gets in their way, and jet off to Mars.
And the red herring about financialized surveillance is crypto-speak. Taking away our
privacy and human rights. Right. Well, the underlying reality which we might not notice, is
our national democratic sovereignty. I am not happy with the casual insouciance of this
post.
I have to say that I was rather disappointed (though not totally surprised given the
source) that the role of the Democratic Party establishment in supporting the move to
neo-illiberalism via its dedication to its Wall Street and Big tech clients and total
antipathy to any minor move to the left within the Party. This has served as an enabler to
the Republican right in their move into Neo-fascism and away from any semblance of
participative democracy in this country.
This screed is just a mess. Neo-liberalism has always been a thoroughly authoritarian
doctrine; it's initial laboratory was Pinochet's Chile. And '"liberal democracy" has always
been a contradiction in terms,- (what's the name of Japan's perennial ruling party?)
Electoral systems, if that"s the minimal criterion of "democracy," have been increasingly
hollowed out of what little popular efficacy they once had after 40 years of neo-liberal
ascendancy. CF. Colin Crouch's "post-democracy" or Sheldon Wolin's "inverted
totalitarianism". So the screed just combines nostalgia for nothing, for what never was, with
sub-Foucaultian paranoia, in the name of the vanity of being an academic intellectual.
There's no mention of the global debt load, 320% of global gdp, which had reached its limits
even before Covid-19, and which will collapse in the aftermath of the Covid-19 induced
depression. That would be the real start of any serious analysis, as the coming terrain of
future contention, rather than imagining that the masters of the universe could continue
their predatory reign in the absence of any sustainable basis for it.
The failed nations of USA, UK, Canada and Sweden haven't controlled the Wuhan coronavirus.
They are identified in the center in red. These neo-liberal governments won't spend money to
hire contact tracers, provide universal testing and quarantine the infected in safe secure
facilities. Instead they've come up with herd immunity, freedom and other nonsense to gloss
over the fact that the excess deaths are of absolutely no concern to the ruling
aristocracy.
The cure is to restore democracy. Halt the pandemic. Rebuild sustainable societies,
infrastructure and nations. This will be difficult unless the truth is recognized that the
reigning elite's ideology of profit over anything else is destructive and quite deadly.
Before coronavirus came to dominate the headlines, one of the most important stories of the
year was the signing of an agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. The deal signed in Doha
on February 29 is a first step toward ending the U.S.'s longest war. After nearly two decades,
thousands of lost lives on all sides, and an estimated $1.5 trillion, the Trump administration
is finally acting on knowledge the U.S. government has long possessed: the war in Afghanistan
is unwinnable.
The parallels between the war in Afghanistan and the Vietnam War are striking. In the
Afghanistan Papers that were acquired by the Washington Post , the senselessness of the
war is laid bare by U.S. government officials. The papers are reminiscent of the Vietnam-era
Pentagon Papers and show that for years, the U.S. government has known that the war in
Afghanistan is a costly and deadly exercise in futility. Afghanistan's terrain, tribal
politics, and culture have long thwarted invaders. This is something that the British and the
Soviets, to the delight of U.S. officials in 1979, learned the hard way.
Yet despite clear lessons from the past and what should have been some institutional memory,
U.S. policymakers pursued financially and strategically ruinous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Estimated expenditures on these two wars and the larger open ended "war on terror" now exceed
$6.5 trillion. Rather than having made the U.S. more secure, these wars, and the unchecked
defense spending that they demand, make the U.S. more vulnerable to a host of internal and
external threats.
America's interventionist policies abroad and the cancerous growth of defense budgets, the
most recent of which is nearly $800 billion, compromise Washington's ability to grapple with
threats like crumbling infrastructure, an educational system that fails to deliver, and true
national preparedness for a crisis like the coronavirus. It is useful to think about what even
a small portion of the $6.5 trillion spent on failed wars could have done had it been spent on
infrastructure, world-class public education, accessible healthcare, and emergency
preparedness. If it had been spent intelligently and strategically, it could have been
transformative.
Instead, the U.S. public, as has so often been the case, continues to allow the
military-industrial complex to exercise undue influence. The companies that make up the vast
military-industrial complex in the U.S. spend millions lobbying Congress. These lobbying
efforts probably have the highest return of any investment on the planet. In exchange for
comparatively paltry campaign donations, members of Congress are persuaded to pass legislation
that yields billions in revenue for these companies.
Those who stand up to the calls for increased defense spending are said to be "soft on
defense" or even called "unpatriotic" by rival politicians and the platoon of retired colonels
and generals who act as paid cheerleaders for defense contractors. In his 1961 Farewell
Address, President Eisenhower presciently warned Americans about the power of the
military-industrial complex. In the often-quoted speech, Eisenhower argued that "we must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex." Eisenhower went on to say that a failure to guard against this
influence could lead to a "disastrous rise of misplaced power" that could "endanger our
liberties or democratic processes."
Americans have ignored Eisenhower's warning, and we are living with the consequences. The
insidious influence of the military-industrial complex infects both Congress and much of the
U.S. news media. Never was this more apparent than after September 11, when those who
questioned the march to war in Afghanistan and Iraq were demeaned or silenced. Real debate
about how to best respond to the threat posed by al-Qaeda and, more generally, militant
Salafism was quashed. Instead, the U.S. pursued the most expensive and, as time would prove,
counterproductive policies imaginable.
Nearly 20 years on, Afghanistan is slowly reverting to Taliban control. The invasion of Iraq
spawned the Islamic State and turned the country into an Iranian satellite. Neither of these
wars achieved their aims, but they did make hundreds of billions of dollars for defense
contractors. Low-cost and effective ways to combat terrorism are rarely considered. Such
methods do exist and often consist of little more than empowering local communities via very
specific tailored development projects. But such methods do not require hundreds of millions of
dollars' worth of drones and Predator-borne missiles. Thus, they receive little attention and
even less funding.
Now, as the U.S. winds down its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the "war on terror" is
passé. The new threats are the old threats: Russia and China. The pivot away from the
war on terror to renewed preparations for combatting China and Russia will be even more
profitable for the defense industry because this means increased funding for big-ticket legacy
weapons systems. The defense budget just passed by Congress is one of the largest in the
country's history and even funds the creation of a sixth military branch, the Space Force. The
demands for ever more defense spending ignore the fact that the combined defense budgets of
China and Russia equal a little more than a quarter of what the U.S. spends on defense. Nor is
there much discussion of the fact that a war between great powers is as unlikely as it is
unthinkable due to the threat of mutually assured nuclear annihilation.
In the same speech in which he warned Americans about the rise of the influence and power of
the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower argued that the only real check on this would be
"an alert and knowledgeable citizenry." One can only hope now that the U.S., and indeed the
world, face the threat of a global pandemic, that Americans will begin to question soaring
defense budgets and endless wars that contribute little to real security. Real security, as
this pandemic will demonstrate, is dependent on internal resiliency. This kind of resiliency is
built on sound infrastructure, accessible healthcare, a well-educated and healthy populace,
localized supply chains, and responsive and responsible government. The coronavirus pandemic
may finally force a rethink of how the U.S. government spends its citizens' money and how
willing it is to continue funding and fighting counterproductive wars.
Michael Horton is a foreign policy analyst who has written for numerous publications,
including The National Interest , West Point CTC Sentinel, The Economist , and
the Christian Science Monitor .
In less than three decades, a mere blink of the eye in historical terms, the United States
has gone from the world's sole superpower to a massive foundering wreck that is helpless before
the coronavirus and intent on blaming the rest of the world for its own shortcomings. As the
journalist Fintan O'Toole noted recently in the Irish Times:
"Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings
in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger.
But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity."
Quite right. But how and why did this pitiable condition come about? Is it all Donald
Trump's fault as so many now assume? Or did the process begin earlier?
The answer for any serious student of imperial politics is the latter. Indeed, a fascinating
email suggests that the tipping point occurred in early to mid-2014, long before Trump set foot
in the Oval Office.
Sent from U.S. General Wesley Clark to Philip Breedlove, Clark's successor as NATO commander
in Europe, the email is dated Apr. 12, 2014, and concerns events in the Ukraine that had
recently begun spinning out of control. A few weeks earlier, the Obama administration had been
on top of the world thanks to a nationalist insurrection in Kiev that had chased out a mildly
pro-Russian president named Viktor Yanukovych. Champagne glasses were no doubt clinking in
Washington now that the Ukraine was solidly in the western camp. But then everything went awry.
First, Vladimir Putin seized control of the Crimean Peninsula, site of an all-important Russian
naval base at Sevastopol. Then a pro-Russian insurgency took off in Donetsk and Luhansk, two
Russian-speaking provinces in the Ukraine's far east. Suddenly, the country was coming apart at
the seams, and the U.S. didn't know what to do.
It was at that moment that Clark dashed off his note. Already, he informed Breedlove, "Putin
has read U.S. inaction in Georgia and Syria as U.S. 'weakness.'" But now, thanks to the
alarming turn of events in the Ukraine, others were doing the same. As he put it:
"China is watching closely. China will have four aircraft carriers and airspace dominance
in the Western Pacific, within 5 years, if current trends continue. And if we let Ukraine
slide away, it definitely raises the risks of conflict in the Pacific. For, China will ask
would the U.S. then assert itself for Japan, Korea, Taiwan the Philippines the South China
Sea?
...[I]f Russia takes Ukraine, Belarus will join the Eurasian Union, and, presto, the
Soviet Union (in another name) will be back...
...Neither the Baltics nor the Balkans will easily resist the political disruptions
empowered by a resurgent Russia and what good is a NATO 'security guarantee' against internal
subversion?
...And then the U.S. will find a much stronger Russia, a crumbling NATO and [a] major
challenge in the Western Pacific. Far easier to [hold] the line now in Ukraine than elsewhere
later" [emphasis in the original].
The email speaks volumes about the mentality of those in charge. Conceivably, the Obama
administration still had time to turn things around – if, that is, it had shown a bit of
flexibility, a willingness to compromise, and a willingness as well to stand up to the
ultra-nationalists who had led the anti-Yanukovych upsurge and opposed anything smacking of an
even-handed settlement.
But instead it did the opposite. Back in the 1960s, cold warriors had argued that if Vietnam
"fell" to the Communists, then Thailand, Burma, and even India would follow suit. But the
proposition that Clark now advanced was even more extreme, a super-Domino Theory holding that a
minor ethnic uprising in a part of the world that few people in Washington could find on the
map was intolerable because it could cause the entire international structure to unravel. NATO,
U.S. control of the western Pacific, victory over the Soviets – all would be lost because
a few thousand people insisted on speaking their native Russian.
Why such rigidity? The real problem was not so much a confrontation mindset as a phenomenon
that the historian Paul Kennedy had identified in the late 1980s: "imperial overstretch." Like
other empires before it, the U.S. had allowed itself to become so over-extended after
twenty-five years of "unipolarity" that strategists had their hands full keeping an
increasingly rickety structure together. Nerves were on edge, which is why an ethnic uprising
that might have been accommodated at an earlier stage of U.S. imperial development was no
longer tolerable. Because the rebels had run afoul of U.S. imperial priorities, they
constituted a fundamental threat and therefore had to be bulldozed out of the way.
Except for one thing: the structure was so weak that each new bulldoze operation only made
matters worse. Insurgents continued to hold their ground in Donetsk and Luhansk thanks to
Russian backing while the government grew more and more corrupt and unstable back in Kiev. In
the Middle East, the situation was so confused that U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar
were channeling money and arms to ISIS as it rampaged through eastern Syria and northern Iraq
and advanced on Baghdad. Thanks to the turmoil that U.S. policies were unleashing, millions of
desperate refugees would soon make their way to Europe where they would spark a powerful
nativist reaction that continues to this day. U.S. hegemony was turning into a nightmare.
It was no different in an America shaken by Wahhabist terrorism and dismayed by wars in the
Middle East that went nowhere yet never seemed to end. Donald Trump rode a wave of discontent
into the White House by promising to "drain the swamp" and bring the troops home. Conceivably,
he could have done just that once he was in office – if, that is, he had been serious
about downsizing U.S. imperialism and was capable of standing up to the CIA. But the
"intelligence community" struck back by launching a classic destabilization campaign based on
the theme of Russian collusion while Trump's foreign-policy ideas turned out be even more of a
mess than Obama's.
So the collapse intensified, which is why America is now such a helpless giant. A crazy man
is at the helm, yet the best Democrats can do is put up a candidate suffering from the early
stages of senile dementia, who may be a rapist to boot. No one knows how things will play out
from this point on.
But two things are clear. One is that the process d id not start under Trump, and the other
is that it will undoubtedly continue regardless of who wins in November. Once collapse sets in,
it's impossible to stop.
>The capitalists have painted themselves into a corner. There is no way out from this
crisis which does not
> involve the end of fifty years of neo-liberalism (and two centuries of the liberal
Political Economy).
I thought the same in 2008. Did not happen.
> Neo-liberalism, allied to warmongering in the MIC and dominating the political
process through its ownership
> of both its own party and the Opposition's, has so dominated US life that the kind of
reforms that Keynes saw
> as necessary to preserve the system from itself are unthinkable.
That's true but neoliberalism evolved in different direction: Trumpism ("national
neoliberalism") is essentially neoliberalism without neoliberal globalization. Domestically
it looks more and more like a unique "Americanized" flavor of neofascism. The latter
historically proved to be a resilient social system (Spain)
> The current policy of giving money in unlimited quantities to corporations, virtually
without condition,
> and invoicing the working class by pledging future tax revenues to repay the cost of
financing, is unsustainable.
OK. But what is the countervailing force ? There is none. By definition creating a viable
political opposition in a national security state is impossible. Note that the USSR crumbled
only when KGB changed sides. And that Nazi Germany did not crumbed until Soviets took Berlin,
and, despite all the misery of the last year of war, there were fierce fight for Berlin (and
heavy losses for Soviets)
> Neo-liberalism, the ideology of capitalist rule, has had its chance. The crisis that
we are in
> is showing how useless it is, how dangerous a society devoted to the profit of a few,
rather than the welfare
> of the many is. With every new twist and turn it demonstrates its inability to
govern.
Neoliberalism will most probably survive COVID-19 epidemic like it survived the crisis of
2008. You can argue whether quarantine was necessary or not and about the level of
incompetence of Trump administration, but you can't deny that the measures taken by the USA
government somewhat softened the blow and the social system remains intact.
Again, there is no viable countervailing force to MIC and financial oligarchy, and the two
party system is very resilient and essentially guarantee that the internal political
situation will stay this way. Looks like only external shocks or disintegration of the
country under the pressure from far right nationalists can crumble this system.
> What this adds up to- mass unemployment and increasing immiseration with no organised
voice to represent tens
> of millions of desperate workers and their families is the likelihood of a series of
explosions, riots,
> strikes, boycotts and direct actions.
In the USA the family of three can survive when each of the adults earn just $10 per hour
(which means income around $40K a year). Real misery is reserved mostly to single mothers and
unemployed. You can't compare the situation in the USA to the situation in "neoliberalized"
xUSSR countries where it is really about physical survival and large percentage of population
live of ~$2 a day. Do we see riots in those countries ?
> There is nobody to press reforms on the ruling class
@Hibernian That is angument for bailing out just " the payment system/ real economy and
per mark Blyth or John Kay( other people's money book) is like approximately 5% of the
economy ,the test is just incredible leverage and fool Hardy financialization.
Watch one of John Kay's talks on YouTube or mark Blyth talk about 2008.
Glass- steagall was not the sole cause of 2008, but it does need to be reinstated. Also
when the banks were recapitalized on the backs of savers, by cutting interest rates , to
almost nothing, the rational response was to take your money out, they make loans of ten
dollars on deposits of one dollar and barely even pay you for the privilege.
A jubilee is needed , during certain reigns in Egypt and china , Jubilee's / debt
forgiveness would happen as frequently as every 18 months.
Kings basically used to make the agreement , I'll give you a monopoly on banking but in
exchange don't think if the world's goes to hell , don't think you are getting 100 cents on
the dollar. Not running my kingdom for you to be made whole. It's worse nowadays because they
print the money put of thin air and expect to be repaid in full, austerity is a vicious
cycle, every dollar that goes to debt is one less to spend on consumption , so demand has to
go down, and it creates a vicious cycle.
Another thing china gets right is they owe money to themselves, not oligarchs like us, if
they want to they just agree not to pay themselves back.
Michael Hudson's book killing the host is also great.
That is an argument for bailing out just " the payment system/ real economy and per mark
Blyth or John Kay( other people's money book) that is like approximately 5% of the economy
,the rest is just incredible leverage and fool hardy financialization. America has ones and
zeros , and china has gold reserves , a better nuclear arsenal, competent leadership, more
human capital, infrastructure, means of production, antibiotics, rare Earth's, is the
greatest creditor nation I believe as opposed to the greatest debtor nation and approximately
82% of American weapon systems require at least one input from China.( Please don't argue
America has competent leadership , because competent leadership would have never allowed it
to get 10% this bad, the main argument against tariffs, is that they kick off a retaliatory
cycle, except the U.S. didn't retaliate until extremely recently.
Those factories were built initially by Rockefellers , Sam Walton, Kissinger and other
American oligarchs to get away from American labor, you reap what you sow, but globalists
could care less.
You don't have to like China but please realize the extra Herculean task of trying to lift
1.4 billion people out of poverty, and realize it will necessitate some tough decisions,
unlike America where the bottom 90-95% haven't gotten raises adjusted for inflation since
1983( the great decoupling)
And Americans love to cry about the Chinese not having political freedom, well when most
dissent is disingenious like tienneman square which was the CIA ( google tienneman myth, the
journalists admit it) and Hong Kong was the CIA and Soros ( you really think those people
organically waved American flags, stupid?)
who is a front man for the CIA if you didn't know, the uyghurs are Muslims that the US has
been cultivating since the 80s under Reagan and the national endowment for democracy( per
William engdahl) who have been knighted to sabotage one belt one road because the US is mad
at it's Navy getting end run arounded similar to how the British got mad at the Germans pre
world war 1 for building a railroad to Baghdad, so they could get oil without dealing with
the British Navy ( guess mackinder and Brzezinski aren't as smart as they think)
On top of that political freedom is somewhat of a dead weight loss, look at the division it's
caused in the US, I'd rather have clean water.( 3800+ US areas have water at least 2x worse
than Flint/ Google it)
We build more prisons, china just kills all the prisoners and people who love the killing of
unborn children bemoan the killing of actual child molestors.
Also please be aware the one child policy was imposed on china by the Rockefellers just
like they sterilized a third of Puerto Rican women by 1965 , by tying their tubes without
consent and telling them it was reversible.
How many people even know how Britain got Hong kong,? They fought two wars over the right
of court Jews( Sassoon) in Britain to flood china with opium, and when China lost not only
did they have to give up Hong Kong, they had to allow opium to flood their country and had to
pay for every dollar spent by both sides.( I'm pretty sure if I was Chinese, k would hate the
west on that fact alone)
Watch one of John Kay's talks on YouTube or mark Blyth talk about 2008.
Glass- steagall was not the sole cause of 2008, but it does need to be reinstated. Also
when the banks were recapitalized on the backs of savers, by cutting interest rates , to
almost nothing, the rational response was to take your money out, but they make loans of ten
dollars on deposits of one dollar and barely even pay you for the privilege.
A jubilee is needed , during certain reigns in Egypt and china , Jubilee's / debt
forgiveness would happen as frequently as every 18 months on average.
Kings basically used to make the agreement , I'll give you a monopoly on banking but in
exchange don't think if the world's goes to hell , don't think you are getting 100 cents on
the dollar. Not ruining my kingdom for you to be made whole. It's worse nowadays because they
print the money put of thin air and expect to be repaid in full, austerity is a vicious
cycle, every dollar that goes to debt is one less to spend on consumption , so demand has to
go down, and it creates a vicious cycle.
Another thing china gets right is they owe money to themselves, not oligarchs like us, if
they want to they just agree not to pay themselves back.
Michael Hudson's book killing the host is also great.
In France, a team of researchers has found the disease was already spreading there in
late December, one month before the first official cases were confirmed. The revelation
followed a study of 14 stored respiratory samples of patients who were admitted to
intensive care units with influenza-like symptoms in December and January.
The researchers identified a 42-year-old patient, whose last overseas trip had been to
Algeria in August, who developed symptoms after one of his children had a flu-like illness.
The patient, who had pre-existing asthma and Type 2 diabetes, was admitted to the ICU for
antibiotic therapy and discharged after two days.
This is a weak article. Indignation as for excesses of neoliberal social system that exists in the USA is a good thing only if
there is a plan to change the system. Eric Zuesse has none. Also for top 10% the US healthcare is very efficient; it is probably the best on the planet.
OK neoliberalism is bad. But what is the alternative? Return to the New Deal capitalism is impossible as management now
is allied with the capital owners and that destroyed fragile coalition of trade unions and apart of professional management that
existed during the new deal as a countervailing force for political power of the capital. Such coalition could exist if financial
oligarchy is suppressed and if taxes of millionaires income (especially income from stocks) were around 80%. As soon as JFK
lowered the taxed that was a writing on the wall: the New Deal is doomed. Financial oligarchy was suppressed and it did not like
it. So in 20180 they staged coup d'état and the New Deal was over.
The question is: what political coalition can take on financial oligarchy. There is no such coalition yet.
Notable quotes:
"... Americans generally are desperate to go to work even if they might be spreading the coronavirus-19. They need the pay and the insurance coverage in order to be able to buy medical care. If they don't pay for it they won't get it. So: whomever does show up for work might reasonably be especially inclined to fear likely to catch the disease from a co-worker there. This is one of the many reasons why socializing the healthcare function is vastly more efficient than leaving it to market forces . ..."
"... Furthermore, prisons are among the institutions that especially increase the spread of an epidemic such as Covid-19. And the United States has a higher percentage of its residents in prison than does any other country in the world . In fact, almost all of the Americans who are in prison are poor (since 100% of the poor cannot afford a lawyer), and the poorer a person is, the likelier that the individual is to get coronavirus-19. ..."
"... America has 655 per 100,000, or 4.5 prisoners for every 1.0 prisoner in the entire world), America has vastly more production of coronavirus-19 that's generated by its being a police-state than any other country does -- and this isn't even taking into consideration the rotten, overburdened, health-care system, and the billionaire-propagandized public contempt for the poor, that characterize America's culture, and that make those prisons, perhaps, the worst amongst industrialized nations. ..."
"... Furthermore, in America, "Approximately 95 percent of criminal cases are plea-bargained, in part because public defenders are too overwhelmed to take them to trial. 'That means the state never even has to prove you did anything. They hold all the cards.'" So, the Constitutional protections, such as trial-by-jury and all of the other on-paper protections, don't even apply, in reality, to at least 95% of criminal defendants. And, in many U.S. states, convicts -- and even ex -convicts -- aren't allowed to vote. America's billionaires also use many other ways to keep down the percentage of the poor who vote. ..."
"... In addition, prior to the coronavirus challenge, both America and UK have been reducing, instead of increasing, their social protections; and, therefore, they were the only industrialized nations where life-expectancies were declining even before the coronavirus-19 hit. The recognition and concern about this decline started in UK, but has now started to be published even in the U.S. ..."
"... In other words: coronavirus hit UK at a time when the Government was already moving away from socializing and into privatizing health care; and, as a consequence, the death-rates had already started increasing in 2015. Coronavirus kills mainly people who already have bad health; and, so, their population were maximally vulnerable to it at the time when this epidemic struck. ..."
"... Even prior to 2015, the U.S. was wasting around half of its entire public-and-private spending for health care -- it was the most inefficient healthcare system on the planet -- and therefore had significantly lower life-expectancies than all other industrialized countries did. But, now, those remarkably low life-spans are actually getting even lower. ..."
"... This is the reason why America is designed so as to fail the coronavirus-19 challenge. The power of big-money (concentrated wealth) is destroying this country. It controls both Parties and their respective media, so the public don't know (and certainly cannot understand) the types of realities that are being reported (and linked-to) here. ..."
"... The fact [the existence of ] corporate prisons exist is pretty much an open declaration that we're a kleptocracy, run by the uniparty. ..."
"... We give an EQUAL vote to children, imbeciles, hostiles, and those who don't even speak the language ..."
"... Democracy is not about efficiency but to keep a check on those in power. It preventing the concentration of powers. It all about checks and balances to preserve the citizens freedoms. ..."
Virtually all other industrialized countries have social-welfare systems in place, such as
health-insurance covering 100% of the population; and, consequently, the residents there don't
lose their health insurance if they lose their job -- they therefore aren't desperate to show
up for work even when they are sick or can spread an epidemic.
Americans generally are desperate to go to work even if they might be spreading the
coronavirus-19. They need the pay and the insurance coverage in order to be able to buy medical
care. If they don't pay for it they won't get it. So: whomever does show up for work might
reasonably be especially inclined to fear likely to catch the disease from a co-worker there.
This is one of the many reasons why socializing
the healthcare function is vastly more efficient than leaving it to market forces .
On April 23rd, Reuters
reported that, "U.S. workers who refuse to return to their jobs because they are worried
about catching the coronavirus should not count on getting unemployment benefits, state
officials and labor law experts say."
In such states, the unemployment-benefits system is being used as a cudgel so as to force
employees back to work, and therefore to increase the percentage of the population who will
become infected by the coronavirus-19.
Furthermore, prisons are among the institutions that especially increase the spread of an
epidemic such as Covid-19. And the United States has a higher percentage of its residents in
prison than does any other country in the world . In fact, almost all of the Americans who
are in prison are poor (since 100% of the poor cannot afford a lawyer), and the poorer a person
is, the likelier that the individual is to get coronavirus-19.
This is yet another reason why prisons are a prime place for the spread of the disease. And
on April 26th, the New York Times headlined "As Coronavirus Strikes Prisons, Hundreds of Thousands Are
Released: The virus has spread rapidly in overcrowded prisons across the world, leading
governments to release inmates en masse." Since America has more of its population in prison
than any other country does (lots more: whereas
"The world prison population rate, based on United Nations estimates of national population
levels, is 145 per 100,000" , America has 655 per 100,000, or 4.5 prisoners for every 1.0
prisoner in the entire world), America has vastly more production of coronavirus-19 that's
generated by its being a police-state than any other country does -- and this isn't even taking
into consideration the rotten, overburdened, health-care system, and the
billionaire-propagandized public contempt for the poor, that characterize America's culture,
and that make those prisons, perhaps, the worst amongst industrialized nations.
Taken all together (and to list the other details would fill a book), America's systematized
intense discrimination against the poor constitutes virtually an invitation to this country's
having exceptional vulnerability to any epidemic. The fact that America now has 33.3% of
the world's coronavirus-19 cases , though only 4.2% of the world's population, is actually
systemic, and not merely particular to this moment in this country, and in the entire world.
Donald Trump, and the current U.S. Congress, are part of a system of oppression, not really
exceptions to it (such as the billionaires' media pretend -- with Democratic billionaires
blaming "the Republicans," and Republican billionaires blaming "the Democrats"). The way this
Government performs is actually somewhat normal for this country since at least 1980 .
In addition, prior to the coronavirus challenge, both America and UK have been reducing,
instead of increasing, their social protections; and, therefore, they were the only
industrialized nations where life-expectancies were declining even before the coronavirus-19
hit. The recognition and concern about this decline started in UK, but has now started to be
published even in the U.S.
In other words: coronavirus hit UK at a
time when the Government was already moving away from socializing and into privatizing health
care; and, as a consequence, the death-rates had already started increasing in 2015.
Coronavirus kills mainly people who already have bad health; and, so, their population were
maximally vulnerable to it at the time when this epidemic struck.
Political-science studies that are based
upon decades of reliably reported data have established that ever since around 1980, the
United States has been a dictatorship: what the public wants (and even needs ) is basically
ignored, but what the super-rich (the country's actual dictators) simply want becomes reflected
in governmental policies. That's the very definition of a "dictatorship." The U.S. national
Government is responsive to the wants of its billionaires, not to the needs of the public (such
as protecting their health, education, and welfare, even when the billionaires don't want it
to).The findings in one of these studies are summarized well in a six-minute video, here .
Although the billionaires who fund America's liberal Party, the
Democratic Party, oppose the billionaires who fund the Republican Party (the conservative
Party -- the one that's overtly in favor of the existing wealth-inequality), this is purely for
PR purposes. Whenever the issue becomes their own wealth versus improving the wealth and
economic opportunity for the poor, they all go for expanding their own empire (sometimes by
funding a tax-exempt 'charity' that will increase, even more, their personal control over the
total empire -- by using that tax-exemption to leverage the operation, which will be controlled
by themselves instead of by the public tax-funded government). Such 'charities' are mainly
tax-dodges.
This is even proud policy ('fiscal
responsibility', etc.) in the Republican Party. Bailing-out investors is 'necessary', but
bailing out employees and consumers is 'fiscally irresponsible'. For example, on April 27th,
the Democrat David Sirota headlined "Red States Owe Workers More
Than $500 Billion -- The GOP Is Trying to Steal The Money: Trump is boosting a McConnell
plan to help states renege on promised retirement and health benefits to millions of workers
and retirees." And he is correct.
However, his Party is going to be compromising with that
(instead of adamantly refuse to accept it and then go on the political hustings shaming the
Republican President and Congress-members so as to break them on their blatantly scandalous
whoring to the entire billionaire-class, who want their investments to be bailed out before the
public is -- which might turn out to be never). It's a "good cop, bad cop," routine, to protect
the super-rich. It accepts holding the public hostage to what the big political donors want,
instead of focuses against that as being the central political issue of the moment, and of at
least post-1980 America.
They're just
trying to deceive their suckers into voting for Joe Biden, or else not voting at all; and, so,
their ad doesn't even so
much as just mention Biden. It's a Biden ad that makes no mention of Biden. It hides its true
motive. That's typical.
This is the reason why America is designed so as to fail the coronavirus-19 challenge. The
power of big-money (concentrated wealth) is destroying this country. It controls both Parties
and their respective media, so the public don't know (and certainly cannot understand) the
types of realities that are being reported (and linked-to) here.
A "good cop, bad cop" government is, in reality, all bad cop.
(I therefore proposed an Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution in order to rectify some of the reasons behind this structural failure of the
U.S. Government. Perhaps the only alternative to that would be violent revolution, but it would
probably make things even worse, not better.)
desertboy , 23 minutes ago
The fact [the existence of ] corporate prisons exist is pretty much an open declaration that we're a
kleptocracy, run by the uniparty.
Reign in Fact, 28 minutes ago
" The power of big-money (concentrated wealth) is destroying this country... This is
'democracy'-as-political-scam... "
No the scam is democracy itself. We give an EQUAL vote to children, imbeciles, hostiles,
and those who don't even speak the language, while allowing wholesale vote-buying bribery of
public unions.
No such system has ever thrived anywhere in the animal kingdom - equality without merit,
or rule by will of the laziest, weakest and dumbest - no matter how small the "society",
team, family, gang, union, band, corporation, religion or nation.
It can't and won't end well.
youshallnotkill , 15 minutes ago
Democracy is not about efficiency but to keep a check on those in power. It preventing the
concentration of powers. It all about checks and balances to preserve the citizens
freedoms.
The fact that you don't understand these where basics of why we have a republic is
testament to our failed school system.
Deep In Vocal Euphoria , 30 minutes ago
Demoracy...usa was a constitutional republic..........
AVmaster , 30 minutes ago
This hasn't been the american "design" since 23DEC1913......
Dragonlord , 1 minute ago
America's design to disable the freedom of state secession has ruined it. As a result, we
are facing the possibility of another civil war.
W
hen
the virus
came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited
them ruthlessly. Chronic ills -- a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy,
a divided and distracted public -- had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably,
with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity -- to shock
Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted
instead like Pakistan or Belarus -- like a country with shoddy infrastructure and
a dysfunctional government
whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.
The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came
willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies
. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and
miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly -- not to prevent the coming
disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the
White House took the mic and politicized the message.
Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed
state. With no national plan -- no coherent instructions at all --
families,
schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter
. When
test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors
pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which
couldn't deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging
and corporate profiteering.
Civilians took out their sewing machines
to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and
their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world's
richest power -- a beggar nation in utter chaos.
Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his
reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the
leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an
armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like
Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And,
like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that's larger and deeper than
one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called
Strange Defeat
, after the historian and
Resistance fighter Marc Bloch's
contemporaneous study of the fall of France
. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of
individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most
Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective
response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?
This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when
Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war,
and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an
alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had
taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort
at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.
Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity
and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008,
intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed
a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials
cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the
Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading
bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before
long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a
"speed bump."
All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt
and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who
came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality -- the
fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s -- grew worse.
This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes,
Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary
Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now
they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were -- in health care, financial
regulation, green energy -- had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched
corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The
lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially
government's.
Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they'd lost. The coming politics was populist.
Its harbinger wasn't Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate
who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump's John the Baptist.
[
David
Frum: Americans are paying the price for Trump's failures
]
Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political
class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like
trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of
private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible
for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they
made themselves Trump's footmen.
Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of
national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us
against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and -- every day
of his presidency -- political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country
locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the
effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.
Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault,
politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and
destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced
career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the
cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment,
one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the
rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was
his means for using power, corruption was his end.
[
Read:
It pays to be rich during a pandemic
]
This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally
connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the
countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred
and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and
growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led
by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion,
with no vision of a shared identity or future.
If the pandemic
really is a kind of war, it's the first to be fought on this soil in a century
and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society's fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed
or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.
The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might
have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan
lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don't have to be in the military or in
debt to be a target -- you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the
inequality that we've tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find,
the wealthy and connected -- the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn
Nets, the president's conservative allies --
were
somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms
. The smattering of individual results
did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in
long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren't actually suffocating.
An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a
rich person's face.
When Trump was asked about this blatant unfairness, he expressed disapproval but added, "
Perhaps
that's been the story of life
." Most Americans hardly register this kind of special privilege in
normal times. But in the first weeks of the pandemic it sparked outrage, as if, during a general
mobilization, the rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks.
As the contagion has spread,
its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people
. The gross inequality of our
health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals.
[
Ibram
X. Kendi: Stop blaming black people for dying of the coronavirus
]
We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned
out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health
directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal
employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the
pandemic's combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver
with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact. In a
smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings,
we're learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive
. An order of organic baby
arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it,
pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns
out to be an impossible luxury. It's worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower
delivery so that they could stay home.
The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler,
the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was
given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job,
after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks
,
then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that
may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler's impulses in public service are those of a dangerous
parasite. A body politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in decay.
The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior
adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a
meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan
entered the Oval Office, in 1981 -- a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared's mediocre
academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation
to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business,
then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had
contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father's support with fierce loyalty when Charles was
sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by
entrapping his sister's husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.
[
Adam
Serwer: Trump is inciting a coronavirus culture war to save himself
]
Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to
rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In
American Oligarchs
, Andrea Bernstein
describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a "disruptor" of the new economy.
Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and
journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model.
So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that
raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with
Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn't matter to most Americans. But since he became an
influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.
In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in
memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols,
flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that
quickly turned to dust. "
The
federal government is not designed to solve all our problems
," he said, explaining how he would
tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was
convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries
to manufacture ventilators -- then Kushner's own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell
through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on
incompetent state governors.
To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante
breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis
, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive
failure of his father-in-law's administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to
governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of
a "deep state" --
they're
essential workers
, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the
nation's health. It turns out that "nimble" companies can't prepare for a catastrophe or distribute
lifesaving goods --
only
a competent federal government can do that
. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of
attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public
has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we
had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.
[
Read:
Trump's coronavirus message is revisionist history
]
The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and
build it anew, or the hardship and grief we're now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current
leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment,
2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime,
so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.
We're faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in
self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we
can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones
so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones;
the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York
; the aerospace workers in
Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians
standing in long lines because they couldn't get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office;
the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to
vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices
. We can learn from these dreadful days
that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that
the alternative to solidarity is death. After we've come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we
should not forget what it was like to be alone.
This article appears in the June 2020 print
edition with the headline "Underlying Conditions."
We want to hear what you think about this article.
Submit a letter
to the editor or write to [email protected].
George Packer
is a staff writer at
The
Atlantic
. He is the author of
Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
and
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
.
"... the nations CEO's become sort of one big club, and the top of the club is the head parasites pulling the strings on the stock market (outfits like Goldman Sachs). ..."
"... NO ONE wants to cross the head parasites, the corrupt political class turns to them as their economic brain trust, and the propaganda class (MSM) spin narratives that comport to the corrupt political class' interests and the corrupt status quo. ..."
As our guest puts it, the recently passed Trump "Bank and Landlord Relief" bill,
mistakenly named the Coronavirus bill, starts by providing banks with an even larger giveaway
of wealth than they received from Obama in 2008. Helping the banks, financial and real estate
sectors in a so-called free market system is conflated with helping the industrial economy
and general living standards for most Americans. The essence of a parasite is not only to
drain the host's nourishment, but to dull the host's brain so that it does not recognize that
the parasite is there.
One of the ways it does this is to entice most of the biggest companies onto the stock
markets, which in turn subordinates them to the financial sector -- more specifically, the
investment bankers. And then the nations CEO's become sort of one big club, and the top of
the club is the head parasites pulling the strings on the stock market (outfits like Goldman
Sachs).
NO ONE wants to cross the head parasites, the corrupt political class turns to them as
their economic brain trust, and the propaganda class (MSM) spin narratives that comport to the
corrupt political class' interests and the corrupt status quo.
This is why [neo]liberalism and neoconservatism are the two sides of the one political coin
that Americans are allowed to choose. Lean left? You'll get a liberal who mostly uses identity
politics to divide and rule. Lean right? You'll get a neocon who mostly uses foreign affairs to
divide and rule. But increasingly, the two cross-over, hence you'll see liberals harping 24/7
about Russiagate and neocons harping 24/7 about Iran, Islam and now China.
None of this is to say that Russia, China and Iran aren't competitors, because they are. But
the liberal and neocon fanatics turn them into existential, kill or be killed
competitors...
Before the coronavirus caused governments to impose lockdowns, whole economies, markets and
even currencies were already on course to be destroyed by a vicious downturn in bank lending at
a time of contracting trade and record debt. The additional strains from the virus have
intensified the crisis further and quickened the pace of all aspects of monetary
destruction.
The coronavirus has permitted America and other Western nations to adopt a war footing by
restricting personal freedom in the interest of the state. As tensions against China rise and
the global economic crisis escalates, these freedoms will be not be returned, being deemed to
be against national interest.
This is an election year for America and the political system is already ramping up blame
for the virus and her economic misfortunes against China. We are entering dangerous territory
when politics mobilises hate against a supposed enemy by using propaganda tactics which are
designed to stir up xenophobic anger.
How China responds will be crucial. Its leadership can defuse the situation with a few
simple changes to its foreign policy, isolating America from her allies in the process. But
does a highly bureaucratic communist leadership have the imagination to do so?
Introduction
One thing is for sure: the world will be different when it emerges from the coronavirus
crisis. Doubtless, on pain of likely death those over seventy years of age must remain
prisoners in their own homes while the younger generations are tasked with the return to
normality. All this is meant to be under government guidance of course. Over the coming months
governments intend to save swathes of business sectors, such as banking, energy production,
utilities and the rest, first by lending the money to pay the bills, and then by rescuing the
failures, taking them into public ownership in many cases.
That is what the post-coronavirus environment can be expected to look like, if, as
governments hope, the recovery is V-shaped. If not, then greater interventions will be visited
on the population to protect it from itself.
While not necessarily intentioned, there has been and will continue to be a dramatic
transfer of freedom from individuals to the state, which the state is always reluctant to let
go when the crisis passes. The evocation of a war against the virus is to facilitate the
transfer of peoples' freedom to the state, because that is what is required to fight a war. But
when it's over, the bureaucrats' instincts are never to return freedoms.
In the vast majority of cases, win or lose, following a war it is usual for a nation to
retain the measures adopted, dropping none of them. It might be called a transitional economy,
kept in place with all the war-time restrictions until an exit path, inevitably to greater
socialism, can be devised. And for America there is a war still to be fought against China for
global domination, justifying yet more control.
Nanny meets fascist socialism
Welcome to the new post-coronavirus intensified socialism. As individuals we have given the
state enormous power over our lives, which will almost certainly be consolidated. The direction
of travel is clear. Not only can big brother censor us, but it can now track our movements more
effectively than the old KGB. If you leave your home, leave your smartphone behind. Wear a
wide-brimmed hat and change your gait, avoiding the cameras. Your money in the bank, or more
correctly in your about-to-be-nationalised bank's money credited to your account, can only be
disposed of for state-regulated products by means of traceable transactions instead of
old-fashioned cash.
Instead of the soviet, we have the nanny state. Nanny knows best. This is the real world of
the 2020s. It is unnatural and will therefore eventually fail. In previous articles I have
written about one aspect of its failure, and that is the impending collapse of unbacked state
currencies. I have pointed out that central banks, and especially the Fed responsible for the
world's reserve currency, are embarking on an exercise in inflation designed, above all, to
uphold the state by maintaining the values of its debt and therefore all other financial
assets. If they fail, and they will because the task is too great, the currencies will fail as
well, and remarkably quickly. Until then, free markets are a primal threat to the system and
must not prevail.
Doubtless, deep state operatives everywhere believe that the threats from their own people
can be contained. Taking that for granted, they are now moving on to contain threats from other
states that don't conform to the West's democratic model. There is now much more propaganda
coming out of America and the UK about the evil Chinese than the evil Chinese are disseminating
about America and Britain.
The story being managed is of a devious state, somehow stealing our souls by selling us
their technology. Mobile 5G puts China into our homes and controls our internet of everything.
It will allow the Chinese to control us . What is not explained is why it is in China's
interest to abuse its customers in this way. What is not explained is why we, as individuals,
will be better off not having Chinese goods and technology. And when Britain's GCHQ
intelligence and security division took Hua Wei's equipment apart, they couldn't find any
evidence of Chinese state spyware anyway.
The irony in all this is that our democratic model, the nanny state, is cover for the same
internal policies as those deployed by the Chinese, admittedly less vicious; but that is
changing. Rather than communist-socialist, both Chinese communism and Western democracies are,
properly defined, fascist-socialist. With communism, the state owns your cow and tells you what
to do with it. With fascism, you own the cow and the state tells you what to do with it. In
these simplistic, but not inaccurate terms, our governments increasingly follow the fascist
creed adopted by the Chinese Communist Party after Mao's death. Give it time and the intense
Chinese-style suppression of free speech could become the defining feature of nanny's
management style as well.
Here we must note a fundamental truth. Socialists of either extreme do not see free markets
as a rival, because they believe they are useful for progressing socialism towards desired
ends. The true rival to your socialism is someone else's socialism. Newly energised Western
state socialism is to be pitted against Chinese state socialism. The World is about to get more
dangerous.
US is upping the propaganda stakes
Last week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said China caused an enormous amount of pain
and will pay a price for what they did with the coronavirus pandemic. On Tuesday, President
Trump threatened to seek reparations from China for infecting Americans. This follows a 57-page
memorandum, entitled Main Messages dated April 17, briefing Republican senators, which was
headed by the following bullet points:
China caused this pandemic by covering it up, lying, and hoarding the world's supply of
medical equipment.
China is an adversary that has stolen millions of American jobs, sent fentanyl to the
United States, and they send religious minorities to concentration camps.
My opponent is soft on China, fails to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party, and can't
be trusted to take them on.
I will stand up to China, bring our manufacturing jobs back home, and push for sanctions
on China for its role in spreading this pandemic.
Clearly, the propaganda war being waged by America against China is undergoing a new lease
of life. And it's not just America: anti-Chinese belligerence is being ramped up through other
national intelligence agencies. Even senior MPs in the UK's Conservative Party and "useful
idiots" in the media are now spouting renewed anti-Chinese propaganda.
On one level, American propaganda can be taken as a defense of President Trump, on the
simplistic basis of finding someone else to blame for his administration's increasingly
desperate economic plight. But the danger is that the White House train has left the station in
the direction of policy escalation with no means of stopping. In this election year someone
must be blamed. To improve his ratings and following an established political tradition of
diverting attention from the domestic scene, Trump must blame foreigners and China is the
easiest target. We are rapidly moving in the direction of unintended consequences.
Meanwhile, we have to hope that President Xi does not take the American bait and escalate
tensions from his side. Xi's equanimity has set the pattern so far. He has made mistakes, and
will almost certainly continue to do so, but his Sun Tzu strategy is making it difficult for
the Americans: "If [the enemy] is in superior strength, evade him".
Of one thing we can be reasonably certain, and that is in a new attack the Trump
administration will escalate trade protectionism against China. It is a policy which will
backfire on America. Assuming no change in the American people's savings habits, the budget
deficit leads almost directly to a trade deficit, the twin deficit syndrome. The trade deficit
is not caused by unfair foreign competition, but as a simple matter of national accounting it
is linked to inflationary funding of government spending. The temporary offset with respect to
the inflationary effect on prices is the expansion of foreign production which ends up as
imports at less inflated prices. Meanwhile, the US's budget deficit is now set to grow
substantially from its trillion-dollar baseline and in the light of recent economic
developments it could easily more than double.
If the trade deficit is to be contained, then measures must be introduced to prevent import
substitution. This is in accordance with enhanced nationalism, typified by Trump's Make America
Great Again slogan. Therefore, the likelihood of America extending trade protectionism beyond
China as the economic crisis progresses is greater than it may currently appear.
Without lower prices for imported goods and consumption generally restricted to domestic
production, inevitably prices for everything will rise at a faster pace. Therefore, at a time
when food prices will almost certainly be rising sharply and causing political difficulties for
Trump, price inflation for all aspects of consumer spending will be getting beyond the managed
control of government statisticians.
Domestically, the combination of an escalating budget deficit and rising consumer prices
will lead to higher interest rates and therefore increased US Treasury borrowing costs. The Fed
will then be unable to control financial asset prices, the dollar will slide, and it could turn
out to be electoral suicide. Trump may not realise it but in this election year he is
conflating two opposing objectives: a geopolitical one against China to improve his political
ratings and an economic one which can be expected to destroy them.
In the past, politicians in this position have responded by clamping down even further on
free markets and personal freedom, evoking Hayek's prophecy of the call for stronger leadership
in his The Road to Serfdom . And with respect to foreign policy, imperialistic motivation
intensifies, which we are already seeing.
Meanwhile, we must hope President Xi stays calm in the face of American self-harm.
Powell, Trump, Washington & Wall Street Recklessly Courted Disaster .
Their Desperate Money-Pumping, Spending & Speculation Inflated The Mother Of All
Financial Bubbles ..
Then Wanna Be Medical Dictators, Hysterical Media And Power Hungry Politicians Imposed
Lockdown Nation ..Sending The US Economy Into The Tank And Unemployment Soaring
Like Always, Main Street Has Been Left High & Dry, Ensnared In The Lies, Scams And
Self-Serving Mendacity Of The Washington-Wall Street Axis
... ... ...
Dear Reader,
The coronavirus is now exposing a far more deadly disease: Namely, the poisonous brew of
easy money, cheap debt, sweeping financialization and unbridled speculation that has been
injected into the American economy by the Fed and Washington politicians.
It has turned Wall Street into a dangerous gambling casino while leaving Main Street buried
under mountainous debts, faltering investment in growth and productivity and the hand-to-mouth
economics of spending more than you earn.
It has also left the American economy exceedingly vulnerable to external shocks like the
thundering blow of Lockdown Nation.
That's because 80% of households have no appreciable rainy-day funds and businesses have
hollowed out their balance sheets and artificially extended their supply chains to the four
corners of the earth in order to goose short-run profits and share prices.
However, this unprecedented fragility has become starkly evident after public health
authorities essentially shut down normal commerce and economic function. Workers have been
separated from their workplaces, consumers from the malls, diners from the restaurants,
travelers from the airlines, hotels and resorts -- with many more like and similar disruptions
to the supply-side of the economy.
In turn, these disruptions are causing production and incomes to fall abruptly. Shrunken
household incomes and business cash flows are literally pulling the legs out from under the
edifice of debt and speculation that has been piled atop the American economy.
So both a renewed financial and economic crisis and an abrupt change of course lie dead
ahead. The 30-year party of False Prosperity is over.
Accordingly, even if the Covid-19 hysteria eventually abates and Lockdown Nation is lifted,
the 2020s will be a decade when the chickens come home to roost.
It will be a time when the cans of delay and denial may no longer be kicked down the road to
tomorrow. Today's economic and political fantasies will be crushed by America's accumulated due
bills.
Bubbles will be burst. Speculators will get carried out on their shields. Easy money wealth
will evaporate.
Some 14 percent of US adults would forgo medical care for Covid-19 symptoms because they
couldn't pay for it, a new poll has found – yet oblivious health authorities act as if
the epidemic will be solved by drugs alone. One in seven American adults would avoid seeking
healthcare if they or a family member experienced symptoms of Covid-19, out of concern they
would be unable to afford treatment, according to a
Gallup poll published on Tuesday. Even if they specifically believed themselves to be infected
with the coronavirus, nine percent would forgo care for financial reasons, the poll found.
Their fears are well-founded – the average cost of coronavirus treatment in an intensive
care unit runs over $30,000,
according to a study released earlier this month by insurance industry group America's
Health Insurance Plans. Even for those who avoid the ICU, American healthcare is the most
expensive in the world, and stories of coronavirus patients being whacked with gargantuan
medical bills are a dime a dozen two months into the pandemic.
Making matters worse is the unemployment crisis, as about 55 percent of Americans receive
healthcare through their jobs. Upwards of 30 million have filed for unemployment in the last
five weeks, adding an unprecedented number of families to the ranks of the uninsured –
which were already estimated in December to include 27.5 million people, more than the
population of Australia. Even those lucky enough to have kept their jobs and insurance may face
steep co-pays or other surprise costs.
After a handful of highly-publicized cases in which Americans died of the virus after being
turned away by hospitals for lack of money, President Donald Trump ordered hospitals to pay for
the cost of Covid-19 treatment, and several large insurers promised at the beginning of the
month to waive all co-pays for coronavirus testing for 60 days. However, those coverage pledges
do not include other costs associated with hospitalization, like ambulance transportation;
outpatient treatment; or treatment for non-Covid-19 patients. Individuals seeking treatment
have been tested and received the good news that they don't have the virus – only to be
hit shortly thereafter with the bad news that they're on the hook for thousands of dollars in
costs. Low-income respondents were much more likely to report they would not seek care for
financial reasons. Perhaps more troublingly, respondents with annual income under $40,000 were
almost four times as likely as those with incomes over $100,000 to report that they or a family
member had been turned away from a hospital for reasons related to overcrowding or high patient
volume, the Gallup poll found.
The big question that we should be addressing, and which we lose sight of when playing
statistical trivia with idiots, is the question of capitalism. This crisis is a direct result
of living under capitalism. Every aspect of it from the way it spread like wildfire across
the world, to the fragility of food supply chains (I am surrounded by farmers growing corn
crops to be converted into ethanol!), to the failures to stockpile protective equipment and
ventilators, to the contracting of the business of fighting the virus to for profit
businesses, to the precarious existences lived by millions of people thrown out of work and
reduced to misery by the crisis- every aspect of this complex and massive socio-economic
crisis calls into question the fundamental nature of our class society.
That is what we should be talking about. Unless of course, like I suspect most of the
quibblers, we are so invested in the religion of Thatcherism and the mysteries of class
exploitation and oligarchy that anything is preferable to the dangerous blasphemy of
questioning cannibalism/capitalism.
Yes, the problem lies with Neoliberal Capitalism, which is a hocus-pocus form of Finance
Capitalism whose rise I've been trying to trace along with Hudson to a point between 1865 and
1885. Dr. Hudson's exposed most of it, but its roots lie outside the USA and connect to that
era's Outlaw Empire--the British. It's very easy to say Capitalism's the problem, but people
want specifics and also need to have their generations of indoctrination upended so they're
capable of clear thinking. IMO, Richard Wolff's thin primer Understanding Socialism is
perfect for that job, and he's been in great demand to talk about Capitalism's failure during
the pandemic. Here's a recent
essay he wrote for Raw Story .
But yeah, we need to get the discussion out into the open, into the public
mainstream--somehow.
I will start the discussion the subject of which was suggested by Bevin @ 214:
... For example there is no doubt that old peoples homes-call them what you will- have been
slaughterhouses in the past few weeks. There are all sorts of reasons-all non medical- why
this has happened and we would do well to discuss what they are. And insist that nothing
like it recur in future years ...
I would add that not only are significant COVID-19 outbreak clusters centring around
nursing homes and aged care facilities, they have also centred around passenger cruise ships.
In Australia there is currently a criminal investigation being undertaken into the actions of
Carnival Australia with regard to the decision made by NSW state health authorities to allow
passengers to disembark from the Ruby Princess in Sydney in late March even though the
results of the tests they had taken were not yet known.
We might ask what do aged care places and passenger cruise ships might have in common.
Apart from often being closed systems - residents in aged care places usually don't move
about much and may not have access to fresh air, and passengers on certain levels of a cruise
ship and many of the crew (especially kitchen staff, cleaners, technical people) may also
have limited access to fresh air - what else might favour the circulation of COVID-19 in
those environments? We ought to look at airconditioning systems, water supply systems, and
the conditions of the people working in nursing homes and cruise ships and how their
conditions influence their work and give rise to situations in which they may be transferring
viruses and bacteria from one patient or passenger to the next.
These environments are microcosms of capitalist society in action.
I trust history and events to come will show these things:
1. When the US economy crashed (which is still happening and yet to come with its full
force), it wasn't the "virus" that crashed it. It was the US economy that crashed the US
economy. As noted above, the economy couldn't take a health shock to its workers.
2. The people of the US did not enter into distancing and self-quarantining because they
were obeying the dictates of any of their governments - they were not cowed unto this, at
least not by government. They chose voluntarily to do this as a survival measure, knowing
that the governments were unable or unwilling to help them. And if, moving forward,
governments attempt to keep an unreasonable control over the people - as if they the
governments had actually been in control through this crisis - those unreasonable controls
will be flouted wholesale by the people.
3. As US society feels its way into a "reopening" - still without testing or affordable
treatment - there will be many nuances to explore and figure out. Society will need to learn
what's useful and what's pointless, which costs are important to bear and which are
disastrous beyond reason. At the first stage of the crisis, one universal hammer for one
universal nail was all that the people had. Now they have masks, at least. The people made
those masks, not the governments, and the people made them work. The people will make the
re-opening work, and do the exploration of how to adapt the culture to what works in an age
of bio-danger.
4. As everyone in the US can agree, what a shit-show it's been.
Lol. So now we talk about C to debunk claims. Take a look at the financial interests of
public health agencies like Fauci, FDA, CDC, etc, WHO, Big Pharma, Gates, etc
Do you know hospitals can charge medicare 15% more if they have a covid-19 diagnosis, and
CDC helps out by saying a test is not required?
Also, as for antibody tests indicating the level of Covid-19 exposure/immunity. Thats not
true. Only those who are exposed and can not clear the virus via their innate and cellular
immune cells go on to develop antibodies (it takes 7-10 days from infection/exposure to
antibody protection), and subsequently test seropositive in antibody test. These people are
naturally immune. They don't get sick. Most of those who cant fight it off without antibodies
don't get very sick. In other cases the antibodies worsen their condition since it activates
another complement pathway which increases inflammation and cytokines.
As the Bronx doctor said, many of the deaths are occurring there in people not because of
Covid-19 but because they aren't getting medical care due to suspension of services or fear
of going to hospital. They die at home or in ambulances. Some may die with covid-19 , not
because of it.
That the lock down is working is the same reasoning that I use with my anti-tiger statue on
my verandah. As I have seen no tigers, then the statue is working perfectly and it was
worth the $100,000 I paid for it!
It is estimated that half the world will lose their jobs by the time this lock down is
finished.
Boeing is buried ten metres deep, they just have not realised it yet. Airbus will soon
be filing for bankruptcy. Hertz is going over the abyss as we speak. AirBnb is toast! The
food chains will soon be breaking down as much of the food industry is geared for the fast
food, restaurant, and hotel business.
Lots of tourist places now have 70% unemployment.
The housing market will soon start to collapse as no-one can pay rents and
mortgages.
Then the manufacturing plants that supply the spare parts for the water treatment and
sewerage plants can no longer supply replacements.
The electric grid goes down as their no parts for the turbines, transformers, etc.
How you going now in your house with no food, water, and electricity? Still happy to sit
in the dark, thinking this is all worth it?
And this is covoid-19, wait for covid-20/21/22/23
How long before we say enough, let's approach this another way, for a pandemic which
does not even touch anyone under thirty!
Sweden is trying something different and seem to be no worse, probably better than the
UK approach.
And we haven't paid our recent 'restaurant bill' now owed to the bankers, payable in
about three years, when we are going to be drained of several pints of financial blood!
And in Australia, with about eighty deaths, the panic borders on the insane!
Great comment. My anecdotal observation is that there are excess deaths because people are
afraid to go to the hospital. In New York, deaths at home are much higher than before.
Yes, there are some wild conspiracy theories out there. But the fact that Covid is indeed
worse than the flu is not necessarily an argument that the cure is not worse than the
disease. The new depression is just getting going, as are pending food shortages. As
governments increasingly print money so the jobless can buy things, this will cause inflation
as there will be too much money chasing too few goods (especially food) being produced. This
will necessitate more printing, causing a vicious circle of increasing inflation.
The poor economy will cause many more problems and excess deaths, in ways we don't yet
understand.
@ 13 "Atlanticist" may not have a lot of meaning to most people out there, but that doesn't
mean it isn't a good word to describe the US and Western European power center. The first
time I heard it was from Kees van Der Pijl in his book "The Making of an Atlantic Ruling
Class." And the term Anglo Zionist is a very good description of the US / Western Europe /
Israeli power block. I don't understand your dislike for the Saker, but it doesn't matter to
me. I agree that Atlanticist and globalist are more or less interchangeable. I guess
globalist would include Japan, too. Would you rather use the term Tri-lateralist?
I am from the United States. I agree that my country has been a large purveyor of much
evil in the world. And a lot of it has been directed at its own subjects. There are many good
people in this country who are just trying to get by.
Neoliberalism was waged against the US populace as it was unleashed on the world at large.
It seems like it really began to gather steam when the dollar was taken off the gold
standard. That was the start of the second Cold War according to Kees van Der Pijl, at least
in my understanding of what he has written. I learned that in his book MH 17, Ukraine and the
New Cold War. The powers that be began to outsource US jobs. Then austerity and
privatization.
I don't know why I am commenting. I always regret doing it. Pregret is a word I have
coined for this sense. I know everyone here is a lot smarter than I am, and lately I have
noticed that the commenters have become a lot less civil.
I did feel that your dismissiveness of the term Atlanticist merited a response though. As
well as the hatred by a lot of people toward a the citizens of the US. The powers that be are
treat us like subjects here. There is not much any of can do about the situation in reality.
I'm sure most of you out there are aware we have a huge prison population. Filled with the
descendants of slaves. We did a real genocide against the native people. The majority of
people can't afford health care. I am one of them.
So for what it's worth, that's my take on the sad state of this country. Sorry for all the
hell we have created.
"... In truth is this is a familiar pattern over the past century where the economy is continually salvaged from ruin by the government at the expense of ordinary workers, small businesses and taxpayers. ..."
"... The system typically privatizes profit for an elite while socializing the losses for the mass of people. It has always been a version of "socialism for the rich". ..."
"... As Eric Zuesse commented in an-depth analysis published in our journal this week, the Covid-19 "top-down bailout" in the U.S. will result in even more social inequality and ultimately more dysfunction in the American economy going forward. ..."
"... Ironically, a virus is exposing the pathological system ..."
The Covid-19 pandemic is unleashing obscene bailouts of Western industries and companies, as
well as lifelines for billionaire business magnates.
It is grotesque that millions of workers are being laid off by corporations which are in
turn receiving taxpayer funds. Many of these corporations have stashed trillions of dollars
away in tax havens and have contributed zero to the public treasury. Yet they are being bailed
out due to shutdowns in the economy over the Covid-19 crisis.
Why aren't the banks and corporations being forced by governments to pay for their workers
on sick leave or in lockdown?
It's because the governments are bought and paid-for servants of the top one per cent. Some
political leaders are the embodiment of the one per cent, like Donald Trump and senior members
of the U.S. Congress.
The biggest orgy of funny money is seen in the U.S. where the Trump administration and
Congress have approved the printing of trillions of dollars to prop up corporations and banks.
Meanwhile crumbs are being thrown at millions of workers and their families.
In just five weeks, unemployment has hit a staggering 26.4 million people in the U.S.
– and that's the official figure. The real level is doubtless much higher. It is reported
that the job losses have wiped out all the employment gains made over the past decade since the
last financial crisis in 2008. As with the present crisis, the U.S. government arranged
trillion-dollar bailouts for banks and industries back in 2008-2009. It didn't last long until
the next binge.
In truth is this is a familiar pattern over the past century where the economy is
continually salvaged from ruin by the government at the expense of ordinary workers, small
businesses and taxpayers.
The recurring rescue is proof that the system of private capital and supposed free markets
is a myth.
The system typically privatizes profit for an elite while socializing the losses for the
mass of people. It has always been a version of "socialism for the rich".
In the distant past the salvaging of broken-down capitalism was at least conducted with a
certain degree of democratization and social progress. In the New Deal era of Roosevelt in the
1930s at least government intervention went a long way to restoring workers and their rights,
despite bitter opposition from capitalists. Over recent decades, however, the rescuing of
capitalism has seen an ever-increasing emphasis on plying money and loans to corporations and
investors while ordinary workers are neglected. This process of embezzlement reached new
heights in the 2008 crash. Now under Trump the larceny has become legendary. It should be
underscored though that the corruption has bipartisan endorsement from Republicans and
Democrats. They are really one party beholden to big business.
As Eric Zuesse commented in an-depth
analysis published in our journal this week, the Covid-19 "top-down bailout" in the U.S.
will result in even more social inequality and ultimately more dysfunction in the American
economy going forward.
"The outcome will therefore be economic collapse, and perhaps even revolution," notes
Zuesse.
It is indisputable that capitalism is a failed system both in the U.S. and Europe. The
Covid-19 pandemic and its disastrous social impact of sickness and deaths shows that such an
economy cannot organize societies based on satisfying human needs. Instead, it functions to
continually enrich the already wealthy while creating ever-greater numbers of impoverished and
deprived. This chronic polarization of wealth has been pointed out by many critics of
capitalism, including Karl Marx, and more contemporaneously by progressive economists like
Richard Wolff and Thomas Picketty.
It is fair to describe corporate capitalism (or socialism for the rich) as a pathology which
produces many other pathologies, including deprivation, crime, insecurity, ecological damage,
militarism, imperialism and ultimately war.
Ironically, a virus is exposing the pathological system. And it is, inevitably, forcing a
cure to arise.
It's time to abolish the parasitical system and implement something more civilized,
effective, sustainable and democratic. That is the task of people organized to fight for their
interests. The delusion of bailing out a failed and sick system must be shaken off once and for
all.
Nonetheless, it's been suggested that a number of Silicon Valley elites have already escaped
the US and sought refuge in New Zealand. And unlike the rest of us, the super-rich aren't
hoarding food and fighting each other for toilet paper and hand sanitizer in the supermarket.
They're not posting up poorly constructed, badly edited renditions of 'Imagine', then patting
themselves on the back and saying, "I made a difference today." US businessman Mihai
Dinulescu and his wife are seeing out the pandemic on New Zealand's Waiheke Island, where he
quipped to the press that they planned to go "billionaire hunting." God forbid that they
might actually meet a poor or middle-class person during their attempt to escape the fate
destined for many of their fellow men, women and children.
Apparently, a refugee fleeing a catastrophe who doesn't feel safe enough to avail themselves
of the protection of their own country is acceptable in a Western nation as long as they are
uber-wealthy
If the new coronavirus pandemic has taught us one thing, it is that we need to rethink what
we need to do to keep America safe. That's why Secretary of Defense Mark Esper's recent
tweet calling modernization of U.S. nuclear forces a "top priority ... to protect the
American people and our allies" seemed so tone deaf.
COVID-19 has already
killed more Americans than
died in the
9/11 attacks and the Iraq and Afghan wars combined, with projections of many more to come.
The pandemic underscores the need for a systematic, sustainable, long-term investment in public
health resources,
from protective equipment , to ventilators and hospital beds, to research and planning
resources needed to deal with future outbreaks of disease.
As Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American
Enterprise Institute, has
noted : "We're going to see enormous downward pressure on defense spending because of other
urgent American national needs like health care." And that's as it should be, given the
relative dangers posed by outbreaks of disease and climate change relative to traditional
military challenges.
... ... ...
ICBMs are dangerous because of the short decision time a president would have to decide
whether to launch them in a crisis to avoid having them wiped out in a perceived first strike
-- a matter of
minutes . This reality greatly increases the prospect of an accidental nuclear war based on
a false warning of attack. This is a completely unnecessary risk given that the other two legs
of the nuclear triad -- ballistic missile submarines and nuclear-armed bombers -- are more than
sufficient to deter a nuclear attack, or to retaliate, should the unlikely scenario of a
nuclear attack on the United States occur.
... ... ...
Eliminating ICBMs and reducing the size of the U.S. arsenal will face strong opposition in
Washington, both from strategists who maintain that the nuclear triad should be sacrosanct, and
from special interests that benefit from excess spending on nuclear weapons. The Senate
ICBM Coalition , composed of senators from states with ICBM bases or substantial ICBM
development and maintenance work, has been particularly effective in fending any changes in
ICBM policy, from reducing the size of the force to merely studying alternatives, whether those
alternatives are implemented or not.
Shimizu Randall Personally I don't see why the Trident subs cannot be refurbished and have
a extended life. I think the Minuteman missiles need to be replace. But I don't understand why
the cost is exorbitant. Terry Auckland
OMG.....what a sensible idea..Other nuclear capable countries will fall into line if this is
adopted....peace could thrive and flourish ...sadly it could never happen..too much money at
state...too many careers truncated...and too many lobbyists and thinktank type's and loyalist
senators to cajole and appease..
A pipe dream I think. ..situation normal will continue to annhilation...
In a country with Gilded Age level of inequality implementing any meaningful social
distancing is next to impossible. Ghettos prevents that and became permanent hotspots.
See discussion of this problem at
IMHO the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the category "younger then 55" in a given
country correlated well with the level of obesity. In other words the virus hits already
deprive and weakened underclass -- the main consumer of junk food.
So what we see in the USA is far from surprising taking into account the level of
neoliberalization of the country and a large permanent uninsured underclass including
contractors and perma-temps.
Existence of nursing homes is another unsolvable problem. Like ships, they also
automatically became hotspots and medical personnel involved became inflected spreading
the infection in the vicinity.
Here is one interesting comment that I found:
The Grim Joker , says: Show Comment April 23, 2020 at 6:52 pm GMT
... ... ...
Yesterday's Action
My bank now has traffic pylons outside the door. They ask the following questions
if you want to enter:
Have you been out of the country? Answer; How am I going to be out of the
country when the airport is closed?
Do you have any symptoms? Answer: If I had I would be at the hospital
Have you associated with anyone who has the symptoms? Answer: If I thought they
did I would ask them to go to the hospital and so would I.
Sir! There is no need to be rude. Answer: Far from it. You are asking questions
parrot fashion. Questions that do not make any sense.
After getting MY money out of THEIR pockets I proceeded to the auto mechanic for
front brakes.
Joker: Am I allowed to come inside ?
70 Year old Mechanic Unmasked: Sure, you are the only customer today. You can
keep me company while I do the work. I cannot afford to lose customers.
NYTmes and Vox both have articles about tha anti-quarantine/pro-virus crowd. Mostly the
protests are being instigated by the usual anti-government oligarchs who are terrorized that
people might actually conclude that government has an important role to play in addressing
problems.
" Among those fighting the orders are FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots, which played
pivotal roles in the beginning of Tea Party protests starting more than a decade ago. Also
involved are a law firm led partly by former Trump White House officials, a network of
state-based conservative policy groups, and an ad hoc coalition of conservative leaders known
as Save Our Country that has advised the White House on strategies for a tiered reopening of
the economy." [found at Gale, not on NYT website!]
In an interview with Theda Skocpol: " For the elite conservative groups sponsoring this
stuff behind the scenes, I think it's driven by a firm belief that if Americans become used
to trusting government and relying on social benefits from government, then that's dangerous
to the victory they think they have almost won in destroying the New Deal and the Great
Society reforms in this country."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/22/21227928/coronavirus-social-distancing-lockdown-trump-tea-party
And, of course, the oligarch-owned media just gobble it up, practically begging for an
apocalypse.
IMO we should just label them the pro-COVID crowd in any discussion of the matter.
"... To be sure, Trump has good reason to hate the intelligence and national security community, which utterly rejected his candidacy and plotted to destroy both his campaign and, even after he was elected, his presidency ..."
"... While it is not unusual for presidents to surround themselves with devoted yes-men, as Trump does with his spectacularly unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner, his administration is nevertheless unusual in its tendency to apply an absolute loyalty litmus test to nearly everyone surrounding the president ..."
"... Most damaging to consumer interests, the rot has also affected the so-called regulatory agencies that are supposed to monitor the potentially illegal activities of corporations and industries to protect the public. As University of Chicago economist George Stigler several times predicted, under both Obama and Trump advocates of ostensibly "regulated" corporations have taken over every U.S. federal regulatory agency . The captured U.S. government regulators now represent the interests of the corporations, not the public. This is more like government by a criminal oligarchy rather than of, by and for The People. ..."
The 24/7 intensified media coverage of the coronavirus story has meant that other news has
either been ignored or relegated to the back pages, never to be seen again. The Middle East has
been on a boil but coverage of the Trump administration's latest
moves against Iran has been so insignificant as to be invisible. Meanwhile closer to home,
the declaration by the ubiquitous Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that current president of
Venezuela Nicolas Maduro is a drug trafficker did generate somewhat of a ripple, as did
dispatch of warships to the Caribbean to intercept the alleged drugs, but that story also
died.
Of more interest perhaps is the tale of the continued purge of government officials,
referred to as "draining the swamp," by President Donald Trump as it could conceivably have
long-term impact on how policy is shaped in Washington. Prior to the virus partial lockdown,
some of the impending shakeup within the
intelligence community (IC) and Pentagon were commented on in the media, but developments
since that time have been less reported, even when several inspectors-general were removed.
To be sure, Trump has good reason to hate the intelligence and national security community,
which utterly rejected his candidacy and plotted to destroy both his campaign and, even after
he was elected, his presidency. Whether one argues that what took place was due to a "Deep
state" or Establishment conspiracy or rather just based on personal ambition by key players,
the reality was that a number of top officials seem to have forgotten the oaths they swore to
the constitution when it came to Donald Trump.
Be that as it may, beyond the musical chairs that have characterized the senior level
appointments in the first three years of the Trump administration, there has been a concerted
effort to remove "disloyal" members of the intelligence community, with disloyal generally
being the label applied to holdovers from the Bush and Obama administrations. The February
appointment of U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard "Ric" Grenell as interim Director of National
Intelligence (DNI), a position that he will hold simultaneously with his ambassadorship, has
been criticized from all sides due to his inexperience, history of bad judgement and
partisanship. The White House is now claiming
that he will be replaced by Texas Congressman John Ratcliffe after the interim appointment
is completed.
Criticism of Grenell for his clearly evident deficiencies misses the point, however, as he
is not in place to do anything constructive. He has already initiated a purge of federal
employees in the White House and national security apparatus considered to be insufficiently
loyal, an effort which has been supported by National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien and
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Many career officers have been sent back to their home agencies
while the new appointees are being drawn from the pool of neoconservatives that proliferated in
the George W. Bush administration. Admittedly some prominent neocons like Bill Kristol have
disqualified themselves for service with the new regime due to their vitriolic criticism of
Trump the candidate, but many others have managed to remain politically viable by keeping their
mouths shut during the 2016 campaign. To no one's surprise, many of the new employees being
brought in are being carefully vetted to make sure that they are passionate supporters of
Israel.
While it is not unusual for presidents to surround themselves with devoted yes-men, as Trump
does with his spectacularly unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner, his administration is
nevertheless unusual in its tendency to apply an absolute loyalty litmus test to nearly
everyone surrounding the president, even several layers down into the administration where
employees are frequently apolitical. As the Trump White House has not been renowned for its
adroit policies and forward thinking, the loss of expertise will be hardly noticeable, but
there will certainly be a reduction in challenges to group think while replacing officials in
the law enforcement and inspector general communities will mean that there will be no one in a
high enough position to impede or check presidential misbehavior. Instead, high officials will
be principally tasked with coming up with rationalizations to excuse what the White House
does.
... ... ...
Subsequent to the defenestration of Atkinson, Trump went after another inspector general
Glenn Fine, who was principal deputy IG at the Pentagon and had been charged with heading the
panel of inspectors that would have oversight responsibility to certify the proper
implementation of the $2.2 trillion dollar coronavirus relief package. As has been noted in the
media, there was particular concern regarding the lack of transparency regarding the $500
billion Exchange Stabilizing Fund (ESF) that had been set aside to make loans to corporations
and other large companies while the really urgently needed Small Business Loan allocation has
been failing to work at all except for Israeli
companies that have lined up for the loans. The risk that the ESF would become a slush fund
for companies favored by the White House was real, and several investigative reports observed
that Trump business interests might also directly benefit from the way it was drafted.
Four days after the firing of Atkinson, Fine also was let go to be replaced by the EPA
inspector general Sean O'Donnell, who is considered a Trump loyalist. On the previous day the
tweeter-in-chief came down on yet another IG, the woman responsible for Health and Human
Services Christi Grimm, who had issued a report stating that the her department had found "severe"
shortages of virus testing material at hospitals and "widespread" shortages of personal
protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. Trump quipped to reporters "Where did he
come from, the inspector general. What's his name?"
On the following day, Trump unleashed the tweet machine, asking "Why didn't the I.G., who
spent 8 years with the Obama Administration (Did she Report on the failed H1N1 Swine Flu
debacle where 17,000 people died?), want to talk to the Admirals, Generals, V.P. & others
in charge, before doing her report. Another Fake Dossier!"
A comment about foxes taking over the hen house would not be amiss and one might also note
that the swamp is far from drained. A concerted effort is clearly underway to purge anyone from
the upper echelons of the U.S. government who in any way contradicts what is coming out of the
White House. Inspectors general who are tasked with looking into malfeasance are receiving the
message that if they want to stay employed, they have to toe the presidential line, even as it
seemingly whimsically changes day by day. And then there is the irony of the heads at major
agencies like Environmental Protection now being committed to not enforcing existing
environmental regulations at all.
Most damaging to consumer interests, the rot has also affected the so-called regulatory
agencies that are supposed to monitor the potentially illegal activities of corporations and
industries to protect the public. As University of Chicago economist George Stigler several
times predicted, under both Obama and Trump advocates of ostensibly "regulated" corporations
have taken over every U.S. federal regulatory agency . The captured U.S. government
regulators now represent the interests of the corporations, not the public. This is more like
government by a criminal oligarchy rather than of, by and for The People.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that
seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its
email is [email protected] .
I yield to no one in my contempt for the fraud-failure of God Emperor Bush III but the author
has to be aware that talk of "impeachable" offenses is meaningless in American politics.
There has never been and never will be an impeachment effort that's not primarily
political rather than process-motivated. It's an up-or-down vote based on a partisan
head-counting and opportunism and public dissatisfaction. All the Article-this-and-that is
Magic Paper Talmudry.
Trump is a somewhat rogueish, somewhat rival Don and faction-head in the same criminal
(((Commission))) that's been running America for well over a century. He's Jon Gotti to their
Carlo Gambino, and his gauche nouveaux-elite style offends the sensibilities of the more
snobbish Davoise, but he's just angling for a seat at the table and a cut of the spoils, not
a return of power to the people.
Impeachment would serve no purpose but what we've seen so far with Russiagate, etc..
– a sideshow distraction from the real backroom, long-knife action going down, ala the
"settling scores" montage in Godfather III.
"To be sure, Trump has good reason to hate the intelligence and national security community,
which utterly rejected his candidacy and plotted to destroy both his campaign and, even after
he was elected, his presidency." -- Yes to this. This is OBVIOUS to all but the dullest rubes
or those who are in on it and trying to escape what they tried to do in attempting to over
throw the US Government. The rest?
Once you have this stated– that an actual Coup which was certainly plotted/sprung by
the last occupant of the Presidency along with Clinton, Brennan, Comey, and many other NWO
Globalists throughout the Government (FBI, CIA, DOJ ) and outside of it (the Globalist NWO
MEDIA) the rest is drivel -- they tried to take him out–JFK they used a bullet, here
not yet– so to say he shouldn't put in people he absolutely trusts at this time into
any position he can? Are you kidding or what? You can't be serious– I've actually had
someone try and kill me they were quite serious about it– my reaction after was not
anything like what I see you suggesting or mirrored in your "analysis". This is how the CIA
"counsels" in response to a murderous Coup -- an attempt to overthrow the duly elected
Government?
How do you overreact to a group of the most powerful people in the World getting together
to try to murder you? That's your argument basically– he's over reacting to that? He
shouldn't have "Loyalists". He needs to work with these other people -- the ones who want to
murder him -- keep some of those "non-Loyalists" on board who time after time have plotted
against him in every way possible during the last nearly 4 years?
You seem to be one strange dude from my life's vantage point any way, what a perspective
.Maybe you would actually deal with people of this magnitude trying to destroy you in the way
you state but no sane/fairly intelligent person would -- I can't get past you have that
sentence in there and then follow it with all the rest -- you seem to live in some alternate
reality where when someone tries to murder you the right reaction is to blow it off and work
with them– give them another few shots at you– say what? You learned this from
your years at the CIA– this is how they train/advise things like this should be dealt
with up at Langley? Or is it just wishful thinking on your part that they get another shot at
him?
While it is not unusual for presidents to surround themselves with devoted yes-men, as
Trump does with his spectacularly unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner, his administration
is nevertheless unusual in its tendency to apply an absolute loyalty litmus test to nearly
everyone surrounding the president
True enough. Trump has also injected into Washington his own nest of swamp creatures and
Wall St. bigwigs. However it is also true that Trump has been under unrelenting attack since
the day he announced his candidacy. This is not fair. With the possible exception of Nixon,
I've never seen a more ruthless campaign by political insiders to demean a public figure.
But to whom must Trump show ceaseless and attentive loyalty to?–no matter what?
I can't get too worked up about the firing of the prison guards; I rather enjoy the
charade.
The real problem is that: 'It's the system, stupid!' and no amount of tinkering or puting
the 'right' people in these positions will ever do anything more than just changing the
illusion that something is being done.
It reminds me a little of that late Soviet Union film "Burned by the Sun" about Stalin's
purges of the criminals that had ridden his coat tails to power. Try as the movie makers did,
I could not and would not feel an ounce of sorrow for those (these) scumbags who had wielded
immoral, arbitrary, and disproportionate power over their subjects.
The government has been against the people for my entire lifetime (I'm an old man now). One
of the only glimmers of light in that time, JFK was snuffed out. After all, who did he think
he was, trying to stop the elites from having their war in Vietnam?
He (Trump) should have purged all of the Obama appointees on day one.
The Vindman twins are a perfect example of the Deep State.
While I can understand your loathing of Trump's middle East policies, I do also, what he has
blatantley done vis a vis the Zionist Entity is very little different than what slick Obama
did under the table, outside of the Iran deal.
And to tell you the truth, as much as I loathe Israel the Iran deal was definitely flawed and
should have been more advantageous to America and the West. Iran should have seen the
advantages of totally relinquishing nuclear weapons even with mad Zionists in their
neighborhood. They could have still kept their ballistic missiles, sans nuclear tips.
@Getaclue
The idea that Trump is fighting the Deep State is ludacris this is a charade if the Deep
State didn't want Trump to be President he wouldn't be. Trump is a Deep State minion. No
matter the existential threat to the US the 1% get richer and the 99% get poorer.
He (Trump) should have purged all of the Obama appointees on day one.
That supposes that Trump is not a Deep Stater as was Obama this is a poor supposition.
Iran should have seen the advantages of totally relinquishing nuclear weapons even with
mad Zionists in their neighborhood. They could have still kept their ballistic missiles,
sans nuclear tips.
Ballistic missiles, sans nuclear tips are useless. Did anybody care when North Korea had
ballistic missiles before they had something worthwhile to put on the tip? Hell no.
Trump has had two open coup attempts in three years, and a constant barrage of leaks etc. His
purges are clearly at least three years too late.
Also, to an outsider, it's strange how some right-wing American journalists write in a way
which indicates that they have faith in the due process, checks-and-balances etc afforded by
the American system. I don't understand how any American right-winger could maintain their
faith in the U.S. political system, it seems corrupt approaching the point that it is
beyond-repair.
Trump's MAGA For The People efforts, must take steps to undo the damage done by the
prior criminal admistration.
Here is an detailed explanation of how Barack Hussein intentionally undermined the rule of
law:(1)
Aside from the date the important part of the first page is the motive for sending it.
The DOJ is telling the court in July 2018: based on what they know the FISA application
still contains "sufficient predication for the Court to have found probable cause" to
approve the application. The DOJ is defending the Carter Page FISA application as still
valid.
However, it is within the justification of the application that alarm bells are found.
On page six the letter identifies the primary participants behind the FISA
redactions:
DOJ needed to protect evidence Mueller had already extracted from the fraudulent FISA
authority. That's the motive.
In July 2018 if the DOJ-NSD had admitted the FISA application and all renewals were
fatally flawed Robert Mueller would have needed to withdraw any evidence gathered as a
result of its exploitation. The DOJ in 2018 was protecting Mueller's poisoned fruit.
If the DOJ had been honest with the court, there's a strong possibility some, perhaps
much, of Mueller evidence gathering would have been invalidated and cases were pending. The
solution: mislead the court and claim the predication was still valid.
I am not sure why Giraldi is defending Barack Hussein and Hillary Clinton's behaviour
& staff choices. All rational human beings see the damage that Hillary created at the
State Department.
"What's complicated is that even if what everything we say about the society of surveillance
is scary and true, the state obtains this obedience in the name of its most undisputed
function, which is to protect the population from creeping death.
That's what plenty of serious studies define as 'biolegitimacy'."
And I would add, today, a biolegitimacy boosted by widespread voluntary servitude.
Linh Dinh: "Diogenes, "I am a citizen of the world.""
Nobody knows exactly what he meant by this. He had previously been stripped of his
citizenship in Sinope, so it may have simply been a way a expressing that fact. Also, it's
worth pointing out that he was a contemporary of Alexander the Great, whose conquests up to
323 BC, the year both men died, included all of the known world. According to some, Alexander
once went to meet Diogenes, who was sunning himself on a nearby hill. Diogenes, unimpressed
with the conqueror, asked him to step out of the way, as he was blocking the sun. Departing,
Alexander is reputed to have said that if he hadn't been Alexander, then he would have liked
to have been Diogenes.
Linh Dinh: "The coronavirus crisis is a turning point in this escalating war
between globalists and us dumb hicks."
Not really a turning point, certainly not in the sense of a reversal. And there's no war,
because for a war you need two sides. The dumb hicks may rail against shadowy "globalists",
but are too stupid to realize that they themselves are globalists. The hicks want their cheap
computers, and the thousands of other things manufactured by slave labor in China, and the
globalists are happy to provide them. Yet the same dopes chanting USA! USA! (the forces of
nationalism, at least in America) don't understand that empire has downsides as well as
advantages. The coronavirus pandemic is an example of the cost of empire, the white man's
technological empire that has come to cover the whole world. In that way, it resembles
previous plagues, such as the plague of Justinian in the sixth century, and the Black Death
in the fourteenth, both of which are also thought to have originated in China and infected
the white world by means of global commerce.
Linh Dinh: "It will be a world of ubiquitous surveillance, universal snitching,
curtailed movement, suffocated speech and enforced, increasingly absurd dogmatism, with a
lockdown to be sprung on us at any time, since we already know the drill."
The hicks themselves will beg for it, because they're always for more law and order.
They're born badgelickers and just can't get enough of it. You can hear their excuses
already. "If it saves only one life it will be worth it." "If it prevents another 9/11, it
will be worth it." "If it allows countries and races to coexist in harmony, it will be worth
it." "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide. Surveill me all you like."
Besides, what remains of privacy anyway? It's been abolished. Technological innovation has
made universal surveillance a fait accompli . The hicks themselves have voluntarily
installed listening devices and spy cameras in their own homes. Every street corner and
shopping mall is equipped with cameras. Drones and satellites oversee everything. Government
supercomputers collate the data; identify threats.
Linh Dinh: "To avoid this fate, we must assert our regional autonomy and resist
each diktat. This will take much clarity, composure and courage. We shouldn't worry about
what foreign hicks are up to, but simply band with neighboring hicks, to defend our
precious hickdom. We must liberate our home turf first."
People will never voluntarily abandon high technology and the empire to which it has given
rise. To do so would cost billions of lives and cause extreme hardship for any survivors. The
technological trap has snapped shut.
The coronavirus pandemic is an example of the cost of empire, the white man's
technological empire that has come to cover the whole world. In that way, it resembles
previous plagues, such as the plague of Justinian in the sixth century, and the Black Death
in the fourteenth, both of which are also thought to have originated in China and infected
the white world by means of global commerce.
We could push that logic a bit father and arrive at: occasional viral outbreaks are the
cost of civilization to begin with, so "lockdowns" are madness. No evolution without
biological exploitation.
Totally agree with your remarks. As rousing as this piece is, it isn't the reality. We
have existed on this arc since fire.
I was in Shenzhen China when the epidemic officially started.
I watched closely when Xi Jinping appeared publicly and assumed leadership
(ie put HIS neck on the line) for the outbreak.
Also reassuring was his declaration of open and factual reporting.
He periodically reappears on the hundreds of state controlled TV channels
calling on delegated officials to meet required standards. Fail in this and you are gone
Most of the official TV/Net information was mostly optimistic, and frequently
nationalistic.
By way of contrast, I was able to access via cellphone the banned western
The Economist, The Guardian. It was like two different worlds.
The western reporting was almost all negative,, ,disparaging, damming with faint praise
or making unsourced statements about draconian authoritarianism in China..
Worse still, Trump had slashed the CDC budget, appointed evangelical Mike Pence as point
man
for the battle against CoVid in the US and indicated at that point
"The markets will determine the cost of CV testing"
So it is worth following the US closely for details of how
Capitalism deals with a communal disease called COVID
WET MARKETS
I did a grid survey of our 50 Block hi-rise by walking around the apartments .
All had shops at the ground level - around 20 per building, and over a third of them were
eateries.
They require a hi-turnover and low-markup for survival . They were in part
supplied by open air markets, where meat is laid out on unrefrigerated wooden blocks
to be cut on demand throughout the day. Yes, the fish are fresh - from swimming
( in distinctly unhygienic water ) into plastic bags within 5 minutes.
Chopping block just given a quick wipe.. Hmm.. I thought this is pandemic country...
This March, as COVID-19's capacity to overwhelm the American
healthcare system was becoming obvious, experts marveled at the scenario unfolding before their
eyes. "We have Third World countries who are better equipped than we are now in Seattle,"
noted one healthcare professional, her words echoed just a few days later by a shocked
doctor in New York who described
"a third-world country type of scenario." Donald Trump could similarly only grasp what was
happening through the same comparison. "I have seen things that I've never seen before," he
said
. "I mean I've seen them, but I've seen them on television and faraway lands, never in my
country."
At the same time, regardless of the fact that "Third World" terminology is outdated and
confusing, Trump's inept handling of the pandemic has itself elicited more than one "banana republic"
analogy, reflecting already well-worn, bipartisan comparisons of Trump to a "
third world dictator " (never mind that dictators and authoritarians have never been
confined solely to lower income countries).
And yet, while such comparisons provoke predictably nativist outrage from the right, what is
absent from any of
these responses to the situation is a sense of reflection or humility about the "Third
World" comparison itself. The doctor in New York who finds himself caught in a "third world"
scenario and the political commentators outraged when Trump behaves "like a third world
dictator" uniformly express themselves in terms of incredulous wonderment. One never hears the
potential second half of this comparison: "I am now experiencing what it is like to live in a
country that resembles the kind of nation upon whom the United States regularly imposes broken
economies and corrupt leaders."
Because behind today's coronavirus-inspired astonishment at conditions in developing or
lower income countries, and Trump's authoritarian-like thuggery, lies an actual military and
political hegemon with an actual impact on the world; particularly on what was once called the
"Third World."
In physical terms, the U.S.'s military hegemony is comprised of 800 bases in over 70 nations
–
more bases than any other nation or empire in history. The U.S. maintains drone bases,
listening posts, "black sites," aircraft carriers, a massive nuclear stockpile, and military
personnel working in approximately 160 countries. This is a globe-spanning military and
security apparatus organized into regional commands
that resemble the "proconsuls of the Roman empire and the governors-general of the
British." In other words, this apparatus is built not for deterrence, but for primacy.
The U.S.'s global primacy emerged from the wreckage of World War II when the United States
stepped into the shoes vacated by European empires. Throughout the Cold War, and in the name of
supporting "free peoples," the sprawling American security apparatus helped ensure that 300
years of imperial resource extraction and wealth distribution – from what was then called
the Third World to the First – remained undisturbed, despite decolonization.
Since then, the United States
has overthrown or attempted to overthrow the governments of approximately 50 countries,
many of which (e.g. Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and Chile) had elected leaders willing to
nationalize their natural resources and industries. Often these interventions
took the form of covert operations. Less frequently, the United States went to war to
achieve these same ends (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq).
In fiscal terms, maintaining American hegemony requires spending more
on "defense" than the next seven largest countries combined. Our
nearly $1 trillion security budget now amounts to about 15 percent of the federal budget
and over half of all
discretionary spending. Moreover, the U.S. security budget continues to increase despite the
Pentagon's inability to pass a fiscal audit.
Trump's claim that Obama had
"hollowed out" defense spending was not only grossly untrue, it masked the consistency of the
security budget's metastasizing growth since the Vietnam War, regardless of who sits in the
White House. At $738 billion dollars, Trump's security budget was passed in December with the
overwhelming support of House Democrats.
And yet, from the perspective of public discourse in this country, our globe-spanning,
resource-draining military and security apparatus exists in an entirely parallel universe to
the one most Americans experience on a daily level. Occasionally, we wake up to the idea of
this parallel universe but only when the United States is involved in visible military actions.
The rest of the time, Americans leave thinking about international politics – and the
deaths, for instance, of 2.5 million
Iraqis since 2003 – to the legions of policy analysts and Pentagon employees who
largely accept American military primacy as an "article of faith," as Professor of
International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham Patrick Porter has said
.
Foreign policy is routinely the last issue Americans consider when they vote for presidents
even though the president has more discretionary power over foreign policy than any other area
of American politics. Thus, despite its size, impact, and expense, the world's military hegemon
exists somewhere on the periphery of most Americans' self-understanding, as though, like the
sun, it can't be looked upon directly for fear of blindness.
Why is our avoidance of the U.S.'s weighty impact on the world a problem in the midst of the
coronavirus pandemic? Most obviously, the fact that our massive security budget has gone so
long without being widely questioned means that one of the soundest courses of action for the
U.S. during this crisis remains resolutely out of sight.
The shock of discovering that our healthcare system is so quickly overwhelmed should
automatically trigger broader conversations about spending priorities that entail deep and
sustained cuts in an engorged security budget whose sole purpose is the maintenance of primacy.
And yet, not only has this not happened, $10.5 billion of the coronavirus aid package has been
earmarked for the Pentagon, with $2.4 billion of that
channeled to the "defense industrial base." Of the $500 billion aimed at corporate America,
$17.5 billion is
set aside "for businesses critical to maintaining national security" such as aerospace.
To make matters worse, our blindness to this bloated security complex makes it frighteningly
easy for champions of American primacy to sound the alarm when they even suspect a dip in
funding might be forthcoming. Indeed, before most of us had even glanced at the details of the
coronavirus bill, foreign policy hawks were already
issuing dark prediction s about the impact of still-imaginary cuts in the security budget
on the U.S.'s "ability to strike any target on the planet in response to hostile actions by any
actor" – as if that ability already did not exist many times over.
On a more existential level, a country that is collectively engaged in unseeing its own
global power cannot help but fail to make connections between that power and domestic politics,
particularly when a little of the outside world seeps in. For instance, because most Americans
are unaware of their government's sponsorship of fundamentalist Islamic groups in the Middle
East throughout the Cold War, 9/11 can only ever appear to have come from nowhere, or because
Muslims hate our way of life.
This "how did we get here?" attitude replicates itself at every level of political life
making it profoundly difficult for Americans to see the impact of their nation on the rest of
the world, and the blowback from that impact on the United States itself. Right now, the
outsized influence of American foreign policy is already encouraging the spread of coronavirus
itself as U.S. imposed sanctions on Iran severely hamper that
country's ability to respond to the virus at home and virtually
guarantee its spread throughout the region.
Closer to home, our shock at the healthcare system's inept response to the pandemic masks
the relationship between the U.S.'s imposition
of free-market totalitarianism on countries throughout the
Global South and the impact of free-market totalitarianism on our own welfare state .
Likewise, it is more than karmic comeuppance that the President of the United States now
resembles the self-serving authoritarians the U.S. forced on so many formerly colonized
nations. The modes of militarized policing American security experts exported to those
authoritarian regimes also contributed , on a
policy level, to both the rise of militarized policing in American cities and the rise of mass
incarceration in the 1980s and 90s. Both of these phenomena played a significant role in
radicalizing Trump's white nationalist base and decreasing their tolerance for democracy.
Most importantly, because the U.S. is blind to its power abroad, it cannot help but turn
that blindness on itself. This means that even during a pandemic when America's exceptionalism
– our lack of national healthcare – has profoundly negative consequences on the
population, the idea of looking to the rest of the world for solutions remains unthinkable.
Senator Bernie Sanders' reasonable suggestion that the U.S., like Denmark, should
nationalize its healthcare system is dismissed as the fanciful pipe dream of an aging socialist
rather than an obvious solution to a human problem embraced by nearly every other nation in the
world. The Seattle healthcare professional who expressed shock that even "Third World
countries" are "better equipped" than we are to confront COVID-19 betrays a stunning ignorance
of the diversity of healthcare systems within developing countries. Cuba, for instance,
has responded
to this crisis with an efficiency and humanity that puts the U.S. to shame.
Indeed, the U.S. is only beginning to feel the full impact of COVID-19's explosive
confrontation with our exceptionalism: if the unemployment rate really does reach 32 percent,
as has been predicted,
millions of people will not only lose their jobs but their health insurance as well. In the
middle of a pandemic.
Over 150 years apart, political commentators Edmund Burke and Aimé Césaire
referred to this blindness as the byproduct of imperialism. Both used the exact same language
to describe it; as a "gangrene" that "poisons" the colonizing body politic. From their
different historical perspectives, Burke and Césaire observed how colonization
boomerangs back on colonial society itself, causing irreversible damage to nations that
consider themselves humane and enlightened, drawing them deeper into denial and
self-delusion.
Perhaps right now there is a chance that COVID-19 – an actual, not metaphorical
contagion – can have the opposite effect on the U.S. by opening our eyes to the things
that go unseen. Perhaps the shock of recognizing the U.S. itself is less developed than our
imagined "Third World" might prompt Americans to tear our eyes away from ourselves and look
toward the actual world outside our borders for examples of the kinds of political, economic,
and social solidarity necessary to fight the spread of Coronavirus. And perhaps moving beyond
shock and incredulity to genuine recognition and empathy with people whose economies and
democracies have been decimated by American hegemony might begin the process of reckoning with
the costs of that hegemony, not just in "faraway lands" but at home. In our country.
Posted on April
16, 2020 by Yves Smith Yves here. It would be
better if I were wrong, but I have doubts about this scenario. It appears to assume some
orderliness in the responses to the coronavirus, both in terms of businesses and governments
cooperating. I don't see this as possible in the US. Not only is there an absence of public
spiritedness, government is not trusted. And that's not an uninformed view. The US in incapable
of mounting a New Deal or war mobilization level response. It lacks the operational capacity.
And too many people in power are in it for themselves. Things may be better in a lot of the
rest of the world in terms of social and political cohesiveness, but few countries are as close
to being an autarky as the US (Russia is probably the best candidate), and so the breakdown of
global supply chains is likely to hit them even harder.
Similarly, if concerns that getting Covid-19 confers only short-term immunity (say a year or
less), then investing in tracking who has contacted it for the purpose of deeming individuals
to be safe from a travel/visa standpoint is a waste of effort.
I suspect Grasmsci is the best seer:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be
born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
By Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator and Jan Ritch-Frel, the executive
director of the Independent
Media Institute . Produced by Economy for All , a project
of the Independent Media Institute
The coronavirus pandemic has upended the global economic system, and just as importantly,
cast out 40 years of neoliberal orthodoxy that dominated the industrialized world.
Forget about the " new
world order ." Offshoring and global supply chains are out; regional and local production
is in. Market fundamentalism is passé; regulation is the norm. Public health is now more
valuable than just-in-time supply systems. Stockpiling and industrial capacity suddenly make
more sense, which may have future implications in the recently revived
antitrust debate in the U.S.
Biodata will drive the next phase of social management and surveillance, with near-term
consequences for the way countries handle immigration and customs. Health care and education
will become digitally integrated the way newspapers and television were 10 years ago. Health
care itself will increasingly be seen as a necessary public good, rather than a private right,
until now in the U.S. predicated on age, employment or income levels. Each of these will
produce political tensions within their constituencies and in the society generally as they
adapt to the new normal.
This political sea change doesn't represent a sudden conversion to full-on socialism, but
simply a case of minimizing our future risks of infection by providing full-on universal
coverage. Beyond that, as Professor Michael Sandel has
argued , one has to query the "moral logic" of providing "coronavirus treatment for the
uninsured," while leaving "health coverage in ordinary times to the market" (especially when
our concept of what constitutes "ordinary times" has been upended).
Internationally, there will be many positive and substantial international shifts to address
overdue global public health needs and accords on mitigating climate change. And it is finally
dawning on Western-allied economic planners that the military price tag that made so-called
cheap oil and cheap labor possible is vastly higher than investment in advanced research and
next-generation manufacturing.
This also means that the old North (developed world) versus South (emerging world) division
that long preoccupied scholars and
policymakers in the post–World War II period will become increasingly stark again,
particularly for those emerging economies that have hitherto attracted investment largely on
the grounds of being repositories of low-cost labor. They will now find themselves picking
sides as they seek assistance in an increasingly divided and multipolar world.
The fault lines of the next economic era have already begun to surface, creating friction
with the previous international structure of banking and finance, trade and industry. There is
a force beyond elites and critical industries driving this: The proletariat has literally
become the "precariat."
In the U.S. and Europe, the staggering number of service economy workers are going to be
quickly politicized by the shortfalls: People have seen a collapse in income, and big failures
in education, and health care. Union-busting, pension fleecing, and austerity budgets and new
technologies that concentrate wealth away from labor have created a circumstance where
ownership and profit models must be revisited to sustain stability. The needs are too acute to
be distracted by the lies of Trump, or the inadequate responses in other parts of the
industrialized world. The current crisis will likely prompt geopolitical and economic shifts
and dislocations we haven't seen since World War II.
Death of Chimerica, the Rise of New Production Blocs
One of the biggest casualties of the current order is the breakdown of " Chimerica ,"
the decades-old nexus between the U.S. and Chinese economies, along with other leading
countries' partnerships with Chinese manufacturing. While the geopolitics of blame for the
origins of coronavirus continue to shake out, the process that saw a decrease in exports from
China to the U.S. from
$816 billion in 2018 to $757 billion in 2019 will accelerate and intensify over the next
decade.
While a decoupling is unlikely to lead to armed conflict, a Cold War style of competition
could emerge as a new global fault line. Much as the Cold War did not preclude some degree of
collaboration between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, so too today there may still be
areas of cooperation between Washington and Beijing from climate to public health, advanced
research to weapons proliferation.
Nor does this shift necessarily spell the sudden collapse of Chinese power or influence --
it has a colossal and still-growing domestic market and is on the international leaderboard for
a wide range of advanced indicators. But its status as the world's most desirable offshore
manufacturing hub is a thing of the past, along with the economic stability that steady inflows
of foreign capital brought with it. It does show a susceptibility to domestic stress, with the
Hong Kong protests last year providing a hint of what is in store as the party leadership can't
pivot to new realities that include slower economic growth and declining foreign
investment.
As investment flows turn inward back to industrialized countries, there will likely be
corresponding diminution of the global labor arbitrage emanating from the emerging world. In
general, that's a negative for the global South, but potentially a positive factor for workers
elsewhere, whose wages and living standards have stagnated for decades as they lost jobs to
competing overseas low-cost manufacturing centers (the increase in inequality is
principally a product of 40 years of sustained attacks on unions). The jobs won't be the
same, but to be sure, manufacturing incomes exceed those of the service industry.
As each country adopts a " sauve-qui-peut " mentality, businesses and
investors are drawing the necessary conclusions. Coronavirus has been a wake-up call, as
countries trying to import medical goods from existing global supply chains face a
shortage of air and ocean freight options to ship goods back to home markets. Already, the
Japanese government has announced its plans "to spend over $2 billion to help its country's
firms move production out of China," according to the Spectator
Index . The EU leadership is publicly
indicating a policy of subsidy and state investment in companies to prevent Chinese buyouts or
undercutting prices.
Two billion dollars is small potatoes compared to what is likely to be spent by the U.S. and
other countries going forward. And it can't simply be done via research and development tax
credits. The state can and must drive this redomiciling process in other ways: via local content
requirements (LCRs) , tariffs, quotas and/or government procurement local sourcing
requirements. And with a $750-billion-plus budget, the U.S. military will likely play a role
here, as it
ponders disruptions from overseas supply sources .
Of course, if the U.S. does this, other parts of the world -- China, the EU, Japan -- will
likely do the same, which will accelerate the regionalization trends in trade. This may mean
that some U.S. firms will have to operate in foreign markets through local subsidiaries with
local content preferences and local workforces (that is how it worked in the 1920s -- Ford UK
was a mostly local British company, different from the U.S. Ford Motor Company, but with shared
profits).
An examination of U.S. planning for the post-1945 world reveals the emphasis was on free
trade in raw materials mostly, not finished goods. (The U.S. only adopted one-way "free trade"
with its Asian and European allies later as a Cold War measure to accelerate their development
and keep them in the American orbit.)
Domestically within the U.S., as
Dalia Marin writes , the coming declines in interest rates will accelerate "robot adoption"
by 75.7 percent, with concentration "in the sectors that are most exposed to global value
chains. In Germany, that means autos and transport equipment, electronics, and textiles --
industries that import around 12 percent of their inputs from low-wage countries. Globally, the
industries where the most reshoring activity is taking place are chemicals, metal products, and
electrical products and electronics."
As the coronavirus pandemic is illustrating, a viable industrial ecosystem cannot work
effectively if it is dispersed to too many geographic extremities or there are insufficient
redundancies built into the transportation of goods back into the home market (rail, highway,
etc.). Proximity has become a significant competitive advantage for manufacturers, and a
strategic advantage for governments. But the U.S. government must play an expanded role in the
planning process. The U.S. is still a leader in many high-tech areas, but is suffering the
consequences of a generation-long effort to undermine the government's natural role as an
economic planner.
In the form of the regionalized blocs that are being sketched, in the Americas, Mexico is
likely to be one of the leading recipients of American foreign direct investment (FDI). It
already has a
$17 billion medical device industry and is sure to absorb much more capacity from China.
This has
already started to happen as a result of the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA,
or new NAFTA) . Furthermore, the
Washington Post reports that "[a]s demand soars for medical devices and personal protective
equipment in the fight against the coronavirus, the United States has turned to the phalanx of
factories south of the border that are now the outfitters of many U.S. hospitals." This is in
addition to the
thousands of assembly plants already in place in Mexico since the establishment of NAFTA.
Indeed, if the jobs that had moved to China move to Mexico, Central America, and South America,
this likely addresses many long-standing social tensions in regard to immigration management,
currency imbalances and corresponding black market industries (ironically, it also likely means
the end of Trump's wall, as the industrial ecosystem of the Americas becomes more cohesive and
widespread).
Big Business Is Good Business
But this will also have significant impacts closer to home: Much as Franklin Delano
Roosevelt ultimately prioritized domestic
ramp-ups in wartime production over trust-busting , so too national champions are likely to
feature more prominently today, as domestic scale and balance sheet strength are given
precedence to accommodate the drive to revive employment quickly,
and work collaboratively to halt the spread of the coronavirus . The scale of companies
will not be regarded as a political problem if they can both deliver for consumers and show the
capacity of following political direction for what the public's needs are. Tech companies like
Apple and Google are stepping up to fill the void left by
massive federal government dysfunction . The " break up Big
Tech " voices are nowhere to be heard at the moment.
We still need a more robust form of regulation for these corporate behemoths, but via a
system of regulation that is "function-centric," rather than size-centric. As co-author
Marshall Auerback has written
before , this kind of regulation "restricts the range of corporate activities (e.g.,
structural separation so as to prevent companies like Amazon and Google from owning both the
platform as well as participating as a seller on that platform), or the prices such companies
can charge (as regulators often do for utilities or railways). These considerations would be
'size neutral': they would apply independently of corporate size per se."
Capitalism has always had its plutocrats, but scaling back America's overly financialized
model (by preventing stock buybacks, to cite one example) would represent a useful reform and
prevent a lot of economic waste. Instead of going to enrich executives and shareholders beyond
the dreams of Croesus ,
that measure might help to ensure that the profits of these companies will be directed to the
workers' wages (which also means supporting increased unionization), or plowed back into
investment (e.g., increased robotics).
Biodata, Privacy, and an End to Pandemic Profiteering
And there are fault lines in the business world. The pharmaceutical and medical research
industries face immense pressure from other businesses to end the pandemic so they can get back
to profitability. That means temporarily setting aside profits and pooling intellectual
property to encourage collaborative efforts on the part of biotech and pharmaceutical companies
to find proper treatments for COVID-19, and make them freely available, especially if
governments were to waive antitrust scrutiny in exchange for all of the data Big Pharma
companies collectively hold. As the
Guardian reports , "[t]here is a precedent. Last June, 10 of the world's largest
pharmaceutical companies -- including Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline --
announced they would pool data for an AI-based search for new antibiotics, which are
urgently needed as antibiotic-resistant bacteria have proliferated across the world,
threatening the growth of untreatable disease."
Privacy
advocates are already expressing concerns about a growing and overweening medical
surveillance state. These surveillance concerns lack historical context: From the 19th century
on, serious health problems were met by hardline government policies to reduce them. Policies
ranging from quarantine to vaccine were not always mandatory, but there was an understanding
that personal concessions had to be made to manage a huge population and an advanced society;
the Constitution was not a suicide pact. We can further alleviate those concerns today by
ensuring that the information uncovered does not become a precondition or additional cost of
receiving insurance coverage. In light of coronavirus, cost savings of incorporating biodata
into immigration and customs are a no-brainer for governments, and are certain to cause
friction with individuals who may not want to give blood or saliva to get a visa or work
permit, and agribusiness leaders who know that safety measures cut into profitability. But the
scales have tipped in the other direction.
North Versus South
What about the other countries in the developing world that don't have close geographic
proximity to a home market, or abundant supplies of key commodities required for 21st-century
manufacturing needs, or even a well-developed manufacturing base (in other words, the countries
that have hitherto been large recipients of investment solely on the grounds of cheap labor)?
Many of them have faced immediate pressure with the collapse in global trade, unprecedented
capital flight that is sure to grow as the coronavirus spreads, all the while coping with
COVID-19 with highly inadequate health systems.
In the meantime, the
multi-trillion-dollar market for emerging market debt , both sovereign bonds and commercial
paper, has collapsed. Many of these countries, via their state pension funds and sovereign
wealth funds, have become the ultimate endpoint for many of the newer asset-backed securities
that finally revived years after the 2008 financial crisis. This has become the potential new
stress point in the $52 trillion "
shadow banking " market. The U.S. Federal Reserve has sought to ease the funding stresses
of much of the developing economies by offering central bank swap lines. It has also broadened
prime dealer collateral acceptance rules, and set up commercial paper swap facilities, all of
which have eased short-term funding pressures in these economies that have incurred substantial
dollar liabilities.
As the emerging world central banks then start to lend on those lines to their own banks, it
should start to alleviate the shortage of dollars in the offshore dollar funding markets. We
are starting to see some easing of stresses, notably in
Indonesia -- because it's an exporter of resources more than a cheap labor price
economy.
But whereas in previous emerging markets crises, China was able to buttress these economies
via initiatives such as the " Belt and Road Initiative ,"
Beijing itself is likely to be buffeted by the twin shocks of declining global trade and a
reversal of foreign direct investment, which declined 8.6 percent in the first
two months of this year .
Longer-term, many other countries face comparable challenges to China: Capital controls,
collapsing domestic currencies, and widespread debt defaults are likely to become the norm.
That's already
happened to serial defaulter Argentina again . South Africa has been
downgraded to junk status . Turkey remains vulnerable. The so-called "BRICS" economies --
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- are all sinking like bricks. The problem is
exacerbated by the fact that coronavirus and likely future pandemics will create additional
stresses on developing economies that depend on their labor price advantage in the
international marketplace to survive.
By contrast, countries like South Korea and Taiwan have had a "good crisis." Both have
vibrant manufacturing sectors and created successful multiparty democracies. Foreign investment in South Korea continued to grow in
the first quarter of this year, as it rapidly moved to contain the spread of COVID-19 through
an extensive testing regime (while keeping its economy open). Similarly in Taiwan, by
activating a national emergency response system launched in 2004 (following the SARS virus),
that country has mounted a thoroughly competent coronavirus
intervention of unprecedented effectiveness . The results speak for themselves: as of April
15, in South Korea, a mere 225
deaths , while in Taiwan, an astonishingly low total
of six deaths in a country of 24 million people -- this despite far more exposure to
infected Chinese visitors than Italy, Spain or the U.S.
Of course, the very success of Taiwan's response revives another potential fault line,
namely the tension underlying the "One China" policy. Before COVID-19, it is
noteworthy that the WHO "even refused to publicly report Taiwan's cases of SARS until public
pressure prompted numbers to be published under the label of 'Taiwan, province of China,'"
according to Dr.
Anish Koka . At the very least, Taiwan's divergent approach and success at fighting the
pandemic will bolster its pro-independence factions.
The question of foreign nations upholding Taiwan's sovereignty with regard to China is
increasingly thorny, given Beijing's growing military capacities. This will present an ongoing
diplomatic challenge to Western parties who seek to increase engagement with Taipei without
heightening tensions in the region.
A Recalculation of 'Economic Value'
We have outlined many fault lines likely to be exposed or exacerbated as a consequence of
COVID-19. Happily, there is one fault line likely to be slammed shut: namely, the false
dichotomy that has long existed between economic growth and environmentalism. The Global Assessment from
the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
reports that "land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23 percent of the global land
surface, up to US$577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and
100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of
coastal habitats and protection." Likewise, the study cites the fact that as of 2015, 33
percent of marine fish stocks "were being harvested at unsustainable levels," and notes the
rise of plastic pollution (which "has increased tenfold since 1980 "),
both of which play a key role in degrading ecosystems in a manner that ultimately destroys
economic growth.
Finally, repeated pandemics over the past few decades have shown these are not blips, but
recurrent features of today's world. Hence, there is an increasing public appetite for
regulation to deal with this ongoing problem. Some industries, such as agribusinesses, won't
like this, but the concerns are well-founded. According to
expert Josh Balk , 75 percent of new diseases start in domestic and wild-caught animals,
and 2.2 million people die each year from illnesses transferred from animals. The majority of
these are transferred from poorly regulated factory farm chickens, cows and pigs; still, the "
wet markets" of Asia and Africa, and the trade in potential " transfer species ," such as
pangolins, a major driver of the $19
billion-a-year global trade in illegal wildlife, must also be addressed. Beijing has
suggested it will
ban trade in illegal wildlife and seek tighter regulation of the wet markets . The latter
in particular may be easier said than done, according to Dr. Zhenzhong
Si , a research associate at Canada's University of Waterloo who specializes in Chinese
food security, sustainability, and rural development. Dr. Si
argued that "[b]anning wet markets is not only going to be impossible, but will also be
destructive for urban food security in China as they play such a pivotal role in ensuring urban
residents' access to affordable and healthy food."
To be fair, this isn't the first time that the sacred tenets of the global economic
framework have dealt with a crisis that seemed to usher in a new era. The same thing happened
in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. But that was largely seen as a financial
crisis, a product of faulty global financial plumbing that nobody truly understood, as opposed
to a widespread social collapse closely approximating the conditions of the Great Depression as
we have today.
Not only has the current lockdown put the entire global economy into deep freeze, but it
also came amidst a backdrop of widespread political and social upheaval, and a faux recovery
whose fruits were largely restricted to the top tier. A collateralized debt obligation is not
intuitively easy to grasp. By contrast, being forced to stay at home, deprived of vital income
and isolated from loved ones, while health care workers perish from overwork and lack of
protective gear, is a different order of magnitude.
Even as we re-integrate, it is hard to envisage a return to the "old normal." Trade patterns
will change. Self-sufficiency and geographic proximity will be prioritized over global
integration. There will be new winners and losers, but it is worth noting that the model of
capitalism we are describing -- one that does not feature obscenely overcompensated CEO pay
co-existing with serf labor and the widespread offshoring of manufacturing -- has existed in
different forms in the U.S. from 1945 into the 1980s, and still exists in parts of Europe
(Germany) and East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) to this day.
Our everyday lives will be impacted as selective quarantines and some forms of social
distancing become the new normal (much as they were when we dealt with tuberculosis
epidemics). All of this has implications for a multitude of industries: restaurants,
leisure, travel, tourism, sporting events, entertainment, and media, as well as our evolving
definition of "essential" industries. Even our concept of personal privacy will likely have to
be amended, especially in regard to medical matters. Concerns about medical surveillance --
stigma (STDs, alcoholism, mental illness) and denial of insurance -- can be alleviated if
everyone is guaranteed treatment regardless of ability to pay, which will mean greater
government intrusion into the lives of citizens and activities of businesses as the public
sector seeks to socialize costs.
Taken in aggregate, we are about to experience the most profound social, economic and
political changes since World War II.
The desperation with which the oligarchy seeks to preserve the neo-liberal dispensation, and
particularly on 'the left' which, historically, opposed its anti-egalitarianism, may be
explicable in very simple terms:
"A new Institute for Policy Studies Inequality briefing paper, authored by Bob Lord,
reveals that between 1980 and 2018, the taxes paid by America's billionaires, when measured
as a percentage of their wealth, decreased a staggering 79 percent.
"The only appropriate metric by which to measure the tax burden on billionaires, the
briefing paper explains, is the rate of tax they pay on their wealth. Unlike the rest of us,
the living expenses of billionaires do not constrain their accumulation of wealth. Nor do
they rely on their work to generate additional wealth. For billionaires, the accumulation of
wealth is driven forward almost exclusively by the growth of their existing wealth and
constrained almost exclusively by the tax they are required to pay. No matter how the taxes
imposed on billionaires are determined – by income, consumption, property ownership,
transfers by gift or bequest – they function only as a tax on wealth.
"By allowing the tax burden of billionaires, as a percentage of their wealth, to plummet
since 1980, policy makers have caused the nation's wealth to concentrate obscenely at the
very top. In the 12 years between 2006 and 2018, IPS reports, nearly 7 percent of America's
real increase in wealth, measured in 2018 dollars, went to the top 400 billionaires. If the
pattern of the past four decades does not change, an even greater share of the nation's newly
created wealth over the next 12 years will flow to the billionaire class..."
"American collusion with kleptocracy comes at a terrible
cost for the rest of the world. All of the stolen money, all of those evaded tax dollars sunk
into Central Park penthouses and Nevada shell companies, might otherwise fund health care and
infrastructure. (A report from the anti-poverty group One has argued that 3.6 million deaths
each year can be attributed to this sort of resource siphoning.)
Thievery tramples the possibilities of workable markets and credible democracy. It fuels
suspicions that the whole idea of liberal capitalism is a hypocritical sham: While the world is
plundered, self-righteous Americans get rich off their complicity with the crooks.
The Founders were concerned that venality would become standard procedure, and it has. Long
before suspicion mounted about the loyalties of Donald Trump, large swaths of the American
elite -- lawyers, lobbyists, real-estate brokers, politicians in state capitals who enabled the
creation of shell companies -- had already proved themselves to be reliable servants of a
rapacious global plutocracy.
"Richard Palmer was right: The looting elites of the former Soviet Union were far from rogue
profiteers. They augured a kleptocratic habit that would soon become widespread.
One bitter truth about the Russia scandal is that by the time Vladimir Putin attempted to
influence the shape of our country, it was already bending in the direction of his."
There's
a verbal tic particular to a certain kind of response to a certain kind of story about the
thinness and desperation of American society; about the person who died of preventable illness
or the Kickstarter campaign to help another who can't afford cancer treatment even with "good"
insurance; about the plight of the homeless or the lack of resources for the rural poor; about
underpaid teachers spending thousands of dollars of their own money for the most basic
classroom supplies; about train derailments, the ruination of the New York subway system and
the decrepit states of our airports and ports of entry.
"I can't believe in the richest country in the world. "
This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the
fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of
existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once
grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and
working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about
our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem
to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.
It is true that, as measured by GDP, or by the size of the credit and equity markets, or
even just by the gaudy presence of our Googles, Amazons and Apples, the United States is the
greatest machine for the production of money in the modern history of the world.
But this wealth is largely an abstraction, a trick of the broad and largely meaningless
aggregations of numbers that makes up most of what the business pages call "economics." The
American commonwealth is shockingly impoverished. Ask anyone who's compared the nine-plus-hour
train ride from Pittsburgh to New York with the barely two-hour journey from Paris to Bordeaux,
an equidistant journey, or who's watched the orderly, accurate exit polls from a German
election and compared them with the
fizzling, overheating voting machines in Florida .
Now, it is true that bridges collapse in Europe , too, although
this past summer's tragedy was in Italy, whose famously ungovernable corruption may be the
closest continental analogue to our own United States. American liberals and leftists tend to
over-valorize the Western European model, but there is no doubt that the wealthy countries at
the core of the EU have far more successfully mitigated the most extreme social inequalities
and built systems for health and transportation that far outstrip anything in the U.S. Even in
their poor urban suburbs or, say, the disinvested industrial north of France, you will find
nothing like the squalor that we still permit -- that we accept as ordinary --
in the USA . Meanwhile, in our ever-declining adversary-of-convenience, the Moscow subway
runs on time.
The social wealth of a society is better measured by the quality of its common lived
environment than by a consolidated statistical approximation like GDP, or even an attempt at
weighted comparisons like so-called purchasing power parity . There
is a reason why our great American cities, for all of our supposed wealth, often feel and look
so shabby. The money goes elsewhere. Seville, a pretty, modest city of less than a million
people in the south of Spain, built 80 kilometers of bike lanes for $40 million in less than
two years, and eliminated a lot of ugly, on-street parking in the process. Imagine a
commensurate effort in New York City, a far wealthier place on paper. Well, its supposedly
liberal mayor is going to give Amazon $1.5 billion in tax breaks instead.
To be fair, New York City and state, mired in graft and corruption, cannot build a single
mile of subway for less than $2 billion.
Elsewhere, the con artists running America's military-industrial complex are worried that
the hundreds of billions we sink every year into planes that
cannot fly in the rain and
ships that cannot steer have left the United States virtually
unable to win any wars . The United States spends perhaps a trillion dollars every year on
its military and wars.
Poverty -- both individual and social -- is a policy, not an accident, and not some kind of
natural law. These are deliberate choices about the allocation of resources. They are eminently
undoable by modest exercises of political power, although if the state- and city-level
Democratic leaders of New York and northern Virginia are the national mold, then our nominally
left-wing party is utterly, hopelessly beholden to the upward transfer of social wealth to an
extremely narrow cadre of already extremely rich men and women.
I voted last week, an exercise that now feels like mouthing polite prayers at someone else's
church. The line snaked out the door of the tiny, hot basement room and into the cold rain.
There were only three voting machines. One was broken, and one seemed to be working only
intermittently. A young woman with a baby in a stroller was in line in front of me. After we'd
waited for 10 minutes without moving, she looked at me and rolled her eyes. "Can you believe
this is how we do this?" she said. "In 2018."
I smiled. I shrugged. I waved at her cute kid. I did not say, "Yes. I can believe it."
It is a sign of how bad things are when the editorial board of the Financial Times, the
world's leading business newspaper, carries an editorial calling for "radical reforms reversing
the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades." The FT editorial of April 3 has
advocated , among other
things, a more active role for governments in the economy, ways to make labor markets less
insecure, and wealth taxes. The FT's editorial board, increasingly concerned about saving
capitalism from itself, had
written about the need for "state planning" and a "worker-led economy" last year in August.
But the April 3 editorial has garnered much more attention since it comes amidst a massive
crisis.
By now it has become obvious that substantial state intervention in the economy -- frowned
upon by the apostles of neoliberal economics -- is back to the center stage across the
world.
The situation is such that the public sector, long maligned by neoliberal economists and
weakened by governments beholden to neoliberalism, is playing a major role in the fight against
coronavirus. Its role would have been much more effective and wide-ranging if it hadn't been
hit hard by decades of fund cuts and waves of privatization. Nevertheless, with the
ineffectiveness of private production with profit motive as its driving force to handle a
crisis becoming more evident, the public sector, production with state direction, and some
amount of planning are making a major comeback.
Public Health Care
The case of the sectors that are directly concerned with health care provision is the most
conspicuous, with the inadequacies of private health care during a crisis becoming evident to
even right-wing leaders.
We see Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the UK, repeatedly talking about the need to
protect the National Health Service (Britain's publicly funded health care system). He even
said , "there really is such a thing as society," contradicting Margaret Thatcher, his
conservative predecessor who batted for pure individualism in 1987 by saying "There is no such
thing as society."
Britain and many other countries in Western Europe have had relatively robust public health
care systems. In many of these countries, such as Italy , Spain and
the
UK , public health care systems have suffered in recent years because of fund cuts and
privatization of public facilities. Apart from the policy vision of the leaders of these
countries themselves, they also
came under pressure from the technocrats of the European Commission, who repeatedly
demanded spending cuts on health care. Along with the easy-going attitude displayed by many of
the Western governments in the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, such weakening of the
public health care systems have made their response to the coronavirus outbreak a more arduous
task. For now, the governments of
Spain and
Ireland have temporarily taken over their private hospitals to deal with the crisis.
The case of the United States, with its private, insurance-based health care system, is far
worse. Not only was a sufficient number of testing kits unavailable in the United States for
months, but the costs of testing and treatment remain prohibitive for a
large section of the population , particularly to the 30 million uninsured and 44 million
underinsured. This means that many people simply wouldn't be able to afford to get tested and
treated, endangering the health and lives of themselves and others.
The difference between the United States on the one hand, and China and South Korea on the
other, comes readily into the picture here. Testing and treatment for coronavirus is
free in China, which was crucial in the country's success in bringing the epidemic under
control. South Korea has done extensive testing , which
was made available for free. Treatment costs were covered by the government
and the insurance companies.
The Importance of the Public Sector, However, Goes Much Further
In times of crises such as the present one, which is comparable to war, the ability of
economies to produce (or at least source) and distribute things becomes critical. Two kinds of
things assume particular importance:
1) Essential things that are necessary for the immediate sustenance of the people.
These include food and medicines, and in turn, the things necessary to produce them. If there
are large gaps in the supply and distribution of these things, there would be a famine. If
the gap is smaller, there would still be many unnecessary deaths. Even leaders who are
otherwise callous about starvation deaths would be concerned about such an eventuality during
a crisis, because social tensions that could rise as a result of this would make it even more
difficult to tide over the crisis, whether it is a war or a pandemic. During the Second World
War, Britain resorted to rationing
to solve this problem. The people of India were
squeezed to finance the Allies' war in South Asia with Japan, and the result was the
Bengal Famine, which took the lives of 3 million people.
2) The kind of things that are necessary to tide over the crisis. During times of
war, armaments would be the most crucial among these. In the case of the coronavirus crisis,
the main things would be items like ventilators, masks, hand sanitizer, gloves and medicines
to treat the symptoms. Large gaps in the supply of these things would be disastrous. In the
case of a war, such gaps could lead to defeat in war. In the case of a lethal pandemic,
people would die in huge numbers, as we see right now. We could say this is an industrial
famine of sorts contributing to the casualties, with countries unable to make ICUs,
ventilators and masks fast enough in adequate quantities, and in many cases, to set up
hospitals and quarantine facilities quickly enough.
It is in this context that leaders of government who ideologically disagree with state
intervention in the economy are seen taking direct action in commandeering private companies to
produce necessary things.
Thus we see Donald Trump, who had initially resisted the pressure to use the Defense
Production Act -- a wartime law -- to mobilize private industry, finally using the law to
direct General Motors to produce ventilators.
The government of Italy directed its only producer of ventilators, Siare Engineering, to
ramp up the production of ventilators for the country, and sent engineers and other staff
members from the Ministry of Defense to help with production. The company canceled all its
orders from abroad to produce for the country.
Countries with a large public sector, robust industrial capacity, and the ability to
effectively intervene in the market would be at a considerable advantage here. That is the case
with
China , which put the state-owned China State Construction Engineering to work to construct
two emergency quarantine hospitals at breath-taking speed. The state ensured the flow of
products such as grain, meat and eggs into the Hubei province while it was under lockdown, and
coordinated the production and distribution of masks and other medical products. Once the
outbreak within the country was under control, it began supplying masks and ICU equipment to
other countries in need.
India, a large country with a poor health care system, does not have enough masks and
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for its health workers. The number of ICU beds and
ventilators available in the country is very low. For a population of 1.34 billion, it
only has 31,900 ICU beds available for COVID-19 patients, according to the country's Health
Ministry officials. To compare, Germany, with 82.8 million people, had 28,000 ICU beds as of
mid-March.
If the number of COVID-19 patients in India surges, hospitals and their critical care
facilities will be overwhelmed. The public sector Bharat Electronics Limited has been
asked to produce
30,000 ventilators to meet the urgent need. Hindustan
Lifecare (another public sector company) and the
Rail Coach Factory under the Indian Railways are going to manufacture ventilators. The
public sector Ordnance Factory Board (OFB), which the government has tried continuously to
weaken
in the recent years, is now producing masks, sanitizer and coveralls for Personal Protective
Equipment (PPE). It has also developed a ventilator prototype and is preparing for
production.
Within India, it is the state of
Kerala that has dealt with the pandemic in the most effective manner. In the Left-ruled
state, which has resisted the policy of privatization pushed by successive central governments,
public sector companies are manufacturing
hand sanitizer and
gloves , and have
raised the production of essential medicines . Kudumbashree, a massive government-backed
organization of women's collectives with 4.5 million members, is
making masks , which the public sector is helping distribute. Mass organizations of
youth and popular science activists are pitching in by making hand sanitizer. Volunteers
supported by a state-led initiative have
developed a respiratory apparatus that could free up ventilators.
It is not as if making masks, sanitizers and gloves requires advanced technology. But
industrial capacity is needed to churn them out in large numbers, or at least large mass
organizations, class organizations or collectives that can mobilize people to manufacture them.
The inability of the United States to even ensure the supply of such items stands out in this
regard. Four decades of neoliberalism seem to have led not only to the undermining of
industrial capacity useful for public purposes, but also to the hollowing out of collective
energies.
Need for Production Capabilities and Societal Control Over Them
In short, the lesson is that in times such as these, a society needs two things.
1) It needs production capabilities. During a time of crisis, if a country doesn't
have the necessary industrial capacity, it will be in trouble even if it has money to buy if
the other countries that do have the production capabilities block the export of the required
goods. This is what is happening right now to so many countries, such as Italy and Serbia. (In
the mad scramble for resources, there have even been reports of countries
offering higher amounts to buy masks ordered by other countries, and of some countries even
seizing shipments for themselves.) Not only is industrial capacity needed, but some excess
capacity is also required in some crucial areas. As the public health expert T. Sundararaman
pointed
out recently, the public health care system needs to have unused capacity, which will allow
it to expand and take on the extra load when there is an emergency. Excess industrial capacity
in China, which is often seen as a problem (including by sympathetic observers
), turned out to be useful, with the country being able to manufacture essential goods to not
just meet its own demands, but also that of other countries.
But relying on market forces doesn't give any guarantee of industrial capacity being built
up. The kind of production capabilities built without planning would be haphazard, and may not
cover the needs of an emergency when it presents itself. India, which adopted a strategy of
substantial economic planning during the first few decades after independence, only to abandon
it in the recent decades, is witnessing this to its peril right now.
2) The society, or the state as the representative of society, needs to be able to
control the production facilities. When a crisis hits a country with production
capabilities in the private sector, the state can invoke emergency powers to bring them under
control. But it would be a painful process, especially in countries where the private corporate
sector is not used to submit to discipline. Given the enormous influence that the corporates
have over the state itself, the state might try to prolong having to invoke such emergency
powers, as was seen in the United States, and that could have disastrous consequences. India
has the worst of all possible worlds -- cronyism is rampant, industrialization has not taken
off (whether it is because of cronyism or in spite of it need not detain us here), and the
public sector has been undermined.
Even when the state is trying to play a more active role, its efforts could be undermined by
private firms acting in their own self-interest of maximizing profits. This was seen in the
United States, where private companies were engaging in price gouging, by selling masks that
are normally sold for 85 cents for $7, leading to the New York state governor to call upon
the federal government to nationalize the acquisition of medical supplies. He said that the
U.S. government should order factories to produce masks, gowns and ventilators; otherwise the
situation would be impossible to manage. The state using private facilities can be costly as
well, as was seen in Britain, where the National Health Service is paying
2.4 million pounds per day as rent to private hospitals for 8,000 beds.
Does calling for more domestic production capabilities that the state can control mean that
every country should be left to fend for itself? Certainly not -- every country cannot produce
everything; smaller countries would find it particularly difficult. International trade would
be needed for countries to procure things that they cannot produce for themselves. But as the
developments of the recent months show, today's trade regime has nothing to do with solidarity,
and it provides no guarantee of countries being able to access goods during an emergency. This
is no accident. Lack of solidarity is embedded in the way capitalism has developed, with the
bulk of the world's wealth concentrated in the hands of a few countries, and within countries,
in the hands of the super-rich. This system has to be overhauled for a regime of solidarity to
emerge. Production and its fruits becoming less concentrated in some regions of the world and
in the hands of a minority would pave the way for power relations to be less unequal, which is
a precondition for real solidarity among people and societies.
Along with socialized health care, an immediate stop to privatization, and a stronger,
expanded public sector should become part of the transitional demands of the left as we search
for an exit from the pandemic crisis.
"No matter how long I live, I don't think I will ever get over how the U.S., with all
its wealth and technological capability and academic prowess, sleepwalked into the disaster
that is unfolding," says Kai Kupferschmidt, a German science writer.
I am continuously amazed at how incompetence is always assumed so as to give elites a
pass.
It seems to me that the Trump Administration delayed a response to the virus so as to
ensure that they could declare an emergency which allowed them to 'play' the virus in a way
that benefited special interests and furthered imperial goals:
"... Authored by Joaquin Flores via The Strategic Culture Foundation, ..."
"... the declining rate of profit necessitated by automation, with the increasingly irrational policies, in all spheres, being pursued to salvage the ultimately unsalvageable. ..."
"... Because the present system is premised on a production-consumption and financial model, the solutions to crises are presented as population reduction and what even appears, at least in the case of Europe, as population replacement. As cliché as this may seem, this also appeared to be the policy of the Third Reich when capitalism faced its last major crises culminating in WWII. ..."
The coronavirus pandemic has shown that the twin processes of globalization and planned
obsolescence are deficient and moribund. Globalization was predicated on a number of
assumptions including the perpetuity of consumerism, and the withering away of national
boundaries as transnational corporations so required.
What we see instead is not a globalization process, but instead a process of rising
multipolarity and a rethinking of consumerism itself.
Normally a total market crash and unemployment crisis would usher in a period of militant
labor activity, strikes, walk-outs and community-labor campaigns. We've
seen some of this already . But the 'medical state of emergency' we are in, has effectively
worked like a 'lock-out' . The elites have effectively
flipped-the-script. Instead of workers now demanding a restoration of wages, hours, and
work-place rights, they are clamoring for any chance to work at all, under any conditions
handed down. Elites can 'afford' to do this because they've been given trillions of dollars to
do so. See how that works?
All our lives we've been misinformed over what a growing economy means, what it looks like,
how we identify it. All our lives we've been lied to about what technical improvement literally
means.
A growing economy in fact means that all goods and services become less expensive. That cuts
against inflation. Rather all prices should be deflating – less money ought to buy the
same (or the same money ought to buy more). Technical innovation means that goods should last
longer, not be planned for obsolescence with shorter lifespans.
Unemployment is good if it parallels price deflation. If both reached a zero-point, the
problems we believe we have would be solved.
In a revealing April 2nd article that featured on the BBC's website, Will coronavirus reverse globalisation?
it is proposed that the pandemic exposes the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of a global
supply-chain and manufacturing system, and that this in combination with the over-arching
US-China trade war would see a general tendency towards 're-shoring' of activities. These are
fair points.
But the article misses the point of the underlying problem facing economics in general:
the declining rate of profit necessitated by automation, with the increasingly irrational
policies, in all spheres, being pursued to salvage the ultimately unsalvageable.
The
Karmic Wheel of Production-Consumption
The shut-downs – which seem unnecessary in the numerous widely esteemed experts in
virology and epidemiology – appear to be aimed at stopping the production-consumption
cycle. When we look at the wanton creation of new 'money', to bailout the banks, we are told
that this will not cause inflation/debasement so long as the velocity of money is kept to a minimum.
In other words – so long as there is not a chain reaction of transactions, and the money
'stays still' – this won't cause inflation. It's a specious claim, but one which
justifies the quarantine/lock-down policy which today destroys thousands of small businesses
every day. In the U.S. alone, unemployment claims
will pass 30 million by mid April .
Likewise, this money appears real, it sits digitally as new liquidity on the computer
screens of tran-Atlantic banks – but it cannot be spent, or it tanks the system with
hyper-inflation. More to the point, the BBC piece erroneously continues to assume the necessity
of the production-consumption cycle, spinning wheat into gold forever.
The elites were not wrong to shut-down the cycle per se. The problem is that they cannot
offer the correct hardware in its place – for it puts an end to the very way that they
make money. It is this, which in turn is a major source for the maintenance of their dopamine
equilibrium and narcissist supply.
This is not an economic problem faced by 'the 1%' (the 0.03%) . It is an existential crisis
facing the meaning of their lives, where satisfaction can only be found in ever greater levels
of wealth and control, real or imagined – chasing that dragon, in search of that
ever-elusive high.
So naturally, their solutions are population reduction and other such quasi-genocidal
neo-Malthusian plans. Destruction of humanity – the number one productive-potential force
– resets the hands of time, back to a period where profit levels were higher. The
algorithmically favored coronavirus Instagram campaign of seeing city centers without people
and declaring these 'beautiful' and 'peaceful' is an example of this misanthropic principle at
play.
That the elites have chosen to shut-down the western economy is telling of an historic point
we have reached. And while we are told that production and consumption will return somewhat
'after quarantine', we also hear from the newly-emerged unelected tsars – Bill Gates et
al – that things will never
return to normal .
What we need to end is the entire theory and practice of globalization itself, including
UN
Agenda 21 and the dangerous role of 'book-talking' philanthropists like Gates and his
grossly unbalanced degree of power over policy formation in the Western sphere.
In place of waning globalization, we are seeing the reality of rising multipolarity and
inter-nationalism. With this, the end of the production-consumption cycle, based upon off-shore
production and international assembly, and at the root of it all: planned obsolescence towards
long-term profitability.
The Problem of Globalization Theory
Without a doubt, globalization theory satisfied aspects of descriptive power. But as time
marched forward, its predictive power weakened. Alternate theories began to emerge –
chief among these, multipolarity theory.
The promotion of globalization theory also raises ethical problems. Like a criminologist
'describing' a crime-wave while being invested in new prison construction, globalization theory
was as much theory as it was a policy forced upon the world by the same institutions behind its
popularization in academia and in policy formation. Therefore we should not be surprised with
the rise of solutions like those of Gates. These involve patentable 'vaccines' by for-profit
firms at the expense of buttressing natural human immunities, or using drugs which other
countries are using with effectiveness.
The truth? Globalization is really just a rebrand of the Washington Consensus
– neo-liberal think-tanks and the presumed eternal dominance of institutions like the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which in turn are thinly disguised
conglomerates of the largest trans-Atlantic banking institutions.
So while globalization was often given a humanist veneer that promised global development,
modernization, the end of 'nation-states' which presumably are the source of war; in reality
globalization was premised on continuing and increasing concentration of capital towards the
19th century zones – New York, London, Berlin, and Paris.
'Internationalism' was once rooted in the existence of nations which in turn are only
possible with the existence of culture and peoples, but was hi-jacked by the trans-Atlanticist
project. Before long, the new-left 'internationalists' became champions of the very same
process of imperialism that their forbearers had vehemently opposed. Call it 'globalization'
and show how it's destroying 'toxic nationalism' and creating 'microfinance solutions for women
and girls' –
trot out Malala – and it was bought; hook, line and sinker.
This was not the new era of 'globalization', but rather the usual suspects going back to the
19th century; a 'feel-good' rebranding of the very same 19th century imperialism as described
in J.A Hobson's seminal work from 1902, Imperialism. Its touted 'inevitability' rested not on
the impossibility of alternate models, but on the authority that flows forth from gunboat
diplomacy. But sea power has given way to land power.
In many ways it aligned with the era of de-colonialization and post-colonialism. New nations
could wave their own flags and make their own laws, so long as the traditionally imperialist
western banking institutions controlled the money supply.
But what is emerging is not Washington Consensus 'globalization', but a multipolar model
based in civilizational sovereignty and difference, building products to last – for their
usefulness and not their repeatable retail potential. This cuts against the claims that global
homogenization in all spheres (moral, cultural, economic, political, etc.) was inevitable, as a
consequence of mercantile specialization.
Therefore, inter-nationalism hyphenated as such, reminds us that nations –
civilizations, sovereignty, and their differences – make us stronger as a human species.
Like against viruses, some have stronger natural immunity than others. If people were
identical, one virus could wipe-out all of humanity.
Likewise, an overly-integrated global economy leads to global melt-down and depression when
one node collapses. Rather than independent pillars that could aid each other, the
interdependence is its greatest weakness.
Multipolarity is Reality
This new reality – multipolarity – involves processes which aspects of
globalization theory also suggest and predict for, so there are some honest reasons why experts
could misdiagnose multipolarity as globalization. Overlooked was that the concentration of
capital nodes in various and globally diverse regions by continent, were not exclusively
trans-Atlantic regions as in the standard globalization model of Alpha ++ or Alpha+ cities.
This capital concentration along continental lines was occurring alongside regional economic
development and rising living standards which tended to promote the efficiency of local
transportation as opposed to ocean-travel in the production process. As regional nodes by
continent had increasingly diversified their own domestic production, a general tendency for
transportation costs to increase as individual per capita usage increased, worked against the
viability of an over-reliance on global transit lines.
But among many problems in globalization theory was that the US would always be the primary
consumer of the world's goods, and with it, the trans-Atlantic financial sector. It was also
contingent on the idea that mercantilist conceptions of specialization (by nation or by region)
would always trump autarkic models and ISI (income substitution industrialization). Again, if
middle-class consumer bases are rising in all the world's inhabited continents as multipolarity
explains and predicts, then a global production regimen rationalized towards a trans-Atlantic
consumer base as globalization theory predicts isn't quite as apt.
Because the present system is premised on a production-consumption and financial model,
the solutions to crises are presented as population reduction and what even appears, at least
in the case of Europe, as population replacement. As cliché as this may seem, this also
appeared to be the policy of the Third Reich when capitalism faced its last major crises
culminating in WWII.
Breaking the Wheel
The shutdown reveals the karmic wheel of production-consumption is in truth already broken.
We have already passed the zenith point of what the old paradigm had to offer, and it has long
since entered into a period of decay, economic and moral destruction.
Like the Christ who brings forth a new covenant or the Buddha who emerges to break the wheel
of karma, the new world to be built on the ruins of modernity is a world that liberates the
productive forces, realizing their full potential, and with it the liberation of man from the
machine of the production-consumption cycle.
Planned obsolescence and consumerism (marketing) are the twin evils that have worked towards
the simultaneous
time-wasting enslavement of 'living to work' , and have built globalization based on global
assembly and global mono-culture.
What is important for people and their quality of life is the time to live life, not be
stuck in the grind. We hear politicians and economists talking about 'everyone having a job',
as if what people want is to be away from their families, friends, passions, or hobbies. What's
more – people cannot invent, innovate, or address the greater questions of life and death
– if their nose is to the grindstone.
Now that we are living under an overt system of control, a 'medical state of emergency' with
a frozen economy, we can see that another world is possible. The truth is that most things
which are produced are intentionally made to break at a specific time, so that a re-purchase is
predictable and profits are guaranteed. This compels global supply chains and justifies
artificially induced crashes aimed at upward redistribution and mass expropriations.
Instead of allowing Bill Gates to tour the world to tout a police-state cum population
reduction scheme right after a global virus pandemic struck, one which many believe
he owns the patent for , we can instead address the issues of multipolarity, civilizational
sovereignty, and ending planned obsolescence and the global supply chain, as well as the
off-shoring it necessitates – which the BBC rightly notes, is in question anyhow.
There's no doubt that the Coronavirus is a serious infection that can lead to severe illness
or death. There's also no doubt that 'virus hysteria' has been used for other purposes. Wall
Street, for example, has used virus-panic to advance its own agenda and get another round of
trillion dollar bailouts. In fact, it took less than a week to get the pushover congress to ram
through a massive $2.2 trillion boondoggle without even one lousy congressman offering a peep
of protest. That's got to be some kind of record.
In 2008, at the peak of the financial crisis, Congress voted "No" to the $700 billion TARP
bill. Some readers might recall how a number of GOP congressmen bravely banded together and
flipped Wall Street "the bird". That didn't happen this time around. Even though the bill is
three times bigger than the TARP ( $2.2 trillion), no one lifted a finger to stop it. Why?
Fear, that's why. Everyone in congress was scared to death that if they didn't rush this
debt-turd through the House pronto, the economy would collapse while tens of thousands of
corpses would be stacking up in cities across the country. Of course the reason they believed
this nonsense was because the goofy infectious disease experts confidently assured everyone
that the body-count would be "in the hundreds of thousands if not millions." Remember that
fiction? The most recent estimate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 total. I don't
need to tell you that the difference between 60,000 and "millions" is a little more than a
rounding-error.
So we've had the wool pulled over our eyes, right? Not as bad as congress, but, all the
same, we've been hoodwinked and we've been fleeced. And the people who have axes to grind have
been very successful in taking advantage of the hysteria and promoting their own agendas. Maybe
you've noticed the reemergence of creepy Bill Gates and the Vaccine Gestapo or NWO Henry
Kissinger warning us that, "the world will never be the same after the coronavirus".
What do these people know that we don't know? Doesn't it all make you a bit suspicious? And
when you see nonstop commercials on TV telling you to "wash your hands"or "keep your distance"
or "stay inside" and, oh yeah, "We're all in this together", doesn't it leave you scratching
your head and wondering who the hell is orchestrating this virus-charade and what do they
really have in mind for us unwashed masses??
At least in the case of Wall Street, we know what they want. They want money and lots of
it.
Have you looked over the $2.2 trillion CARES bill that Trump just signed into law a couple
weeks ago? It's pretty grim reading, so I'll save you the effort. Here's a rough breakdown:
$250 billion will go for the $1,200 checks that most of us will receive in a couple weeks.
And $250 billion will be provided for extended unemployment insurance benefits.
That's $500 billion.
Working people will get $500 billion while Wall Street and Corporate America will get 3
times that amount. ($1.7 trillion) And even that's a mere fraction of the total sum
because– hidden in the small print– is a section that allows the Fed to lever-up
the base-capital by 10-to-1 ($450 billion to $4.5 trillion) which means the Fed can buy as many
"toxic" bonds and garbage assets as it chooses. The Fed is turning itself into a hedge fund in
order to buy the sludge that has accumulated on the balance sheets of corporations and
financial institutions for the last decade. It's another gigantic ripoff that's being cleverly
concealed behind the ridiculous coronavirus hype. It's infuriating.
So here's the question: Do you think Congress knew that working people would only get a
pittance while the bulk of the dough would go to Wall Street?
It's hard to say, but they certainly knew that the economy was cratering and that $500
billion wasn't going to put much of a dent in a $20 trillion economy. In other words, even if
everyone goes out and blows their measly $1,200 checks on Day 1, we're still going to
experience the sharpest economic contraction on record, a second Great Depression.
Maybe they should have talked about that in congress before they voted for this
trillion-dollar turkey? Maybe they should have thought a little more about how the money should
be distributed: Should it go to the people who actually buy things, generate activity and
produce growth, or to the parasite class that blows up the system every decade and drags the
economy down a black hole? That seems like something you might want to know before you pass a
multi-trillion dollar bill that's supposed to fix the economy.
It's also worth noting that the $5.8 trillion is not nearly the total amount that Wall
Street will eventually get. The Fed has already spent $2 trillion via its QE program (to shore
up the dysfunctional repo market) and Fed chair Jay Powell announced on Thursday that another
$2.3 trillion in loans and purchases would be used to buy municipal bonds, corporate bonds and
loans to small businesses. The allocation for small businesses, which falls under the, Main
Street Lending Program, has been widely touted as a sign of how much the Fed really cares about
struggling Mom and Pop businesses that employ the majority of working Americans. But, once
again, it's a sham and a boondoggle. The program is on-track to get $600 billion funding of
which the US Treasury will provide the base-capital of $75 billion. The rest will be levered-up
by 9-to-1 by the Fed, which means it's just more smoke and mirrors.
What readers need to realize is that the Treasury has accepted the credit risk for all of
the loans that default . In other words, the American people are now on the hook for
100% of all of the loans that go south, and there's going to be alot of them because the
banks have no reason to find creditworthy borrowers. They get a 5% cut off-the-top whether the
loans blow up or not. And, that, my friend, is how you incentivize fraud which, as Bernie
Sanders noted, "is Wall Street's business model."
It also helps to explain why Trump has repeatedly rejected congressional oversight of the
various bailout programs. He's smart enough to know a good swindle when he sees one, and this
one is a corker. The government is essentially waving trillions of dollars right under the
noses of the world's most ravenous hyenas expecting them not to act in character. But of course
they will act in character and hundreds of billions of dollars will be siphoned off by scheming
sharpies who figure out how game the system and turn the whole fiasco into another Wall Street
looting operation. You can bet on it.
So, what is the final tally?
Well, according to Trump's chief economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, the first bailout
installment is $6.2 trillion (after the Fed ramps up the Treasury's contribution of $450
billion.). Then there's the $2.3 trillion in additional programs the Fed announced on Thursday.
Finally, the Fed's QE program adds another $2 trillion in bond purchases since September 17,
when the repo market went haywire.
Altogether, the total sum amounts to $10.5 trillion.
You know what they say, "A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking real
money."
Of course, no one on Capitol Hill worries about trivialities like money because, "We're the
United States of America, and our dollar will always be King." But there's a fundamental flaw
to this type of thinking. Yes, the dollar is the world's reserve currency, but that's a
privilege that the US has greatly abused over the years, and it's certainly not going to
survive this latest wacky helicopter drop. No, I am not suggesting the US would ever default on
its debt, that's not going to happen. But, yes, I am suggesting that the US will have to repay
its debts in a currency that has lost a significant amount of its value. You don't have to be
Einstein to figure out that you can't willy-nilly print-up $10 or $20 trillion dollars without
eroding the value of the currency. That's a no-brainer. Central bankers around the world are
now looking at their piles of USDs thinking, "Hmmm, maybe it's time I traded some of these
greenbacks in for a few yen, euros or even Swiss francs?"
So how does this end? Can the Fed continue to write trillion dollar checks on an account
that is already $23 trillion overdrawn? Will Central banks around the world continue to
stockpile dollars when the Fed is printing them up faster than anyone can count? And what about
China? How long before China realizes that US Treasuries are grossly overvalued, that US
equities markets are unreformable, that the dollar is backed by nothing but red ink, and that
Wall Street is the biggest and most corrupt cesspit on earth?
Not long, I'd wager. So, how does this end? It ends in a flash of monetary debasement
preceded by a violent and destabilizing currency crisis. It's plain as the nose on your face.
The Fed knows that when a nation's sovereign debt exceeds 100% of GDP, "there's almost no
mathematical way to service that debt in real terms." Well, the US passed that milestone
way-back in 2019 before this latest drunken spending-spree even began. It's safe to say, we've
now entered the financial Twilight Zone, the Land of No Return. If we add the Fed's bulging
balance sheet to the final estimate, (after all, it's just another shady Enron-type Special
Purpose Vehicle) the national debt will be somewhere north of $33 trillion by year-end,
which means that Uncle Sam will be the greatest credit risk on Planet Earth. Imagine how
jaws will drop on the day that Moodys and Fitch slash the ratings on US Treasuries to Triple B
"junk" status . That should turn a few heads.
So what can we expect in the months to come?
First, the economy is going to slip into a deflationary period as people get back to work
and slowly resume their spending. But once demand picks up and the Fed's liquidity starts to
kick in, the economy will rebound sharply followed by steadily rising prices. That's the red
flag that will signal a weakening dollar. Similar to 1933, when Roosevelt took the U.S. off the
gold standard and printed money like crazy, economic activity picked up but the value of the
dollar dropped by 40%. A similar scenario seems likely here as well. Economist Lyn Alden
Schwartzer summed it up like this in an article at
Seeking Alpha:
"One of the common debates is whether all of this debt, counteracted by a tremendous
monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve in response, will cause a deflationary bust or an
inflationary problem .. Fundamentally, evidence points to a period of deflation due to
this global shutdown and demand destruction shock, likely followed in the coming years by
rising inflation .
In the coming years, the United States will be effectively printing money to fund large
fiscal deficits , while also having a large current account deficit and negative net
international investment position. This is one of the main variables for my view that the
dollar will likely decrease in value relative to a basket of foreign currencies in the coming
years ." ( "Why This Is
Unlike The Great Depression" , Seeking Alpha)
So, after decades of lethal low interest rates, relentless meddling and gross regulatory
malpractice, the Fed has led us to this final, fatal crossroads: Inflate or default. From the
looks of things, the
