Coronavirus Questions – and Explanations

 

Can anyone do basic math? Does anyone fact check? Does anyone question the media or the government? Another $2 trillion was just announced by the US Federal Reserve  to continue the historically unprecedented transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street, after a record $4.2 trillion was approved just last week. Yet nobody questions or even looks at the underlying numbers of the coronavirus crisis itself. The people and the pundits are both lost in a fog.

According to Bloomberg business journal, the global death toll as of April 9 was just over 110,000. Compare that to 500,000 deaths a year, which is common for the common flu.

“Unprecedented” – the word seems to be on everyone’s lips. Yes, this wave of deaths from infectious disease is unprecedented: except for the yearly deaths from the common flu last year, and the year before, and the year before that; and for the past 300,000 years of human history. But otherwise, it’s totally unprecedented.

250,000-650,000 people die of the common flu every year. The coronavirus deaths are certainly tragic, but they are no more tragic than the yearly flu deaths – and so far, they are only 1/3rd to 1/6th of the global death toll from the common flu.

The only things that are unprecedented here are: 

1. The level of propaganda success is staggering; 

2. That three billion people were put effectively under house arrest, is unprecedented, are a dire omen. 

3. The predicted result of a global economic lockdown, which was an elite decision, remember, not an act of God, was to cause a global economic train wreck. 

And

4. The planned economic train wreck allowed the rationalization for a second round of multi-trillion dollar wealth transfer from the many to the elite few ($20 trillion already between 2008-2010); and this is while the usual daily looting of the people and the planet is accelerated a thousand-fold, and the police state arrives, or rather, is brought in, in full. 

These things are unprecedented; a relatively small number of deaths from a virus, among a fraction of a percent of the population, is not.

How can a state of emergency be justified, much less a literally fascist police state and martial law, with three billion people effectively placed under house arrest, for an infectious disease that has a lower death toll than the annual flu?

How is it that virtually no one is asking such questions?

Montaigne said of fear, “There is no emotion which more readily ravishes our judgement.” That would seem to be the best explanation of our current mass social psychology: the great majority, including most of the otherwise thoughtful, intelligent, and emminently sane, are temporarily incapable of rational thought, due to panic and intense fear. That is to say, temporary insanity has descended upon them.

Montaigne echoes all the sages: when you meditate on death, you can face your mortality, and hence, conquer the fear of death; and when you conquer the fear of death, you thereby conquer all fear of life – and it is then only that we begin to truly live.

“To practise death is to practise freedom. The man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.” – Michel de Montaigne

Yet, the great majority hide from death, and thus hide from life – and their secret fear makes them easily misled, easily manipulated, easily ensnared and enslaved, easily irrational and confused, as well as perpetually filled with a secret, unconscious, perpetual anxiety and fear, no matter how cleverly masked or disguised.

“No wonder that they often get caught in a trap. You can frighten such people simply by mentioning death… And then, in the midst of pain and terror, God only knows what shape their good judgement kneeds into!”

– Michel de Montaigne

Blind faith in the medical establishment, with its clear and well-document ties and frequent if not general subordination to the pharmaceutical industry, would be plainly stupid. Blind faith in government and the media should be unthinkable by now. Have the people been living under a rock for the past several decades?

No, that is not it. They are simply “beside themselves” with fear: meaning, temporarily incapable of reason, and insane.

Why is the mortality rate in Europe lower this year than in the three previous years? Why is that not the top news story, repeated from the thousands of media echo chambers, which by the way are 80% owned world-wide by six corporations?

Why is no one questioning the official narrative? A pandemic of brainlessness?

There is a simple explanation for the enormous discrepancy between the facts of the virus and the wild-eyed panic, hysteria, and draconian measures in response to it, which have put three billion people into effective mass house arrest and enforced a police state lockdown. 

The Davos billionaire elite benefit from such extreme, utterly unjustified authoritarian measures in three ways at least: 

1. Mass distraction from vastly bigger issues; 

2. Divide and conquer: sow fear, panic, and hysteria, and make people terrified of social contact: keep the people separate and isolated – “social distancing” serves one purpose above all, and it is not public health.

3. Economic warfare, which simply represents an enormous surge in the usual, on-going feeding frenzy of the super-rich 0.1% upon the 99.9% of the people and the planet (the super-rich always benefit from an economic crash); 

4. And what should be most obvious: implement and install fascist architecture and fascist measures, rationalized by a wildly exaggerated crisis.

As the Grand Inquisitor said, (I am paraphrasing here,) and Huxley quoted: In the end, the people will beg us to take away their freedom and put them in chains.

Welcome to the Brave New World. And with the intellect and common sense, and basic ability to think rationally, to question, or check a single fact, laid to waste across the political spectrum, from right to left, we are certainly in grave, and unprecedented, danger indeed.

JTR,

April 11, 2020

The Failure of the “Left” – Continued

 

In addition to the giant blunders that I’ve already written about, and the clear absence of leadership on the left, there is the even more glaring indictment, which is this:

The US Democratic party, including all major self-proclaimed “progressives”, just voted unanimously, along with the Republicans, to give a $4.2 trillion bailout to the Wall Street corporate elite (after they crashed theeconomy by invoking the lockdown which caused the economic meltdown).

But, the fake left got the people a one-time $1,200 check per person – which won’t do anything – for which they are praising themselves like they are true messiahs.

That was, as it has been said, the cheese that baited the trap. But when the mousetrap snaps shut, as Jimmy Dore said, millions of heads will be crushed.

Millions of families are going to lose their homes – even more than the 5.1 million families who lost their homes in the last crash, in 2007-2009, when the faux left under Obama chose to bail out Wall Street instead of the 99% – which the faux left has just now done again.

Will someone please explain to the left, as well as the centre and right, that trickle-down economics don’t work? If you give billions or trillions to the business elite, it just makes the richest 0.1% richer – it doesn’t help the poor or the middle class, and it doesn’t stimulate the economy.

$20 trillion was transfered from Mainstreet to Wall Street between 2008 and 2010. It made the billionaires and the corporate giants even more astronomically wealthy and powerful. It caused stocks and assets to become super-inflated in an even bigger bubble (through stock buy-backs, which in an earlier era would have been called fraud). It post-poned the structurally inevitable major market correction, aka, crash. But it failed to revive the economy, which has remained in global recession since 2007. The richest got richer, while the 99% continued to be devoured.

Giving $20 trillion in debt relief to the poor, the middle class, and to small and medium business, instead of the Wall Street elite, would both help the people greatly, and also massively stimulate the economy – because they will spend the money, as they have to, to survive; whereas the elite just line their pockets further if you give it to them.

A Green New Deal to build renewable energy and transportation infrastructure would do the same – help the 99% greatly while powerfully boosting the economy – while creating millions of jobs.

For the $4.2 trillion that was just handed to Wall Street, both a job-creating, true economic stimulus of a Green New Deal, as well as debt relief for the struggling majority, could have neen done. Instead, the people have been looted, lied to, and swindled again.

Repeating the same failed multi-trillion dollar wealth transfer from the 99% to the ruling 1% in 2020 is not going to help the people or the economy this time, any more than it did the last time. In factm it is a giant swindle. It is economic warfare: class war. And “the left” legitimized it, and helped make it happen.

Disgraceful.

In the biggest single transfer of wealth from the 99.9% to the top 0.01% in history, “the left” was unanimously on board, just like the centre and the right. Clearly “the left” is, at present, devoid of leadership. Clearly, in fact, it is the faux left. There is no courage, vision, or leadership there.

Is the left leadership corrupt, cowardly, or simply deer caught in the headlights, momentarily shellshocked into a stupor of paralysis and brain fog? I don’t believe it is the first, in general. Let’s hope it is the last explanation, not the second. That would be the most promising.

Whatever the causes of the pervasive failure of the left, we need to correct it, and soon. Things are clearly in dire straights. Moreover, the people need to question everything, and everyone – including their “leaders”.

JTR,

April 9, 2020

Post-Script:

Immediately after writing this short essay, I see the announcement: Fed To Approve Another $2 Trillion In Stimulus. The business elite are tripping over themselves to give themselves ever greater wealth transfers from the people. They jusy can’t plunder the people fast enough, it seems.

Revolution is brewing, mark my words.