Robber Barons and the Black Death

There is a mind-blowingly large transfer of money from the 99% to the 1% going on right at this moment and no one seems to be noticing it.

Central banks are "injecting" an enormous amount of money into the "economy", to "stimulate the markets". These terms are simply not explained to the general public, nor what these astronomical amounts actually mean. There is now no waffle about "quantitative easing", in case we should wonder why we had all that quantitative easing over the last 12 years just to end up in the mother of all crises yet again. A few days ago the ECB surreptitiously injected some some 120 billion euros ($135.28 billion), all of which upped share prices during a few minutes before they fell again. The Fed's amount was $1.5 trillion. The Bank of England has just printed up £330 billion. You could throw a dollar out of the window every second for 143,000 years and still not get to the end of the amounts that these three central banks have thrown at the markets in one day. Not to mention the pounds, euros and dollars that have been "injected" on other days too numerous to mention.

The "economy", despite the constant mismatch, is NOT the stock market. The stock market is vital to bolster capitalism's workings but does NOT translate into a better life for the vast majority of its citizens. It does make some people very wealthy, and they will and do use that wealth to make sure that things generally keep getting a little bit worse for everybody else.

These obscene amounts of money were ostensibly not available over the years for a top-class health or education service, nor for decent homes and jobs. Instead, when capitalism starts to stumble, money is quickly thrown at the business community, ie given to corporations, that then spend it on buying back their own shares as so many of their top directors depend on the share price for their jobs and bonuses. They do not buy bonds as interest rates are kept so low; but they do accumulate debt for themselves, for the same reason, meaning that indebtedness soars even as money is thrown at them. This money, in essence just printed up, will be paid for by you and me and the next generations in reduced public services, the merming of our scant savings, the loss of our jobs and the further reduction of our remaining rights. It will not save the stock market this time in any case. Money will be thrown at the markets but the system is now so rotten to the core that it will be like throwing money at a black hole. High inflation is on the horizon, good for those who have debts, bad for those who have managed to save a bit (but are not owners of large tracts of land).

We are locked in our homes, being bombarded with scary messages, being led to believe that this coronavirus is like the Black Death - although the number of fatalities is risibly low -, or like the misnamed Spanish flu. Curiously Wikipedia has just revised downwards its mortality rate for Spanish flu and its new rate is now entirely incompatible with the number of people who actually died. Some have suggested that Wikipedia has done this in order to make people think that the current coronavirus is as dangerous as Spanish flu and that hundreds of millions will die. They will not. We live in regions where there is clean water, for a start, and conditions have absolutely nothing to do with the Late Middle Ages or with countries devastated by war and hunger.

But the capitalist venture continues apace meanwhile, undebated and not voted for. I notice that Mike Pompeo in the US is once again ramping it up about human rights in Iran (at the very moment that we are in lock-down over here and ostensibly without so many of our most basic rights); and that the British MOD (Ministry of Defence) has just ensured that the crimes soldiers commit abroad, as they trample over the rights of people in foreign lands in search of plunder, now expire after 5 years. This legislation is, apparently, to stop ‘vexatious’ claims.

No lock-down for the military it seems.

What's Happened to Civil Disobedience?

Look around you. Are dead bodies stacking up everywhere you look? Ah, you answer, it's important to spread out the coronavirus infection rate so as not to overload our national health service, the only one that will treat you free for the coronavirus. (The same health service relentlessly run down and privatised for decades.) We have to "flatten the curve"!!! So we have to self-isolate.

I have two things to say to you:

1. It would be good to make sure in the future that our national health service is not running at full capacity or more in normal times, so that new minor viruses do not create armageddon.
2. The relentless propaganda being spewed from every TV screen and newspaper is precisely what has made people overload the health system with symptoms best treated by a stay in bed and not spreading your germs around.

The media blitz has been more akin to that of the Twin Towers coming down than anything else. Wherever you look, mass media is screaming "Virus!" and "Pandemic!" at you with huge red letters, in loud repetitive images.

Remember that South Korea's low death rate for the virus is due to having identified with great efficiency those who had the virus in the first place. The WHO's death rate of 3% is in its own words "naïve and misleading", because it depends on the number of reported cases of the virus, which is a tiny reflection of the real number of cases. The very large number of mild cases are not reported, those people who get better on their own or with a couple of paracetamol are not in there. The WHO's figure of total cases is only of those who were made seriously ill by the virus and ended up in hospital, disproportionately the elderly and infirm, and their death rate is higher. People in countries without a national health system typically only go to hospital when they are very ill, especially those who are poor and disadvantaged.

Note that the under 30s in S Korea have a 0% death rate. And with 66 deaths out of 7,869, the death rate is only 0.84% among detected cases of infection, with a higher level among males due to smoking.

In England and Wales, according to the BMJ, the total number of deaths is NOT rising, the number of respiratory deaths are NOT on the rise, total deaths have NOT increased and respiratory deaths have NOT increased.

So, given that the coronavirus death rate is more or less similar to the other coronaviruses we get every year during the "flu season" in scope and target, the hysteria shown by media, government and population does far more harm than the illness itself. In Spain I saw on national TV a reporter showing a "terraza" with people having beer (alas, no more!), calling them irresponsible and mentioning their cardinal sin of being in an open space close to other people and "eating olives using their hands".

The WHO only recently called this a "pandemic", while the MSM did so since the very first day relentlessly. Does this make the crisis a pandemic though? There really isn't even an quantified definition of "pandemic", merely being an epidemic that has spread to various countries. Would you call the common cold a "pandemic"?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now the second largest donor to the WHO, after the US government (think about it). It has also financed a vaccine that will be ready in April. No conflict of interest there then. Call me cynical but I bet you Bill and Melinda themselves won't be having that vaccine.

The drastic and bourgeois measures being taken, confining people to their homes, prohibiting visits to friends, closing all public spaces, and so on, are extremely detrimental to vulnerable people: old people who are spending days without seeing anyone and watching scary content incessantly on their TVs, children who depend on school dinners, people who live with mentally ill or violent people, and so on. Not to mention the homeless. The closing of schools and daycare centres means that many health workers will stay at home in order to look after their own children or dependent relatives.

You may no longer go outside, not even to a park, although no one ever got a virus by walking in the park. Your children must stay indoors for the foreseeable future. You are allowed to take a crowded tube or bus to work, and to work in a cramped call centre, using headsets that many other have used minutes before. You may not go shopping unless it is to a supermarket, on your own, and you can buy sweets and tobacco. Drones and the military are being used to enforce the law. Meanwhile, 30,000 US soldiers are arriving in Europe in its largest military operation for the last 25 years, with no sanitary measures being taken and with absolute freedom of movement in their leisure time. (The US's aggressive stance has put Russia on maximum alert.)

Now that the obsessive disorder of repeated hand-washing has become prescriptive, an order even, now that our very hands have been rendered untouchable, now that we are no longer to physically engage with other people - excluding the ridiculous elbow bump -, is there nothing that is not prohibited or prescribed in this new totalitarian regime?

In such a short time we have succumbed to the brainwashing and herd mentality that dictates that it is irresponsible, or even a dereliction of civic duty, to meet up with other people, talk face-to-face and touch other human beings, all these things now potentially severely sanctionable. Where is the hard-won right to free movement on our common planet, to public or private association with others and to public demonstration against corruption and power that overreaches itself? Who will now stand up for the persecuted or those who are discriminated against? Has real selflessness and sacrifice really become, in the popular eye, a dangerous, subversive, inconsiderate behaviour that must be stopped at all cost. Instead we are obliged to show a herdlike patriotism by clapping on our balconies in solidarity with health workers, clapping alongside all those same people who voted over and over again for political parties that destroyed the national health service.

There is no level of threat to health - and the current coronavirus is very far from being even a significant threat to public health - that warrants the elites dictating who can meet up inside or outside their home, or where they can go. The rich have, as things go, not confined themselves, but have headed off, staff and all, to enjoy the next few weeks in the luxury of their second homes and in the company of their gangster friends. They will not risk losing their livelihood. You will not see many images of them as they live it up in their gated compounds, or unseen at the beach. As Orwell said, "The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Goering's bombing planes." After all, we are told this is a war, but it is not the one we think it is.

Meanwhile, central banks have just injected another fortune into the pockets of the very rich. Please note that they have not pardoned student debt or the mortgage debt of those who lose their jobs. For example, the ECB has injected some some 120 billion euros ($135.28 billion), all of which was siphoned off in minutes. The Fed's amount was $1.5 trillion. You could throw a dollar away every second for nearly 50,000 years (think about it). This money, in essence just printed up, will be paid for by you and me in reduced public services, the merming of our scant savings, the loss of our jobs or further reduction of our remaining labour rights. In fact the amounts are far higher. They've been injecting money surreptitiously for months now, patching over a crumbling economic system that has now found the perfect scapegoat.

At the same time we have lost our hard-won right - people died for it - to demonstrate against having our most basic rights to movement and association taken away. Add to that the fundamental right to bodily integrity (legally recognised as habeas corpus in 1679), shortly to be thrown out the window when you are forcibly vaccinated, or arrested and strip-searched (and then vaccinated) for not doing so.

Like 11S, which also had a before-and-after as concerns civil rights, we're succumbing shockingly easily to the passive-aggressive bombardment we're receiving. The two messages are in fact incompatible, but don't let that put you off: the "don't worry, stay calm, carry on working and then lock yourself indoors" message, followed by the "Pandemic! Killer virus! You're going to die!" one.

Don't fall for it.