Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

[blindpig]

Politics and pandemic: what the world must learn not to repeat the same mistake
Mission Truth

Apr 8 · 9 min read

In almost four months of development and evolution, the Covid-19 pandemic has represented an entire political earthquake in wide areas of the world.
It is not the first time that liberalism has failed
Certainly, the economic, financial and international system crisis that has been put at the center of the scene already came from before, however, the impact at the health level and the fragility of States to successfully manage the pandemic has compromised the paradigm neoliberal before our eyes in a unique way.
This historical episode marked by the collapse of political and economic structures might seem novel, but in reality it is not if we put memory to work. We have already attended other events close to the apocalypse, only now we have the “privilege” of observing our tragedy live and direct, 24 hours a day, thanks to the wonder of the Internet.
But the reasons and causes that have precipitated this scenario have not changed much either.
The First and Second World Wars, the Great Depression of 1929, Fascism and Nazism, and the wars in retaliation for the Russian Revolution, a combination of events that brought human suffering to unknown limits for forty consecutive years, had been cooking in the short wave of buoyant industrial capitalism that spanned from 1870 to 1914.
In a matter of a few years, the image that the liberal project had solved all the problems of humanity collapsed. His premise that state intervention was negative and his obsessive conception that the free market would effectively regulate world trade and political tensions, ended in the catastrophe of Nazism on the one hand, and in the reordering of the world's political and economic paradigm. , for another.
The fall of liberalism was total and opened the way to Keynesianism (a mix between capitalism and wealth distribution that would accommodate the defects of the system) in the late 30s of the last century.


A caricature of John M. Keynes in TIME magazine and another Keynesian cover in Newsweek. Image: Mises Center

The liberal project left the world table for more than 40 years having lost all its credibility. Meanwhile, Keynesianism maintained its bellows as an ideological instrument to contain the program of the Soviet revolution that was committed to a radical change in capitalist production structures.
The monsters return
But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also a decade earlier, the world again embraced the ideas that failed in 1914 as if nothing had been learned from that process. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm assures in his extensive work on the 20th century that humanity had lost all organic connection with its past as a result of a historical change that we did not fully understand.
The fact is that the western elites, without an alternative project at the forefront, resumed their commitment to liberalism but in its most savage and globalizing version: neoliberalism.
Once again, all human affairs were delegated to the market economy within the framework of a cycle of privatizations, deregulation and concentration of the economic apparatus that has left us a social and economic inequality that borders on tragedy.
And to the same project, the same crises. The inclement overdose of neoliberalism in the blood tissue of the economy and culture for more than 30 years has resulted in remastered versions of Hitler and Mussolini, adapting to an ideological world where mediation of social networks dominates.
The faces of our time, Trump, Abascal, Bolsonaro and other unmentionable, sneak out the window, assume positions of power and leadership in countries of international weight and we seem not to find a reliable response to such unpleasant events.


Jair Bolsonaro with Donald Trump in Florida on March 7. Photo: Reuters

But there is and it is very humiliating: we repeat a failure that had already cost us millions of deaths among famines, pandemics and wars in the last century.
A highly contagious flu has revealed that a system designed to turn everything into merchandise and private profits cannot save humanity, cannot provide it with medical assistance, compensate its unemployment or its debts or reduce other pressures associated with the crisis and the uncertainty of this moment.
In this sense, the systemic crisis that Covid-19 has exploded forces us to accumulate the following lessons for the post-pandemic world. Because there may be no other opportunity to correct the failures of a ruthless, self-centered, and asocial Western elite.
The scam market
Blind confidence in the market made it impossible for countries to prepare for the pandemic, precisely because it is unable to foresee these circumstances of such characteristics by its own mechanism.
On this the analyst Richard Wolff warns the following and focuses his consideration on the main focus of the pandemic worldwide:
“The important thing for public health is the preparation of each society: stored tests, masks, ventilators, hospital beds, trained personnel, etc., to handle dangerous viruses. In the United States, such objects are produced by private capitalist companies whose goal is profit. It was not profitable to produce and store such products, that was not and is not yet being done. ”
Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn takes this argument much further by comparing the current crisis with that of 1914 :
“'Lions led by donkeys' was the phrase used to condemn the waste of lives by incompetent World War I generals and their political masters. The same words could be used again today: once the shortage was for machine guns and artillery shells, whereas now they are for ventilators, surgical masks, and test kits. The common feature is that in both cases the shortage will kill or disable a proportion of those who do not receive essential equipment. ”
For his part, Robert Reich indicates that "there are no institutions analogous to the Federal Reserve with the responsibility of supervising and managing public health, capable of taking out a giant checkbook at any time to avoid human, rather than financial, devastation," evidencing the priorities of the main western power and how they have unleashed a crisis that can reach 200 thousand deaths.
It is urgent to reduce the power of the market on health, and furthermore, to take away space in the conduct of the vital affairs of humanity.
Bet on public health
Precisely countries that have not treated health as a lucrative business have been better prepared to face the pandemic.
Countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, China, among others, which have opted for a universal public health model, have found themselves in better conditions to fight against Covid-19 and are currently positioning themselves internationally as fronts of health support for European countries with uncontrolled contagion and death curves.


National Chemical Physical Control Laboratories of the Center for State Control of Medicines in Havana. Photo: Marcelino Vázquez Hernández / ACN

Contrary to the liberal preaching that enshrines the linking of the market in all spheres of life, in the framework of Covid-19 the nationalization and nationalization of health is the only approach that can protect humanity. It has been shown that countries with robust public health systems can better combat this disease.
Paradoxically, the model of health privatization is showing its inefficiency and lack of solidarity.
Cuts kill
Although the overcoming of the pandemic and the return to a certain normality still seem far away, the capitalists and their political elites are preparing to transfer the cost of the Covid-19 economic crisis to the poor layers of the population.
They appeal to this cruel and ruthless approach under the myth that taxes and other public investments hamper economic development and discourage growth. But it is precisely this vision that has brought us here, since the systematic reduction of taxes and cuts to public services has left countries without defenses against the pandemic.
The looming post-pandemic world will surely be one marked by economic depression, recession in strategic sectors, and a chronic unemployment cycle. The intensity and depth of this panorama has yet to be defined, and the prolongation of this first stage will depend on it.
Faced with this scenario, the wealthy western layers are preparing to capture economic benefits taking advantage of the context of a weakened and desperate society. It is already happening in the United States with a mega “anti-crisis” plan that will benefit Wall Street, in Colombia with tax exemptions for businessmen, and in Brazil and in many other countries where the wealthy receive financial aid lines.
For this reason, this crisis must rethink the place of the State, not as a petty cash fund of the rich but as an instrument to prevent the poor from paying the economic effects of the pandemic.

The United States has made it a policy to save the super-rich and not the poor. Photo: Mary Altaffer / AP
Without a boost in employment, social security and without a widespread economic stimulus plan, the effects of the pandemic are likely to last over time as the wealthy dig in to their tax havens.
Reformat globalization
The pandemic has also been a faithful account of how the virus travels as fast as capitals do in the context of globalization. And it is that a totally open world, hyperconnected digitally and commercially, with diffuse borders and weak governments subject to supranational structures, is fertile ground for the pandemic to spread in a matter of hours.
Politically, globalization is being questioned by a dilemma that the German sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has specified in his notorious work Liquid Modernity . Words more words less, Bauman maintains that while money has been emancipated from any relationship with space, the middle and lower layers are still tied to the ground. This implies that while the government and the population respond to local dynamics, capital is global, moves without restrictions and takes advantage of this condition to squeeze the workforce.
Neoliberal globalization has resulted in growing inequality that has been compromising its credibility. And in a certain sense, the Covid-19 is a disease of money: the large transnational companies with businesses in countless countries have created a massive network of commerce, transport and consumption that weakens the controls of the States and exposes the population not only to miserable wages. , but to aggressive movements in different directions.
The countries of the Global South are compromised in this crisis by decades of blackmail and extortion of global capital, which requires governments to make all kinds of tax reductions and labor guarantees to establish their businesses.
The pandemic must open the way to a globalization reform where capitals begin to operate in an area of ​​less impunity.
Build another international order
Another aspect that the pandemic is revealing is that the current international order, dominated by western countries, is incapable of offering effective responses.
The crisis has reached such a point that the criminal Henry Kissinger recently recognized that the coronavirus can undermine the liberal international order where the United States, since the end of the Second World War, has had a dominant position.
Although Kissinger sweeps home and tries to save America's place, he is correct in claiming that the pandemic is causing liberal institutions in the West to fail in the eyes of citizens.


Interview of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with his ally Augusto Pinochet in 1976. Photo: Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs

With a geopolitics marked by globalization, it is virtually impossible for any country, individually, to face the pandemic without appealing to multilateral cooperation and alliances. However, Western countries are in a defensive and non-dialogical position, prohibiting exports of medical equipment, seizing that of other countries or placing obstacles to benefit in the midst of high demand.
This has caused the drift towards the disintegration of the current international structures to sharpen, while on the other hand the countries that have opted for a cooperative approach such as Venezuela, Cuba, China and several European and Asian countries are strengthened.
The terrain is served for an international turn or for a drift that further polarizes the challenging positions of the Western powers.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/po ... 6e18d61d71

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[blindpig]

Debunking the Myth of the Wuhan Seafood Market Part 4 Ancestral Form of sars cov 19 virus found predominantly in the USA and australia

11 APRIL, 2020 ~ LEAVE A COMMENT
Scientific research continues along fascinating paths. In a study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (the article is here), a team from the University of Cambridge has identified three main mutations of the Sars-COV-19 genome.

Type A, which is the ancestral type, is found mainly in samples from the United States and Australia. To quote: ‘It is noteworthy that nearly half (15/33) of the types in this [A] subcluster, however, are found outside East Asia, mainly in the United States and Australia.’ Yes, Australia. Could Australia be the source of the whole pandemic? Let us wait and see.

As for type B, this is the one found in China, which clearly is a mutation (by a few steps) from the ancestral type, perhaps a needed mutation to overcome East Asian immune resistance. Interestingly, it was two North Americans with the type A sub-cluster who had spent quite some time living in Wuhan before the virus mutated.

Type C is the one found mainly in Europe and in Latin America, and entails further mutations. It is absent in the Chinese mainland, but found in the special administrative zones of Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as the southern part of the Korean peninsula.

If you are into science-speak, here is the abstract:

In a phylogenetic network analysis of 160 complete human severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2) genomes, we find three central variants distinguished by amino acid changes, which we have named A, B, and C, with A being the ancestral type according to the bat outgroup coronavirus. The A and C types are found in significant proportions outside East Asia, that is, in Europeans and Americans. In contrast, the B type is the most common type in East Asia, and its ancestral genome appears not to have spread outside East Asia without first mutating into derived B types, pointing to founder effects or immunological or environmental resistance against this type outside Asia. The network faithfully traces routes of infections for documented coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases, indicating that phylogenetic networks can likewise be successfully used to help trace undocumented COVID-19 infection sources, which can then be quarantined to prevent recurrent spread of the disease worldwide.

And here is a summary of the article in the Global Times : https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1185291.shtml

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An insight into Fangcang hospitals – a new approach to epidemic control
11 APRIL, 2020 ~ 2 COMMENTS
People around the world may have been impressed with the way China built two temporary hospitals from the ground up – Huoshenshan and Leishenshan – in a little over a week in Wuhan. But less attention has been paid to the Fangcang Hospitals.

Since the policy was to put all coronavirus patients in hospital, even mild cases, the demand for hospital beds in Wuhan soared. The solution: convert existing venues, such as exhibition halls and stadiums into temporary hospitals. This was achieved in 29 hours for the first 3 Fangcang hospitals, and even faster for the remainder.

Linked into the efficient system of medical management, the Fangcang hospitals focused on triage, mild to moderate cases, and rapid referrals for patients who developed more serious symptoms.

The studies on all aspects of Wuhan’s approach and indeed the approach in the whole of China are beginning to flow in scientific journals.

In some way, it reminds me of the battle of Kursk in the Second World War (1943). Through stunning innovation, the Soviet Red Army showed how it was possible to blunt a German Blitzkrieg. The example generated a massive amount of analysis and became a standard topic in nearly all military colleges throughout the world. Analogously, the lockdown in Wuhan (along with other cities in Hubei and where necessary elsewhere in China) is the first time an edpidemic has been stopped in its tracks – the curve did not ‘flatten’, it was smashed. Looks like it will become a text-book case, refined and honed over time, for how to deal with an epidemic, or indeed a poison attack.

Too long an introduction. An article has recently been published in The Lancet (here), which details the development, building and experience of the Fangcang hospitals.

Here is a brief overview of the article’s background (click here):

A Chinese team has recently published its research on Fangcang shelter hospitals, a novel public health concept built to tackle the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak on the leading British medical journal The Lancet.

Wang Chen, 58, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, advocated building temporary hospitals in Wuhan, the hard-hit city in Central China’s Hubei province, and he has been in the front line in Wuhan since February.

China began to roll out Fangcang hospitals to tackle the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan for the first time in February. These hospitals were converted from existing public venues, such as stadiums and exhibition centers into large-scale, temporary health-care facilities.

The research team led by Wang has documented the development of Fangcang hospitals, explaining key characteristics such as rapid construction, massive scale and low cost, as well as essential functions such as isolation, triage, basic medical care and frequent monitoring.



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How China deals with new outbreaks: Suifenhe border crossing with Russia
11 APRIL, 2020 ~ LEAVE A COMMENT
The major rail crossing with Russia in the northeast of China, in Heilongjiang, is the town of Suifenhe. It has a population of 70,000, which is a small town by Chinese standards. In the last few days there has been a spike of infections of COVID-19. Out of almost 2,500 people – Chinese citizens – who returned to China from Russia, 151 tested positive for COVID-19 and almost as many asymptomatic cases. So the town has been shut down, medical proffesionals have been rushed to set up facilities, and so on. This will be the reality in many parts of the world until a vaccine is found.

Here is an account from the Global Times (here):

The city on the border of China and Russia, Suifenhe, located in Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province has been accepting donations from the public as an increasing number of imported coronavirus cases mount huge pressure on the small city.

The city is now accepting donations of protective clothing, masks, medical alcohol, temperature detectors, disinfectants and other medial materials, according to a document released on Saturday.

From March 27 until Thursday, a total of 151 imported confirmed cases and 148 asymptomatic infections were reported in Suifenhe. In addition, 2,497 people have entered China from the Suifenhe border crossing as of Friday since March 21, according to data released by the Health Commission of Heilongjiang Province.

Suifenhe, a prefecture-level city, has an area of 460 square kilometers and a population of less than 70,000, seeing a lack of medical staff.

Heilongjiang Province has dispatched medical teams of 222 staff since March 31 to Suifenhe and its jurisdiction city Mudanjiang, with a preparation team of 1,000 medical support personnel stationed in other prefecture-level and provincial-level medical institutions.

A cabin hospital in Suifenhe, providing more than 600 patient beds, is to be put into operation on Saturday, with around 400 medical staff expected to work in the hospital, the city’s publicity department said.

A resident surnamed Liu from the Xinxing community told the Global Times on Saturday that all estates in Suifenhe have been locked down and only one person from a household will be allowed to go out to buy necessities every three days.

Liu is a primary school teacher. All teachers and students have been teaching and learning at home since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pneumonia began.

According to the latest policy, ports in Heilongjiang Province have implemented isolation measures and closed-loop controls, including complete quarantine for inbound transportation, temperature monitoring for entry personnel, implementation of nucleic acid sample testing and complete isolation.

All front-line staff who have had contact with imported cases will be picked up from home and taken to work via specially designated vehicles to curb contact with other people.

https://stalinsmoustache.org/

[blindpig]

Debunking the myth of the Wuhan seafood market, part 5: did the novel coronavirus originate in Australia?
12 APRIL, 2020 ~ LEAVE A COMMENT
Following on from my previous post (here) in relation to an article in PNAS, my wife, elder daughter, her husband and I have been discussing this further. I should add that my elder daughter has a PhD in molecular biology and works in directing clinical research trials at the regional hospital. Yesterday, I sent her the PNAS article (here) and we discussed it today. It certainly does not surprise her at all.

Then our discussion moved into more speculative terrain: what if the virus itself – SARS-CoV-2 – originated in Australia? This was based on the scientific reality that the original or ancestral form of the virus (A) is the predominant form found in Australia.

Now for the speculation: the small city of Newcastle, where I am currently holed up, has many, many fruit bats. They particularly like the Lilli Pilli (a native type of fig) trees that are plentiful hereabouts. From spring to autumn hundreds of them flap about, especially at dusk. And when the weather is hot – as in 40 degrees Celsius and above – they can attack and bite human beings. Given that 96.2 percent of SARS-CoV-2 virus is found in bats, could it be that it derives from the local bats?

Obviously, this is pure speculation. Good for a laugh. But I did ponder catching a few of the local bats and taking them to the regional hospital’s research unit and asking them to test the bats.

And … back in December my wife and I actually had a flu virus with symptoms that are remarkably like COVID-19. While I had some mild symptoms and recovered after about 10 days, my wife got a secondary infection, which knocked her out for weeks: raw throat, high temperature exacerbated by Ibuprofen, conjunctivitus, difficulty breathing, unable to concentrate, bedridden for ages. Australia’s health system is not so good these days, so they simply hit her with a broad-range strong antibiotic that may or may not have helped. As I write, she is still recovering, noting a continued shortness of breath when exercising.

We will never know. Pure speculation. But what if Australia is indeed the source?

To help, here is an overview of the current scientific research being undertaken (at the People’s Daily):



The COVID-19 virus has mutated as it has spread, research has found, allowing scientists to track its origins and potentially predict future trends.

The study may also help to establish whether the divergence in severity of the illnesses suffered by different people may be linked to infection from different strains of the coronavirus.

What is believed to be the earliest known strain of the virus, most closely related to that found in pangolins and bats, is termed by the scientists as “Type A.” This variation is commonly found in the U.S. and Australia. Type A appears to have mutated into “Type B,” which then evolved into a “Type C,” which is the predominant strain found in Europe.

Lead author of the study, Peter Forster of Cambridge University in the UK, (above) told CGTN Europe how the journey from Type A to Type C was not apparent before this new research.

“Type A is the original type that would have infected humans and then it would mutate and change into Type B. This Type B was then the first genome to be picked up in Wuhan when the disease became apparent.

“And so researchers might be forgiven for thinking at the time that B is the original type. But actually it’s not, it’s Type A, which on one hand is only a minority type, but B has become the majority type during the outbreak. And that has mutated further into C.”

The scientists noticed that Type B was almost exclusively found in East Asia, leading them to question whether people living outside the region had some kind of resistance to it.

But as Forster pointed out, it’s hard to find a full picture of the virus because “the research effort is very different from country to country.”

“We have 40 genomes sequenced by laboratories [in the UK] which is not a great deal, but it’s better than nothing. For Italy we have five or six. For Germany we have five or six. Netherlands has done 100, the Americas 300,” he told CGTN Europe.

The study, conducted by scientists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Kiel, the German Institute of Forensic Genetics and Fluxus Technology and Lakeside Healthcare in the UK, can be used to create a map of the coronavirus’s journey around the world.

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers reported they could not trace the virus to its roots as yet.

However, subsequent work, which has not been peer reviewed, allowed the researchers to conclude that the virus’s first transmission to humans was between the middle of September and early December 2019, Forster said.

https://stalinsmoustache.org/

[blindpig]

Johns Hopkins tally of COVID-19 cases corrected after miscalculation
By Zhang Zhihao | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2020-04-14 11:33



Johns Hopkins University had quickly adjusted its tally for COVID-19 confirmed cases in the United States from the previous 682,619 cases to 581,918 as of Tuesday morning.

Media around the world were surprised to find the cases in the US had jumped by over 120,000 in the past day when citing figures from the university. The correct figure was around 26,641. The cause of the miscalculation is not explained.

The World Health Organization said there are more than 1.78 million confirmed cases in 213 countries and regions as of Tuesday morning.

The university's COVID-19 dashboard map for the US is led the Johns Hopkins Centers for Civic Impact, with participation from the Applied Physics Laboratory, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Whiting School of Engineering. 

The data are updated manually and are sourced from international and regional health departments including the WHO, centers for disease control and prevention in China, US, and Europe, as well as local media reports and other statistical platforms.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20200 ... 16143.html

Moving the goalposts?

[blindpig]

How many daily COVID-19 tests are undertaken in China?
15 APRIL, 2020 ~ 2 COMMENTS
1.7 million is the answer. Every day.

I have received official confirmation of this figure from the National Medical Products Administration, as well as the China Daily news outlet by email.

China has been able to undertake 1.7 million tests per day since 26 February, 2020.

Therefore, since that date China has undertaken 85 million tests. If we include the period before 26 February, with lower number of tests, the total number of tests is well over 100 million.

For the most reliable information, please use this website at China Daily (here). As is the Chinese way, all information is verified by the State Council Information Office. This ensures that the information is reliable, accurate and based on truth from facts.

https://stalinsmoustache.org/

[blindpig]

Coronavirus: thesis on the present

Mission Truth

Apr 14 · 19 min read

By Diego Sequera


"Great electric skull", engraving by the Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posadas (1900)

“It is true, for the first time in the history of all the peoples of the earth there is a common present: no event of importance in the history of one country can remain as a marginal accident in the history of any other. Each country has become the almost immediate neighbor of any other, and each man feels the shudder of events taking place at the other end of the globe. "

Hannah Arendt, thinking about the world view of the dense and overwhelming Karl Jaspers, may have written this in the 60s of the last century about the proximity between nations, people and about the possible ominous reality that a world unified mainly by technological path, where all citizens are erased by the weight of unity, but here, from this moment in the historical torrent, what he wrote seems to be clothed with an even more current character.
Sixty years later, the Covid-19 world has brought us closer to being together as a species, in spite of us and also in spite of the trade and the margins of the overwhelming late neoliberalism.
The contracted world of today brings us closer in this strange process of equalization of vulnerabilities, its contracted folds make us suffer the same in a more explicit way and in this approach, in this new (by unpublished) affirmation of community in danger, the “shudder of events ”has also forced us to the evidence of a critical moral deep sea that is expressed in the ineffectiveness, paralysis, rapine, brutality or great virtues with which the states, that other unification mechanism, respond when they feel threatened .
Which brings up a new question: threatened by whom? And what makes circumstances threaten states, governments, and societies, beyond the common danger of monochord death from a disease to which we are not immune and whose protection remains a question? Where can we catch a glimpse of threat states at a time when the movement of things level geopolitics at the same point and no longer touch their faces in one fell swoop?

The virus in the bones: inhabiting uncertainty and seeing sideways

It seems that the artificial superstition of the advanced and ultramodern world has clouded and called for a chapter that no matter how hypertechnified one part of the planet is (at the expense of the other), humanity, since there is a record, will always be subjected to secular cycles of plague and general disease. The distance between the reality by which millions of people die from treatable diseases has become ineffective. There is no refuge, the crown reminds us now, beyond our confinement and the disciplinary guidelines with which each country and each society assumes quarantine.
Al-Mutanabbi, in the 10th century, treated fever like a mistress who visited him where he slept under cover of night, and which, he says, is the only time he appeared in his dwelling. In doing so, the poet offers her sheets and pillow, "but she rejects them," he tells us, "and spends the night among my bones."
Let's contract both notions: never, in generations, have we been so explicitly linked throughout the planet as now, and never, for the same reason, has the idea of ​​proximity and experience been more difficult to avoid: this new something that lives between our bones.
Life in Planet Lockdown ( Pepe Escobar dixit ), where confinement reduces distances and inhibits the habitual and essential differences of each society, brings more than we still have measure. This new definition of the “glocal” (the global and the local unified) has become the dark side of that aspiration for “global citizenship” that has so much driven the desire for a sort of improvement that transcends borders. The new frontier in ourselves brought us to isolation, and to the reaffirmation of that favorite objective of turbocapitalism in its liberaloid or neocon variations: what illusoryly makes us closer raises the territorial walls deepening divisions.
“A system should be valued for its fruits and not for its promises. Globalism offered "free movement" of people, but has caused the largest human quarantine in history, "they say .
On that measure, the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (where the last patient left the hospital leaving the hospital ), or the cholera outbreak in Haiti, have never been so far, we just wanted them to be. The collapse of that abstraction marks another boundary line in the capabilities of the system, and in the soul of many people.
It also reminds us that the fear of the dystopian of the so-called "advanced societies" is more a defense mechanism that surrenders to the evidence, and not a threatening moment that needs to be prevented. Because dystopia was actually always here .


"They caught us doctor" by José Guadalupe Posada, El Jicote magazine, No. 1 (1891)

Unfeasible border expansions

Global paralysis has not prevented the United States from finding an instance of reaffirmation, no matter that it accelerates even more that death that it carries within and that expands without interruption. The demonstration of sadism with Iran, the exhibition of decompensated musculature with Venezuela or the dysfunctional adolescent behavior with China and the World Health Organization (WHO) also draws the contour of the limits that nations can reach in moral and systemic terms.
Intellectual circles, think tanks , that give philosophical substratum to wars through economic terrorism focus the discussion on the effectiveness that the violent Covid-19 outbreak will have in achieving, now, the long-awaited goals of regime change in the Republic Islamic, in the most uphill battle in its recent history as a result of unilateral coercive measures.
The humanitarian coverage of the population that used to be the narrative center for which it was a categorical urgency to force Iran towards "democracy" becomes mute. The more dead, the better , is the premise with which sub-figures such as Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), or that disgusting semi-human circumference called Mike Pompeo, find unconfessed pleasure. and the consecration of his worldview.

The criminal alibi that they wield on which Iran and Venezuela can still, despite the sanctions, acquire medicines, sanitary devices or food, but that they do not do it "because they do not want", inaugurates a new ratio in the process of infantilization of the American politics.
Naturally, it does not contribute much to the public self-consolation of Pompeo or Carlos Vecchio on the crime that one commits and the other promotes, the supplementary role of pressure groups that make it unviable that such "humanitarian clauses" are even less than narrative padding: there where legal scaffolding cannot operate, yes, for example, United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI) operating on a database where each of the companies that carry out commercial actions collect exactly where the supposed “humanitarian exemptions” should act, naming and humiliating said companies, attacking them through lobbying actions within the Treasury Department and criminalizing their possible or proven action within the spheres of the corporate world and the private sector, inhibiting these companies to risk negotiating with Iran, even under the legal protection of those who issue sanctions.

Thus, disease corporations such as Bayer, Merck, Genzyme, AirSep, Medrad, Becton, Dickinson & Company, Ely Lilly and Abott Laboratories due to pressure from UANI (all of them, in front of a perfectly traceable circle of financial and ideological power) their business with Iran ceased .
While the ineffectiveness of the supposed legal channels that allow the acquisition of "humanitarian resources" is corroborated anyway , the rest of the scaffolding of extraterritorial jurisdiction ensures that in any case there are no ways for Caracas or Tehran to use their funds to acquire what is dramatically lacking, which is not the ability to cope.

John Wayne, that super-male symbol of the golden age of gringo Westerns, says that after the hour of his death he had more than 20 kilos of fecal matter in his body. And they also say that the latest movement in the United States announcing a tune-up "anti-narcotics operation" in the Caribbean where they have been emphatic whose main objective is to "cut off the financing channels" to the government of Nicolás Maduro, resembles the conduct of a cowboy in the old west.

It is convenient to stop at the western metaphor , the "last frontier" . Perpetual expansion is a central symbol of the American national myth. Some would say that the gringo empire originates and also returns to that dividing and appropriating wire. They say that in order to understand the barbaric drive that makes them act in Falluja with the same intensity with which the caging of migrant children is normalized, it is justified as a legitimate procedure that is directly related and becomes the metaphysics of its borders inward.

And that once the landmass that was conquered by making it the territory of the United States of today is the ruling principle by which it assumes that running the border line in times of late neoliberalism. The same drive that makes that border locate anywhere, wherever they want, be it the southern Caribbean basin or the Strait of Hormuz, and, therefore, there it acts "sovereignly" on what it conceives as threats.

It all comes back to the beginning. And just as the 1989 resonance of Panama over Venezuela refers to the climax of the last imperial adventure that began in the 80s of the last century with the conservative counterrevolution, acknowledging receipt of the frank inability to reinvent which it has already displayed, its expeditionary symbol par excellence, the aircraft carrier finds in the USS Theodore Roosevelt a monstrous synthesis of everything that sustains it : a floating hospital, Covid-19 breeding ground, with a captain relieved of his command to remove from the silence the hardship for which The crew was passing, in a kind of drift through the Pacific. A floating and bulging John Wayne.

The containment of the SARS virus that proliferated in various Asian countries ten years ago, they say , was due to the world making a unified effort to prevent the epidemic from reaching global pandemic status.

It is no secret to anyone that the same cannot be said now, while demonstrations continue to occur every day that certify the death of a consensus on the order of things, since the elevation of that way of representing oneself as the crystallizations of the greatest human achievements , all those beacons of civilization, left the drill and went directly to the bachaqueo of state and frank piracy, without covering their faces. In this, Europe is also well portrayed.

That behind the adolescent and extortionate departure of the Trump administration to blame China and the WHO to reduce the noise of their apoplegic reaction to the spread of the virus, added to the testosterone rattle against Venezuela and the sado-urticaria that drives rounds of sanctions and Suffocating the Iranian economy while still being hit by the effects of the blockade and the crown, it is also the sound of when the notion of empire collides with its limits.

Already said the defense secretary, Mark Esper:

"As nations around the world shift their focus inward to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, many criminal organizations are trying to capitalize on the crisis."

Your word go ahead.

Exceptional drifts

The convention says that normality was blown up. The ordinary, routine, everyday was suspended and it is assumed that the world, in its most devastating moment of common present than could be recorded, has entered the realm of the exceptional. With or without the name, it is assumed that almost the entire planet has entered a state of exception. Global one.

There is no doubt about that. The routine life of countries that conventionally live, or simulate, a state of normality, of little altered daily life, under the illusion of predictability and little surprise, have been the first to experience the shock (without being minimally prepared for that, as before they were). Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, pillars of the "West", together with the rest of the world, bear witness to the almost total interruption of their daily habits.


A woman in a mask passes through Wall Street on March 6. The following day, New York declared a state of emergency. Photo: Andrew Kelly / Reuters

The exception is opposed to the ordinary, to the "normal", it can be said of truism. And the figure of state of exception, as a category of constitutional law, is something that will vary within that framework according to its definition in the different magnum letters, alluding to the suspension of that normality as a result of an event of force majeure or an emergency. , in which the state is conferred extraordinary powers to face the eventuality that alters the regular course of an equis society, where only essential rights remain, while the rest remain on hiatus, until the contingency passes.

But what is the content of that suspense? Or, even, such suspension of life necessarily passes by decreeing such a state of emergency? For Giorgio Agamben , long the most notable scholar of the subject in this century, there is a "no man's land between public law and political fact, and between the legal order and life" among the existential brackets of the exception.

In fact, for Agamben, the Covid-19 pandemic and his country's emergency declaration would be a situation of this type par excellence . But beyond what I say at the moment about that, which has sparked a debate with other high -profile philosophers like Jean-Luc Nancy , for the gaze of someone who lives in the same country as me, from that point of view , could be insufficient, and not for reasons of jurisprudence. The only surprise is that now the rest of the world is too. And less prepared than us.

While "normality" could still be a valid concept for an Italian citizen who does not see beyond his social habits and routine before the declaration of emergency, Venezuela has long been a country forced to live in the exception, where the daily conquest of a minimum of normality (according to how we understood it seven years ago) is the main battlefield. Because the exceptionalization of our lives was decreed from the outside.
If we continue with Agamben, his legal archeology survey on the subject comes across that such emergency powers, in addition to being a wide drawer where the ultimate meaning is justified by the powers that enact, being an excessively flexible definition, gradually too It has been the true norm to govern, especially in those countries that are supposed showcases of all the ingredients of the "exemplary" liberal democracy in the West, with its respective economic consensus.

In the 21st century, it tells us in a state of emergency. Homo priest, II, I (2005), the paradigm of these emergency powers, "as an original structure in which the law includes the living in itself through its own suspension" is manifested in two legal instruments produced by the Bush administration (that is, Dick Cheney and company), after the attacks of September 11: the military order that decrees indefinite detention managed through military commissions (not courts) of November 13, 2001, and the Patriot Act of October 26 of the same year, through which all foreigners (and locals as well) suspected of activities that threaten national security (of the United States) entered that total limbo whose maximum expression remains Guantánamo.

The measure of October 26 was decided and approved by the Senate and the Department of Justice, that of November 13 by the army by presidential decree. The entire spectrum of the state.

But emergency action is not supported in the legal veneer, but in acts of force, as has been demonstrated in the peripheries of Globalistan while the good consciences of transatlantic citizens continued to enjoy the apparent normality that their first attack with the financial crisis of 2008, and which has received the final blow with the “perfect storm” that has not yet fully started, as a result of the even deeper fracture of supply chains, the edge reached by the debt machine and the halt in economic and commercial activity crowned by the pandemic. Already with or without Covid-19 we were moving in this direction.

But, once again, what is exceptionally supervised is a known experience for countries in open intervention warfare (Yemen, Syria) or target nations of economic terrorism and “indirect” procedures of hybrid warfare (Venezuela, Iran, Cuba).

Identity politics, that Pavlovian consensus on which feel good ideologies depend so much on those who are increasingly unable to literally take care of their own shit, and which have happily proliferated in the professional and middle university layers from the social sciences in Perpetual self-sabotage, they are usually based on diffuse claims of individual and individual sovereignties while canceling national sovereignty and segmenting their own oppression to the diversity of boxed dissents.

Amusingly, they denounce the health schemes and "the bodies" subjected by "the state" to a statistical and objectifying regimentation, but they cannot see that this, the Foucaultian categories of biopower and biopolitics, operate with devastating clarity when the overall vision is decreed "Across the seas" and reduces the sovereign guidelines to the decision of who deserves to live and who dies. Achille Mbembe's idea of ​​“ necropolitics ”, and which finds no better description than in the current State Department humanitarian catechism. Reality may be boring, but it is reality.
In this way, the “management” of these microconflicts and their discussion, increasingly de facto privatized, omits several elements that are now agonizing due to dissonance with the direction the planet may take.

A citizen who holds an Israeli passport and lives in those cities totally dependent on dystopia, today they are disturbed and cornered given that the Israeli state imposes checkpoints that block free transit, its intelligence services monitor the digital movement of people, as claustrophobia increases. So says Gideon Levy.

But Levy also clarifies that this version of the state of exception could be a dream, for example, for the Palestinian population, whose perpetual harassment and the suppression of intervals in life (Fanon would say), is clearly several steps down in hell. that still, with extraordinary measures, they would end up realizing that.

“No foreign soldier will invade their homes at midnight, night after night, for no reason. No one will snatch them out of their beds and take them away. No one will arrest them without trial. No one will question their children and imprison them in contravention of the international agreements to which Israel is a signatory, "he recalls , adding that" even in the worst dystopia of the coronavirus in Israel, there is no scenario that features snipers competing with each other shooting at them. knees hundreds of protesters ... ".

They will live (who knows if) provisionally the exception, but unlike the degradation of life and death in Gaza ( where there are 56 respirators and 40 intensive care beds for 2 million people), they still would not comply with the third precept, in addition to biopower and the state of exception, with which one lives in the remaining patches of historical Palestine: the state of siege.


Volunteers disinfect the al-Islam mosque in Jan Yunis, Gaza. Photo: Abet Zagout / Red Cross

Biopower, a state of exception and a state of siege, the trilogy with which Mbembe theorizes, could also resonate with the Iranian patient who sees how sanitary containment mechanisms battle against the artificial collapse that facilitates the blockade, or the Venezuelan population that in In the midst of the pandemic, in addition to the economic rigors, he suffers with the perpetual threat of a punitive steroid expedition by the US Navy and the Southern Command, despite being, like John Wayne, zombies with twenty kilos of fecality in his shitty biology.

Or a Haiti where the population has not ceased living the state of exception forever, and where the war machine that maintains 11 million people in permanent tension, and where there are 30 intensive care beds that work from 130, to the 11 million inhabitants.

But it seems that the post-Covid-19 world aspires to move in that direction. We were barely ahead. In troubled times of hollow shudder, the winners sharpen their aim , vying for the desired financial model, and for the savage commercial race to control the patent and commercialization of the coronavirus treatment and vaccine, the Holy Grail of the moment.

And if this sounds tremendous, it is not that from our latitude we can find comfort that now, after what is supposed to happen to us is part of the repertoire of doom destiny for the Global South or the Third World, the States themselves United is closer to us than to its ruling class, now that sanctionism and the exception turn against itself . There, by the way, in the self-styled by his establishment as the "exceptional nation".

On the other hand, we talked about how the Hitler who surprised them so much when he arrived at the door of his house (thus dressed in pink, being politically correct and speaking deconstructed; neoliberal Hitler), had already been harassing the south of the planet for decades.

Renowned writer Margaret Attwood opposes the exclusive notion of dystopia, in favor of what she called " ustopia, " the contraction of utopia and dystopia, since in every apparently exclusively dystopian universe, as in 1984 , a niche, a slit, where we outsiders will see that someone has a perfect and pleasant life, at the cost of the fatal order over the rest.

And this perhaps then leads us to take again into consideration one of the fundamental pillars from which Agamben himself takes as a starting point the intrinsic logic of the state of exception: in Walter Benjamin:

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the rule is the 'state of exception' in which we live. We have to come up with a concept of history that corresponds to it ”, he says in his eighth thesis on the philosophy of history.

The global state of exception has also become the largest dispossession wealth transfer operation in history: the necropower that now wants to define that (very) high everything goes to contain the low, now yes in all possible latitudes .

The crisis was already looming, committing to the worldview itself that supports it (and the lava of political and economic responsibilities). The appearance of SARS-CoV-2, regardless of its origin, ended up bringing the collapse to all ends of human activity. The legalization of piracy in the “advanced” states is just another small symptomatic reflection.

Behind that, “The economic freeze caused by the coronavirus has crushed more people in a shorter period of time than any other crisis in memory. The working population will need much more relief than in the last collapse to not only support themselves but the foundations themselves that make the global economy continue, ” says financial specialist Nomi Prins.

With or without Covid-19, these are also political actions, and perhaps the most obvious certification that "concrete utopia" is a matter solely for the leadership behind Wall Street. The time has come to expel cheesy words about freedom from the vocabulary. Ramón has already said it: "You cannot build a world with the same language with which it was destroyed."

Freedom is something else, and "there is no legitimate freedom except when it is directed to honor humanity and perfect its lot," reminds us of El Libertador.

Nothing should make us dodge anymore that the dead in the streets of Guayaquil , and the consolation of the government of Guayas for the suffering families are to supply cardboard urns is not a management problem either, but a declaration of principles, in the same way with the one that the cretinous senator Lindsey Graham wants to hold the People's Republic of China responsible for the new more than 6 million unemployed in the United States, while the Dow Jones is going through its best week.

This is the gringo meme of the moment:


Dow Jones Best Week “Coincides” With Job Loss for Over 16 Million Americans

We have never been so close.

Meanwhile in Venezuela (a provisional closure for this unbearable note)

Just as the worst seems to be shaping his own face, I refuse to deny that this whole moment, which also has a lot of tremendous fertility, is also one that carries in its entrails an instance of revelation with the same urgency with which the agents of death.

In the global order, it is becoming clear what might be, or already are, the forces that respond to the lethal spread of the system and the pandemic, advancing in the gestation, perhaps, of a true probable or possible model. True virtuosities also emerge from crises.

And as we continue to traverse this interregnum between one world and another, here in the country where I live, we witness a reverse exodus where sisters and brothers instrumented by supremely distant interests and (in many cases) the urgency of the closest possible needs, carry out the trip back to his home, the time of emergency also opens the question about, despite everything, what will be that country for which we have the obligation to imagine.

While the agonizing extensions of Venezuelan parapolitics die of irrelevance, and the “pact of conscience” (also the word of the Liberator) that has made the preparation that we have already had like this be traumatic as a society to bear fruit while elsewhere of the planet shock and denial leaves them relatively prostrate, and despite the serial censorship with which those same places deny the place that Venezuela has conquered in its capacity and manifest will to protect the population, with secular difficulties and precariousness that we already knew and that also take us to the limit, here we have managed to demonstrate that not everything is said. Nor lost.

That, in the contrast that we establish (along with other countries), other evidence is clear and is remembered by “the enormous amount of money it costs to be poor”, as César Vallejo would say , the niche that is supposed to be the privilege of “ustopia ”Of the others, he may take on another new direction, perhaps capable of derailing the death train on the move, with his John Wayne powerless and terminally obstructed.
Perhaps sharing and understanding this common present indicates some way out of chaos, loneliness, and death.

Or, as Arendt's sentence that opened this unhappy essay closes: "But this factual and common present is not based on a common past, and in the least guarantees a common future."

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/co ... 946ec77af3

Google Translator

[chlamor]

The numbers at the CDC show record lows for 'flu positives' for the last three weeks for comparable time of year. I will post specifics on this data by next week. When I say record lows I am speaking of by a factor of 9. Week 14 for example has only 0.8% flu positives. The previous record low for Week 14 was 9.6% with virtually every other Week 14 rate at or above 12%. This covers a 20 year time span of record keeping. How is this possible? Where have all the flu cases gone? And this all in a year where weeks 6 and 7 (early Feb.) had near record high flu positives.

When you look over this data at the CDC it is staggering and obvious- they are cooking the books.

[chlamor]

It should be kept in mind that these hooligans that walk the corridors of power are not likely to give up this goose that laid the golden egg so quickly.

This COVID “narrative” needs not only to be destroyed but there needs to be non-stop pressure on officials of all levels who accepted and promulgated this narrative to be removed from whatever office they hold. It is imperative that everyone here be out in their community talking about this non-stop or creating opportunities to speak about this regardless of place or circumstance- gas station, any stranger walking by, grocery store, everywhere you can. I am already sensing from my daily rounds in which I do the above avidly a shift in the acceptance of the "COVID" narrative. Keep moving that needle.

If this narrative is allowed to hold it, or some version of it, will be rolled out time and again whenever there is a crisis- and crisis means in the eyes of the ruling class parasites people speaking out and protesting against their oppression.

What first drew me to question this entire narrative was the situation in Italy. I know of the area they referenced- the Lombardy Region in N Italy. This is where 84% of the "covid-related" deaths have occurred in Italy. That specific region is the single most polluted place in Europe. Unfortunately that region has been experiencing "excess deaths" due to influenza for years. As many as 25,000 in one year 16/17 season (that's just what they call the flu) and commonly 15-20,000. This is due to that pollution which is destroying upper respiratory systems and immune systems. Combines w/aging population and high rate of smokers (males) and deteriorating health systems (hospital cuts due to austerity) for what we are seeing. They have just labelled it differently this year and it is different as virus mutates- but not the pandemic they are citing unless every year should be declared a pandemic. There is a context to this as well. BTW same conditions in Madrid, Tehran, Wuhan (some of the worst air quality on earth) and NYC.

Updates and embedded links here:

https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

Medical updates

In the British Telegraph, Professor Alexander Kekulé, one of Germany’s leading microbiologists and epidemiologists, calls for an end to the lockdown as it causes more damage than the virus itself. In people under 50 years of age, severe disease or death are „very, very unlikely“. The general population should develop rapid immunity, while risk groups should be protected. One cannot wait for a vaccine, which will take at least six to twelve months, but must find a way to live with the virus, Professor Kekulé said.

The German Network for Evidence-Based Medicine reports that the lethality of a severe seasonal influenza (flu) such as 2017/2018 is estimated by the German Robert Koch Institute to be 0.4% to 0.5%, and not only 0.1% as previously assumed. This would mean that the lethality of Covid19 could even be lower than that of a strong seasonal influenza, even though it may spread faster.

The Luxembourger Tageblatt reports that Sweden’s „relaxed strategy on Covid19 seems to work“. Despite minimal measures, the situation seems to be „clearly calming down at the moment“. A huge field hospital that was set up near Stockholm remains closed due to lack of demand. The number of patients in intensive care units remains constant at a low level or is even slightly declining. „There are many vacancies in intensive care units in all Stockholm hospitals. We are approaching the flattening of the illness curve,“ explained a senior physician at the Karolinska Klinik. So far there have been about 900 deaths with Covid19 in Sweden.

A direct comparison between the UK (with lockdown) and Sweden (without lockdown) shows that the two countries are almost identical in terms of case numbers and deaths per population.

A letter to the New England Journal of Medicine reports that in a study of pregnant women, 88% of test-positive women showed no symptoms – a very high figure, but one that is consistent with earlier reports from China and Iceland.

Professor Dan Yamin, director of the Epidemiology Research Laboratory at Tel Aviv University, explains in an interview that the new corona virus is „hardly dangerous“ for a large part of the population and that rapid natural immunity must be the goal. The money is better spent on extending a clinic than on paying for damages due to the lockdown, he said.

The president of the Israeli National Research Council, Professor Isaac Ben-Israel, argues that according to current findings, the corona epidemic is over in most countries after about 8 weeks, regardless of the measures taken. He therefore recommends to lift the „lockdown“ immediately.

The British statistics professor David Spiegelhalter shows that the risk of death from Covid19 corresponds roughly to normal mortality and is visibly increased only for the age group between approx. 70 and 80 years (see the graph at the end of the linked article).
Professor Karin Moelling, emeritus director of the Institute of Virology at the University of Zurich and an early critic of excessive measures, stresses in a new interview the role of local special factors such as air pollution and population density.

The British Guardian pointed out in 2015 that extreme air pollution in Chinese cities kills 4000 people per day. This is more than China has so far reported in total Covid19 deaths.

The German virologist Hendrik Streeck has defended himself against criticism of his pilot study. Streeck found a lethality (based on cases) of 0.37% and a mortality (based on population) of 0.06%, which corresponds to a strong seasonal flu.

Austrian internal medicine specialists warn of „collateral damage“: Due to the coronavirus, control and operation dates are postponed and fewer patients with heart attack symptoms come to the hospitals.

A Swiss biophysicist has for the first time graphically depicted the rate of positive Covid19 tests in Switzerland since early March. The result shows that the positive rate oscillates between about 10% and 25% and that the „lockdown“ has had no significant influence (see graph below). Interestingly, Swiss authorities and media have never shown this graph.

A Swiss researcher has analysed the latest Covid19 report of the Federal Office of Public Health and again comes to a critical assessment: „The situation report is unsuitable for politicians and competent decision making, is highly unspecific, incomplete and lacking in informative value“.

In a new article, the Swiss chief physician for infectiology, Dr. Pietro Vernazza, explains that the alleged lack of immunity formation in Covid19 is a matter of „rare individual cases or even just clues“, which „on closer inspection do not pose a problem“, but which are „exaggerated and hastily dished up as shocking news“ by some media.

[chlamor]

How is it possible that anyone would accept any of the COVID numbers at face value. The CDC and various health departments are completely cooking the books on what they call COVID-related deaths. They are not even trying to hide this nor are they shying away from openly stating that for many of these deaths they will be doing no testing or diagnosis. How can you ignore these facts?

For but one example over the last two weeks, the city’s fire officials said more than 2,192 New York City residents died in their homes, compared to 453 during the same time period last year. On average there are 25 deaths in home per week in NYC- last Tuesday for example there was 256. The reason? People are afraid to go to the hospitals, cardiologists are confirming this, lest they get infected with the “killer virus.” This means when they are in the early stages of cardiac arrest, for example, they stay at home and some don’t make it.

NYC officials stated that they WILL NOT be conducting tests on these at home deaths nor will they be doing any diagnostics on the cadavers.

NYC officials also confirmed that they will begin to count suspected COVID-19 deaths in addition to cases confirmed by a laboratory.

Stephanie Buhle, a spokeswoman for the New York City’s Health Department, confirmed the change in protocol:

“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) and the NYC Health Department are working together to include into their reports deaths that may be linked to COVID but not lab confirmed that occur at home.”

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio in his infinite wisdom acknowledged that the vast majority of deaths taking place at home were likely also due to COVID-19. No tests, no diagnosis but the mayor with his crystal ball stated:

“We do want to know the truth about every death at home, but it’s safe to assume that the vast majority are coronavirus related.”

Safe to assume? C'mon this is at best dishonest and in fact quite corrupt and illegal.

If anyone thinks the "corona narrative" is going to benefit the working class in any way shape or manner you are fooling yourself- quite the opposite is already happening at a very quick rate of acceleration.

[chlamor]

From a comment over at WSWS- BTW the Trots are in full on rank opportunism mode- no surprises there.

There is no doubt that what we are dealing with is a human tragedy but that must not blind us to objective reality we are facing in this COVID pandemic.

The major problem in any pandemic as I see it, is that too many people these days including even many versed in Marx pseudo leftists are simply scared to death or turn opportunists whether they admit it or not as skepticism and honesty vanishes dissolved in fear as Camus warned.

And hence they no longer seek knowledge, no truth, no understanding of objective reality of pandemic and definitely apply no Marxist analysis based on objective material reality required to produce sound actions and informed judgments as all history and historical process seems denied squeezed into explicitly or implicitly accepted fantasy of new post pandemic era.

Instead recognition of continuity of historical process they dwell in comfortable willful ignorance of pre-pandemic era as revolutionaries of ideology of abundance of caution, concept alien to brave, courageous even heroic but rational socialists of the past, de facto fueling mass psychosis of fear serving only interests of ruling elite.

It is perhaps because knowledge would then tell them not to irrationally fear this COVID pandemic any more than at worse a bad seasonal flu pandemic that in this supposedly mild season infected already at minimum 40 millions (CDC) of Americans, sent hundreds of thousands to hospitals and killed tens of thousands already and keeps killing with no whimper about it in media for half a year of such carnage.

The acknowledgement of those CDC sourced hard facts would perhaps present those people with legitimate and disturbing questions of huge, historically unprecedented disproportionality of response to COVID, extremely puzzling and suspicious targeting of that response toward completely unrelated efforts and who actually benefited from such huge exaggeration of public threat and what was then true motivation of broadly publicized early, overblown pandemic projections of doom only to be downgraded orders of magnitude to numbers so far much below or in some hot spots similar to bad seasonal flu numbers.

The people who would wake up from quite alarmist hypnotizing media narratives, may ask why COVID pandemic raging two months, from at least mid January to mid March when mass Coronavirus testing began, produced no detectable excessive mortality among flu patients as those numbers must have included at least mild to moderate COVID cases misdiagnosed as flu having almost identical symptoms as Coronavirus, a fact confirmed by congressional testimony.

In fact CDC found opposite, a precipitous drop of flu cases and deaths more than expected for any flu epidemic in January and February every year.

According to US Congressional testimony the first US SARS-Cov2 test positive sample specimen was in January 22, 2020. As genomic research confirmed, Chinese and European strains of novel Coronavirus were already present in US in early January in ILI (Influenza) test sample specimens taken at that time and used later in genomic analysis.

Rational minds may ask what happened to victims of coronavirus in US in those two months when no containment, no tracking, no restrictions and no social distancing, no lockdowns were implemented and unobstructed “importing” of infected people traveling to and from Wuhan, and other China regions continued until early February and from EU until early March.

One of plausible explanation backed by scientific studies of Chinese and French epidemiologists is that severity of symptoms , lethality of coronavirus virus and observed mortality of coronavirus pandemic is very similar to that of ILI (Influenza Like Illnesses) monitored by CDC, and hence would not be detected as spike on already decreasing flu epidemic curve.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 7920300972

https://www.nature.com/search?q=Estimat ... n%2C+China

Hence the rise in Coronavirus COVID infection numbers in March when mass testing began was in most part a data artifact due to exponential growth in testing while pathogen was already present in communities likely infecting 15-20% of population already as much as Influenza did.

Similarity unusual reported exponential growth in COVID attributed death numbers in that time period is likely due to CDC frantic mid March redefinition of COVID deaths (why?) allowing nearly catch all classifications of deaths counted as COVID deaths.

Under new definition deaths are immediately counted and reported to media, CDC or other authorities as presumed and/or confirmed COVID deaths in a one combined daily number, allowing for double or triple counting due to lag between death date, actual test, return of test result and final determination of cause of death.

The COVID Clinical deaths are to be counted, according to CDC without any requirement of positive coronavirus test or with pending but unknown results, hospital deaths of COVID with no mandated autopsy to establish cause of death, or positive post-death tests of other, unrelated to COVID, clinical cases, or deaths among former COVID cases already released from hospital in good conditions or if tested positive people never to have been ill enough to be placed in hospital died due to other causes, all pneumonia deaths even if patient was only after death found infected or was presumed to have been infected as come to contact with infected, just to mention few very questionable or outright violating of common clinical practice situations that CDC guidance suggest to be classified as COVID victims.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/coro ... deaths.pdf

In Northern Ireland any death that occurred within 28 days after test positive date is declared COVID death, no autopsy needed. Such reclassification of COVID deaths makes ten fold over-counting of deaths of actual victims of SARS-Cov2 virus very plausible indeed, similar as it was in Italy.

This purposeful quite unscientific vagueness and catch all definitions of COVID deaths worldwide fuels fear as it produces fraudulent overestimating numbers implying false reality of excessive lethality of exponentially spreading COVID pandemic while data suggested slow linear growth or stagnation of infection among population.

Such attitude and practice has however one clear benefactor namely getting of the hook true culprits of excessive death count namely horrific state of health of world population, epitomized by mass preexisting conditions, who were denied free Universal healthcare and that de-funded collapsed Public Health Institutions routinely failing to handle common seasonal epidemics and other diseases.

Another reporting curiosity may shed light on manipulation of numbers.

In the same time when COVID deaths in US exploded in mid March, according to CDC report public lab Influenza tests, Influenza attributed clinical cases and deaths all collapsed in numbers in unprecedented ways as deaths of patients potentially infected by variety of viruses including barely tested influenza specimens and /or massively tested coronavirus may have been marked as COVID deaths according to new CDC COVID deaths reporting guidance, substantially adding to the problem of overestimating COVID clinical deaths.

The coronavirus infection as it has similar symptoms to influenza could be initially misdiagnosed in mild to moderate cases, and additionally experimental CT-PCR test broadly used under emergency for diagnostic purposes can produce up to 50% of false positives when influenza or other viruses are present in a sample, as manufacturer of the test warns creating another question about reliability of test results.

Some confusion arise when prose try to justify new broad CDC COVID clinical death classification guidance including those sociological pandemic deaths resulting from consequences of lockdown and systemic failures, trying to confuse virus lethality threat with clearly botched response by authorities.

Of course something like pandemic death sociological category exist and that is routinely under-counted by authorities for obvious reasons as they are mostly not biological but systemic.

This sociological category count, beyond clinical or epidemiological cases, also includes people who died because of social support collapse and abandonment, extreme social stress or panic leading to depression, suicide or most severe mental disorders, failure of welfare state, social services and public health Institutions in realm of bed capacity and quality of medical and technical support , inadequate numbers personnel as they have been exposed to pathogen , lack or inadequate, even harmful medical treatment, misdiagnosis and severe side effects of medicines used or malpractice under extreme stress and exhaustion of heavy patients load and improvisation under exigent circumstances of pandemic emergency as well as disastrous political and economic decisions, stress induced or economic/poverty malnutrition and starvation, and failure of life maintaining infrastructure to name few factors that may produce deaths associated with pandemic, not directly caused by pathogen itself, but by unprepared, blind, misguided or deliberately sabotaged health and welfare response to it always due to specific systemic characteristics of capitalism .

After media hysteria is over those dead victims of capitalism will be removed from front pages and bury in mass anonymous graves to be forgotten.

It is irrefutable fact not a conspiracy theory that ruling elites are not trying to fight this calamity but instead they are using it as a new weapon to kill in ongoing class war they wage. And list of their victims, not as much coronavirus/COVID victims, are updated daily in media to placate us with pure propaganda fabrications to scare us and to shock us into submission of draconian political and surveillance control permanently as Snowden posited.

The time, to ponder material reality of COVID medical epidemiological, medial, economic, social and political and human phenomenon and related underlying class interests that drive it, has almost passed.