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Pentagon Warns They Aren’t Set Up to Fight Coronavirus – News From Antiwar.com

Posted by M. C. on March 18, 2020

The only disease the military will be brought in to control is the one reading this.

https://news.antiwar.com/2020/03/16/pentagon-warns-they-arent-set-up-to-fight-coronavirus/

Jason Ditz

With many politicians long seeing the military as an all-purpose problem solver with a bottomless budget, it is unsurprising that the outbreak of coronavirus has many, particularly high-ranking Democrats, angling for a declaration of war and an outright militarization of the domestic issue.

“I would call out the military now,” Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden said on Sunday. He said it’s an emergency and the US needs to treat it like a war. He suggested that the military could provide a “surge” for US hospitals, building more beds and tents that are secure. “We’re at war with the virus,” Biden added.

They all think that sounds like a great idea, except for the US military itself. Pentagon officials are warning that fighting a virus really isn’t their thing, and that those tent hospitals are designed to treat combat casualties, not respiratory illness.

Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the top medical adviser to the Joint Chiefs, said that the US military simply doesn’t have any 500-bed hospitals designed for infectious disease. Even more of a problem, they don’t have a bunch of idle doctors and nurses to man them if they did.

If the military was expected to set up such tent hospitals, they’d have to call in reserves and the National Guard to staff them, and many of them would be taken away from civilian facilities, meaning they’re just shifting people from a building to a tent.

Friedrichs added that the military is eager to help, but that he thinks the Pentagon needs to be transparent about its limitations before starting this huge “war” for the sake of public health. Whether that will deter anyone remains to be seen.

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Is the global pandemic a product of the elite’s Malthusian agenda and U.S. biowarfare?, by Max Parry – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on March 18, 2020

If the outbreak has led many to be suspicious of the official story, it is exactly because of the history of U.S. biological warfare and the elite’s potentially genocidal and pessimistic worldview that the only way to prevent the demise of humanity is by thinning the herd.

https://www.unz.com/article/is-the-global-pandemic-a-product-of-the-elites-malthusian-agenda-and-u-s-biowarfare/

On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the ongoing outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) to be a global pandemic, the first since the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Initially reported in the city of Wuhan in Central China in December, just four months later there are now over 150,000 cases in more than 130 countries which has put many on total lockdown while the world economy has been brought to a virtual standstill. While the People’s Republic of China was the first country to report COVID-19, there has been a widespread presumption that the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) must have emerged in the capital of Hubei province that has not been held under sufficient scrutiny by Western corporate media.

The question of whether the COVID-19 coronavirus could have come from the U.S. army was controversially raised by China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liljian Zhao, who tweeted an article from the Center for Research on Globalization website which subsequently went viral. Feigning concern over the spread of “disinformation”, Western media coverage uniformly avoided sourcing the article Zhao had shared on social media while predictably dismissing the claim as a “conspiracy theory.” Meanwhile, Iran’s Civil Defense Chief also said the coronavirus could be a biological attack on China and Iran, as the Islamic Republic has been the third-most impacted nation with more than 12,000 cases including many at the highest levels of its government with multiple senior officials infected. Contrary to such mainstream media scaremongering, it is completely reasonable and should be permitted to speculate about the origins of the virus. That Zhao’s posing of the theory received such a hostile response from the U.S. establishment is telling of how delicate their propaganda echo chamber is.

‬Although the disease is widely assumed to have been first transmitted through zoonosis because the earliest grouping of cases were linked to a Wuhan seafood market trading exotic wildlife in late December, the actual first known case was traced to the beginning of the month and may not have been originally passed through an animal. Many on the political right have even suggested the coronavirus is an effect of Chinese biological warfare which unexpectedly leaked from a lab in Wuhan, a theory disseminated in the pages of propaganda rags like The Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the founder of the right-wing Korean Unification Church cult, Sun Myung Moon, as well as The Epoch Times of the similarly fascistic religious sect of Chinese expatriates, the CIA-linked Falun Gong. In spite of that, it is true that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has close ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the University of Texas, one of the Pentagon’s largest biological defense lab programs. Whereas no evidence exists that the Chinese government is responsible for COVID-19, nor does the PRC have a history of engaging in bio-warfare, there is an abundance of proof that the U.S. government has long been involved in the manufacturing and use of biological weapons since the Korean war.

When the accusations were first made by North Korea and China that the U.S. was using biological and germ warfare in the 1950–1953 Korean War, they were rejected outright by Washington as a hoax and rebuffed by the Western-biased WHO. In the decades since, the U.S. has maintained its denial while scholarly debate on the subject is divided. However, an unredacted report from 1952 from an investigation sponsored by the World Peace Council and conducted by an International Scientific Commission headed by Sir Joseph Needham, a highly reputable British biochemist of his era, was unearthed in 2018 and presents ample substantiation of the allegations, including eyewitness testimony, photographic evidence and documented confessions by American POWs. More disturbingly, the investigation indicates direct links between the U.S. biological warfare program and the germ warfare program of Unit 731, a clandestine bio and chemical warfare unit of Imperial Japan during World War II. During the Cold War, the Japanese researchers were secretly given immunity and recruited by the U.S. in exchange for their knowledge in human experimentation, along with many “former” Nazi scientists in Operation Paperclip.

Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army collected data not only through performing deadly experiments on humans but environmentally testing “plague bombs” by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start disease outbreaks. Many of these tactics were continued by the U.S. in the Korean War. According to Stephen Kinzer, journalist and author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, the CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA which was coordinated with the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories was:

“…Essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.”

Frank Olson , one of the biowarfare scientists and CIA employees in the program who died under mysterious circumstances in 1953, is the subject of the Netflix docu-drama series Wormwood, directed by Errol Morris and featuring renowned journalist Seymour Hersh, which reveals Olson may have been a potential government whistleblower on the CIA’s activities and U.S. bio-war crimes. It is worth noting that the usage of such agents in the Korean War included Chinese targets, the last and only major armed conflict between the U.S. and China, so if the COVID-19 pandemic were proven to be a product of U.S. biowarfare against Beijing, it would not be the first time.

Officially, the U.S. is said to have abandoned its bioweapons program in 1969, but its installation in Fort Detrick, Maryland, has continued conducting research into deadly pathogens and viruses on the stated purpose of bio-defense, as well as fighting disease outbreaks, developing vaccines, and other public health concerns. Yet just last year, research into fatal viruses and bioweapons were suspended amid concerns they could be accidentally be released. The last time Fort Detrick’s germ warfare research was suspended was in 2009 after the Pentagon found discrepancies in the inventory of its infectious agents, the same year as the last pandemic of the H1N1 swine flu outbreak.

Fort Detrick has been under tighter restrictions since the 2001 anthrax attacks were traced to Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the facility. The suspected perpetrator and army biologist committed suicide in 2008 after learning the FBI was going to charge him with terrorism, which if proven to be true would mean that the Pentagon’s own biodefense research itself had led to rather than protected the American public from bioterrorism — though there is plenty of evidence suggesting Ivins was framed by the feds. As journalist Whitney Webb uncovered, the U.S. Army’s Medical Research branch headquartered in Maryland has cooperated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology mentioned previously for decades.

Toying around with organisms that can produce disease is a regular practice for the Pentagon. In 2005, U.S. scientists announced that they had even successfully recreated the avian influenza flu virus in a lab which killed at least 50 million people worldwide in 1918, widely known as the ‘Spanish flu.’ The name is actually a misnomer, as it was disproportionately attributed to Spain which was neutral in World War I and was not subject to the same wartime censorship of the press to upkeep morale like in Germany, the UK, France and the U.S. whose media initially underreported the pandemic’s effects in their respective countries. The geographic source of the Spanish flu is still the subject of much debate, but the first observation of the disease was at a U.S. military installation in Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918. Needless to say, the risks involved with resurrecting a disease that wiped out more than a quarter of the world’s population are not trivial, but this did not prevent the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology from extracting the genetic coding of the Spanish flu from the exhumed corpse of a Native Alaskan woman frozen in the ground who died of the disease in an Inuit town in 1918.

Soldiers ill with the Spanish flu at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1918
Soldiers ill with the Spanish flu at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1918

There is no direct evidence showing that the 2009 swine flu said to have originated in Mexico through zoonosis from pigs was any leak of the restored Spanish flu, but the previous swine flu outbreak of 1976 began at a U.S. army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey, just like the Spanish flu of 1918. After the Gerald R. Ford administration jumped the gun and announced a flu epidemic was pending following the death of a single soldier, a subsequent mass immunization program without proper testing for side effects was administered to a staggering 45 million people, exactly a quarter of the entire U.S. population at the time, which ended up killing more Americans than the disease itself. The scandal forever sowed the seeds of public distrust regarding inoculation after more than 450 people developed Guillain-Barré Syndrome and 25 died from the immunization before it was halted.

If such a mandatory vaccination program were to be implemented again in the U.S. for COVID-19, the government would have to reassure the public its previous negligence of such side effects would not be repeated, an unlikely scenario after the corporate breach of trust exposed on Wall Street in recent years involving large pharmaceutical firms. Regardless, Big Pharma is already partnering with the U.S. army to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus which would have to be tested and evaluated before licensing by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and recommended for use by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both of which partner with the WHO whose largest financial contributor is the U.S. government.

One of the WHO’s other largest benefactors is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with whom it has a partnership on vaccinations. The billionaire Microsoft Corporation founder has used his enormous wealth to dodge paying taxes under the guise of philanthropy and his ‘charitable’ private ventures have mostly focused on producing vaccines for developing countries and purportedly tackling global poverty, especially in Africa. On the surface this may appear to be benevolent work, but like many so-called altruistic projects it is a scheme which allows ultra-wealthy plutocrats like Gates to influence global policy and obtain political power with no accountability by investing in “fixing” the social problems caused by the very system which made them rich, with the expansion of neoliberalism as their real agenda. The consequences of this can be seen with charitable projects involving Gates in the Congo which forced its local agribusiness into using GMO seeds which only benefited private companies like Monsanto.

More disturbing is that in regards to environmental concerns about man-made climate change, Gates has made public his views on curbing human population growth as a solution. At a 2010 TED Conference, Gates stated:

“First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”

To put it another way, one of the world’s wealthiest men admitted in public he believes vaccines should be used for depopulation, just as he is financially investing in both developing and delivering them to countries in the global south. The misanthropic myth of ‘overpopulation’ pushed by Gates and the elite not only suggests that depopulation is a solution for slowing the warming of the climate but retains the logic of an essential component of eugenics with the implicit idea that the quality of life for the human species can be improved by discouraging human reproduction. Since developing countries have the highest child mortality rates, families are more likely to be larger because children are less likely to survive. Hence, the inherent racism and classism in such a misconception.

Given that the vast majority of carbon emissions are produced by a short list of fossil fuel companies and the world’s largest polluter is the U.S. military, promoting this dangerous fallacy is the perfect way for the ruling elite to shift the responsibility for climate change onto the world’s poor. Unfortunately, this dangerous falsehood has been popularized in the mainstream environmental movement and pseudo-left with examples such as BirthStrike, a group of mostly female activists protesting the lack of regulations on the ecological crisis by refusing to bear children that has been irresponsibly endorsed by popular “progressive” politicians such as U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). ‘AOC’ is also the face of the Democratic Party’s Green New Deal which has troubling ties to the United Nations Agenda 21 sustainable development program that calls for “achieving a more sustainable population.”

The false notion of “overpopulation” became a misguided cornerstone of the modern day environmental movement thanks to the publication of American scientist Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book The Population Bomb in 1968 , an alarmist diatribe that has in the years since become famous for its inaccurate doomsday predictions as a result of the mistaken belief which never came to fruition. Today’s doom merchants regarding the climate, no doubt a serious issue, are in many respects channeling Ehrlich’s false prophecies which are considered a modern rehash of the influential 18th century British economist and philosopher, Thomas Malthus. No single scholar was more loathed by Karl Marx and and the working class movement than Malthus, whose pseudo-scientific theories about demography were thought to have been intellectually defeated until they found new life in Ehrlich’s eco-fascism. As much as today’s ‘population bombers’ like Bill Gates may shun the more explicitly racist Malthusian ideas that the global north should contain the population of developing countries, they still tacitly endorse them by arguing that the size of the population itself is a source a poverty and climate change.

Bill Gates has cited business tycoon John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in American history who had an even greater monopoly on the oil business as Gates had at one time on the computer industry, as an inspiration in using his wealth to invest in medical research as a focus of his philanthropy. However, Gates has something else in common with the Rockefeller family in his views on population, as the Rockefeller Foundation was the single largest donor to the American eugenics movement in the 1920s and 30s and helped establish its German branch, even subsidizing the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics that Nazi physician Josef Mengele worked in prior to his wartime experiments. Despite the fact that a line can be traced from the American eugenics movement to the Nazi regime’s programs, which Nuremberg defendants even tried to use as justification for their atrocities in court, Rockefeller’s grandson John Rockefeller III continued the family legacy of interest in demography with the founding of the Population Council NGO which conducts research in “reproductive health” (sterilization) in developing countries. The Nazi government was also the first to ever pass legislation safeguarding the environment which they equated with German national identity, another unexpected intersection between brown and green politics.

In an astonishing coincidence, the Gates Foundation hosted an event just last October with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum called Event 201, a pandemic simulation which gathered elite figures in government, business and health expertise to plan for the possibility of a worldwide outbreak. Gates himself has warned of pandemics for years and ominously wrote that the world should “prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war.” The Event 201 fictional scenario just so happened to be a coronavirus called CAPS from Brazilian pigs which infected people globally and after a year and half in the exercise caused tens of millions of deaths and set off a worldwide financial crash. Since the outset of the real COVID-19 coronavirus, Gates himself has stepped down from Microsoft to focus on his philanthropy while his foundation is busy working on a vaccine.

Many have observed that some characteristics of COVID-19 bear a resemblance to HIV that could not have happened organically. The recent documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld, which won an award at last year’s Sundance film festival , puts forth a chilling theory that a South African white supremacist organization deliberately spread HIV/AIDS among black Africans through vaccines in previous decades. The film begins as an investigation of the mysterious plane crash in Northern Rhodesia which killed Swedish diplomat and United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961. In 1998, a document authored by a shadowy paramilitary organization called the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) was uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission justice assembly in post-apartheid South Africa which indicated that Hammarskjöld was the victim of an assassination. Not only do the filmmakers discover in their inquiry the distinct likelihood that the plane was shot down by a Belgian mercenary employed by SAIMR which was operating under orders from MI6 and the CIA, but the more stunning revelation is a recorded confession from a former SAIMR soldier to having deliberately spread HIV/AIDS to black Africans through immunization. If what is claimed about SAIMR is true and that they were connected with Western intelligence, that the COVID-19 virus could be something deliberately spread is not outside the realm of possibility.

Maybe it will prove to be the case that the yellow press’s version of the coronavirus beginning with the zoonotic transfer of the disease after the consumption of a pangolin or wild bat by a ‘patient zero’ in Wuhan is accurate. Nevertheless, the pandemic should be a chilling reminder of the elite’s eco-fascist agenda and the continuous danger that the military-industrial complex puts the world’s population in by continuing to conduct dangerous research into deadly pathogens where the risk vastly outweighs the benefits. If the outbreak has led many to be suspicious of the official story, it is exactly because of the history of U.S. biological warfare and the elite’s potentially genocidal and pessimistic worldview that the only way to prevent the demise of humanity is by thinning the herd.

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The Forgotten Epidemic: Cholera in Yemen – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on March 17, 2020

Five years ago, in March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its allies began bombing Yemen after the Houthis gained control of the capital Sanaa. At the same time, the Obama administration released a statement pledging military and logistical support to the coalition. Since the bombing campaign began, the US-Saudi coalition has targeted vital civilian infrastructure, including water infrastructure.

How the US government deals with disease in one of the poorest places on the planet.

Back at home it is martial law.

https://original.antiwar.com/Dave_DeCamp/2020/03/16/the-forgotten-epidemic-cholera-in-yemen/

by

As Americans are gripped with fear over the coronavirus, the cholera epidemic quietly continues in Yemen. The disease spreading in Yemen is not some new untreatable virus, but a well-known illness that can be easily prevented with access to clean water, or with a cheap oral vaccine. The outbreak is a direct result of the barbaric US-Saudi siege on the country that started in 2015.

The cholera outbreak started in Yemen in October 2016. The outbreak exploded in 2017 when the country saw over one million cases, the worst cholera epidemic since records started in 1949. In 2019, Yemen experienced the second-worst year, with over 860,000 suspected cases. 2020 is on track to be another bad year, with over 56,000 new suspected cases recorded in the first seven weeks. As of March 8th 2020, the World Health Organization has recorded 2,263,304 cholera cases in Yemen and 3,767 deaths related to the illness since 2017.

The international humanitarian organization Oxfam has warned the rainy season in Yemen will cause a spike in cholera cases, as it has in previous years. The rainy season starts in mid-April and lasts until August.

Cholera is an infectious disease that causes severe diarrhea and vomiting, which can lead to dehydration and death if not treated properly. People catch cholera by drinking contaminated water or coming into contact with a person’s feces who has the disease. Treatment for cholera can be as simple as drinking water and taking antibiotics. Countries with compromised water and sewage infrastructure are susceptible to a cholera outbreak.

Five years ago, in March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its allies began bombing Yemen after the Houthis gained control of the capital Sanaa. At the same time, the Obama administration released a statement pledging military and logistical support to the coalition. Since the bombing campaign began, the US-Saudi coalition has targeted vital civilian infrastructure, including water infrastructure.

The Yemen Data Project has compiled all available data on coalition airstrikes on Yemen from March 2015 to January 2020. According to the data, 97 airstrikes directly hit water infrastructure, which includes water tanks, water trucks, wells, water and sewage plants, and water desalination plants. The worst year for hits on water infrastructure was the year the cholera outbreak started, 2016, when 30 bombs hit water targets.

Attacks on water infrastructure are just a small sample of the atrocities committed by the US-Saudi coalition. The coalition has also hit hospitals, schools, farms, fishing boats, houses, and market places. Direct targeting of civilian infrastructure, and the blockade on the country enforced by the US Navy, has created what the UN calls, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The latest report from UNICEF puts the number of Yemeni people in need of humanitarian assistance around 24 million, about 80 percent of the population.

It’s tough to know exactly how many people have died in Yemen since the war started. The Armed Conflict Location & Data Project (ACLED) announced in October 2019 that over 100,000 people had been killed in direct violence during the war, 12,000 of those deaths being civilians.

The UN released a report in April 2019 that said if the conflict ended that year, it would have accounted for 233,000 deaths. The UN breaks these numbers up into 102,000 combat deaths, which reflect the ACLED numbers, and 131,000 deaths due to lack of food, health services, and infrastructure. If the conflict continues through 2022, the UN predicts it will be responsible for 482,000 deaths. In the nightmare scenario that the war is not over until 2030, the UN predicts the war will kill 1.8 million people, the majority of those deaths being children under five.

There have been efforts in Congress to end US support for this genocidal war, but they have all been vetoed by President Trump. In April, Trump vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have ended US involvement in the war, and in June, he vetoed resolutions that would have blocked arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The latest effort to end the war was an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would have terminated the flow of US logistics, intelligence, spare plane parts, and other forms of support to Saudi Arabia. In the end, this amendment was gutted from the NDAA, and US support for the war continues.

Most people arguing in favor of supporting the Saudi’s brutal campaign in Yemen cite the Iranian threat. In September 2019, an attack on Saudi oil infrastructure that severely damaged oil output was blamed on Iran, even though the Houthis immediately took credit for it.

Before the September attack, the Houthis had launched similar attacks inside Saudi Arabia, and Houthi drone technology was the subject of much reporting. But these facts were thrown down the memory hole as the hawks in Washington used the attack as justification to increase troop presence in the Middle East and continue support for the war on Yemen. In response, President Trump sent a few thousand troops to Saudi Arabia, showing the world that Saudi oil is far more valuable than Yemeni lives.

The cholera epidemic is just one example of the challenges Yemenis are facing every day. And the war in Yemen is just one example of the dire humanitarian crises created by US imperialism. In the midst of a global pandemic, Washington still maintains crippling sanctions on Iran and Venezuela. Iran has been hit particularly hard by coronavirus, and nobody should criticize the response of the Iranian government without recognizing the impact of US sanctions.

In the face of coronavirus, Americans are scared. Schools and businesses are shutting down across the country. People are rushing to the stores to stock up on toilet paper, food, and hand sanitizer. Now would be a good time to stop and think about the people of Yemen who have been dealing with an outbreak of a deadly disease for years. A man-made outbreak, not only exacerbated by but directly caused by US intervention.

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Yemen faces worst cholera outbreak in the world, health ...

 

 

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The Rutherford Institute :: Detect, Deter and Annihilate: How the Police State Will Deal with a Coronavirus Outbreak | By John W. Whitehead |

Posted by M. C. on March 17, 2020

Indeed, zombie fiction perfectly embodies the government’s paranoia
about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored,
tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered
impotent.

Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our
communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat
us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping
its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/detect_deter_and_annihilate_how_the_police_state_will_deal_with_a_coronavirus_outbreak

“Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it’s indistinguishable from the purest paranoia.”— Terrence Rafferty, New York Times

What do zombies have to do with the U.S. government’s plans for dealing with a coronavirus outbreak?

Read on, and I’ll tell you.

The zombie narrative was popularized by the hit television series The Walking Dead, in which a small group of Americans attempt to survive in a zombie-ridden, post-apocalyptic world where they’re not only fighting off flesh-eating ghouls but cannibalistic humans.

For a while there, zombies could be found lurking around every corner: wreaking havoc at gun shows, battling corsets in movies such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and running for their lives in 5K charity races.

Understandably, zombie fiction plays to our fears and paranoia, while allowing us to “envision how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports.” Yet as journalist Syreeta McFadden points out, while dystopian stories used to reflect our anxieties, now they reflect our reality, mirroring how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

Indeed, the U.S. government has spent a lot of time and energy in recent years using zombies as the models for a variety of crisis scenarios not too dissimilar from what we are currently experiencing.

For instance, back in 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put together a zombie apocalypse preparation kit “that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door.” The CDC, in conjunction with the Dept. of Defense, even used zombies to put government agents through their paces in mock military drills.

Fear the Walking Dead—AMC’s spinoff of its popular Walking Dead series—drove this point home by dialing back the clock to when the zombie outbreak first appears and setting viewers down in the midst of societal unrest not unlike our own experiences of recent years (“a bunch of weird incidents, police protests, riots, and … rapid social entropy”). Then, as Forbes reports, “the military showed up and we fast-forwarded into an ad hoc police state with no glimpse at what was happening in the world around our main cast of hapless survivors.”

Forbes found Fear’s quick shift into a police state to be far-fetched, but anyone who has been paying attention in recent years knows that the groundwork was laid long ago for the government—i.e., the military—to intervene and lock down the nation in the event of a national disaster.

We’re seeing this play out now as the coronavirus contagion spreads.

What we have yet to experience (although it may only be a matter of time) is that the government through the imposition of martial law could pose a greater threat to our safety (and our freedoms) than any virus.

As the Atlantic noted about Fear the Walking Dead: “The villains aren’t the zombies, who rarely appear, but the U.S. military, who sweep into an L.A. suburb to quarantine the survivors. Zombies are, after all, a recognizable threat—but Fear plumbs drama and horror from the betrayal by institutions designed to keep people safe.”

Indeed, zombie fiction perfectly embodies the government’s paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent.

Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?

For years now, the government has been carrying out military training drills with zombies as the enemy. In 2011, the DOD created a 31-page instruction manual for how to protect America from a terrorist attack carried out by zombie forces. In 2012, the CDC released a guide for surviving a zombie plague. That was followed by training drills for members of the military, police officers and first responders.

As journalist Andrea Peyser reports:

Coinciding with Halloween 2012, a five-day national conference was put on by the HALO Corp. in San Diego for more than 1,000 first responders, military personnel and law enforcement types. It included workshops produced by a Hollywood-affiliated firm in…overcoming a zombie invasion. Actors were made up to look like flesh-chomping monsters. The Department of Homeland Security even paid the $1,000 entry fees for an unknown number of participants…

“Zombie disaster” drills were held in October 2012 and ’13 at California’s Sutter Roseville Medical Center. The exercises allowed medical center staff “to test response to a deadly infectious disease, a mass-casualty event, terrorism event and security procedures”…

[In October 2014], REI outdoor-gear stores in Soho and around the country are to hold free classes in zombie preparedness, which the stores have been providing for about three years.

The zombie exercises appeared to be kitschy and fun—government agents running around trying to put down a zombie rebellion—but what if the zombies in the exercises were us, the citizenry, viewed by those in power as mindless, voracious, zombie hordes?

Consider this: the government started playing around with the idea of using zombies as stand-ins for enemy combatants in its training drills right around the time the Army War College issued its 2008 report, warning that an economic crisis in the U.S. could lead to massive civil unrest that would require the military to intervene and restore order.

That same year, it was revealed that the government had amassed more than 8 million names of Americans considered a threat to national security, to be used “by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.” The program’s name, Main Core, refers to the fact that it contains “copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.”

Also in 2008, the Pentagon launched the Minerva Initiative, a $75 million military-driven research project focused on studying social behavior in order to determine how best to cope with mass civil disobedience or uprisings. The Minerva Initiative has funded projects such as “Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?” which “conflates peaceful activists with ‘supporters of political violence’ who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on ‘armed militancy’ themselves.”

In 2009, the Dept. of Homeland Security issued its reports on Rightwing and Leftwing Extremism, in which the terms “extremist” and “terrorist” were used interchangeably to describe citizens they perceived to be disgruntled or anti-government.

Meanwhile, a government campaign was underway to spy on Americans’ mail, email and cell phone communications. News reports indicate that the U.S. Postal Service has handled more than 150,000 requests by federal and state law enforcement agencies to monitor Americans’ mail, in addition to photographing every piece of mail sent through the postal system.

Fast forward a few years more and local police were being transformed into extensions of the military, taught to view members of their community as suspects, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and equipped with all of the technology and weaponry of a soldier on a battlefield.

The Obama administration then hired a domestic terrorism czar whose job is to focus on anti-government American “extremists” who have been designated a greater threat to America than ISIS or al Qaeda. As part of the government’s so-called war on right-wing extremism, the Obama administration agreed to partner with the United Nations to take part in its Strong Cities Network program, which is training local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism.

Nothing has changed for the better under the Trump Administration.

Those who believe in and exercise their rights under the Constitution (namely, the right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share their political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), continue to be promoted to the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

“We the people” or, more appropriately, “we the zombies” are the enemy in the eyes of the government. This coronavirus merely ups the ante.

So when presented with the Defense Department’s battle plan for defeating an army of the walking dead, you might find yourself tempted to giggle over the fact that a taxpayer-funded government bureaucrat actually took the time to research and write about vegetarian zombies, evil magic zombies, chicken zombies, space zombies, bio-engineered weaponized zombies, radiation zombies, symbiant-induced zombies, and pathogenic zombies.

However, in an age of extreme government paranoia, this is no laughing matter.

The DOD’s strategy for dealing with a zombie uprising, outlined in “CONOP 8888,” is for all intents and purposes a training manual for the government in how to put down a citizen uprising or at least an uprising of individuals “infected” with a dangerous disease or dangerous ideas about freedom. Read the rest of this entry »

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Some Ask a Taboo Question: Is America Overreacting to Coronavirus? – The New York Times

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2020

So obvious even the NYT will admit to it.

A NYT account is needed to view the post. Ahhhh I don’t have one.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-hype-overreaction-social-distancing.html?action=click&module=Top+Stories&pgtype=Homepage

By Amy Harmon

As an America desperate to stem the coronavirus outbreak put in place sweeping restrictions last week on every facet of public life, the University of Wyoming economist Linda Thunstrom asked what felt like a taboo question: “Are we overreacting?’’…

Be seeing you
#697 – All the News That’s Fit to Print – Sketches From Memory

 

 

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The Real Coronavirus Threat Everyone Is Missing | The National Interest

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2020

Depending on the jurisdiction, the threshold ranged from 250 to 1,000—and in one case, 2,500–with little or no explanation or justification from authorities for choosing a particular number. Worse, in most cases, event sponsors or other affected parties had no recourse to appeal the decision.  In some cases, they did not even have an opportunity for input regarding the restriction or ban.

The pervasive assumption is that the coronavirus outbreak is a temporary menace that will be overcome in the next few weeks or months, the current restrictions will be lifted, and life in America will return to normal.  But what if that assumption is wrong? 

I am from the government. We don’t know what we are doing but if you don’t do as you are told you’re gonna die!

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/real-coronavirus-threat-everyone-missing-133002

by Ted Galen Carpenter

Worries about the threat the coronavirus posed to public health are entirely understandable. The disease spreads easily and has a disturbingly high mortality rate among its victims (especially the elderly).  Nevertheless, some important and potentially dangerous policy precedents are being set without much consideration or reflection. That approach is unwise, since many of the measures being taken to combat the coronavirus epidemic entail major restrictions on liberties that Americans take for granted. A sober discussion of those precedents is needed, or they may come back to haunt our country.

The original reaction in the United States to the corona outbreak was surprisingly casual, but the prevailing attitude and the resulting policy responses in both the private and governmental sectors have changed dramatically over the past two weeks. A deluge of announcements cancelling or postponing major public events, including concerts, plays, the “March Madness” NCAA basketball tournament, and the Masters tournament, has now occurred. Even when there is no outright cancellations or indefinite postponements, barring the public from attending events, such as the scheduled primary debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and upcoming NASCAR races, is increasingly the norm. Schools and businesses around the country are shutting their doors, likely for weeks, with employees and students expected to work or study from home. The economic and social impact of such dislocations is certain to be enormous.

Many of those decisions were by private organizations that concluded that having large numbers of people congregate posed an unacceptable risk of the corona pandemic becoming even more widespread.  However, other closings occurred because of government edicts—including some that seemed highly arbitrary.  Local authorities in Austin, Texas, for example, cancelled the annual South by Southwest music festival at the last minute, blindsiding the festival’s organizers.  Government orders banning “large gatherings” reflected great imprecision about what constituted “large.”  Depending on the jurisdiction, the threshold ranged from 250 to 1,000—and in one case, 2,500–with little or no explanation or justification from authorities for choosing a particular number. Worse, in most cases, event sponsors or other affected parties had no recourse to appeal the decision.  In some cases, they did not even have an opportunity for input regarding the restriction or ban.

The scope of governmental restraints is growing steadily as well.  In late February, President Trump barred entry of foreign travelers coming from China, and he gradually expanded that restriction to other countries, culminating in his March 11 announcement barring non-American travelers from most European nations for 30 days. Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on March 13 gave him extensive additional powers.

Even well-established political rights are now conditional and at potential risk.  On March 13, the Louisiana Secretary of State postponed the state’s April 4 presidential primary election. The Louisiana move is especially troubling.  There have been only a handful of postponed elections in the United States since the end of the Civil War.  A rare recent case was the primary election in New York, which was supposed to be held on September 11, 2001.  The 9-11 terrorist attacks were such a disruptive event that there was little choice but to reschedule the balloting.  But deciding to postpone an election scheduled for three weeks later because of professed fears about a public health issue is far more questionable. That decision illustrates the potential for diktats made in response to the coronavirus outbreak to set worrisome precedents and create opportunities for abuse in less dire situations.

Therein lies a serious concern and the need for a comprehensive public discussion about policies going forward.  It’s a universal truth that governmental power always expands during periods of perceived crisis.  It also is a universal truth that politicians and bureaucrats seize opportunities to expand their missions and power.  We must keep those dynamics in mind when evaluating government actions with respect to the coronavirus threat.

The pervasive assumption is that the coronavirus outbreak is a temporary menace that will be overcome in the next few weeks or months, the current restrictions will be lifted, and life in America will return to normal.  But what if that assumption is wrong?  What do we do if this lethal virus (or one like it) becomes a feature of the annual flu season?  Do we (indeed, can we) lock down the country under such repeated “crisis” conditions?  The economic disruption and damage alone would likely preclude such a response; it doesn’t seem possible to operate a modern economy in a bunkered society.  Taking draconian steps in reaction to a public health problem less severe than the current epidemic would be needlessly destructive to both the economy and to America’s system of liberty.

It’s not too soon for sober reflection and debate about such matters. Unfortunately, the current atmosphere increasingly exhibits the characteristics of a collective panic—and that is always a poor basis for intelligent policy decisions.  Americans must not passively accept government edicts and restrictions without raising pertinent questions, and when necessary, voicing objections.

 

 

 

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PETER HITCHENS: Yes, coronavirus poses a risk – but our response to it is not intelligent or useful. Britain is infected… by a bad case of madness – Mail Online – Peter Hitchens blog

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2020

I must ask them: are you really worried about our health, or are you just afraid of being blamed for a small number of the deaths that your policies are causing? 

Governments distil fear into power. In a way, they are right to do so. We fear foreign invasion. The State builds a navy to protect us. We fear crime and disorder. 

The State hires police and builds prisons. But they have become less and less good at these basic tasks, and perhaps they now seek other fields, where they can show how much we need them. 

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/03/peter-hitchens-yes-coronavirus-poses-a-risk-but-our-response-to-it-is-not-intelligent-or-useful-brit.html

PETER HITCHENS: Yes, coronavirus poses a risk – but our response to it is not intelligent or useful. Britain is infected… by a bad case of madness

CAPTION

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Yes, you are right. We have gone quite mad. I know that many people are thinking this, but dare not say so.

I will be accused of all kinds of terrible things for taking this view – but that is another aspect of how crazy things are.

Yes, coronavirus poses a risk. No, our response to it is not intelligent or useful. In fact, I think it is increasingly damaging and will soon become more so.

The key word here is proportion. There is nothing wrong with simple, practical precautions.

I have for many years believed that door handles pose one of the greatest threats to health, and try never to touch them with the naked hand. I was taught from my earliest years to wash my hands before eating.

I am a health faddist. I work at a standing desk. For many years I have walked and bicycled wherever I can. I often take the stairs rather than the lift. I can’t understand how anyone in my generation or younger can smoke, given what we know about it.

I regard sugar as a delicious poison to be avoided as much as possible. I drink little. I get up early and go to bed early. I believe cars are heart-attack machines, noisy, smelly, ugly devices, which depreciate in the gutter while they are not stopping us from exercising and wrecking our lower backs.

Yet our country is so badly planned that few families can manage without them nowadays.

For these reasons, I reckon that my risk from coronavirus is quite small. If I catch it, and I quite possibly will, I doubt it will trouble me all that much.

The truth is, people with what are called ‘underlying conditions’, many of which follow decades without exercise, are in danger not just from coronavirus but from almost everything.

If the Government is so worried about them, why has it followed transport and housing policies that have made it hard and dangerous to walk or bicycle, and so devastated the health of the people?

Why is the sale and possession of cigarettes still even legal? I wouldn’t normally raise these questions quite so fiercely, but the ever-increasing panicky bossiness of the authorities is annoying me.

I must ask them: are you really worried about our health, or are you just afraid of being blamed for a small number of the deaths that your policies are causing?

And are you just anxious to try to demonstrate how good you are? In such matters, we fuss where we do not need to, and do nothing where urgent action is required.

If a train crashed tomorrow and ten people died, it would be huge headlines for days, even though railways are, in fact, extremely safe. An inquiry would be held.

But each year more than 1,700 people die in road crashes, and another 25,000 are seriously injured, and it barely registers, because their lives are ended or ruined in ones and twos.

Governments distil fear into power. In a way, they are right to do so. We fear foreign invasion. The State builds a navy to protect us. We fear crime and disorder.

The State hires police and builds prisons. But they have become less and less good at these basic tasks, and perhaps they now seek other fields, where they can show how much we need them.

I have serious doubts about whether our Government has any idea how to slow the spread of this virus. I suspect it quietly reached these shores long before anyone noticed.

But I am quite sure that many of the current panic measures do far more harm than good. They create the idea that we are in the midst of a terrifying plague that will kill us all, when the truth – though disturbing – is far less frightening.

Their worst effect is to savage the economy by scaring people away from normal activities.

I went to the cinema last Sunday evening and there were six people in the theatre for what ought to be a successful film.

A florist known to me has just lost hundreds of pounds in business from cancelled events this weekend.

We have all seen the staggering, tottering behaviour of the stock markets, possibly triggered and certainly worsened by virus frenzy.

No doubt it will soon become impossible, under some frantic Emergency Powers Regime, to make this point.

I’ll be accused of giving aid and comfort to the virus, or of spreading Alarm and Despondency.

But before the roadblocks go up, and you need a pass to go to work, I thought I’d say it anyway.

Moving reminder of a pointless war

Normally, I might be a bit cool about a movie such as Military Wives, which dramatises the foundation and success of a choir of women worrying at home, as their soldier husbands face danger far away in Afghanistan.

It barely brushes against the other problem – that it was very hard to work out what those soldiers were risking their lives for.

But the film – pictured above – moved me because it reminded me very strongly of that stupid, utterly pointless war whose victims often returned home in their flag-wrapped coffins, along a road not far from where I live.

I went, whenever possible, to stand with my head bowed as they went past, while silently cursing the governments that had sent them there.

I notice that a group of senior officers and MPs have recently written to The Times daftly attacking the new peace deal in Afghanistan – which might at last get Western troops out of a place they should never have entered.

In some way, apparently, the deal will tarnish the memories of the British dead.

Idiotically, they wrote: ‘These hasty negotiations may compromise the Afghan people and the gains that they have made in the past 19 years. They do not want to surrender women’s rights, freedom of speech and their democratic institutions.’

Well, do you know what? I don’t care. If anyone really wants to impose third-wave feminism on Afghanistan, let them get up an international brigade of volunteers and see how they get on.

Our soldiers, who joined to serve Queen and Country, went because they were ordered to.

The real problem with the planned deal is that it exposes the stupidity and vanity of the politicians who sent troops to Afghanistan, and never should have done.

End this wicked trap

I learned last week that a large group of military widows have been caught in a stupid legal trap.

Because they have remarried, they have lost pensions, under former strict rules.

These rules were abolished in 2014 for those bereaved in later years, but the change does not apply to 300 women, widowed by long-ago conflicts such as the Falklands.

According to Julian Lewis MP, these 300 can get the money they are entitled to only if they divorce, and then marry again. This is obviously absurd.

Can Mr Johnson please put it right?

I remember being told in 2010 that I should support David Cameron’s Tories because ‘we must get Gordon Brown out’. Since Wednesday’s terrifying spendthrift Budget could have been written and delivered by Mr Brown, as could most of the government’s other policies, I don’t think that plan worked out very well.

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March Madness – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2020

One of the more annoying narratives going viral is the notion that we’re all a bunch of imbeciles and without the authorities herding us around we’d die by the hundreds of thousands.  The assumption is that in times of crisis, central control is superior to letting people fend for themselves.

So why are cruise operators mothballing ships at immense cost when they could be offering cheap rates that would give many young adults the opportunity of a lifetime to travel the world?  Part of the reason is that the government is wielding a big stick...

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/03/kevin-duffy/march-madness/

College students are on spring break and the cruise ships have plenty of idle capacity.  While the coronavirus rightly keeps seniors away, the risks to young people are probably not much greater than getting on an airplane.  Fuel costs plunged last week as the Saudis and Russians engage in a price war, putting even more downward pressure on costs.  Amid this free market match made in heaven, the cruise operators are suspending operations for a month.

Wait, what?

One of the more annoying narratives going viral is the notion that we’re all a bunch of imbeciles and without the authorities herding us around we’d die by the hundreds of thousands.  The assumption is that in times of crisis, central control is superior to letting people fend for themselves.  A tiny minority, among them AIER’s Jeffrey Tucker, say the conventional wisdom has it backwards:

I don’t know what should and shouldn’t be shut down.  But neither does the government have some special magical access to information on risk probabilities and the proper way forward. In fact, government is the last institution that should be making this judgment. Government acts out of self-interest; enterprise acts in the public interest. The obvious answer here is to leave the decision to private actors who are in the best position to make a good judgment on what should shut and what should open.

So why are cruise operators mothballing ships at immense cost when they could be offering cheap rates that would give many young adults the opportunity of a lifetime to travel the world?  Part of the reason is that the government is wielding a big stick, interfering in international travel and pushing people into semi-isolation.  The cruise operators also expanded too rapidly, took on debt and left themselves with little margin of safety, another consequence of the 2008 financial bailouts and a decade of ultra-cheap credit.  When the coronavirus first appeared in China, they remained complacent, maintaining dividends and reassuring investors that the outlook was bright.  Rather than take responsibility, pick a fight with the government, and try to claw their way back, they’ve decided to toss in the towel and get in line for potential future bailouts.

Who can blame them?

Barron’s – March 16, 2020

The financial press is back begging for bailouts, just as they did when the first cracks in the credit bubble appeared in 2007, well over a year before the 2008 meltdown.  The weekend issue of Barron’s shamelessly promotes a massive government response to fight the coronavirus and its spillover effects:

This isn’t 2008, when deep problems were rooted in the financial system.  Covid-19 is a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a financial crisis rolled into one – and policy makers will need to get creative to keep panic at bay…  [P]oliticians from both sides of the aisle must find a way to work together – or risk something worse than the financial crisis.

Investors are like spoiled children who go crying to daddy every time they get into trouble.  After decades of moral hazard conditioned a whole host of economic actors to believe any downturn would be painless and brief, they’ve become devoid of critical thinking and prone to emotional reactions.  Since stocks peaked February 14, the S&P 500 has dropped 20%, yet Treasury bonds have been the safe haven of choice – with the “TLT” up 7% – while gold has actually fallen 4%.  Early last week, the yield on 30-year T-bonds hit an all-time low and now stands at 1.55%.

Anyone who would loan money to the U.S. government at 1.55% for the next 30 years needs to have their head examined.

It is $23 trillion in debt.  Its economy is heading into recession.  It is about to take out the bazooka and go on a spending and money printing spree.  As a friend warned me after the 2016 presidential election, “If you are a creditor, the last person you want to see on the other side of the table is Donald Trump.”

Will the confidence game work again?  Will panicked moviegoers rush back into a burning theater?  Don’t bet against it.  Of course, that won’t extinguish the fire.

Most analysts believe the cruise ship industry can survive the coronavirus pandemic as long as it doesn’t last more than a few quarters.  Even so, these companies will be forced to tap into credit lines, making them more vulnerable to the next shock.  Meanwhile, the large banks which provide these loans will become more fragile as well.  The government, too, will become more leveraged (just as the Boomers are set to swamp entitlement programs).  Just as the system’s defenses are dilapidated, a severe economic storm is bearing down.

After decades of lifeboats showing up on cue, there are no more rescues.  Investors and businessmen, you’re on your own.

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: “What Have We Done?”; What is the Coronavirus Response Act Really About?

Posted by M. C. on March 15, 2020

Everything surrounding the legislation suggests a crony operation that will do nothing but benefit those close to power centers.

I did not understand why we had to shove this through in the wee hours of a Friday night/Saturday morning when the Senate won’t even return to start looking at this until Monday.

There were a number of things that concerned me as I read through this bill. For example, if you had a business and wanted to go above and beyond any requirements for paid family leave for your employees that was even more than the two weeks paid family leave the bill required, you got punished by having to add another 14 days onto the days you already provided. That doesn’t make sense.

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2020/03/what-have-we-done-what-is-coronavirus.html

The old Rahm Emanuel comment “never let a serious crisis go to waste” has been bandied about a lot during the current COVID-19 panic. Most of the time, it has been used in a way that doesn’t apply, but one place you always have to keep an eye on is congress and that is certainly the case with the current COVID-19 period.

The House just passed the “Families First Coronavirus Response Act.”

Everything surrounding the legislation suggests a crony operation that will do nothing but benefit those close to power centers.

I am not in favor of any government actions to deal with COVID-19, or for that matter anything else (SEE: Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person), but it is instructive to understand the rudiments of what is going on in this Act.

Congressman Louie Gohmert (TX-01) has put out a press release discussing many of the shady things going on around the Act and why he voted against the legislation. The full press release is below along with keypoints highlighted by me.

Gohmert on H.R. 6201 

Congressman Louie Gohmert (TX-01) released the following statement on his vote against H.R. 6201, “Families First Coronavirus Response Act”:

“In the wee hours of Saturday morning, the U.S. House of Representatives voted on a bill to address economic issues that the Coronavirus may cause. There is so much we do not know about what this pandemic will do, but I am extremely grateful to our President for his unwavering, steadfast efforts to tackle this pandemic head on. There was a great deal more money in the original bill this week going to things that had nothing to do with our Coronavirus national emergency – including a provision that provided for federally funded abortions.

Our President stood firm on things that needed to be in there and to take out things that did not. As a good leader does, he left the specific language of the bill to the so-called experts in Congress. However, the actual wording is too often done by staff members who have never run a business, filed a quarterly tax report, or ever had to cut expenses to stay in business.

As a judge, I was often frustrated by careless wording of a statute which initially looked all right until there was a controversy. Without business experience, staffers worded laws without a thorough review and revision, so damages were created that no federal, state or local government could ever make whole again. When I ran for Congress, I was determined that, if elected, I was going to try to see that we did not vote for such careless wording that have real consequences to real people.

Then on arriving in Congress, it was appalling how often on very critical bills, the main concern was getting something done so we could say we passed a bill, rather than spending the time necessary to protect people and their businesses with carefully considered and constructed legislation.

I was proud of the work the President did negotiating, especially calling the Speaker’s bluff when she demanded a vote on Thursday because she was going to leave and not be there on Friday. Then she said she would not be here on Saturday, so we had to vote right away to pass a bill before we knew what was in it. But with this bill, President Trump made clear that he did not want to destroy small businesses in our effort to help those who could not help themselves in this crisis.

As the bill kept changing, we were having trouble getting copies of the latest version. I was reading the version I got around 9 pm Friday or shortly thereafter. I had noted some concerns in that version that might do more harm than good. The Rules Committee that has to vote on the rules to bring the final bill to the floor had to recess to await the language of that final bill. But they never got the bill or had a hearing on it.

It is also important to understand that when a bill is drafted, it normally has many pages of striking certain language and substituting other language, or adding additional language, or sometimes just deleting words or provisions of a current law. In order to truly understand the effect of a new bill like the one last night, one really needs to look at the underlying laws being changed and read them with the new language added and old words deleted. The language of the new law is not present in the bill, only the changes that are being made to the original law. There was no time for any of that careful review for the bill last night.

Final text of the bill was publicly released at apparently 11:57 pm. The new bill was 110 pages, while the 9 pm version was 108 pages. I did not even have time to do a side-by-side to see what was different.

An example of concerns, this caught by Congressman Dan Bishop, is that it looks like a worker will be worse off under this bill by getting paid up to 10 weeks of wages at the bill’s mandated 2/3’s rate as “public health emergency leave” instead of receiving workers compensation because workers comp is non-taxable though employer paid leave is taxable. That provision hurts the worker. Another issue that may tell you who did the lobbying is that the sick leave and public health emergency leave mandated in the bill will largely substitute for workers compensation payments which would result in the payments being shifted away from the workers compensation insurance company and now be borne by the small business owner. We will find more of these problems as people now have time to see what we have done.

I did know that the exemption language for businesses on the bottom of page 28 said: “Section 101(4)(A)(i) shall be applied by substituting ‘fewer than 500 employees’ for ‘50 or more employees for each working day during each of 20 or more calendar workweeks in the current or preceding calendar year’ ” had moved to the top of page 29.  That is the manner in which most of the bill spoke.

That language, like most of the bill, really needed to be examined in context with existing law, but we, as elected officials, were not afforded the time to see what this language would do.  Apparently, we will leave that to some judge like I used to be to figure it out. But that will only come after some government bureaucrats use their own interpretation that could cause massive damages sufficient to cause a lawsuit, or that causes an affected business to go out of business.

House Rules would have required that the bill go through the Appropriations Committee, Ways & Means Committee then to the Rules Committee for examination by the Members of the Committees of Jurisdiction, holding hearings by each with an opportunity to amend mistakes. However, this is a crisis so some rules may have needed to be bypassed. We had already appropriated the billions of dollars needed to cover vaccines, medications, and medical care last week, so this was to address economic damages from the Coronavirus. The President has access to around $50 billion by virtue of his “National Emergency” declaration.  I did not understand why we had to shove this through in the wee hours of a Friday night/Saturday morning when the Senate won’t even return to start looking at this until Monday.

This newest bill adds billions of dollars to our deficit. We just needed to make sure we did not make our economic problems bigger. It might have been worth spending another 12 to 24 hours to make sure we did not do something to destroy small businesses that took lifetimes or even generations to build up. After all, a majority of employees and new jobs in America are in small businesses, although that has slipped with the Congress giving big banks and big businesses the means to drive out small banks and businesses, despite the intentions of most of Congress.

There were a number of things that concerned me as I read through this bill. For example, if you had a business and wanted to go above and beyond any requirements for paid family leave for your employees that was even more than the two weeks paid family leave the bill required, you got punished by having to add another 14 days onto the days you already provided. That doesn’t make sense.

If you have not provided any paid family leave days, you only have to meet the new 14-day requirement. If that were the only concern, I might have had to vote for it anyway. Sure I get it that the requirement that 72 hours must be provided between the time a bill is filed and the time we vote on it must sometimes be ignored, but that 72 hours here might really make a difference in minimizing damage that Congress causes in these fraudulent cliff hanger situations. The President had time and as I stated earlier, the Senate will not return to look at this bill until Monday. What’s the rush?

We should have taken the time. This crucial bill was not even given the normal amount of time to debate it on the House floor. I rushed over to the floor hoping to get some questions answered during debate, or at least before we voted, but there was no time for answering all the questions or even properly examining the bill after it was filed. Just vote and be on our way. We voted, and I truly had wanted to vote yes, but could not for a bill that created so many concerns without time to examine whether some of our language did more harm than good.

The bill does raise a new question: with the new requirements for businesses we were not able to adequately consider, will the government pay for people’s sick leave, family leave and vacation time after the business goes bankrupt and has to shut down and can no longer pay anyone for anything? I am very concerned that yet again, the drafters listened to the biggest businesses and may have helped them drive the little guys out of business.

We have seen all of this before as Nancy Pelosi always wants us to pass bills to find out what’s in them. They wrote it, and we didn’t even have the language but for a very short time before we voted on it in the wee hours of Saturday morning. I trust our President, but I do not trust this Speaker at all. I have already been to this rodeo too many times.

Unfortunately, now that it has passed the House, we will find out what this bill actually does. Hopefully, the Senate will take the time to clean up the damage our bill caused and not just rubber stamp it, so I can vote for the bill that they send back to the House. Unfortunately, there are editors and commentators who are more concerned with appearances or “just doing something even if it is wrong” who will condemn my trying to push the House to do the RIGHT thing instead of ANYthing.”

# # #

–RW

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: Michael Jordan and The Economics of the Coronavirus

Posted by M. C. on March 15, 2020

But lost in the hysteria concerning the virus is the fundamental fact that humans rank choices every day, all the time.

Government edicts to deal with the virus are simply various methods to trample over human individual choices. This is economics 101.

So sick and suffering from flu-like symptoms that at times he staggered, a dehydrated and exhausted Michael Jordan wills himself to 38 points against the Utah Jazz in a pivotal Game 5, adding to the Bulls star’s legend as a clutch performer and relentless competitor…

This is not freedom of choice. It is the opposite of free choice. It is taking choices and options away from individuals and businesses. It is the economics of authoritarianism.

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2020/03/michael-jordan-and-economics-of.html

By Robert Wenzel

The airwaves and the internet are filled with warnings about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19). There is more panic in the air than virus itself. The panic is a non-stop viral news dump.

But lost in the hysteria concerning the virus is the fundamental fact that humans rank choices every day, all the time.

Government edicts to deal with the virus are simply various methods to trample over human individual choices. This is economics 101.

Consider, it seems pretty clear that if someone under the age of 65 contracts COVID-19, it generally means a week or so of illness and that’s it. Full recovery.

In some circumstances, perhaps many, young and middle-age individuals may want to risk the possibility of getting infected as opposed to missing some important (or unimportant) event. It is about rankings and value scales.

A government quarantine and the banning of large crowd events is simply the government posing as being useful when they are just taking options away from people.

It may be the case that people over 65, especially if they have serious chronic health conditions, should take extra precautions against exposure, but the elderly can do this on their own without government measures.

I can remember when not that long ago, Michael Jordan was hailed for playing an NBA Finals basketball game with flu-like symptoms.

From the start of the broadcast with Ahmad Rashad reporting:

At 3:30 this morning, Michael Jordan woke up with flu like symptoms. He had a stomach ache and a headache, and he couldn’t go back to sleep. He threw up all night and as reported earlier he missed shoot around, but he was in bed all day and continued to throw up. As a matter of fact he got in here early. When I went to talk to him back in the back room, he was in a dark room trying to get some rest, but still throwing up. And Marv, I talked to him, I said ‘How do you feel?’ and he said ‘I really feel horrible.’ It is history in games where he’s either been hurt or sick, it’s been bad news for the opponent.

NBA.com records it as “Top NBA Finals moments: Jordan’s flu game in 1997 Finals”:

So sick and suffering from flu-like symptoms that at times he staggered, a dehydrated and exhausted Michael Jordan wills himself to 38 points against the Utah Jazz in a pivotal Game 5, adding to the Bulls star’s legend as a clutch performer and relentless competitor…

 His 3-pointer in the final half minute gave Chicago a lead it did not lose, setting up the famous video clip of teammate Scottie Pippen helping his rag-doll pal off the floor. “Probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” Jordan said afterward. “I almost played myself into passing out just to win a basketball game.” Not just any game, though — a Finals game. Said Bulls coach Phil Jackson: “This was a heroic effort, one to add to the collection of efforts that make up his legend.”

Michael Jordan helped off the court by Scottie Pippen at the end of Michael Jordan’s “Flu Game.”

This is what The New York Times reported in December of that flu season (my bold):

Cases of the flu have increased rapidly in the last few weeks, dominated by a dangerous strain that hits hardest at the elderly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today…

From the Center for Disease Control, for that flu season (my bold):

The proportion of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza (P&I) reported by 122 U.S. cities exceeded the epidemic threshold  for 10 consecutive weeks from December 8, 1996, through February 15, 1997, before returning to baseline.

In other words in a flu season where tens of thousands, mostly elderly, died, it was business as usual without government quarantines, flu-related edicts, etc.

It is not much different today in the case of COVID-19 except that government officials and the media are hyping the virus hysteria to unprecedented proportions.

The government is for the most part composed of power freaks who believe they should overrule individual choices, and other government officials are posing so that they can stay in power.

And don’t get me started about the so-called necessity to fight the possibility of anyone getting the virus so that the elderly are protected. They call it herd immunity, a concept promoted heavily by vaccine manufacturing scam artists. I will discuss this in a separate post.

What is really going on is that the mad dogs of coercion have been let out with the notion that the goal should be the complete halting to many activities to fight the virus as if this is the only goal all people should have as priority number one. Even though it would likely not be priority number one for many who are willing to take the risk of possibly becoming infected and feeling ill for a week.

As for the elderly, they can take any precautions they choose, government doesn’t need to tell them to be cautious if that is what they want to be.

Yes, there was a time when Michael Jordan roamed basketball courts and the idea that life had to be dramatically disrupted because of a virus, that was not a serious threat to most, did not exist. It was a time when the ill fought through the illness with, sometimes, thousands in the stands cheering.

Now, the nanny state wants to stop this, to remove individual choices and heroic efforts, and replace them with demands and orders.

This is not freedom of choice. It is the opposite of free choice. It is taking choices and options away from individuals and businesses. It is the economics of authoritarianism.

Be seeing you

Hawaiian libertarian: The Conspiritard Review

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