Supremacism, Social Darwinism

Cuomo blames nursing homes for following his Covid-19 order that KILLED PATIENTS – after removing it from website

RT | May 27, 2020

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has stealthily attempted to rewrite history, deleting his controversial order requiring nursing homes to admit Covid-19 patients from the state health website and blaming facilities for obeying it.

After being lambasted in the press for the March 25 executive order that forced New York elder care facilities to accept patients infected with the highly contagious virus, Cuomo attempted to blame the nursing homes for not disobeying his orders during a Wednesday press conference.

“The obligation is on the nursing home to say, ‘I can’t take a Covid-positive person,’” the governor insisted. “If they said ‘I can’t take the person,’ they can’t take the person! So that’s how it works.”

The coronavirus has cut a devastating swath through New York’s nursing homes, killing more than 5,800 people in long-term care facilities since the pandemic began – nearly a fifth of the state’s Covid-19 deaths so far, according to AP statistics compiled on Thursday. The policy ultimately sent over 4,500 recovering coronavirus patients to nursing homes, which Cuomo himself called “the optimum feeding ground for this virus.”

But the executive order itself leaves little room for disobedience, reading (in underlined text, no less), “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [Nursing Home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.” Elsewhere in the document, facilities are advised they “must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals” so long as they’ve been deemed medically stable – no excuses allowed. Facilities aren’t even permitted to test incoming patients.

But that same order, titled “Advisory: Hospital Discharges and Admissions to Nursing Homes,” was apparently removed from the New York healthcare website early this month, according to Fox News, which discovered its absence on Tuesday. Unfortunately for Cuomo’s revisionism, it’s still available in the Wayback Machine. The governor issued a revised directive on May 10, barring hospitals from sending patients back to nursing homes unless they tested negative for the virus. However, his communications director denied the more recent order represented a “reversal” of the old one so much as “build[ing] on” it.

By Saturday, however, Cuomo was blaming the Trump administration for the ill-advised Covid-19 mandate, declaring New York was merely “following the president’s agencies’ guidance” and “follow[ing] what the Republican Administration said to do.” While the governor’s office claimed he was referring to a March directive from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, that order merely required nursing homes to “admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including… from hospitals where a case of Covid-19 was present” and even advised setting aside a unit to quarantine patients returning from hospitals – a safety measure notably missing from Cuomo’s executive order.

The New York governor’s handling of the nursing home situation has gotten decidedly mixed reviews, with a recent poll showing just 44 percent of state voters approve of the job he’s done managing the virus in state elder care facilities – while 48 percent give him a thumbs-down. Published Wednesday, the Siena College poll reveals a predictable partisan split, with 54 percent of Democrats approving of how he’s managed the nursing home problem as opposed to 55 percent of Republicans disapproving. Independents were the most vehement in their disdain, with 61 percent viewing his response negatively.

Cuomo’s overall approval ratings have also slipped since the early days of the pandemic, when he won over Democrats by taking an oppositional stance to President Donald Trump. Approval for his handling of the outbreak in general sits at 76 percent for May, down from 84 percent last month, while his overall job approval rating has slid to 63 percent from 71 percent in April.

May 27, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Andrew Cuomo, New York, United States | 2 Comments

Meet Bill Gates

Corbett • 05/24/2020

There can be no doubt that Bill Gates has worn many hats on his remarkable journey from his early life as the privileged son of a Seattle-area power couple to his current status as one of the richest and most influential people on the planet. But, as we have seen in our exploration of Gates’ rise as unelected global health czar and population control advocate, the question of who Bill Gates really is is no mere philosophical pursuit. Today we will attempt to answer that question as we examine the motives, the ideology, and the connections of this man who has been so instrumental in shaping the post-coronavirus world.

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TRANSCRIPT

Computer whiz kid. Talented software developer. Shrewd businessman. Benevolent philanthropist. Global health expert.

Given that we are currently living through a crisis that has been “predicted” by Bill Gates, which is triggering a response from the global health organizations that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has bankrolled, and driving us toward a vaccination and biometric ID “solution” which Bill Gates has been working on for years, the answer to the question “Who Is Bill Gates?” is quickly becoming one of the most important questions of our lives. That answer will not only tell us about the world that we are living in, but about the one that we are being thrust into . . . and how we can avoid it.

Today we will attempt to answer that question as we examine the motives, the ideology, and the connections of this man who has been so instrumental in shaping the post-coronavirus world.

Meet Bill Gates.

You’re tuned into The Corbett Report.

So who is Bill Gates?

Some argue that he’s a genius who leveraged his natural computer savvy into a billion-dollar fortune.

INTERVIEWER: You’re called a genius and I will—well, no, I don’t think that embarrassed you at all. They call you a genius. Part of your genius is that you are a computer whiz, and the other is that you did have the business acumen to turn it into a working company. Are you a business genius, too?

GATES: Well, I wouldn’t say “genius.”

SOURCE: Watch 28-year-old Bill Gates explain why he didn’t see himself as a genius

Others insist that he is a visionary who changed our lives with his foresight and bold imagination.

ALAN GARBER: Bill had a vision—and I understand it went back even then—that computing would be ubiquitous. It would be part of all of our lives. And, indeed, as you all know, he executed on that vision. And the world today has changed so dramatically in large part due to the work that Bill has done throughout the years.

SOURCE: A Conversation with Bill Gates’ Q&A at Harvard University

He has been hailed as a shrewd executive who built the Microsoft empire with his remarkable talent for business.

JAMES WALLACE: When the biographers and historians write the history of the 20th century, Bill Gates is going to go down as the best businessman of our century, and Microsoft as one of the greatest companies of the 20th century.

SOURCE: Biography: Bill Gates

And he has been praised as a philanthropist who is selflessly devoting his wealth to improving the lives of people around the world.

JESSE KORNBLUTH: Bill, even your harshest critic would have to admit that your philanthropy work is, you know, planet-shaking incredible and could be, if you make it, a second act so amazing that it would dwarf what you’ve actually done at Microsoft. [APPLAUSE]

SOURCE: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Face Off

But, like anyone of his status, he has his detractors. In the 1990s he was often portrayed as the greedy head of the evil Microsoft monopoly.

BENJAMIN WOOLEY: Bill Gates isn’t content with his Windows system running just a few PCs. He wants it to run the world, spreading like a computer virus into our faxes, our phones, our TV sets, and, yes, even our toasters.

SOURCE: Bill Gates on the dawn of the Internet

But in the age of the coronavirus crisis, he is most often treated like some sort of epidemiologist or leading health researcher.

ANDERSON COOPER: Back here with us once again to talk about this, as well as testing, treatments and more: Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill, thanks so much for being back with us. It’s been a little over a month since you were here and at that time you said the US had not hit its peak. So at this point do you think we have peaked and where do you think we are right now in kind of the arc of the pandemic?

SOURCE: Bill Gates says US system produces ‘bogus’ testing numbers

But in truth, none of these perspectives are accurate.

Microsoft’s big break famously came from a deal to provide software for IBM as they moved into the personal computer market. But the deal was not the result of Gates’ technical genius or amazing business acumen. As has been quietly admitted by IBM executives in the years since, Microsoft was given their shot at the chance to work with “Big Blue” as a result of Gates’ mother’s relationship with IBM CEO John Opel.

GORAN MILIC: You remember your partnership of IBM and Bill Gates? How did it break up?

EDWARD ANDRUS: I do remember very well, actually. Bill Gates at the time at the beginning of our relationship with them was living on pizza and Pepsi Cola in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And his mother happened to be on the United Way board with our chairman and asked our chairman to help him. And you know, when the chairman comes in and tells you to go help this kid, nine hundred people get on the plane Monday morning and they all go down to try to help Bill Gates.

[. . .]

So I don’t see Bill Gates as this great, creative person. I see him as an opportunist. And, in fact, in those days there was a lot of sharing of software code. People gave it away in Silicon Valley; they would share everything. He came in and he tried to control everything and put a price on it.

SOURCE: Idemo u Ameriku 2

Computer historians have long known how the basis for what became MS-DOS was not Bill Gates’ brilliant imagination, but QDOS, a “Quick and Dirty Operating System” that had been thrown together by Tim Patterson, a worker at Seattle Computer Products, as a placeholder until he could sell a proper operating system to his customers. And as even Gates himself admitted, the breakthrough Graphical User Interface that became the basis for Windows was ripped off from the researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

As Bill would say after Apple unsuccessfully sued Microsoft for copyright infringement over Windows’ GUI: “Hey, Steve, just because you broke into Xerox’s house before I did and took the TV doesn’t mean I can’t go in later and take the stereo.”

SOURCE: Paul Allen, Idea Man (p. 156)

And, as Gates also admits, it is not a spirit of selfless generosity that motivates his interest in vaccines and other lucrative health interventions.

BECKY QUICK: I’d like to talk to you about your approach to vaccinations. You wrote something recently, and, like you always do, you kind of looked at the problem from a scientific and business perspective on things. You’ve invested 10 billion dollars in vaccinations over the last two decades, and you figured out the return on investment for that. It kind of stunned me. Can you walk us through the math?

[. . .]

BILL GATES: You know, we see a phenomenal track record. It’s been a hundred billion overall that the world’s put in—our foundation is a bit more than 10 billion—but we feel there’s been over a 20-to-one return. So if you just look at the economic benefits, that’s a pretty strong number compared to anything else.

SOURCE: Bill Gates: My ‘best investment’ turned $10 billion into $200 billion worth of economic benefit

As we have seen, Gates’ “philanthropic” investment scheme has paid off well, with his $50 billion net worth having ballooned to over $100 billion after his decade of “altruism” in the vaccine market. As critics of his foundation have repeatedly pointed out, the 9,000,000 people who die every year of hunger would be best served by securing food supplies, running water and other basic necessities, not costly medical interventions for rare diseases. But there is no return on investment to be made from that kind of charity.

No, this is not about charity. It is about control. The population control grid that Gates has been quietly funding into existence for the past decade—a biometric identification system tied to a digital payments infrastructure that will be used to track, catalogue and control every movement, every transaction and every interaction of every citizen—is just now coming into view.

But the real question is: Why is he doing this? What drives a man like Bill Gates, a man rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, to spend his time and invest his fortune in schemes to control the population? To find the answer to that question, we have to examine Gates’ family background.

Bill Gates, it should not be surprising to learn, was born into money. His great-grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, was the president of National City Bank in Seattle. His grandfather, Willard, was also a banker, and his grandmother, Adele, a prominent Seattle civic leader.

Bill Gates’ mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, was a scion of the Maxwell banking family and, by all accounts, as hard-driving as her forebears. She served as a director of several companies, including First Interstate Bancorp and KIRO-TV of Seattle. She served as a regent at the University of Washington. And she was appointed to the board of the United Way of America, where, as we have seen, she persuaded IBM CEO John Opel to help her son in his fledgling software development career.

Bill’s father, William H. Gates, Sr., was a prominent Seattle-area lawyer. He co-founded a powerful law and lobbying firm, helped Howard Schultz in his bid to buy Starbucks, served on the boards of numerous companies and organizations, and, along the way, had a profound influence on his son’s life and career.

GATES: My dad was a large presence, both physically and in terms of his wisdom. He worked very hard, so he’d leave in the mornings, often before we had breakfast, and get home in time for dinner. I always looked up to my dad in terms of how hard he worked.

At the dinner table my dad would go through various lawsuits and expect us to follow along. He had high expectations.

SOURCE: Celebrating My Father’s 90th Birthday

The young Bill Gates—technically “William H. Gates, III,” although his card-playing family dubbed him “Trey”—learned much from his parents. From his mother’s banking family he inherited a “nose for the dollar,” as one childhood friend’s father called it. From his hard-driving legal-minded father, he learned the value of legalizing business arrangements. As a child, he even had a legal contract drawn up to grant him the use of his older sisters’ baseball mitt.

These traits would not earn him many friends, but they served him well as he began to bring order to the anarchic software development community of the 1970s. At that time, software for the brand new personal computer market was the realm of computer hobbyists—people whose excitement about the microcomputer revolution and love of engineering and problem-solving led them to develop and share code freely with each other.

But this was no good for the young Bill Gates, who, even before Microsoft was off the ground, was already dreaming of commoditizing this hobby and turning it into the basis of a business empire. In 1976, with the ink still wet on Microsoft’s first contract with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the then-21-year-old Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists excoriating the early computer enthusiasts, who represented his main market. for sharing Microsoft’s code for Altair BASIC.

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Is this fair? [. . .] The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man [sic] years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

SOURCE: Open Letter to Hobbyists

The letter was awkward and tone-deaf, as many people have described the young Bill Gates in his social interactions. It heaped vitriol on the very people who would be the customers of any future business and tried to change an established culture of sharing software code merely by decree. Even Apple Computers, which would go on to be one of the prime purveyors of “walled garden” systems that restrict users’ ability to control their own computers, scored an easy marketing victory by responding to Gates’ angry letter with a reminder that “Yes, Folks, Apple BASIC is Free!”

But the gauntlet was thrown down, and Gates would have his way. Although freeware and other forms of open source software development still exist, the establishment of software code as legally protected intellectual property has led to the rise of billionaires like Gates.

A “nose for the dollar” and a knowledge of how to use the legal system to get what you want were not the only things to emerge from Bill Gates’ childhood, however. His parents also encouraged discussion about the family’s charity work and the causes they held close to their heart.

As Gates revealed to Bill Moyers in 2003, those causes included “the population issue” which sparked a lifelong interest in “reproductive health.”

GATES: One issue that really grabbed me as urgent were issues related to population . . . reproductive health.

MOYERS: But did you come to reproductive issues as an intellectual?

GATES: When I was growing up, my parents were always involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.

SOURCE: A Conversation with Bill Gates: Making a Healthier World for Children and Future Generations

Gates tips his hand when he equates “issues related to population” with “reproductive health.” The topic is particularly controversial, because “population control” and “reproductive health” have been used for half a century as a euphemism for eugenics, the discredited pseudoscience that holds that certain families are fit to be leaders of society by virtue of their superior genes.

As we saw in “Why Big Oil Conquered the World,” eugenics was a field named and codified by Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin. Ostensibly concerned with heredity and what would later be known as genetics, the eugenicists believed that the rich and powerful were rich and powerful not because of luck or chance or happenstance, and certainly not from the deployment of cutthroat business tactics and underhanded dealings; no, the rich and powerful had attained their status because they came from “better stock.” Conversely, the poor were poor because of their “defective germ plasm.”

As transparent as it seems to us today that this ideology was a self-serving self-justification for the ruling class, it was quickly taken up as the great social crusade of the early 20th century. From Teddy Roosevelt to H. G. Wells to Julian Huxley to Winston Churchill, there was widespread support for the eugenicist notion that society must strive to make sure that the rich and “well-born” breed as much as possible, and the poor, infirm, and “feeble-minded” be prevented from having children.

A common eugenicist argument was that the scarce resources of society should not be used to support the lower classes, as that only encouraged more of their kind. Instead, life-saving medical care and intervention should be rationed so that those resources can be best put to use elsewhere. So-called negative eugenicists even took things further, with some, like famed playwright George Bernard Shaw, calling for people to be called before a state-appointed board to justify their existence or be put to death.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: [. . .] But there are an extraordinary number of people whom I want to kill. Not in any unkind or personal spirit, but it must be evident to all of you — you must all know half a dozen people, at least—who are no use in this world. Who are more trouble than they are worth. And I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board, just as he might come before the income tax commissioner, and, say, every five years, or every seven years, just put him there, and say: “Sir, or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?”

SOURCE: George Bernard Shaw talking about capital punishment

But, in the post-WWII era, as the name of eugenics became tarred by association with the Nazi atrocities, the talk of death panels and other harsh eugenicist notions was dropped from public conversation. Now, the quest to reduce the size of the poor population was spoken of as “population control” and “reproductive health.” Still, occasionally, these old negative eugenics ideas are revisited in moments of candor.

GATES: You’re raising tuitions at the University of California as rapidly as they [sic] can and so the access that used to be available to the middle class or whatever is just rapidly going away. That’s a trade-off society’s making because of very, very high medical costs and a lack of willingness to say, you know, “Is spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient—would it be better not to lay off those 10 teachers and to make that trade off in medical cost?” But that’s called the “death panel” and you’re not supposed to have that discussion.

SOURCE: Bill Gates: End-of-Life Care vs. Saving Teachers’ Jobs

It is worth questioning why this man, who openly muses about death panels and the trade-offs of providing health care to the elderly is to be taken completely at face value in his attempts to slow population growth in the third world or to handle a coronavirus health crisis that primarily affects the elderly.

That the Gates agenda is being driven by a eugenicist ideology is suggested by multiple lines of evidence, both historical and current.

As we have also seen in “Why Big Oil Conquered the World,” the Rockefeller family was instrumental in funding and promoting eugenics, both in America and overseas.

The Rockefellers helped fund the Eugenics Record Office.

The founding director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, William Welch, sat on the ERO’s board and helped direct its activities.

The Rockefellers sponsored the studies of the eugenics researchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Germany, including Ernst Rüdin, who would go on to draft Nazi Germany’s forced sterilization law.

And, when the American Eugenics Society became embarrassed of its own name, its long-time director, Frederick Osborne, merely took over as president of the Rockefeller-founded Population Council.

This dedication to the cause of “public health” did not escape the approving gaze of Bill Gates, Sr. In a chapter of his 2009 book, Showing Up for Life, called “Walking With Giants,” he writes admiringly of the Rockefellers and their influence in the field:

Every corner we’ve turned in the field of global health, we’ve found that the Rockefellers were already there and had been there for years.

When we committed to childhood immunization we found ourselves building on efforts the Rockefeller Foundation had helped launch and fund in the 1980s.

When we became interested in fighting malaria and tuberculosis, we learned that the Rockefellers had been studying the prevention and treatment of such diseases around the globe for, in some cases, as long as a hundred years.

A similar dynamic held true in the case of HIV/AIDS.

A lesson we learned from studying and working with the Rockefellers is that to succeed in pursuing audacious goals you need like-minded partners with whom to collaborate.

And we learned that such goals are not prizes claimed by the short-winded. The Rockefellers stay with tough problems for generations.

SOURCE: William H. Gates. Showing Up for Life (pp. 158-159)

As Gates, Sr., suggests, it is by working with “like-minded partners” that such “great” achievements in the field of global health can be made. For the Gates, these like-minded partners include the Rockefellers themselves. Bill Gates, Sr. got to discuss global health, agriculture and environment with the likes of David Rockefeller, Sr., and David Rockefeller, Jr., at a meeting on “Philanthropy in a Global Century” at Rockefeller University campus in 2000. And Bill Gates, as we have seen, co-hosted a meeting on reducing the population with David Rockefeller in 2009.

But the most salacious hints of a deeper agenda are not to be found in the Gates’ public associations, but in the associations that they have tried to hide from the public.

STEPHANIE RUHLE: Jeffrey Epstein may be dead, but this story isn’t. A shocking new report from The New York Times sheds light on the connection between Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the late Jeffrey Epstein. After Gates’ name came up in connection with Epstein and MIT Media Lab, Gates gave a statement to The Wall Street Journal where he insisted he did not have any business relationship or friendship with Epstein. But a new report outlines conversations with Gates and Epstein and a conversation with Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation. A connection between their foundation and JPMorgan Chase to set up a charitable fund to benefit Epstein. You know what I want to know: Why?

SOURCE: NYT: Bill Gates Repeatedly Met With Jeffrey Epstein | Velshi & Ruhle | MSNBC

Beginning in August of last year, a string of information connecting Bill Gates to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein began to emerge.

Flight logs revealed that Gates had flown on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet.

An email surfaced showing disgraced MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito—who resigned from his position after it was discovered that he had helped cover up Jeffrey Epstein’s identity as an “anonymous” donor to the lab—informing his staff that a $2 million donation to the lab in 2014 was a “gift from Bill Gates directed by Jeffrey Epstein.”

As the story gained momentum, Gates tried to downplay the relationship, with a Gates spokesperson protesting that Gates “didn’t know it was Epstein’s plane,” and Gates himself insisting that “I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with [Epstein].”

This was immediately contradicted by The New York Times, who reported in October of 2012 that Gates had in fact met with Epstein on multiple occasions, even going so far as to discuss the creation of a multibillion dollar charitable fund with seed money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase.

According to the Times, Gates emailed his colleagues about Epstein in 2011: “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.”

Epstein’s will even named Boris Nikolic—a Harvard-trained immunologist who served as the chief scientific advisor to both Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and who appears in the sole publicly known photo of Epstein and Gates’ 2011 meeting at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion—as the backup executor of Epstein’s estate.

It is not difficult to see why Gates would try to distance himself from his relationship with a child sex trafficker. Epstein, after all, is suspected of ensnaring high-ranking politicians, businessmen and even royalty in an intelligence-directed “honeypot” operation, recording them in the act of sexually abusing underage girls and using that evidence as blackmail.

But, as it turns out, the attempt to suppress the Gates-Epstein story may have been an attempt to suppress the revelation of an altogether different shared interest.

KRISTEN DAHLGREN: Sources say several accusers have come forward in New Mexico, where Epstein owns a sprawling ranch. According to a new report published in The New York Times—not verified by NBC News—Epstein wanted to use the ranch for controlled breeding, using his DNA to improve humanity. Citing two award-winning scientists and an advisor to large companies and wealthy individuals, the article reports Epstein surrounded himself with leading scientists and would tell them he wanted to have 20 women impregnated at a time on the ranch.

SOURCE: Jeffrey Epstein Had Plan To Father Dozens Of Children, Report Says | TODAY

The already scarcely believable Jeffrey Epstein story took another bizarre turn in August of 2019, when it was reported that Epstein “Hoped to Seed the Human Race With His DNA.” As The New York Times explained, Epstein’s plan to impregnate 20 women at a time at his New Mexico ranch in order to “seed the human race with his DNA”—a plan he told to a number of the “scientific luminaries” he kept in his orbit—put a modern gloss on a very old idea:

Mr. Epstein’s vision reflected his longstanding fascination with what has become known as transhumanism: the science of improving the human population through technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Critics have likened transhumanism to a modern-day version of eugenics, the discredited field of improving the human race through controlled breeding.

SOURCE: Jeffrey Epstein, Surrounded by Scientific Luminaries, Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA

Epstein’s interest in genetics led him to sponsor a number of scientists working in the field, including George Church, a Harvard geneticist whose lab received funding from Epstein’s foundation from 2005 to 2007 for “cutting edge science.” Church publicly apologized for his connection to Epstein, which included several meetings a year from 2014 onward. This was neither the first nor the last time that this unassuming Harvard biologist, whose “cutting edge science” often strays into controversial areas, caused a public scandal. In 2019, Church proposed a “genetics dating app” which was immediately denounced as applied eugenics.

Church also acted as scientific advisor to Editas Medicine, a startup seeking to use the genome-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9, to eliminate diseases by deleting the parts of a genetic code responsible for the illness. In 2015, the company announced it had raised $120 million from a group led by Epstein’s appointed backup executor, Dr. Boris Nikolic. Naturally, that group of investors included Bill Gates.

Yes, Bill Gates is certainly following his father’s advice to collaborate with “like-minded partners.”

So, the question remains: Is Bill Gates motivated by eugenics? Given that eugenics went underground over half a century ago, we are unlikely ever to unearth a frank admission along those lines from Gates himself. After all, there are no longer any card-carrying members of the American Eugenics Society; the society was rebranded in the 1970s when, as the society’s founder noted, “it became evident that changes of a eugenic nature would be made for reasons other than eugenics, and that tying a eugenic label on them would more often hinder than help their adoption.”

But there was an American Eugenics Society in the 1920s, and it just so happened to boast a “William H. Gates” on its member roster. But perhaps that is just a coincidence.

And there was an American Eugenics Society in the 1960s, when William H. Gates II was preceded as head of Planned Parenthood by Alan Guttmacher, who simultaneously served as the Director of the American Eugenics Society.

And perhaps it was coincidence that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation organized their London Summit on Family Planning, at which the Gates recommitted themselves to funding population control in the third world, in July 2012, on the anniversary of the First International Eugenics Congress, held in London exactly 100 years prior.

And perhaps it is reaching to compare the young Bill Gates’ dating preferences to the genetic-based dating favored by modern-day eugenicists.

JAMES WALLACE: I interviewed several women who had dated Bill just briefly and one told me the very first question Bill asked her was: “What did you score on your SAT test?” You know, this is not exactly what a young woman wants to hear. For Bill Gates, though . . . He had scored a perfect 800 on his math portion of the SAT and this was a matter of pride with him. And he wanted to make sure whoever he was dating, you know, had scored a pretty high grade.

SOURCE: Biography: Bill Gates

No, we cannot expect an answer about Bill Gates true motives to come from Gates himself. By this point the question of Bill Gates’ intentions has been buried under the combined weight of hundreds of millions of dollars of paid PR spin. Like the Rockefellers before them, the Gates have long since learned the secret of enlarging their family fortune—not to mention their control over the human population—by donning the mask of philanthropy.

There are many perspectives on Bill Gates; depending on who you ask, he is a computer savant, a genius businessman, or a saintly philanthropist. But all of these perspectives have been brought to you through PR outlets founded or funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates is no longer a subject for historians but hagiographers.

Now we must confront the question of why this man is motivated to build such a web of control—control over our public health agencies—

GATES: And for all 193 member states, you must make vaccines a high priority in your health systems, to ensure that all your children have access to existing vaccines now—and to new vaccines as they become available.

SOURCE: BILL GATES TO WORLD HEALTH ASSEMBLY: IMMUNIZE EVERY CHILD

Control over our identities—

GATES: And the lack of an ID system is a problem, not just for the payment system, but also for voting and health and education and taxation. And so it’s a wonderful thing to go in and create a broad identification system

SOURCE: Bill Gates at the Financial Inclusion Forum, December 1, 2015

Control over our transactions—

GATES: Once financial flows go underground—where you have lots of legitimate transactions mixed in with the ones you want to track—and once they’re going over a digital system that the US has no connection to, it’s far more difficult to find the transactions that you want to be aware of or that you want to block.

SOURCE: Bill Gates at the Financial Inclusion Forum, December 1, 2015

And even control over our bodies—

GATES: We’re gonna have this intermediate period of opening up, and it won’t be normal until we get an amazing vaccine to the entire world.

SOURCE: Watch CNBC’s full interview with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on the coronavirus pandemic and his work toward a vaccine

We must confront the possibility that this quest for control comes not from a selfless spirit of generosity that never seemed to exist before he became a multi-billionaire, but from the same drive for money, the same desire for domination and the same sense of superiority that motivated him on his way up the corporate ladder.

But if the answer to the question “Who is Bill Gates” is “Bill Gates is a eugenicist,” that tells us some important things about the world that we are living in.

It tells us that Gates is deceiving the public into supporting his takeover of the world with a false front of philanthropy.

It tells us that the goal of the Gates, like the goal of the Rockefellers before them, is not to improve the world for humankind, but to improve the world for their kind.

And most importantly, it tells us that Bill Gates is no comic-book supervillain, single-handedly directing all of the chaos that is unfolding in the world or single-handedly bringing his own order to that chaos.

No, if Bill Gates is a eugenicist, driven by a belief in the superiority of himself and his fellow wealthy elitists, then what we are facing is not one man, or even one family, but an ideology.

This is not a trivial point. One man, whatever his wealth, can be stopped easily enough. But even if Bill Gates were to be thrown in jail tomorrow, the agenda that has already been set in motion would continue without missing a beat. An entire infrastructure of researchers, labs, corporations, governmental agencies and public health bodies exists, funded more often than not by Gates, but driven by the belief of all those millions of people working for these various entities that they are truly working in the best interest of the people.

No, an ideology cannot be stopped by stopping one man. It can only be stopped when enough people learn the truth about this agenda and the world of total, pervasive control that is coming into view.

If you have watched all four parts of this exploration on Bill Gates, then you are now one of the most informed people on the planet about the true nature of this agenda. You have seen how the takeover of public health has been used to railroad the world into a headlong rush toward mandatory vaccinations, biometric identification and digital payments. You have seen how the pieces of this puzzle fit together, and how they represent a far greater threat to the future of humanity than any virus.

Here is the good news: Armed with this information, you have the antidote to the scourge of this eugenicist ideology. The truth is that ideologies are viruses of the mind; they spread from person to person, infecting them with ideas that can lead to a disease of the body politic.

But here is the even greater truth: Inoculations do work. Inoculations of truth against the lies of those spreading their poisonous ideology.

If you have made it this far, it is incumbent on you to help inoculate those around you against the corrupt ideology of Bill Gates and all those who seek to control the population of the world. You must help to spread this information so that others have a chance to see the bigger picture and decide for themselves whether they are willing to roll up their sleeves and accept what is coming, or not.

But time is not on our side. Even as we speak, mass vaccination campaigns are being prepared:

ALLISON ARWADY: You know we are already building our plans to vaccinate the whole city of Chicago and working with others across the region on a major plan for this. We’ve bought syringes, we’ve bought cold boxes, we’ve planned out locations.

SOURCE: COVID COACH

Biometric identification schemes and “immunity passports” are already being rolled out:

CARYN SEIDMAN BECKER: And so while we started with travel, at our core we’re a biometric-secure identity platform, where it’s always been about attaching your identity to your boarding pass at the airport or your ticket to get into a sports stadium or your credit card to buy a beer. And so now with the launch of Clear Health Pass, it’s about attaching your identity to your COVID-related health insights for employers, for employees, for customers.

SOURCE: CLEAR’s new Health Pass service to help screen for coronavirus: CEO

Programs for tracking, tracing, and surveilling the entire population are already being beta-tested:

DEENA HINSHAW: Today we are launching another useful tool that can supplement the critical detective work we are conducting in public health. Alberta Trace Together is a voluntary secure mobile contact tracing application to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

SOURCE: Alberta rolls out COVID-19 contact tracing app

And the digital payment infrastructure, the system of financial exclusion that will allow governments to turn off our access to the economy at will, is being put into place:

UHURU KENYATTA: In order to avoid the risk of transmission through physical handling of money, we encourage the use of cashless transactions such as mobile money M-Pesa and otherwise and credit cards.

SOURCE: Uhuru: Government encourages cashless transactions to reduce risk of coronavirus transmission

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: People are using touchless payment systems much more than they’re using cash, both because we’re not interacting with people directly as much anymore and also because cash is kind of skeezy.

SOURCE: A Post-Pandemic Cashless Society? Was Remote NFL Draft a Tech Success? | Tech In :60 | GZERO Media

We must spread the word about the dark nature of this population control agenda to as many people as we can before our ability to speak out against this agenda is taken away for good.

Thanks to the likes of Bill Gates, the virus of this population control agenda is already here. It is threatening to crash the system as we’ve known it.

But if Bill Gates has taught us anything, it’s how to deal with a virus.

It’s time for a hard reset.

May 24, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | 1 Comment

Government by billionaires? Cuomo names former Google CEO to join Gates & Bloomberg in drafting post-pandemic ‘reforms’

RT | May 6, 2020

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has appointed ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt to lead a panel on post-pandemic “reform” of health and education systems, despite criticism for taking other billionaires with conflicts of interest on board.

Schmidt will head a ‘Blue Ribbon Commission’ tasked with “reimagining” New York’s existing systems of healthcare and education, Cuomo announced on Wednesday during his daily coronavirus briefing. The decision to place such power in the hands of another unelected billionaire has riled critics already uneasy about the governor’s post-Covid-19 plans.

The panel’s initial priorities will be “tele-health, remote learning and broadband,” Schmidt announced, dropping into Cuomo’s broadcast. The former Google exec still receives a paycheck from parent company Alphabet in an advisory capacity, raising questions of conflict of interest given Google’s leading role in developing a digital contact-tracing platform for Covid-19. While Cuomo confirmed in the same presser that the state is partnering with former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg – another billionaire – in building a human contact-tracing network, any digital component will likely involve the participation of Google. At the same time, the tech giant’s insatiable hunger for health data, as evinced by initiatives like Project Nightingale and Google’s acquisition of Fitbit, is unlikely to sit well with New Yorkers concerned about the company’s privacy record.

Cuomo was previously deluged by criticism after announcing on Tuesday that he would place the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in charge of developing a “blueprint to reimagine education in the new normal,” praising former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates as a “visionary” and calling for state schools to be “revolutionized.” Public schooling groups slammed the billionaire, accusing him of promoting “one failed educational initiative after another, causing huge disaffection in districts throughout the state.”

The Gates Foundation poured nearly half a billion dollars of its own money into the notorious Common Core program, which while pitched as a way to improve floundering educational performance in mathematics has actually caused the US to drop even lower in international rankings since its nationwide implementation in 2013. After steering over $4 trillion of taxpayer dollars into the government-funded program, the Foundation tacitly admitted failure in 2016, acknowledging in a letter to donors that it had “underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement [Common Core].”

Cuomo himself has landed in hot water in the past for his efforts to unilaterally refashion New York’s admittedly dilapidated public school system. In 2015, he was accused of “unconstitutional interference in education policy” by New York State Allies for Public Education, which highlighted his “cozy relationships” with charter school advocates and education technology businesses. One of those education technology businesses was Google. In 2014, Schmidt, then the company’s executive chairman, was appointed to a three-person commission to advise on a ‘Smart Schools’ bond issue, setting off alarm bells among consumer advocates who pointed out that Google would directly benefit from system-wide adoption of Google Apps and Chromebook laptops.

The New York governor’s history with his state’s healthcare system is equally checkered, marked by a long string of budget cuts, hospital consolidations, and layoffs, and his pledge to “revolutionize” the chronically strapped system has already gotten off on a bad foot. On Wednesday, Cuomo announced that out-of-state nurses who had come to New York to help out with the coronavirus epidemic would be required to pay state income tax on whatever compensation they had received, even if they were being paid by companies located in their home state.

Cuomo’s decision to appoint private equity bigwigs, including Bill Mulrow of Blackstone Group and Steven Cohen of MacAndrews & Forbes, to the economic advisory team charged with reopening New York has also come in for criticism, given that private equity firms often benefit from the same bankruptcies the state’s businesses are hoping to avoid.

May 7, 2020 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Google, Mike Bloomberg, New York | 5 Comments

ONE IN SEVEN Americans would avoid Covid-19 treatment for fear of cost, as pricey new pill shows promise

By Helen Buyniski | RT | April 30, 2020

Some 14 percent of US adults would forgo medical care for Covid-19 symptoms because they couldn’t pay for it, a new poll has found – yet oblivious health authorities act as if the epidemic will be solved by drugs alone.

One in seven American adults would avoid seeking healthcare if they or a family member experienced symptoms of Covid-19, out of concern they would be unable to afford treatment, according to a Gallup poll published on Tuesday. Even if they specifically believed themselves to be infected with the coronavirus, nine percent would forgo care for financial reasons, the poll found.

Their fears are well-founded – the average cost of coronavirus treatment in an intensive care unit runs over $30,000, according to a study released earlier this month by insurance industry group America’s Health Insurance Plans. Even for those who avoid the ICU, American healthcare is the most expensive in the world, and stories of coronavirus patients being whacked with gargantuan medical bills are a dime a dozen two months into the pandemic.

Making matters worse is the unemployment crisis, as about 55 percent of Americans receive healthcare through their jobs. Upwards of 30 million have filed for unemployment in the last five weeks, adding an unprecedented number of families to the ranks of the uninsured – which were already estimated in December to include 27.5 million people, more than the population of Australia. Even those lucky enough to have kept their jobs and insurance may face steep co-pays or other

After a handful of highly-publicized cases in which Americans died of the virus after being turned away by hospitals for lack of money, President Donald Trump ordered hospitals to pay for the cost of Covid-19 treatment, and several large insurers promised at the beginning of the month to waive all co-pays for coronavirus testing for 60 days. However, those coverage pledges do not include other costs associated with hospitalization, like ambulance transportation; outpatient treatment; or treatment for non-Covid-19 patients. Individuals seeking treatment have been tested and received the good news that they don’t have the virus – only to be hit shortly thereafter with the bad news that they’re on the hook for thousands of dollars in costs.

Low-income respondents were much more likely to report they would not seek care for financial reasons. Perhaps more troublingly, respondents with annual income under $40,000 were almost four times as likely as those with incomes over $100,000 to report that they or a family member had been turned away from a hospital for reasons related to overcrowding or high patient volume, the Gallup poll found.

While a study of the experimental drug remdesivir as a treatment for Covid-19 published positive preliminary results on Wednesday, such treatment is likely to remain just as far out of reach as existing coronavirus care for many patients. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, nevertheless cheered the results, declaring the trial had “proven” that “a drug can block this virus.”

Absent from his victory dance was the fine print that Gilead, the company that owns remdesivir, has been skewered in the past for drug-profiteering, tripling the price of a pill it purchased to treat hepatitis C and charging $2,000 per month for the HIV drug Truvada, which costs $6 per pill to make. Gilead only reversed course on its mission to lock down its patent on remdesivir by securing “orphan drug” status – a coveted designation that bars competitors from developing cheaper generic versions for seven years – after the Food and Drug Administration had already granted the status, triggering tremendous public criticism.

Gilead has tried to combat the bad PR by promising to donate 1.5 million doses of the drug to clinical trials, “compassionate use,” and other programs, but it has refused to commit to making remdesivir affordable. Until it does, all the positive test results in the world may not make a difference to the poorest and most vulnerable patients in the US.

May 6, 2020 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Human rights, United States | 1 Comment

Swedish Firms to Pay Billions to Shareholders While Firing Workers and Seeking Aid Amid Pandemic

Sputnik – May 6, 2020

Swedish manufacturing giants, including luxury car-maker Volvo, bearing manufacturer SKF AB and Assa Abloy conglomerate, are still paying out around 15 billions of kronor (or $1.5 billion in total) to their shareholders despite applying for state aid during the coronavirus pandemic and laying off thousands of workers who are now also seeking financial support, Bloomberg revealed.

Earlier, the Committee on Finance in Sweden’s Riksdagen made a plea to prohibit dividends for companies that have been appealing for state aid during COVID-19 health crisis in a bid to stay afloat during economic turmoil. This measure, however, still has not been introduced.

Volvo is reportedly planning to pay out 11.2 billion kronor ($1.1 billion) to its owners in dividends, while some 20,000 of its employees have been fired in Sweden. At the same time, SKF, which has recently applied for a $4 million aid package from the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth, is believed to be planning a payment of $132 million to its shareholders.

“The finance committee is unanimous in its position that such payouts are unjustifiable,” said a spokesman for Swedish parliamentary Christian Democrats party, Jakob Forssmed. “There should be a clear signal for large listed companies to act accordingly if they are interested in large subsidies from the state, regardless of legislation.”

So far, the Social Democrat-led government headed by Prime Minister Stefan Lofven remained deaf to calls from the parliament’s finance committee to ban dividends for companies relying on state aid. Some officials, including Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson, also emphasised that the reasons for absence of any actions in this regard is explained by the fact that administration was seeking a “trade-off” between taking perfect measures and being “swift”, as suspending dividends would have potentially slowed down the response to the COVID-19 crisis.

She still argued, however, that this situation can be changed in the end if companies become “too generous” with their shareholders while the economic crisis resulting from the coronavirus pandemic is still unrolling.

In the end of April, the Swedish government presented an additional measure that will help around 180,000 national businesses that lost their turnover during the pandemic with a projected share of $4 billion in state support.

May 6, 2020 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Sweden | Leave a comment

REVIEW: ‘Planet of the Humans’ lands the occasional hit, but pulls too many punches

By John Steppling | OffGuardian | May 3, 2020

Michael Moore is estimated to be worth 50 million dollars. He is a wealthy man. His political support is for the Democratic Party. He has stumped for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in New York and for Rashida Tlaib in Michigan (does one need to say more?). Moore is essentially a brand.

Moore came to prominence with Roger and Me, but became a part of the cultural zeitgeist with Bowling for Columbine. Moore was satirized in TV cartoons like South Park (a sort of cultural marker for brand success), but despite his celebrity there has been in subsequent films a gradual yet inexorable expression of the law of diminishing (box office) returns.

He has now granted his imprimatur as producer (a bit like Nike is now branding medical face masks. Well… OK… not exactly like that, but still…) on a new documentary by Jeff Gibbs: Planet of the Humans.

Now, the essential and overriding two problems with this film can be generalized as absence of class analysis, and an absent analysis of western Imperialism.

More succinctly, the military is never mentioned, not ever. And the open Malthusian meme ‘we are the problem’, or what is often called ‘the overpopulation argument’ (or Pogo argument) is a profoundly reactionary and racist idea based on classic eugenics, and the one glaring omission and the other rather disturbing ideology, eclipse the genuine (though limited) truths of the film.

And I say limited because while, yes, Al Gore is a ruling class vulture and Bill McKibben an opportunistic self-promoting liar, and pointing this out is correct and even satisfying, these points are subsumed by Gibbs greater political mystifications.

The curious result of these missing ideas and the criticism of them and by extension the film, means that finds oneself aligned, however fleetingly, with people who hate the film for exactly the wrong reasons — the pro capitalist DNC linked pro climate justice. Green energy supporters, among whom one can count Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who producer Michael Moore supports and campaigns for (cognitive dissonance exhibit A) and all the myriad other corporate interests that Cory Morningstar painstakingly catalogues in her Wrong Kind of Green blog.

There have been hysterical attacks on Gibbs from these people, and they are wrong. And their egregious *wrongness* here still doesn’t mean its not a flawed film.

But herein lies the real issues that need to be carefully tweezed apart. Even Cory Morningstar linked to the film on the above-mentioned blog.

On an importantly positive note, the stuff that Gibbs gets right is important and one wishes dearly he were a more sophisticated political thinker. And that he wasn’t working with Moore. But details on industrial energy, palm oil, all the massive destruction caused by solar and wind power. That the hype for renewable energy is dishonest and manipulative. Gibbs is exactly right (though a bit late to the party one has to say).

The attacks on him from the proto-capitalist green energy people are cynical and dishonest.

The film is not without poignancy. The image of an 800-year-old Joshua Tree being ground up will not soon leave you, nor the image of the Orangutan – that Orangutan – this is the future under capitalism. There is no escape from it.

I want to return to the nature of the acute ambivalence this film elicits, but first, another factor needs to be noted. Timing.

That this film (which was rejected, apparently, by major distributors, although I have no direct evidence of this) is released during the Corona panic (for free), during the global house arrest (and this, in turn, means a necessary sidebar on Bill Gates) is troubling.

One of the most prevalent themes being repeated ad nauseam in media is one that depicts the suddenly clean waters of the Venice canals, the return of wildlife to the suburbs of America and northern Europe, and the generally breathable air of previously polluted big cities. And the message is, like the Gibbs film, “we are the problem”. Get rid of people, or keep them inside, and voila… an Edenic Gaia. The film then becomes tantamount to a marketing campaign for depopulation simply by virtue of its release date.

This, in turn, links to another problem with Planet of the Humans, and that is that it is very white. And I find a surprising number of (surprise) white people who either will object to this description, or simply tell you it has no meaning. But it does have meaning and it has history.

A history where twelve presidents owned and worked slaves. A history in which the U.S. Army gave out blankets, infected with smallpox, to native american tribes. Ponder that. The U.S. history is so interwoven with its slave-owning and genocidal past; add Manifest Destiny, and the Monroe doctrine, and sixty years of intense anticommunism and covert CIA coups – many of which targeted post-independence Africa – that history is inseparable from any cultural or political product.

THAT history colours all cultural discussion, it cannot be escaped. And there is an unsettling sense of privilege (even if not literally true) in listening to a white guy intone for a hundred minutes.

So, when white men narrate films where nearly all humans are white, it is ipso facto problematic. White men with apparently no politics beyond ‘trees are nice’.

Now, having said this, the subject Gibbs is tackling is important. Many of his conclusions are correct, but only up to a point because looming over everything is the spectre of de-population. And this Malthusianism is so threadbare at this point, so utterly at odds with the facts, that for Gibbs to promote it means he loses credibility for everything. And it’s sinister.

There are not too many people; thats simply not true, and in fact across the planet birth rates are cratering (why is IVF such big business?) But again, if one reads the reviews in corporate-owned media (Vox, or Salon et al.) it’s enough to make one root for and defend Gibbs… almost.

In fact, reading the mainstream press on the topic of this film is an object lesson in how propaganda is disseminated. It is a perfect illustration of the internalizing of the meta-narrative for climate, as it is for Covid 19. They can’t be separated, just as drone assassination and US/NATO Imperialist wars cannot be separated from SWAT teams kicking in doors in south-central.

The fact that the U.S. has over two million people in prison, which is the most per capita and real in the world, and that two million with a disproportionate number of black prisoners, is also suggestive of a deep intractable terror of a planet with dwindling white power.

But cutting across this, as I say, is the frightening erosion of democracy in the Covid 19 emergency. Never mind Malaria killed 400,000 last year, or that even the slimy frontman for Gates and his friends, Dr Fauci, admits the case mortality rate will be very low. It doesn’t matter because this stopped being about the virus long ago.

Here is essential reading regarding Gates…. two pieces. One from Jake Levich and the next from Alison McDowell.

I read in social media how people are so inspired about ‘frontline medical workers’ (you see there is always a new vocabulary, much like with climate and carrying capacity and wet bulbs and 6th mass extinction etc) and yet, in fact, huge numbers of hospitals are closing (likely to never reopen) and those doctors and nurses and now among the growing mass of unemployed in the US.

It seems the American bourgeoisie want to believe this is a dire threat. They want to self isolate. Perhaps this massive quarantine is a time of leisure that they don’t often get. I have no idea, honestly. But I do know for certain the quarantines will kill far more than the virus, in the long term, and that the new mass upticks in surveillance and invasions of privacy won’t ever be rolled back. But the bigger question is in terms of global travel and the Gates agenda (see Fourth Industrial Revolution, smart cities, etc).

What Gates wants is everyone to carry a certificate (or microchip) that indicates if they have had this or that vaccination. This is exactly what your dog has to have when you fly them out of the country.

I am deeply sorry Gibbs did not resist, or maybe actively joined, the agenda of the eugenicists. And as to the lack of mention of the military, well, I honestly don’t know how that is even possible if you claim to be making a documentary about destruction of the planet. The US war machine cuts across ever aspect of human existence today. That is not hyperbole. And yet Gibbs ignored it. I want to defend Gibbs against the corporate attacks against him, but I find it hard. And a final thought on all this.

The white liberal educated class so hate Trump that all rational perspective is lost. Anything that throws shade on Trump is a good thing. And this hatred is being enjoyed far too much; it is as if Trump came along and answered their unconscious prayers for active exercise of a deep soul-crushing hate. It bonds people, a negative bonding to be sure, but that is better than nothing.

The pimps for lockdown seem impervious to the loss of millions of jobs (just today in Norway SAS airlines cut 5000 jobs, and nobody expects them back. Or in Hollywood, as shooting resumes, crews are decimated. Thousands of jobs that likely won’t return). The importance of specific facts in Planet of the Humans are undeniable. I sincerely hope people will watch it, but watch it with an educated critical eye. For Gibbs is in bed with this man.

Two multi-millionaires performing the role of concerned citizens, and confused, confused I tell you, why people don’t want to lose their jobs and ability to feed their families.

Cory Morningstar wrote just the other day:

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the #coronavirus pandemic, America’s ultra-wealthy elite have seen their net worth surge by $282 billion in just 23 days.”

There seems an almost class divide actually, for both climate discourse and corona discourse. The working-class fear loss of food and shelter far more than an only moderately lethal virus. They fear the excesses of federal bureaucracies, and the boot-heel of domestic US city police departments, not to mention custodial supervision. The white educated bourgeoisie fear but are also exhilarated by this contagion. As the lockdown began the top viewing film on Netflix that week was Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011).

This is exciting they think, and it allows yet another new vocabulary. So in social media where once one was confronted with endless white guys who were getting to play being scientists and climatologists, now one is running into a constant stream of Epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists and biologists.

I’m going to quote myself here, with apologies, from a recent blog post:

The pandemic is fetishized and much like the climate alarmism associated with Greta and The Guardian paper, there is a curious fetishized and cultic response in much of the population. And it is the latent masochism of the already terrorized. It also feels like a faint cry of Puritan angst, a call to piety. This is a very American sensibility, this punitive moralism.

And I want to quote Paul Haeder, who is a social worker and writer in Oregon. This is a comment he made on his blog (which you should all read) here:

And the underlying message is population control. The great white hope of Michael Moore and I guess Jeff Gibbs is really the underpinning of the flick – and no credence is given to the millions upon millions of people fighting this bastardization of humanity, of life, called Western Capitalism. There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of groups that Gibbs could have put front and center who are local, indigenous, part of the peasant movement, others, who are real forest protectors and water protectors and life protectors.

The for Evidence-Based Medicine (Oxford University) has the infection fatality rate at between 0.1% and 0.36%. That is pretty much what seasonal flu comes in at. [It should be noted that SARS-CoV-2 is far more transmissible, and that populations still lack immunity, making comparison with influenza based simply on the infection fatality rate fundamentally wrong (.36% of 7 billion is over 25 million)]. Something many of us said a month ago. The comparisons between the climate discourse and the Covid discourse are striking. One might even think there was an agenda here. But such topics are nowhere to be seen in the Gibbs film.

Which is fine, I suppose, if he only had viewed the lies and venality of the boosters for New green capitalism in something like a political frame. His obvious personal disappointment ends up feeling like, again, privilege.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is one meant to permanently eliminate humans from their work and livelihoods. This is the dream of the 1%. The fact that western capital continues to promote the “we are the enemy” meme should make us suspicious. It does not seem to have made Gibbs suspicious at all.

Watch the full documentary on Bitchute.

May 2, 2020 Posted by aletho | Environmentalism, Film Review, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | 1 Comment

France and COVID-19: Incompetence and Conceit

By Patrick Howlett-Martin | CounterPunch | April 22, 2020

On December 31, 2019, the Chinese government informed the World Health Organization of an epidemic of animal origin in Wuhan, reporting similarities to SARS-CoV (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, originally appearing in 2002 in the province of Guangdong) and to MERS-CoV (Middle East Repiratory Syndrome, originally appearing in Saudi Arabia in 2012). On January 12, Chinese scientists shared the completely sequenced genome of this new coronavirus with the entire international scientific community.

The epidemic had already killed 80 people in China and thousands were infected. The city of Wuhan (11 million inhabitants) and the province of Hubei (60 million inhabitants the city of Wuhan included) were isolated on January 25-26. Factories, offices, stores, schools, universities, museums, and airports were all closed down.Urban transportation in the city was significantly reduced. As a precaution, the authorities extended the Chinese New Year vacation by one week (January 23-31) to cover the incubation period for the virus among the inhabitants of Wuhan who left the city and could have been infected. They set up shelter hospitals (“fangcang”) in gymnasiums, conference centers, hotels, and other facilities to separate the symptomatic and the likely-infected from their healthy relatives. With the number of ill people exceeding local hospital capacity, the authorities set up two 1,200-bed hospitals in fifteen days and summoned medical and voluntary nursing personnel from all over China. More than 42,000 healthcare personnel responded. Despite the use of Personal Protective Equipment, 4.4% of them (3,387) had tested positive and 23 had died as of April 3 according to the Chinese Red Cross.^[1] The lockdown was strict and neighborhood committees were mobilized to ensure food deliveries to the inhabitants. Masks were requisitioned and distributed to the population. Street fixtures and furniture were disinfected, even banknotes were disinfected. The average age of the ill was 55 and 56% of them were men. No case of infection was reported in anyone under the age of 15.

All this information was shared in international medical journals by Chinese doctors and researchers starting on February 20.^[2] The creation of hospitals ex nihilo in the space of a fortnight was given ample coverage in the media but the French authorities did not appreciate the gravity of the implications: they preferred to view the initiative as the Chinese marketing their public works. In mid-January, COVID-19 cases were recorded in Bangkok, Tokyo, and Seoul. Thermal sensors were installed in the airports of China, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. On January 26, the authorities in Hong Kong cancelled all sports and cultural events. A testing campaign began in the city on February 18.

And what of France? On January 24, the Ministry of Health announced that three patients coming from China had been hospitalized with the coronavirus. The French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) outlined two scenarios for the spread of COVID-19: one high-risk, the other low-risk. Given air traffic, the countries estimated to be the most exposed were Germany and the United Kingdom. Italy was not even mentioned. The Minister of Health, Agnès Buzyn, commented on the INSERM scenarios that same day as she left the Council of Ministers: “the risk of secondary infection from an imported case is very low and the risk of propagation of the virus in the population is also very low.”^[3]

On January 30, France repatriated 250 French citizens and 100 European immigrants from Wuhan, putting them in quarantine in southern France. On February 10, a British citizen coming from Singapore infected five other people in the small Alpine ski resort of Contamines-Montjoie. A summary screening did not detect other cases at the resort. The infected were hospitalized. Buzyn reminded us on that occasion that “the risk of infection is very low; only close and sustained contact with an infected person can increase it.”^[4]

At that point, with 900 reported dead in China, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made clear reference to the danger of global propagation, “we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg.”^[5]

But in France the authorities—duly warned but strangely untroubled—took no particular measures. On March 6, while at the theatre with his wife, President Macron stated, “Life goes on. There is no reason, except for the more vulnerable members of the population, to change our outing habits.”^[6] His aim was to encourage the French to continue to go out despite the coronavirus epidemic and the lack of protective masks. That same day, the Italian government decided to lock down Lombardy, extending the provision to the entire country the following day. While Macron was enjoying the performance, there were 613 cases of coronavirus in France and the number was doubling every three days (roughly the same rate recorded by Chinese physicians in Wuhan in January and seen in South Korea and Italy). Extrapolating this exponential growth, it could be estimated that on March 16 there would be approximately 6,500 cases; the final official figure was 6,633.

The French government was all focused on the pension reform, president Macron’s top priority. Protests were organized in all French cities: retirees, railway workers, physicians, lawyers, fire fighters, and students all took to the streets. The demonstrations were violently suppressed by the police. Economists were in unanimous agreement—a rare event—that the proposed reform would harm all categories of worker except those in the upper income brackets. Sociologists warned the government about the deepening social schisms, as had been thrust into the public eye earlier with the 12 months revolt of the gilets jaunes [yellow vests]. These protests had been staged every Saturday for nearly a year in all cities in France, drawing in a broad range of the hardest-hit social and occupational categories, a large portion of whom were pensioners. But all for naught: on Saturday afternoon, February 29, with the chamber of the Assemblée nationale -where the debate on the bill was taking place—almost empty because of the of the day, the government seized the opportunity of the COVID-19 pandemic to pass pension reform by constitutional decree. On that date, gatherings of more than 900 people were prohibited because of COVID-19. The authorities no longer risked protests by the people in the street.

But the Macron administration did not stop there. Against the advice of the medical team and the stadium manager, it authorized a Juventus–Olympique Lyonnais football match for the Round of 16 in the Champions League. Three thousand Italian fans were in Lyon on February 26: at that time Italy had 21 coronavirus deaths and 900 people infected. Dr. Marcel Garrigou-Grandchamp, who had warned the new Minister of Health on the morning of the match, published an opinion piece on the website of the Fédération des Médecins de France on March 31, where he spoke of an “explosion” in coronavirus cases in the Département du Rhône some two weeks after the OL–Juventus match. A similar sequence of events had taken place in Italy with the Atalanta B.C. – Valencia match on February 19, termed a “bomba biologica” by many Italian physicians. It was March 4, fifteen days after the match, that the number of cases in the Lombard city of Bergamo exploded, making it the most heavily impacted city in Italy. Walter Ricciardi, Italian representative to the WHO, acknowledged that the match had been a “catalyst for the propagation of the virus”. The Paris-Nice 8-stage professional cycling race was held as scheduled from March 8th to the 15th. More significantly, the government confirmed the first phase of municipal elections on March 15, after it had ordered the closure of schools and universities on March 12 and the shutdown of most stores, bars, and restaurants on March 14. There are 34,000 communes in France that had to organize the elections with local volunteers: volunteers and voters without adequate protection—there were no masks available. The government had requisitioned them for hospital personnel, where the shortage was critical. Half of the voters stayed home for safety’s sake. To make matters worse, Agnès Buzyn announced her candidacy for mayor of Paris on February 16, less than one month before the election, to take the place of the government’s candidate, Benjamin Griveaux, who had been discredited when an explicit video he had sent to a young woman was posted online. Buzyn left the Ministry of Health in the middle of the Coronavirus crisis. The healthcare workers who had organized numerous strikes over the previous eleven months to protest the deterioration of public hospitals felt belittled. Losing by a wide margin, Buzyn declared in an interview for Le Monde that the election had been a “masquerade”.^[7] The lockdown was not ordered until the day after the elections, politique oblige.

The new Minister of Health, Olivier Vérant, a member of parliament with the party in power, took up the government’s mantra, one that every minister and secretary of state is expected to chant in unison: “masks are useless, the tests are unreliable”. They all swear by handwashing and lockdowns. No reference is made to the way things had been handled in Seoul, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, where free masks were distributed and people were required to wear them, and large-scale testing was carried out, and where economic life goes on, in slow motion, but it goes on. Today, with 23 million inhabitants, Taiwan has recorded 6 COVID-19 deaths; Hong Kong, with 7 million inhabitants, has lost 4. As for the French doctors who were in Wuhan working alongside their Chinese colleagues and thus well informed, they were not even consulted.

The French police stop and fine transgressors, solitary walkers or joggers, while the metro, airports, trams, and buses are all operating and supermarkets and tobacconists are open for business. The police are themselves without masks and many fall victim to the virus, becoming potential carriers. The same is true of healthcare and administrative personnel, working without personal protective equipment in retirement homes. The authorities refused to report the number of victims among healthcare workers, citing “medical secrecy” concerns. The elderly die but are not counted in the official statistics. Nor are those who die at home. Now that their numbers are so high and can no longer be ignored, we discover that the residents of these retirement homes account for 40% of the deaths recorded in France. They are not hospitalized. Their treatment? Paracetamol for the mildly afflicted, morphine for the rest. Close to half of the nursing staff in retirement homes are affected by the epidemic.^[8] But the government is powerless: it does not have sufficient testing solution and will not allow tests to be conducted in retirement homes unless there is a confirmed case there. Ubuesque!

The borders remain open. President Macron refuses to close the border with Italy, which the leader of the Rassemblement National party, Marine Le Pen has been demanding since February 26. For the Head of State, the problem posed by the epidemic “can only be resolved through perfect European and international cooperation.” The events of the following days would quickly contradict this wishful thinking. Every country has closed in on itself. But not France. There are no health controls at French airports, train stations, or ports. Not even today, April 18, 2020, when the official death toll has reached 18,000. In the worksite next to my home, Italian workmen come to work, without protective equipment, every morning on the 7:35 train from Ventimiglia, getting off at the Gare d’Eze: no checks when they depart, no checks when they arrive. Italy has now officially recorded more than 23,660 deaths. On its April 18 evening newscast, the television station Antenne 2 aired the report by journalist Charlotte Gillard, who had taken an Air France flight from Paris to Marseille: the plane was packed, not a free seat, the passengers did not have masks, no one’s temperature was checked on either departure or arrival.

We gradually learn from news reported in the press that France currently has no stores of masks or test kits. For economic reasons—annual savings of 30 million euros—the country’s strategic stocks were depleted in 2012 and never replenished. On the eve of 2020, when the coronavirus epidemic began to spread, France’s supplies consisted of zero FFP2 masks, 117 million adult surgical masks, and 40 million pediatric masks! The hospitals are experiencing critical mask shortages. The nursing staff in retirement homes have no protection (no gloves, no masks, no sanitizing gel). There is no more sanitizing gel available in pharmacies or stores. Doctors and nurses do not have the equipment they need. As for hospitals, they have neither enough beds nor enough ventilators to adequately cope with the epidemic.

The French authorities do not admit it publicly. And they seem to drag their feet for reasons that are impossible to grasp. They did not expect this. And when it began to materialize, they denied it for reasons that can only be called conceit, a traditional mark of distinction among the French political elite. The French regions authorities, realizing the government deficiencies, order and purchase their supplies directly from China. When they arrive, they are requisitioned by the state: thus 4 million masks that were ordered from China by Bourgogne-Franche-Comté for the nursing staff in its retirement homes were confiscated on the tarmac of the Basel-Mulhouse airport by the police on April 4, using methods that would make a gangster blush. As for the rare mayors who have stocks of personal protective equipment and graciously make them available to the local population, requiring the use of masks, they are taken to court by the Ministry of the Interior, which wants to preserve its royal prerogatives. On April 16, the Council of State, the highest administrative body in France, asserted its regal status by limiting the power of mayors. The decision calls to mind its role in 1942-1944 during the Vichy regime. It stays true to itself; it serves the State, not the Nation.

The nurses in the intensive care units in Paris hospitals report that given the shortage of beds and ventilators, they are essentially practicing battlefield medicine. This means there is a triage among the sick, choosing between those considered too old and those the doctors feel have a better chance of recovery.^[9] It is no coincidence that the two European countries least afflicted by the pandemic are well-equipped Austria and Germany, which have not, so far, experience a shortage of beds or ventilators. In France, veterinarians are lending their ventilators to hospitals! Instead of nationalizing private clinics as they have done in Ireland, they transport patients long distances in medical trains, helicopters, or buses to less congested hospitals in the province or abroad (Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg), increasing the possibility of infecting healthcare personnel and the risk of death. The statistics are biased because patients over the age of 75 do not have access to the ICU services: this is a sad fact for retirement homes.

It was not until March 28 that the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, announced: “More than a billion masks have been ordered from France and other countries for the coming weeks and months.” This was the man who a few days earlier repeated publicly, in a sort of litany, that masks were useless.

In its decision of April 15 on the screening and protection of the elderly, the Council of State revealed the extent of the disaster. Assailed by associations demanding that people living in retirement homes and their caregivers be systematically tested and that protective equipment (masks, sanitizing gel) be distributed, the Council of State limited itself to reciting the paltry figures promulgated by the government (“40,000 tests per day will be available across the country by the end of April; 60,000 will be available in the weeks to come”). So in mid-May, France will be ready to do close to what Germany has already been doing for a month and a half: 500,000 tests per week. As for masks, the “current orders amount to some 50 million masks”. However, given the delivery rate, it will take nine months to receive them all.

There are 430,000 healthcare personnel and 752,000 pensioners in retirement homes and health centers. All told, there are close to a million healthcare professionals (210,000 active doctors and 700,000 nurses and nursing assistants) in France.

Under these conditions, it is clear that Macron’s announcement of the end of the lockdown and the resumption of school classes on May 11 is a gamble. If all teachers were to return to the classroom, that would mean 870,000 masks per day—reuse of masks is contraindicated. And if all the students return on this date, or even gradually, they would have to be supplied with more than 12 million masks per day.

Even with the President publicizing the “grand public” mask, a French invention no doubt handcrafted locally, the end of the lockdown on May 11 and the resumption of school classes is at best a gamble; without reliable masks to protect the entire population, it is a risky and irresponsible act.

The end of a health crisis that the authorities did not anticipate will be all the more painful for the French, both fiscally and socially, with the President and his administration coming out of this ordeal diminished and wholly discredited.

Notes.

1) “Death from Covid-19 of 23 Health Care Workers in China”, The New England Journal of Medicine, April 15, 2020.

2) The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, see Chen Wang “Covid-19 control in China during mass population movements at New Year”, February 20, 2020 (on line).

3) Statement to the press, BFM TV, Palais de l ‘Elysée, January 24, 2020.

4) Benoit Pavan, “Coronavirus : la station de ski de Contamines-Montjoie, en Haute-Savoie, un foyer potentiel en France”, Le Monde, February 10, 2020.

5) Frederic Lemaître, “Coronavirus : la semaine où tout peut basculer”, Le Monde, February 9, 2020.

6) BFM TV, March 7, 2020.

7) Ariane Chemin, “Les regrets d’Agnès Buzyn : ‘On aurait dû tout arrêter, c’était une mascarade’”, Le Monde, March 17, 2020.

8) Béatrice Jérôme, Lorraine de Foucher, “Dans les Ehpad décimés par le coronavirus, ‘c’est un cauchemar collectif’”, Le Monde, April 2,l 2020.

9) “Une situation de médecine de guerre”, Nice Matin, April 16, 2020.

Patrick Howlett-Martin is a career diplomat living in Paris.

April 22, 2020 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Covid-19, France | 1 Comment

COVID-19: Fallout From a Navy Captain’s Heroism: The Possible Emergence of a New Idea of ‘National Security’

By Gareth Porter | Consortium News | April 13, 2020

The United States is experiencing an upheaval from the Coronavirus pandemic that is deeper than anything in modern American history, and military and civilian Pentagon elites have responded to it in a way that seems certain to further magnify the broader corrosive impact of the crisis on their enormous power.

It has further widened the existing socio-political seam between those elites and their servicemen and women who have faced threat to their health not only from pandemic itself but from the decisions made by military bureaucrats directly affecting their safety.

That is the larger significance of the dramatic recent events involving Captain Brett Crozier, the crew of USS Theodore Roosevelt and the hapless, now-cashiered Navy Secretary Thomas Modly.

Modly had made the most embarrassing public appearance of a senior official in recent history on board the stricken aircraft carrier after having relieved Captain Crozier, who had received an unprecedented standing ovation from his crew as he walked to shore. Modly not only attacked Crozier, suggesting he was “stupid” to circulate his letter urging immediate action to evacuate sailors from the ship but was condescending to the crew as well.

Modly’s rambling and profanity-laced talk to the crew clearly conveyed the official view that they had no business cheering their Captain, who had stood up for their interests, because he had embarrassed the “chain of command.”

Modly thus dramatically illustrated the wide gulf that separates military and civilian Pentagon elites from the lives of U.S. servicemen and women. The interests of the senior military and civilian officials in the Pentagon have always focused primarily on their missions and capabilities, which are the tokens of their power and prestige.

The health of soldiers and sailors has inevitably emerged as a secondary consideration, despite official protestations to the contrary. That much is clear from a review of the press briefing given by Modly and Chief of Naval Operation Admiral Michael Gilday on March 24, after the first three cases of Covid-19 had been identified on the Theodore Roosevelt.

Gilday revealed in the briefing that the Navy was only testing when there was evidence of symptoms and not for all sailors on board the ship.

The Navy Surgeon General Rear Admiral Bruce Gillingham further explained the Navy was doing “surveillance testing,” which he described as “cross section” testing, to “give us an idea”, rather than testing all the sailors on board. When another reporter asked how concerned the Navy was about a new cluster of cases emerging onboard, Gillnghham didn’t address that question and instead answered another question the reporter had posed.

Even more revealing of the Navy’s priorities, however, were the responses to a journalist’s observation that the Navy did not appear to have a coherent position guiding commanders in regard to maintaining social distance onboard. Modly said it was “almost impossible to try to micromanage these types of decisions,” and Gilday added, “We really do trust the judgment of our commanders, and so we’re giving them authority to do what they think they need to do to remain on mission and take care of people.”

USS Nimitz Also Threatened

Commanding officers could hardly have missed the clear implication that they were to “remain on mission” and do the best they could to deal with the risk of a Covid-19 outbreak that would inevitably be significant. By the time of that press briefing, of course, the virus was already spreading rapidly on the Theodore Roosevelt, and within days, it was a severe emergency demanding radical action.

The full story of what happened during those crucial days is still untold, but Captain Crozier obviously met resistance from the “chain of command” to his call for immediate evacuation of a very large number of the 4,000 sailors from the ship, leaving behind about 1,000 to maintain the nuclear reactors and the billions of dollars of weapons onboard.

The same pattern of Navy treatment of the problem is evident in the case of the USS Nimitz, which is still at its base in Bremerton, Washington. It has had two positive diagnoses, including one sailor who had taken sick while on leave. Fifteen more sailors who had been in contact with him had been taken off the ship and quarantined, but those remaining on board have not been tested for Covid-19, according to the father of a new member who has stayed in close contact with his son. The father reported last week that the screening included asking some, but not all crew members whether they felt ill.

The father told a reporter that he “feels like they’re not taking it seriously.” The Nimitz is preparing for sea trials this month that will last for weeks, and the Navy the Pentagon are obviously eager to have it proceed without delay. The responses of Vice-Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff Gen. John Hyten and Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist, at an April 8 press briefing, revealed unintentionally the way the Pentagon elite prioritizes its institutional interests over the military personnel facing the Covid-19 threat.

More than one journalist asked how the Pentagon was planning to adjust its operational tempo to take account of outbreaks like the one on the Theodore Roosevelt in the coming coming months. But Hyten and Norquist refused to acknowledge any such necessity. When one journalist asked how the Theodore Roosevelt could participate in combat if 10 percent of its crew were found to be positive for Covid-19, Norquist incredibly suggested the Navy could take it in stride, explaining, “[A] significant percentage for the military are asymptomatic. Others have mild flu-like symptoms, the sort of things that our fleet is normally used to dealing with.”

Reckoning Awaiting

Captain Crozier’s four-page letter, which had elicited the wrath of those Pentagon and Navy bureaucrats, challenged their deeply engrained habit of pursuing those institutional interests to demonstrate the super power of the U.S. military, while giving minimal weight to the costs imposed on ordinary soldiers and sailors.

“We are not at war,” Crozier had observed. “Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors.”

Taking Crozier down looked like a safe bet for opportunists like Modly, Norquist and Hyten, especially since Donald Trump had publicly scolded Crozier for sending the letter. But the political tide had already shifted against them, as Crozier emerged as a national hero for his defense of the interests of sailors against the wishes of the bureaucrats.

And more important, as Americans begin to come to grips with the enormity of the socio-economic catatrasophe caused by a global pandemic for which the United States government was totally unprepared, a reckoning seems inevitable for the political-military institutions represented by these officials.

Retired Army Gen. David Barno, who was head of the combined forces command in Afghanistan 2003-05 and Defense policy analyst Nora Bensahel, have predicted that Americans will not look at “national security” in the same way again. Instead, Barno and Bensahel write that Americans will “conclude that the country has gotten the very idea of security wrong.”

They wrote:

“Americans will look at national security differently than they did before and may no longer be willing – or even able – to give the Department of Defense almost three-quarters of a trillion taxpayer dollars each year to defend against foreign threats.

Americans will look at the biggest single discretionary spending line in the government’s budget and conclude that the country has gotten the very idea of security fundamentally wrong. They will realize that this massive loss of life was inflicted not by a terrorist attack or rampaging enemy armies, but by an unseen and amorphous health threat. And they will recognize that despite spending more than $700 billion each year on the Department of Defense, the Pentagon’s focus on external threats meant that it played only a very small role in protecting the nation against this deadly and life-changing threat, and in responding once it began to spill across the nation.”

A poll taken in February found that 31 percent of those surveyed thought that the United States was spending too much on defense. But that number will likely rise after the pandemic ends as Americans start to ask: How well did all that defense spending protect us? Many are likely to conclude that domestic threats and global health issues imperil their personal security and the American way of life far more than any looming foreign adversary. They may emerge from this crisis with radically different spending priorities (as discussed below) that will pressure the defense budget even further downward.”

The utter failure of the Pentagon bureaucracy to take care of its own soldiers and sailors in the face of the pandemic should combine with this broader shift in political attitudes and priorities to present the biggest threat to the power of the military-industrial-congressional complex in its entire history.

Out of the havoc and ruin of this disaster should emerge the first real opportunity for a popular movement to end the dominance of that complex over American politics, policy and resources once and for all.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. His latest book, with John Kiriakou, is “The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis: From CIA Coup to the Brink of War.”

April 13, 2020 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | United States | Leave a comment

Ecuador’s Covid-19 catastrophe is man-made disaster

For political elites ordinary Ecuadorians are just disposables

People wait next to coffins to bury their loved ones outside a cemetery in Guayaquyil, Ecuador, on April 6, 2020 © AFP / Jose Sanchez

By Pablo Vivanco | RT | April 7, 2020

Corpses line the streets of Ecuador’s city of Guayaquil, as it’s struggling to deal with the outbreak of Covid’19. But catastrophe could’ve been avoided had the political elites not put monied interest before the lives of people.

Even by Latin American standards, the images emerging from Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, have been shocking. Since the first case of Covid-19 was announced in late February, Ecuador has turned into the epicenter of the crisis in Latin America, touching many of the city’s 3 million residents.

“I know several people who have been infected and also some who have died,” Guayaquil resident Xavier Flores Aguirre tells me. “I think that by this point, everyone in Guayaquil is experiencing something similar.”

In the last weeks, videos and photos have been circulating on social media showing wrapped and covered bodies strewn on the streets in 30 degree temperatures.

Others chose to bury their dead loved ones in empty fields, some in mass graves, and in some cases even resorting to burning the corpses on the streets, all in desperate attempts to save other family members from being contaminated.

Government officials initially played down reports about the outbreak in the city, and Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno even tweeted on April 1 that this was “fake news with clear political intent.”

Ecuadorian authorities have become accustomed to either denying inconvenient facts, or to simply blame the previous government for any of the country’s woes, but when the mainstream media outlets that have toed government lines in the past began to report on the situation, they had no choice but to acknowledge what was happening.

The city’s hospitals are now spilling over with the sick and dead, and workers from morgues have not been picking up cadavers, leaving many with few options other than the moribound ones that are all over social media.

But who is to blame for the post-apocalyptic scenes in Ecuador’s busiest port?

“I think that the fact that Guayaquil is the most affected population is related to the development model imposed by the political right in the city since the 1990s,” says Flores Aguirre.

Home to the country’s wealthiest people, Guayaquil has long been governed by the Social Christian Party, which has concentrated resources and efforts on supporting the export industries of the city. Social investments have historically been paltry, and in 2018 the city put aside more money for publicity than it did for health. Despite its ‘law and order’ mantra, Guayaquil retains the highest homicide rates, and it has also been deemed as a central gateway for cocaine to Europe.

But the lack of social infrastructure created under decades of uninterrupted rule in Guayaquil can only partly explain why the city accounts for some 90% of the confirmed Covid-19 cases in the country.

Since the beginning of the outbreak, the city’s leaders have carried on as usual, allowing large gatherings to continue and even encouraging people to flock to the Copa Libertadores match in the city. Over 20,000 people showed up to see Barcelona SC play Independiente del Valle in what is certainly a repeat of ‘biological bomb’ in the Champions League match in Northern Italy between Atalanta and Valencia.

Even as the city garners world wide attention for the disaster on the streets, Mayor Cynthia Viteri branded a ‘donation of 1000 cardboard coffins’ to the victim’s families as an act of ‘solidarity.’ The level of contempt and disregard that Guayaquil’s leaders have shown their residents is truly astounding.

But Viteri and her party share responsibility with their allies for this debacle.

“The highest authorities of the central government must be held responsible for the ineffective, late and reactive response,” says Flores Aguirre, who is a constitutional lawyer by trade.

As soon as he was elected, President Moreno back-stabbed his former left-wing allies, as well as predecessor Rafael Correa, by forming a pact with right-wing parties and groups to dismantle the institutions and policies created by the ‘Citizen’s Revolution’ that he helped usher in. He also cosied up to Washington and brokered deals with the International Monetary Fund, all the while pushing through harsh austerity measures that have gutted key social services and diminished the state’s capacity to respond to a crisis like this.

In the health sector, the Moreno government slashed spending from $306 million in 2017 to $201 million in 2018, and then $110 million in 2019, according to a March report from the Central University of Ecuador.

Just two weeks after the first confirmed Covid-19 case, Moreno announced another budget cut of $1.4 billion, including the elimination of 4 regulatory and control agencies, 3 public companies and 4 technical secretariats. Later in March, Ecuador chose to pay $324 million to creditors instead of making investments to stem the impact of the impending crisis.

This is no coincidence of course, as creditors such as the IMF make reduction of public spending a condition of their loans, and this was certainly the case for Ecuador, where the proposed cuts sparked weeks of violent protests in October of 2019.

Moreno worked to dismantle the apparatus and regulations created under Correa, in order to return the country towards the model of governance that his allies have been carrying out in Guayaquil for decades. Simply put, the tragedy unfolding in Guayaquil is the result of the political leaders being unwilling to seriously confront any sort of social crisis, let alone a health related one, and decimated institutions being unable to.

What’s more, the specter of the Guayaquil problem threatens to spread across the country, as the state struggles to ensure police are allowed to patrol the popular tourist city of Banos, or even to properly equip or pay doctors at public hospitals while they attend to the worst crisis that has hit the country since the devastating 2016 earthquake.

Comparing the response now with that of the Correa government in 2016, where the central government moved to coordinate relief and rescue efforts quickly, underscores the fact that what is playing out in Guayaquil is a man-made tragedy.

Health workers wearing protective gear are seen behind body bags outside of Teodoro Maldonado Carbo Hospital in Guayaquil, Ecuador April 3, 2020 © REUTERS / Vicente Gaibor del Pino

The government now acknowledges almost 4,000 cases and under 200 deaths, but surely this number is considerably higher. A joint military-police operation in the city has now begun picking up more than 100 bodies a day, and the country’s health minister said in an interview that as many as 1,500 had died in the city so far.

Ecuador was already turning into a powder keg, as the October protest showed. However, this callous indifference in the handling of this crisis should make it clear that, to the country’s political elites, ordinary Ecuadorians are disposable. Once the dust has settled, those who have already had to scramble to dispose of the corpse of their uncle or grandmother won’t be likely to forget that quickly…

Pablo Vivanco is a journalist and analyst specializing in politics and history in the Americas, who served as the Director of teleSUR English. Recent bylines include The Jacobin, Asia Times, The Progressive and Truthout. Follow him on Twitter@pvivancoguzman

April 7, 2020 Posted by aletho | Economics, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Ecuador, IMF, Latin America | Leave a comment

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By Jon Collins | MPR | June 26, 2012

ST. PAUL, Minn. – About 100 Minnesota law enforcement officers attended a counter-terrorism training conference in Minneapolis Monday.

The conference was put on by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the FBI and Minnetonka police. … Full article

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People wait next to coffins to bury their loved ones outside a cemetery in Guayaquyil, Ecuador, on April 6, 2020 © AFP / Jose Sanchez

Health workers wearing protective gear are seen behind body bags outside of Teodoro Maldonado Carbo Hospital in Guayaquil, Ecuador April 3, 2020 © REUTERS / Vicente Gaibor del Pino

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