COVID-19 Is Both Serious and a Distraction

The director of WHO, who is a politician not a doctor, claimed a 3.4% mortality rate from COVID-19, setting off the panic that we have witnessed since.

But he was either mistaken or lying. Someone cooked the books.

His statistics compared confirmed cases to confirmed deaths. If that same methodology was used for seasonal flu, its mortality rate would appear to be around 10%. But that is not how the CDC and other organizations do it. They estimate 36 million cases of seasonal flu in this current "flu season", 222 thousand of which required medical attention (confirmed cases), 22 thousand of which have died (mortality). If standard methodology is applied to COVID-19, its mortality rate is somewhere between .2% and .8%.

It is a serious disease, but the panic is being manufactured to divert attention away from a collapsing financial market which itself is the predictable result of 100 years of the Federal Reserve and Wall Street rigging the economy in their own favor.

I'm not sure how returning a portion of every Americans' stolen money will help. The Fed has injected $2.2 trillion (with a "t") into (mostly) the banks in the past week alone, and it hasn't prevented the markets from crashing. Creating another $1 trillion out of thin air and handing some of it over to Americans is more than they usually do for us little people - prices generally don't rise overnight, and therefore those who receive those large injections of cash tend to benefit more from it than those of us who have to wait for it to "trickle down", by which time prices have risen and whatever crumbs we get have depreciated.

That process is precisely why we've experienced this "boom-bust" cycle (and perpetual militarism) since the Federal Reserve (and the income tax) was created in 1913. It's the old adage that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If your only tools are to lower interest rates and print money, even if doing so incentivizes malinvestment (because if they win, they win, but if they lose, the rest of us bail them out ... rinse repeat), that is what you're going to do.

So there are two points to be made here:

First, a bubble bursts when the chemical bonds on its membrane are under too much pressure. Lowering interest rates and printing money are analogous to increasing that pressure. The financial markets are by orders of magnitude the largest bubble in history.

Second, advocates of so-called "Modern Monetary Theory" think the solution is to lower interest rates and print more money ... without any sense of history, let alone irony. They believe this is proof of "late-stage capitalism" and that financialization is the natural evolution of capitalism. This is dead wrong. Between Nixon essentially aborting Bretton-Woods and Reagan advocating "supply-side" economics - which George HW Bush called "voodoo economics" but seemed curiously on board once he realized how much money it could make the Carlyle Group - we have been bailing out speculators, and as a result more and more of the US economy has moved away from production of goods and services toward riskier and riskier financial instruments. "Supply-side" is mercantilism, not capitalism.

Contrary to what some politicians want you to believe - since the public schools don't teach civics or economics anymore - losses are at least as important to capitalism as profits. They are an indication of demand for goods and services. Demand drives supply, not the other way around, in actual capitalism. Is there a demand for F35s or $1200 coffee mugs? Then why are we paying for them? Exactly - because we don't have a choice.

When this virus calms down a bit in the warmer months (as most viruses do) and nobody hoarding toilet paper right now is the least bit ashamed; in a year or two when there's a widespread vaccine - a lot of people will be scratching their heads in the unemployment lines, wondering how the financial collapse happened. Some will be wondering how that temporary emergency power their government seized during a crisis somehow became permanent even after the crisis was abated. They can't say nobody saw it coming, because it's entirely predictable.

PS: When some algorithm written by some self-righteous asshole on here indicates duplicate content, I'm duplicating my own content. Fix your shit or at least keep it off my posts, or I will downvote your worthless bot.