Crisis

The decisions we take in this coronavirus crisis are defining us as a nation and a people.
Patrick BUCHANAN
The same day the number of U.S. dead from the coronavirus disease hit the 15,000 mark, we also crossed the 15 million mark on the number of Americans we threw out of work to slow its spread and “bend the curve.”
For each American lost to the pandemic, 1,000 Americans have lost their jobs because of conscious and deliberate decisions of the president and 50 governors.

Compare hundreds of millions of Asians’ serene response to the coroavirus crisis with the West’s fear, panic and hysteria
Pepe ESCOBAR
As the Raging Twenties unleash a radical reconfiguration of the planet, coronavirus (literally “crowned poison”) has for all practical purposes served a poisoned chalice of fear and panic to myriad, mostly Western, latitudes.

America’s bailout package to overcome the coronavirus ‘recession’ is twofold:
One part is printing money for employees and consumers, so that they won’t be thrown out onto the streets for non-payment of debts such as mortgages, car-loans, credit cards, and student loans.
Another part is printing money for bondholders and stockholders, so that their investments will still have value and there won’t be panicked selling of them as corporations accumulate soaring losses because consumers are staying home and are cutting way back on expenses.

A perception ‘gap’, so wide, you could sail a Cruise Liner through it. On the one hand, we have the looming spectre of recession; a major loss of jobs, and of earnings cratered (some 80% of the global workforce has seen their workplaces closed, or partly closed, as a result of the virus crisis), and on the other hand, the shocking non-sequitur of the U.S.

The coronavirus pandemic has shown that the twin processes of globalization and planned obsolescence are deficient and moribund. Globalization was predicated on a number of assumptions including the perpetuity of consumerism, and the withering away of national boundaries as transnational corporations so required.
What we see instead is not a globalization process, but instead a process of rising multipolarity and a rethinking of consumerism itself.

As the contemporary Corona virus hysteria narrative continues to collapse (here and here) another dubious narrative, launched a quarter of a century ago – Srebrenica genocide – comes to mind.

This has been the pattern: the Executive assumes new power that is never fully annulled when the threat ends.
Rick B. LARSEN

Julian Simon – thou shouldst be living at this hour.
Simon, of course, was the University of Maryland economist who caused a major intellectual stir in the early 1980s with a not-bad anti-Malthusian polemic called “The Ultimate Resource.

Major patterns of the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic are now all too clear: But the patterns that have emerged are never discussed in the 24/7 American Mainstream Media (MSM) and its European liberal wannabe cheerleaders led by the always ineffable BBC in Britain.
The right-wing old Reagan imperialists and fundamentalists continue to endlessly proclaim that the crisis has mortally wounded China’s standing in the world; That is simply a lie.

Pepe Escobar looks at a frightening future that might follow the already terrifying Covid-19 global outbreak.
Pepe ESCOBAR
You don’t need to read Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics to understand that neoliberalism – in deep crisis since at least 2008 – is a control/governing technique in which surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded.