“… and when we look back on this in two years time, from the ruins of our economy and the ruins of our liberty, we will want to see some kind of justice, that the people who made this decision should pay a penalty for what they’ve done.” – Peter Hitchens
Economic activity across the country has collapsed, GDP is shrinking at the fastest pace on record, and the economic data is worse than anytime in history. Every sector of the economy is contracting and every economic indicator is pointing down. According to economist Nouriel Roubini, the country is headed towards a decade of “depression and debt”, and that is probably an understatement.
What prompted our leaders to follow the path of China? Were they bullied into it by Dr. Fauci and the Vaccine Gestapo or were they simply reacting to the sudden rise in Covid cases that skyrocketed overnight? Whatever the reason might be, the country is now headed for either a short-but-severe “U” shaped recession or an excruciating-and-protracted 1930s-type slump. Small and mid-sized businesses are folding by the thousands, the states are drowning in red ink, and more people are currently unemployed than anytime in the country’s 244 year history. The lockdown has effectively obliterated the economy and left the country in ruins. Here’s some background from an article at Yahoo Finance:
“Permanent job losses are likely to be a feature of the eventual U.S. recovery, according to University of Chicago research, which estimates that 42% of recently unemployed workers will not return to their jobs amid the “profound” shock stemming from coronavirus lockdowns.
The pandemic has taken a brutal toll on the world’s largest economy, with at least 36 million people thrown out of work over the last two months….The lockdowns have cratered activity in an economy that consists of 70% consumer spending, while undoing all of the jobs created since the great recession ended….
“It will likely take a number of years for the labor market to recover from its pandemic-induced meltdown.”…researchers extrapolated their findings that over 100,000 restaurants are expected to be permanently shuttered in the near-term…”
Some employers will shift resources to other roles, while many laid off workers may have to find new positions or careers.”
(“‘Major reallocation shock’ from coronavirus will see 42% of lost jobs evaporate: Study” Yahoo Finance)
The American people have yet to grasp the magnitude of the devastation caused by the lockdown but, soon, it will be the only topic of conversation. Most people left their jobs thinking they would return to them in a matter of weeks. They never imagined that a policy blunder would put the economy into a vicious death spiral that would terminate their livelihoods, dampen their prospects for the future, and reduce them to hopelessness and destitution. They never thought that such a nightmare was possible, especially since they were just following the orders of their governors and the affable Dr Fauci. They trusted these people. They put their lives in their hands and they were misled, duped into believing that these “experts” knew what they were doing when, all-along, they were making it up on the fly. Now we’re all going to pay for the mistakes for which they alone are responsible. This is from abc7news:
“Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus.…The head of the trauma in the department believes mental health is suffering so much, it is time to end the shelter-in-place order.
“We’ve never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time,” he said. “I mean we’ve seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.”
Kacey Hansen has worked as a trauma nurse at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek for almost 33 years. She is worried because not only are they seeing more suicide attempts, she says they are not able to save as many patients as usual.
“What I have seen recently, I have never seen before,” Hansen said. “I have never seen so much intentional injury.”The trauma team is speaking out because they want the community to be aware, for people to reach out and support each other and for those who are suffering to know they can get help.” (“Suicides on the rise amid stay-at-home order, Bay Area medical professionals say”, ABC News 7)
Here’s more from an article at the Washington Examiner:
“A study published in early May suggested that the coronavirus could lead to at least 75,000 deaths directly brought on by anxiety from the virus, job losses, and addiction to alcohol and drugs. Another study conducted by Just Facts around the same time computed a broad array of scientific data showing that stress is one of the deadliest health hazards in the world and estimated that the coronavirus lockdowns will destroy 7 times as many years of human life than strict lockdowns can save….
Earlier this week, more than 600 doctors signed their names on a letter to President Trump, referring to the continued lockdowns as a “mass casualty incident” and urging him to do what he can to ensure they come to an end….By late March, more people had died in just one Tennessee county from suicide than had died in the entire state directly from the virus.” (“California doctors say they’ve seen more deaths from suicide than coronavirus since lockdowns”, Washington Examiner)
So the lockdown is a “mass casualty incident”?
Of course it is. What else would you call it? People are locked in their homes indefinitely while the predatory media does everything in its power to terrorize them with one appalling horror story after the other. Did anyone consider this grim scenario before the lockdowns were imposed? Did anyone think that, perhaps, fragile people — that are cut off from the world, their friends and their families– might become so depressed that they’d take their own lives? Of course none of this matters to the media that measures its success in terms of its ratings not the number of people they’ve killed with their relentless fearmongering. For that, they accept no responsibility at all. Here’s more:
“Researchers warn that socially isolated people are over 40% more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or other major cardiovascular event. Moreover, the socially isolated are nearly 50% more likely to die from any cause….The study was conducted by Dr. Janine Gronewold and Professor Dirk M. Hermann from the University Hospital in Essen, Germany. They analyzed data on 4,316 people (average age: 59 years old) who had been recruited for research between 2000 and 2003…
“We have known for some time that feeling lonely or lacking contact with close friends and family can have an impact on your physical health”, Dr. Gronewold explains in a release. “What this study tells us is that having strong social relationships is of high importance for your heart health and similar to the role of classical protective factors such as having a healthy blood pressure, acceptable cholesterol levels, and a normal weight.”…
“We don’t understand yet why people who are socially isolated have such poor health outcomes, but this is obviously a worrying finding, particularly during these times of prolonged social distancing,” Dr. Gronewold says.” (“Social Isolation Increases Risk Of Heart Attack, Stroke, & Death From All Causes,” Study Finds)
Repeat– “We don’t understand why people who are socially isolated have such poor health outcomes??”
Yes, we do. It’s because they’re desperately lonely and cut-off from normal human-to-human contact. That, in turn, effects their overall health and well being. Of course if it was up to the malevolent Dr. Fauci we’d never even shake hands again. Fauci would like to repeal 5 thousand years of normal, social interaction and remake the world according to his own ghoulish specifications. Unfortunately, we are now seeing the blowback from that delusional world-view in the form of growing mental health problems, depression, anxiety and suicide. Should we tally the suicides alongside the Covid deaths to see whether Fauci’s strategy is working or not or should we simply ignore the horrible human costs of this twisted lockdown experiment? Some day, the American people will demand an accounting for the last 10 weeks, but we’re not there just yet. Here’s more from Bloomberg News:
“Retail landlords are sending out thousands of default notices to tenants, a situation that could tip already-ailing retailers into bankruptcy or total collapse….Department stores, restaurants, apparel merchants and specialty chains have been getting the notices as property owners who’ve gone unpaid for as long as three months lose patience, according to people with knowledge of the matter and court filings.
…“The default letters from landlords are flying out the door,” said Andy Graiser, co-president of A&G Real Estate Partners, whose firm works with retailers and other commercial tenants. “It’s creating a real fear in the marketplace,” Graiser said.” (“Default Notices Are Piling Up for Retailers Unable to Pay Rent”, Bloomberg)
More bad news. The lockdowns have triggered a tsunami of defaults and bankruptcies. With no source of revenue, merchants cannot pay the rent nor can landlords roll over their debts. The economy is an interlocking row of dominoes that tumble in sequence once the first block is set in motion. The American people were sold the idea that the economy could be turned “on and off” like a light switch. Now they can see that the theory has no basis in reality. As the bankruptcies pile up, the job losses will continue to increase pushing the country deeper into recession. Fauci’s directives have turned the country into a economic wastelands, that much is certain. Check out this excerpt from an article by is a clip from an article by Naomi Klein:
“…. former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that both set the new tone and made clear that Silicon Valley had every intention of leveraging the crisis for a permanent transformation….
” Schmidt called for “unprecedented partnerships between government and industry…
At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police, and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies….
If tech companies win their ferocious lobbying campaign for remote learning, telehealth, 5G, and driverless vehicles — their Screen New Deal — there simply won’t be any money left over for urgent public priorities, never mind the Green New Deal that our planet urgently needs…
For them, and many others in Silicon Valley, the pandemic is a golden opportunity to receive not just the gratitude, but t he deference and power that they feel has been unjustly denied.” (Screen New Deal, Naomi Klein, The Intercept)
Can you see what’s going on?
The fact that tens of thousands of people are dying and the nation’s economy has been reduced to rubble, doesn’t matter to the tech giants. For them the crisis is a “golden opportunity”, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to further subsume the government, to garner more government funding for their futuristic projects, to assert greater influence over public policy, and to wrap their tentacles more tightly around the levers of state power.
The tech giants are using the pandemic as a vehicle for imposing their own vision on the country and for promoting their own malign police state agenda. Just as Corporate America is using the crisis to restructure the labor market, and Wall Street is using the crisis to garner lavish multi-trillion dollar bailouts, and Fauci and Co are using the crisis to push for universal vaccines, so too, the tech giants are using the crisis to grab more power, more money and more integration with the state until the US government is nothing more than a trifling subsidiary of the ever-expanding Google octopus. That’s the ultimate goal, privatizing the state so the corporations rule the world. It is a Mission (that is nearly) Accomplished!
So how are the people going to respond to these developments? What will the reaction be when ordinary working people realize that their lives have fundamentally changed for the worse, that their living standards will continue to slide, that full-time work and job security have gone the way of the Dodo, that the middle class is going to be reduced to the size of an acorn, and that the social safety-net has been replaced by higher taxes, fewer public services, a weaker dollar and years of grinding, demoralizing austerity? Should we expect social unrest, rioting and street violence in the near future or should we assume that that those outbursts are inevitable now that personal liberty has been strangled while the economy was vaporized?
No country that willingly destroys its own economy should expect anything different. No people that abandon their liberty for the faux-security of state protection should expect anything different. Peter Hitchens sums it up perfectly in an article at the Daily Mail:
“I hate this word, (“lockdown”) because it does not seem to me to be fitting to describe free people in a free country. But we are no longer such people, or such a country. We have become muzzled, mouthless, voiceless, humiliated, regimented prisoners, shuffling about at the command of others, stopping when told to stop, moving when told to move, shouted at by jacks-in-office against whom we have no appeal. We are learning, during this induction period, to do what we are told and to become obedient, servile citizens of a new authoritarian State. We are unlearning the old rules of freedom.” (“Peter Hitchens: The New Authoritarian State’s Dream”, Daily Mail)
Well put. Bravo, Peter Hitchens!
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from TUR
