A Tiny Virus Blows Up the Biggest Con

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ March 2, 2020

Who knew? People will accept or ignore lies, criminality, gross incompetence, and widespread ignorance until it comes to a planetary pandemic. Suddenly incompetence and stupidity are not funny anymore.

Who put these assholes in office? This shit is serious. A laughable fool puts a superstitious idiot in charge of our national response to a planetary pandemic, tells everyone he saved them, and the stock market craters. We would be better off to pick the fifth person we see on the street and make that person the COVID-19 czar. We might get lucky with someone who had, at least, an elementary understanding of biology and disease control.

The giant con built on big lies that seems to befuddle a portion of the population collapses in the face of a virus. Suddenly its Trump as Humpty Dumpty and all of his stooges trying to put the orange egg back together.

The market is saying you guys are screwed because the effect of shutting down significant parts of a massive, interlinked economy based on instantaneous information and just in time delivery is not a minor inconvenience. It does not take the Black Death, killing half the population to screw up 21st century supply chains. It takes only a few weeks of corporations shutdown to create significant disruptions.

The implications are not going away on a month or two despite massive market injections by the banks. The neoliberal economy is already on thin ice because we know we must change. After all, the future is ugly. Global warming will slowly destroy our coasts, fisheries, and our farmlands while creating a billion more refugees than we have now. And that cannot be stopped, let alone reversed.

We are not dealing with just another coronavirus but one that can devastate public health by overloading the system, as we see in Wuhan China, Italy, and South Korea. This pandemic will be deadly for thousands, but it is also fatal for international production systems needing tight schedules with no significant breaks. The implications of this pandemic are already escalating well beyond regional public health fiascos.

This problem set is complicated by capitalist distortions with capital tied up in hoards owned by a few thousand people. Already the massive expense of fossil fuel elimination and conversions to sustainable production will take everything we have. But heavily leveraged corporations with sales stopped will be screaming for relief very soon. We will see these effects domino around the planet.

But neither the public health disaster of COVID-19 or the economic train wreck that it is already producing is itself fatal. But in combination with the public awareness of the more significant climate problems, this is a volatile mix. I think this mix is the underlying cause of the stock market collapse.

While markets are incredibly shortsighted, the people reacting to triggering events cannot erase what they know about the future. Things are coming apart, and that is only partially the result of gross corruption and incompetence in the US government, even though that has an outsized influence.

Maybe this is the time to make some significant changes. Perhaps those changes are being highlighted for us by a handy coronavirus. People looking at a way to force the economic reforms needed are neither stupid nor willing to kill themselves making things that suddenly stopped for COVID-19 start working again only to stop them again later.

People opt for health and welfare for their families with the latest medical and scientific knowledge. Some can be duped by corrupt politicians to think they don’t want national healthcare, but when faced with a pandemic, the greedy idiots who plundered the CDC become a real threat.

Trump fired all the people who knew what to do to pocket the money. That’s what grifters do. It was alright as long as it was just some of those educated people who were unhappy about it as the news people were saying they didn’t know anything, anyway. But now real people and their families are at risk of infection due to incompetence.

That quickly becomes an issue wi even a moderately lethal pandemic, and this one is still mostly unknown. COVID-19 is one of those wild cards that gets dealt by history and blindsides eight billion people.

This is not the Black Death that killed about half the population of Europe and Asia in the 14th century. But we are at the very beginning of this and only beginning to learn how a digital, planetary society reacts to significant disruption. We are likely to lose at least half of 2020 worldwide to this and its economic implications.

The experts, not the political stooges, are saying that this is now at pandemic levels and will accelerate its spread in North America. This coronavirus pandemic can be contained but takes competence and care per the WHO.

It’s a lesson in humility, and a wake-up call for those who think incompetent and corrupt politicians are just a joke.